"Bilingual edition, Russian text established by the editor, printed in the pre-1917 alphabet according to Tsvetaeva's wish, with several facsimiles of the manuscript.

Detailed notes and commentaries on the history of the poems and problems of metrical translation.

In 1939, just before following her husband and daughter back to the Soviet Union (after 17 years of emigration), Tsvetaeva showed great foresight by preparing her most valuable papers for safekeeping in Switzerland. Soon her husband would be executed, her daughter arrested and sent to the camps; and in 1941 Tsvetaeva herself commited suicide. Only a few parts of the great cycle of poems she called The Demsne of the Swans had ever been published. The manuscript in the Basle University Library is the source for the definitive Russian edition, published here in its corrected form for the first time. This is also the first complete translation of any cycle of poems by Tsvetaeva to appear in any language other than Russian."

--excerpted from the inside cover of the 1980 edition.