The book is devoted to the analysis of the dominant theme in M. Tsvetaeva’s poetry: the impossibility for a woman to be included in traditional myths about finding poetic inspiration. The book reveals a complex of stable mythopoetic metaphors and leitmotifs, reproduced and evolving throughout Tsvetaeva’s work. This complex serves the woman poet as an alternative myth of poetic genesis. The image of an acrobat, perilously balancing between earthly existence in the body and eternal existence in pure spirit, becomes central and unifying. This image is associated with Tsvetaeva’s reinterpretation of the myth of Psyche and with the mythologized image of a hopeless circle. In all versions of Tsvetaeva’s myth, the role of “muse” is played by male poets, Tsvetaeva’s contemporaries: Alexander Blok, Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke, Nikolai Gronsky, Anatoly Steiger. Painful relationships with them become part of Tsvetaeva’s poetic strategy. The main goal of the study is to understand how the mechanisms of Tsvetaeva’s poetic consciousness operate, in particular, how, with the help of mythological mechanisms, she tries to overcome the exclusion of herself as a woman from the fundamental foundations of poetic activity.