On March 26, in the small hall of the Petrovsky Book Club, a conversation took place on the topic “Yesenin and the Revolution.” Tatyana Igorevna Fomicheva, senior researcher at the National Institution “People's Museum of S.A.” acted as an expert. Yesenin."
The event was held as part of the Volunteer Project “Cultural Voronezh” and the “School of Historical Literacy” program. Voronezh residents learned about the peculiarities of the great poet’s work, and were also able to watch a sand animation made on the theme of poems dating back to the “revolutionary period.”
Sergei began writing poetry very early. At the age of 8, he realized his work as the work of a real poet. Yesenin received an excellent education - the Zemskaya four-year school, the Moscow People's University, where he studied at the literary and philosophical department.
In Moscow, the young poet worked in a printing house and published his first poems.
The moment when Yesenin went to St. Petersburg to see Alexander Blok and showed his work, became a turning point for him: his poems began to be published in the capital’s publications, his name became recognizable.
At the same time, Yesenin became acquainted with members of the magazine “Scythians”, who expressed Slavophile ideology. The “Scythians” dissuaded Yesenin from close friendship with the Royal Family. Subsequently, under their influence, ideological and artistic images of Yesenin’s works were formed, namely: the perception of the revolution as a special path for Russia, the vision in it of changing the world, the ascension and transformation of the Russian spirit. During this period, each of his poems was filled with Christian and ancient Vedic images.
The first powerful response to the revolution was expressed in the poem “Comrade”. This poem opens a revolutionary cycle. The lyrics here give way to religious symbolism.
Here he does not glorify or justify the revolution, but writes about what he sees nearby, what he predicts in the future. In this poem, Yesenin buries Christianity along with the past world. He offers in return his peasant, peasant Rus', which he loves and sees in the future. This Rus' is set out in the theses of Russian cosmism: this is a Russia without rich people and masters, without poor laborers. Yesenin depicts these ideas in subtle strokes in his works.
The poet feels the new time, and expresses this in poetry - “Wake me up early in the morning.”
The collection of poems Transfiguration was published after the revolutionary events. Judging by the name, this world should be clean, beautiful, renewed, without cross and torment. This is the story of Inonia's poem - a utopian peasant paradise. In reality, the country is tormented by civil wars, famine and devastation. In the urban world, the poet has difficulty finding himself. Yesenin is having a hard time with the city’s attack on his native village. In one of his poems, the village is compared to a foal on thin legs that a steam locomotive is trying to catch up with.
His work expresses sadness for the past dear to his heart, anxiety for the future of the peasants who are the breadwinners of Russia.
Text: Yulia Komolova
Believe, victory is ours!
The new coast is not far away.
Waves of white claws
Golden sand scraped.
Soon, soon the last wave
A million moons will sprinkle.
The heart is a candle at mass
Easter masses and communes.
A dark army, a friendly army
We are going to unite the whole world.
We go, and the dust of the blizzard
The gorilla cloud is melting...
For Yesenin there was no question - to accept or not to accept the revolution. Yesenin accepted the October Socialist Revolution, by his own admission, with a “peasant bias.” During the days of the revolution - Yesenin on the streets of Petrograd. The poet Pyotr Oreshin, recalling his meetings with Yesenin during the years of the revolution, noted: “Yesenin accepted October with indescribable delight, and accepted it, of course, only because he was already internally prepared for it, that his entire inhuman temperament was in harmony with October.. .” More and more Yesenin is captured by the “vortex” principle, the universal, cosmic scope of events. In his “Heavenly Drummer” Yesenin enthusiastically proclaims:
Long live the revolution
On earth and in heaven!
Yesenin felt: one cannot sing about Russia, transformed by October, in the old way.
“Stop singing this stylized Klyuevskaya Rus' with its non-existent Kitezh... Life, the real life of Rus' is much better than the frozen picture of the Old Believers,” Yesenin wrote to the poet Alexander Shiryaevets.
