Later Years
During World War II, Parnakh, like many other members of the Writers Union, were evacuated to Chistopol and had absolutely no means of support. Desperately seeking work, he applied together with the poet Marina Tsvetaeva (a long-ago lover of his sister Sophia) to the Soviet Literature Fund asking for a job at the LitFund's canteen. He was hired as a doorman, while Tsvetaeva's application for a dishwasher's position was turned down and she committed suicide six days later.
Parnakh's only work to be published after the war was his translation of memoirs by Théodore–Agrippa d'Aubigné in 1949, with his own foreword rejected by the publishing house. Parnakh outlived Tsvetaeva by a decade and died in his Moscow apartment on January 29, 1951. He was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. His twin sister, who died in 1968, is buried near him.
Read more about this topic: Valentin Parnakh
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