Marina Tsvetaeva: I don't live to write, I write to live

Nabokov slights Tsvetaeva in Verses and Versions (there's not one of her poems there and, if I'm not mistaken, he calls her a mediocrity or the equivalent)--not to mention Mandelshtam (he at least gets a single poem)--but one reading of Nabokov's The Original of Laura sees a suffering, dying, writer trying to "hang on" via the power of the written word, i.e., Nabokov wrote to live.

Finished (for now) with Laura. I'll have to let it sit for a while; read it again. Fragmented, yes, but thought-provoking all the same: a writer approaching death, writing to live, writing as erasure, an author not really himself (approaching a caricature of himself), the index card method, etc.

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