Yesenin connected his future poetic destiny with the revolutionary renewal of Russia. However, disappointment soon set in regarding the revolution. Yesenin began to look not into the future, but into the present. The revolution did not justify the poet’s aspirations for a nearby “peasant paradise,” but Yesenin unexpectedly saw other sides in it that he could not perceive positively. Intervention, counter-revolution, blockade, terror, hunger, cold fell on the shoulders of the people.
Russia! Dear land to the heart!
My soul is in pain."
“What is happening is completely different from the socialism that I thought about... It’s cramped for the living, closely building a bridge to the invisible world... for these bridges are being cut down and blown up from under the feet of future generations.”
The poet’s utopian dreams of socialism as a “peasant’s paradise” on earth, which he had recently so inspiredly sung in “Inonia,” collapsed. “I was in the village. Everything is collapsing... You have to be from there yourself to understand... It’s the end of everything” - these were Yesenin’s impressions of those years. Yesenin expressed this worldview with special lyrical emotion and drama in the poem “Sorokoust”.
Have you seen
How he runs across the steppes,
Hiding in the lake mists,
Snoring with an iron nostril,
A train on cast iron legs?
And behind him
Through the big grass
Like at a festival of desperate racing,
Throwing thin legs to the head,
Red-maned colt galloping?
More and more often, the poet now appears in lines full of mental confusion, anxiety and sadness.The attack of the city on the village began to be perceived as the death of all real, living things. It seemed to the poet that life, in which his native fields were resounding with the mechanical roar of an “iron horse,” contradicted the laws of nature and violated harmony.
I the last poet villages
The plank bridge is modest in its songs.
At the farewell mass I stand
Birch trees burning with leaves.
On the blue field path
The iron guest will be out soon.
Oatmeal, spilled by dawn,
A black handful will collect it.
Soon, soon wooden clock
They will wheeze my twelfth hour!
His trip to Europe and America helped Yesenin take a different look at the world and events in the country. “Only abroad,” said Yesenin, “did I understand the full significance of the Russian revolution, which saved the world from hopeless philistinism.” Yesenin rejoices at the good changes that have taken place in the life of the Russian peasantry. “You know,” he told one of his friends, “I’m from the village now... And everyone is Lenin! He knew what word needed to be said to the village in order for it to move. What strength is there in him.”
Objectively S.A. Yesenin accepted the October Revolution. I accepted it as it is, with all its pros and cons, breaking old value foundations, and building a model of a new one - the Soviet system of value views for very long decades. But phe never found peace of mind, could not fully comprehend social processes, affecting Russia. Only one feeling never left his work - a feeling of sincere love for the Motherland. This is exactly what poetry teaches him. Like a spell, like a prayer, Yesenin’s call sounds in our hearts: “O Rus', flap your wings!”
During the years of the revolution he was entirely on the side of October, but he accepted everything in his own way, with a peasant bias.
Sergey Yesenin
Yesenin's time is a time of sharp turns in the history of Russia. From field Rus', patriarchal, receding into the past, from Russia, plunged by tsarism into the abyss of a world war, to Russia, transformed by the revolution, Soviet Russia - such is the path traveled by the poet together with his homeland, his people.
This path is grandiose and beautiful - the path of the Great March of working Russia into the future. At the same time, he was stern and dramatic. And not every writer of that time was able to stand on the deck of the ship - Russia, when the revolutionary storm broke out. Let us remember Alexei Tolstoy and his epic novel about a lost and regained homeland. Let us remember the tragedy of Bunin...
The historical events that rapidly unfolded in the country after February 1917 find the most direct and lively response from the poet:
O Rus', flap your wings, Put up a different support! A different steppe rises with different names.
The popular forces that smashed the royal throne and continued to seethe and seethe after February: the unrest of soldiers at the front, workers in the cities and especially peasants in the countryside, who never received the long-awaited land - all this fills Yesenin’s poetry with new social content.
Defining his civic position, his attitude to the ongoing revolutionary events, the poet says:
It’s enough to rot and whine, And to glorify with take-off: I’m rotting - The risen Rus' has already washed away, erased the tar.
