I should like to lie in the Tarusa Khlyst cemetery, under an elder bush, in one of those graves with a silver dove, where the reddest and largest wild strawberries in our parts grow

But if that is unattainable, if not only may I not lie there, but that cemetery is no more, I should like a stone from the Tarusa quarry to be set up on one of those hills over which the Kirillovnas walked to us at Pesochnoye, and we to them at Tarusa:

Here would have liked to lie
MARINA TSVETAEVA

The cenotaph of Marina Tsvetaeva, made of Tarusa dolomite and erected, in accordance with her wish, on the high bank of the Oka at Tarusa. This is the second memorial stone set up here by admirers of the poet. The first appeared above the Oka soon after the publication of Tsvetaeva's essay "Khlystovki" in the celebrated uncensored Soviet almanac "Tarusa Pages" in 1961, in which she had expressed her wish concerning her burial. But since the erection of the monument had not been authorised, local officials ordered the cenotaph destroyed; according to legend, it was either smashed to pieces or thrown whole into the river. The second cenotaph was put up much later, in the years of permitted veneration of Marina Tsvetaeva, on the eve of her birthday in 1988