A happy hour, an hour of transformation - this is what the last hour of noble-landowner rule, the death hour of Russian tsarism, became for the poet of peasant Rus', as well as for the multimillion-dollar Russian village. What the Russian peasant dreamed of happened: the heirs of Razin and Pugachev broke the chains of autocratic slavery. For the poet, this renewed, formidable, violent peasant Rus' is close and dear.
Clouds are like lakes, The moon is a red goose. Wild Rus' dances before your eyes. The green forest trembled, the spring began to boil. Hello, renewed My Otchar, man!
In the works created by Yesenin soon after the February events, the peals of the rebellious peasant alarm can already be clearly heard:
The Volkhov ringing and Buslaev's revelry were heard, The Volga, Caspian and Don spun to the roar.
This is how the Russian land now appears before the poet’s gaze, yesterday still a sad “peaceful corner”, “a gentle homeland”, “a side of the feather grass forest”. The whole world for him is painted in light, rainbow colors. The Russian plowman, the Russian peasant, who until recently was so earthly and peaceful, turns into a brave, proud-in-spirit hero - the giant Otcharya, who holds the “unkissed world” on his shoulders. Yesenin's man - Otchar is endowed with the "power of Anika", his "mighty shoulders are like a granite mountain", he is "ineffable and wise", in his speeches there is "blue and song". There is something in this image from the legendary heroic figures of the Russian epic epic. It makes me remember first of all epic image the hero-plowman Mikula Selyaninovich, who was subject to the great “thrust of the earth”, who playfully plowed the “open field” with his miracle plow.
"Otchar" is one of Yesenin's first poetic responses to the events of the February Revolution of 1917. This poem was written by Yesenin in the summer of 1917 during his stay in his native village. In September, "Otchar" is published by one of the Petrograd newspapers *.
* (A matter of peoples. Pg., 1917, No. 151, September 10. Then Yesenin publishes it in the collection "Scythians". Pg., 1918, No. 2, where it is dated: “1917, June”; then, in 1918, the poet published it in his collection “Rural Book of Hours”, where he dates it: “1917, June, 19-20. Konstantinov.”)
In this poem, as well as in those written somewhat earlier, in Petrograd, “The Singing Call” and “Octoeche” *, the theme of the revolutionary renewal of the country is revealed in images that are most often of a cosmic, planetary nature. Hence the prophetic pathos of these poems, their oratorical and polemical rhythmic structure.
* (In Yesenin's collection "Rural Book of Hours" (M., 1918), "The Singing Call" is dated: "April, 1917, Petrograd", "Oktoich" in the layout of the collection "Rye Horses" - "1917, August".)
Rejoice! The earth has appeared as a New Font! The blue snowstorms burned out, and the earth lost its sting. . . . . . . . . . In a man's nursery a flame was born for the peace of the whole world!
This is how Yesenin begins his “Singing Call”. In "Octoechos" this junction of the "earthly" with the cosmic receives its further development:
With our shoulders we shake the sky, with our hands we shake the darkness, and into the skinny ear of bread we inhale the starry grain. O Rus', O steppe and winds, And you, my father’s house! Spring thunder nests on the golden veil. We feed the storm with oats, We water the valley with prayer, And the mind-ox plows the blue arable land for us. . . . . . . . . . . . Hosanna in the highest! The hills are singing about heaven. And in that paradise I see You, my father’s land.
In "Octoechos", as well as in "The Singing Call" and "The Father", mythological images and biblical legends are filled with new, revolutionary and rebellious content. They are reinterpreted by the poet in a very original way and transformed in verse into pictures of a “peasant paradise” on earth.
In “Otchar” Yesenin tries to poetically present this new world more visibly:
There hunger and thirst do not sing in the roots, but the one day Light of angelic yurts is ripening. There, with the dish ringing, the coolness of the bush, and red-haired Judas kisses Christ. But the ringing of a kiss does not rattle Money, And the chain of Akatuya is the path in front of the monastery. There is a decrepit time there, Wandering through the meadows, Calling the entire Russian tribe to tables. And, glorifying your courage and your proud spirit, The circle surrounds them with a sable mash.
This figurative “encryption” of the future in “Otchar” is not accidental. It is still difficult for the poet to imagine what exactly the new world will be like, but one thing is obvious to him - that the light of reason and justice should reign in it (“the light of angelic yurts”): need and hunger there will be excluded (“there hunger and thirst in the roots will not sing"), there will be no division into rich and poor, there will be one free "Russian tribe", any betrayal will be impossible there, even the kiss of "red-haired Judas" "does not rattle with money." He “kisses Christ” sincerely (according to biblical legend, Judas, one of the twelve apostles of Christ, betrayed his teacher for “thirty pieces of silver”); everyone will be free, no one will know the hard labor “chains of Akatuy” (people were sent to hard labor to the Akatuy mine under the tsar).
The civic pathos of these poems (“Otcharya”, “Octoechos”, “The Singing Call”) finds its figurative expression in the poet’s romantic dream of the harmony of the world, renewed by the revolutionary storm: “We did not come to destroy the world, but to love and believe!” The desire for equality and brotherhood of people is the main thing for the poet.
And one more thing: already the February events give rise to a completely different social mood in Yesenin’s lyrical poems. He joyfully welcomes the arrival of a new day of freedom. He expresses this state of mind with great poetic power in the beautiful poem “Wake me up early tomorrow...”. S. Tolstaya-Yesenina says that, “according to Yesenin, this poem was his first response to the February Revolution” *. Yesenin now connects his future poetic destiny with the revolutionary renewal of Russia:
* (Tolstaya-Yesenina S. A. Comments on the poems of Sergei Yesenin. Typescript. Department of Manuscripts of the State Literary Museum.)
Wake me up early tomorrow, O my patient mother! I will go behind the road mound to meet my dear guest. Today in the Pushcha I saw the trace of wide wheels in the meadow, the wind flutters its golden arc under the cloud cover. At dawn tomorrow he will rush by, bending his moon hat under a bush, and the mare will playfully wave her red tail over the plain. Wake me up early tomorrow, Shine a light in our room. They say that I will soon become a famous Russian poet.
The feeling that now he, the son of peasant Rus', is called upon to become an exponent of the thoughts, aspirations and aspirations of the rebellious people, Yesenin conveys with great pathos in the poem “O Rus', flap your wings...” - a kind of poetic manifesto, lines from which have already been quoted higher. Everything is now within the power of the poet, everything is subject to his free, free speech:
The road is long and steep, the slopes of the mountains are countless; But even with the secret of God I conduct a secret dispute. I knock down the moon with a stone, and to the silent trembling I throw, hanging into the sky, a knife from my boot. A ring of others follows me in an invisible swarm, And far through the villages their lively verse rings. . . . . . . . . . . . . A different steppe rises with different names.
In his poetic manifesto, Yesenin puts forward a noble, democratic idea: to show revolutionary Rus' in all its beauty and strength.
The poet strives to expand his artistic horizon and deepen the social issues of his works. One should especially highlight Yesenin’s “little poem” “Comrade,” which he wrote hot on the heels of the February events in Petrograd.
On February 26, in the afternoon, fire was opened on the columns of demonstrators on the streets and squares of Petrograd. More than fifty people were killed, and many of the wounded were carried away by the demonstrators. The commander of the Petrograd Military District, Khabalov, and the Minister of Internal Affairs, Protopopov, hastened to assure Nicholas II (the Tsar was at headquarters) that “order has been restored.” But the movement of the popular masses grew with lightning speed. And already on March 1, the remnants of the tsarist troops went over to the side of the rebellious people. On Peter and Paul Fortress the flag of revolution was raised...
On one of the working days in March 1917, the working Petersburg, in stern, mournful silence, saw off on their last journey those who had fallen in the armed struggle against the autocracy. One hundred and eighty heroes of the revolution were buried on that memorable day of mourning in a mass grave on the Champ de Mars.
In “Comrade,” Yesenin begins in a restrainedly simple and at the same time epically broad manner his harsh, truthful story about a worker who, in the days of the defeat of tsarism, “did not cower before the power of the enemy’s eyes,” and about how his son, little Martin, was carried away by the heroism of his father. , stands up to defend the republic.
The image of a worker was new for Yesenin. And it is noteworthy that the poet was able to find spare and at the same time expressive touches to convey in “Comrade” the atmosphere of those days and create an exciting image of a St. Petersburg worker who lived his life not in vain and, in a battle with the enemy, chose death over betrayal.
Where the Russian people fight, Tell them to stand for freedom, For equality and labor!..
What is the outcome of the struggle? Who will win? Martin’s father was killed, “baby Jesus fell, struck by a bullet,” and now Martin himself “is being crushed by someone... someone is strangling him, burning him with fire.” The tragedy of events is growing. It seems to be the end... But the “February breeze” is blowing more and more strongly... and “the iron word is calmly ringing outside the window, then going out, then flaring up again, the iron word: “Rre-es-pu-u-u glare!”
Such a sharply contrasting turn of the narrative at the end of the poem conveys the drama and tension of events with the greatest emotional force. In the menacing, hammered rhythm of the final lines of “Comrade”, in the alarming peals of the iron word “Rre-es-pu-u-ublika!” as if one could hear the inexorable tread of the steps of the revolution.
Writer Lev Nikulin, in his memoirs about Yesenin, tells how he was lucky enough to once hear the poet reading “Comrade”. This was in 1918. “At that time,” he notes, “a lot of poems had already been written about the revolution that overthrew tsarism, moreover, by different poets, but Mayakovsky’s “poet-chronicle” “Revolution” and “Comrade” by Yesenin remained in the literature. Yesenin especially excited his listeners, he says Lev Nikulin, at the moment when he “reached almost the end of the poem and suddenly, tearing the collar of his shirt, shouted almost in horror:
Someone crushes him, someone strangles him, Burns him with fire.
And after a long silence, when there was dead silence all around, he said solemnly and soulfully:
But the Iron Word rings calmly outside the window, now extinguished, now flaring up again...
And, like a long distant clap of thunder, ever intensifying, joyfully menacing:
Rre-es-pu-u-ublika!
He was a great success. He easily jumped off the stage and sat down at the table. There was a long break - the poets understood that it was unprofitable to read after Yesenin. Some man, apparently unfamiliar to him, sat down at the table where Yesenin was sitting and persistently asked the poet why Jesus was present in his poems. This man could still reconcile with the cat, but Jesus bothered him and interfered with him in some way.
Bursting with laughter, Yesenin explained to his interlocutor:
Well, my dear... the icon just hangs in the corner, hangs and hangs." *
* (Nikulin L.V. In memory of Yesenin. - In the collection: Memories of Sergei Yesenin, p. 213, 214-215.)
The poem "Comrade", written by Yesenin under the influence of the funeral of the victims of the February Revolution on the Field of Mars in Petrograd, visibly expanded the ideological and aesthetic boundaries of his poetry *. "Comrade" became an important milestone on Yesenin's path to his future works about the revolution. This “little poem” by Yesenin, imbued with civic pathos, convincingly testifies to how great the potential artistic possibilities a poet who responded with all his heart to the mighty impulse popular forces revolutionary Russia.
* ("Comrade" was published for the first time in Petrograd. “The Cause of Nations” (Pg., 1917, No. 58, May 26), then in “Scythians” (Pg., 1918, No. 2) and Yesenin’s collection “Rural Book of Hours” (M., 1918), where it is dated: “1917 March. Petrograd." In the collection "Red Bell" (Pg., 1918), "Comrade" was published along with "Us", "Singing Call", "Father" and "Martha the Posadnitsa" under the general title "Verse".)
Yesenin was one of those Russian writers who, from the first days of October, openly sided with the rebellious people. “During the years of the revolution,” Yesenin wrote, “he was entirely on the side of October, but he accepted everything in his own way, with a peasant bias.”
Everything that happened in Russia during the October Revolution was unusual, unique, and incomparable with anything.
“Today the basis of the world is being revised,” said Vladimir Mayakovsky. "Keep your step revolutionary!" - Alexander Blok called on the sons of the rebel Russia. Sergei Yesenin also foresaw great changes in the life of Russia:
Come down and appear to us, red horse! Harness yourself to the earth's shafts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . We give you a rainbow as an arc, the Arctic Circle as a harness, Oh, take our globe onto a different track.
More and more Yesenin is captured by the “vortex” principle, the universal, cosmic scope of events.
The poet Pyotr Oreshin, recalling his meetings with Yesenin during the years of the revolution, emphasized: “Yesenin accepted October with indescribable delight, and accepted it, of course, only because he was already internally prepared for it, that his entire inhuman temperament was in harmony with October.. "*
* (Oreshin P.V. My acquaintance with Sergei Yesenin. - In the collection: Memories of Sergei Yesenin, p. 191.)
At first, it is sometimes difficult to find a reflection of certain revolutionary events in Yesenin’s poems. In such works as “Transfiguration”, “Inonia”, “Dove of Jordan”, written on the “second day” of the October victory *, the revolutionary content is sometimes still contained in mythological images, echoes of biblical legends. At the same time, already in the poem “Transfiguration,” written in November 1917, and even more so in “Inonia,” work on which Yesenin completed in January 1918, the poet’s gaze is turned primarily to earthly joys and anxieties. Recalling his meetings with Yesenin in the winter months of late 1917 - early 1918, V. S. Chernyavsky emphasizes that “during these months, all his godless and cosmic poems about the revolution were written one after another. In such a continuously creative state, I preceded him never saw... About his “Inonia”, which had not yet been read to anyone and, it seemed, only conceived, he spoke to me one day on the street as about some really (emphasis added. - Yu.P.) existing city and he himself laughed at my bewilderment: “I will have such a poem... “Inonia” is a different country...” ** And indeed, in the poem “Inonia”, on which Yesenin worked with extreme tension and inspiration, romantic pictures of the “city of Inonia” appear , where the deity of the living lives" and where, according to the deep conviction of the poet, a new, "revolutionary faith" will have to take root:
New on a mare Rides to the world Spas. Our faith is strong. Our truth is in us!
* (Thus, the poem “Inonia” was written in January 1918 and was soon published in full in the journal. "Our Way", 1918, No. 2; "Transfiguration" was first published in April 1918.)
** (Chernyavsky V.S. Meetings with Yesenin. - New world 1965, № 10. )
The main thing that the new “prophet Sergei Yesenin” is now dreaming of and calling for in “Inonia” is the transformation of the face of the earth:
And I will plow the black cheeks of your fields with a new plow; The golden fortieth Harvest will fly over your country. The new one will ring the inhabitants of the Spike Wings. And, like golden poles, the Sun will stretch its rays to the valley.
These utopian dreams and religious “insights” are evidence of intense ideological and artistic quests and contradictions in the views of Yesenin himself, who “met the first period of the revolution sympathetically, but more spontaneously than consciously.” At the same time, Yesenin’s first post-October works reflected the moods and aspirations of those working strata of the Russian countryside who, having accepted October, at first (like the poet) met the revolution more spontaneously than consciously.
In “Inonia” and other poems one can clearly hear the rumbles of the raging ocean of petty-bourgeois peasant element. The seething hatred among the people for the system of violence and lies overthrown by the revolution, the just and holy destructive rage towards the old world - all this objectively largely filled Yesenin’s poetry after October with the pathos of anger and denial, a rebellious spirit, and motives of fighting against God.
In "Inonia" the poet not only rises to the denial of the official church with its false morality. He now openly rebels against the foundations of the Church's religion:
Cry and howl, Muscovy! New Indicoplov has arrived. I will peck all the prayers in your book of hours with my beak of words. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I curse you, Radonezh, your heels and all your footprints! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Now, in the stormy voice of an ox, I shout, taking off Christ’s pants: Wash your hands and hair from the basin of the second moon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I'll stretch my legs to Egypt, I'll strip horseshoes of flour from you...
The poet discards the motives of humility and submission in some of his early poems, for “he has comprehended the teaching differently.” It's full vitality, self-confidence and “today I’m ready to turn the whole world with an elastic hand”:
Now I lift you up onto the peaks of the stars, earth! I will reach out to the invisible city, I will bite through the Milky cover. I will pluck even God's beard with the baring of my teeth. I will grab him by the white mane and tell him in the voice of a blizzard: I will make you different, Lord, so that my verbal meadow may mature! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I will lead your people away from hope, I will give them faith and power... *
* (The theme of the poet’s “conversation” with God was completed in the poem “Pantocrator,” written by Yesenin in February 1919.)
“At the beginning of 1918,” Yesenin noted, “I firmly felt that the connection with the old world was broken, and I wrote the poem “Otherness,” which received many attacks and because of which the nickname of a hooligan was established for me.” Interesting in this regard is the testimony of one of the poet’s contemporaries, who recalls Yesenin’s reading of the poem “Innoia” in a Kharkov park in 1920:
“A crowd of people walking surrounded us in a dense ring and began to listen to the reader first with surprise and then with interest. However, when the poems took on a clearly blasphemous character, the crowd became agitated. Hostile cries were heard. When he sharply, pointedly threw into the crowd:
The body, the body of Christ I spit out of my mouth, -
There were indignant cries. Someone yelled: “Beat him, the blasphemer!” The situation became threatening, especially since Yesenin enthusiastically continued his not at all “Easter” reading. Suddenly the sailors appeared. They made their way to us through the dense ranks of the public and cheerfully shouted to Yesenin:
Read, comrade, read!
There were sympathizers in the crowd and they applauded. The hostile voices fell silent, only a few people, cursing loudly, left the square." “I read it right somewhere on the boulevard.”
* (Povitsky L. Sergei Yesenin (Memoirs). Quote according to the manuscript.)
True, Yesenin’s poems did not always meet with such support from the audience as they did in Kharkov... On January 22, 1918, Alexander Blok made the following entry in his notebook: “Decree on the separation of church and state... - Yesenin called, talking about yesterday "morning of Russia" in the Tenishov Hall. Ghisetti and the crowd shouted at him, A. Bely and mine: "traitors". They do not shake hands. The Cadets and Merezhkovskys are terribly angry with me. The article is "sincere", but "cannot be forgiven." Gentlemen, you never knew Russia and never loved it!” * Blok is referring to his famous article “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution,” which was first published in the newspaper “Znamya Truda” on January 19, 1918.
* (Block A. Notebooks. 1901-1920, p. 385.)
“Peace and brotherhood of peoples” is the sign under which the Russian revolution is taking place,” Blok wrote excitedly. - That's what her stream roars about. This is the music that anyone with ears should hear...
With all your body, with all your heart, with all your consciousness - listen to the Revolution." *
* (Block A. Collection cit., vol. 6, p. 13, 20.)
Blok himself is working with inspiration on the poem “The Twelve” these days. Yesenin at this time created “Inonia” and his other poems and poems, consonant with the revolutionary pathos of Blok’s poem. It was in the rebellious, God-fighting theme, so significant and characteristic of Yesenin’s first post-October works, that the poet’s revolutionary spirit was primarily manifested.
High pathos, prophetic pathos, metaphorical images - all these were new features of the poet's artistic style *.
* (Yesenin's first post-October works were met with interest outside the borders of our Motherland. Thus, already in the early 20s, the poem “Inonia” was translated into French, German, and Bulgarian. The Bulgarian poet Mladen Isaev, for whom, as he writes, Sergei Yesenin was always a favorite poet, says: “Here, in Bulgaria... back in the first half of the 20s, S. Yesenin was met with great interest from the then young groups of poets and other people of art who were looking for something new, unusual, daring in literature from the outside. The then young poet Lamar translated S. Yesenin's "Inonia", which was met with interest among Bulgarian readers "(quoted from the autograph of Mladen Isaev's letter to the author books).)
Already in 1917-1918, images and vocabulary borrowed by the poet from the arsenal Christian religion, to which he was still resorting at that time, conflict with Yesenin’s obvious attraction as a realist artist to the vocabulary and images born of October and conveying the revolutionary intensity of those unforgettable days. Thus, in the poem “The Jordanian Dove” * the following verses sound like a culmination:
The sky is like a bell, The month is a language, My mother is my homeland, I am a Bolshevik. For the sake of the universal Brotherhood of man, I rejoice in the song of your Death. Strong and strong For your destruction I ring the blue bell for a month. Lay brothers, my song to you. I hear the Good News in the fog.
These poems, written by Yesenin during his stay in his native village of Konstantinov in the summer of 1918, were inspired in many ways by what the poet happened to observe in the village, and above all by the mood of the peasants who received the masters' arable land during the revolution "without ransoming it." The sister of the poet E. A. Yesenina recalls: “1918. God knows what was going on in our village.
Down with the bourgeoisie! Down with the landowners! - rushing from all sides.
Every week the men gather for a gathering.
Everything is led by Petr Yakovlevich Mochalin, our fellow villager, a worker at the Kolomna plant. During the revolution, he enjoyed great authority in our village. Our Konstantinovsky youth of those years owed a lot to Mochalin, and not only the youth.
Mochalin’s personality interested Sergei. He knew everything about him. Later, Mochalin served him to a certain extent as a prototype for the image of Ogloblin Pron in Anna Snegina and the commissioner in The Tale of the Shepherd Petya.
In 1918, Sergei often came to the village. His mood was the same as everyone else's - elated. He went to all the meetings, talked for a long time with the men."
* (Yesenina E. A. In Konstantinov. - In the collection: Memories of Sergei Yesenin, p. 43-44.)
After some time, Yesenin again returns to the topic he touched upon in “The Jordanian Dove”:
They say that I am a Bolshevik. Yes, I'm glad to curb the land...
These lines, of course, should not be taken literally (it is known that Yesenin was not a member of the party). At the same time, this is not a simple ringing phrase. For the poet, who in his youth dreamed of serving the people and was ready to accept “humiliation, contempt and exile” for this, the phrase “I am a Bolshevik” is full of deep meaning. It is still difficult for Yesenin to understand much in the revolutionary views of the Bolsheviks, but in his soul he clearly sympathizes with them, people who are even able to “rein in the earth”, their unbending will in the battle with the dark forces of the old world. How rapid the process of bringing Yesenin’s poetry closer to reality was during the years of the revolution, how sincerely the poet was in solidarity with the rebellious people - you are once again convinced of all this when reading Yesenin’s “Heavenly Drummer,” written in 1918.
The collision of two worlds and the fate of the homeland in the revolutionary era is the core thought that worries the poet in “The Heavenly Drummer.” Hence the life-affirming romantic pathos, hyperbolic images, and the oratorical marching rhythm of the verse:
The leaves of the stars flow into the rivers in our fields. Long live the revolution On earth and in heaven! We throw bombs at souls, We sow a blizzard whistle, Why do we need icon saliva In our gates to the heights? Are we afraid of the commanders of the White herd of gorillas? The world is rushing to a new shore like a whirlwind cavalry.
"Heavenly Drummer" in ideological and artistic terms is much broader than such works of Yesenin as "Transfiguration", "Inonia". Significant in it is the open call to fight against the “white herd of gorillas” - the interventionists. The battle with the enemy will not be easy; it will require the efforts of the people and even sacrifices. The poet addresses the rebels with an inspired word:
Close yourself with a tight wall, Who hates fog... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Believe, victory is ours! The new coast is not far away.
The revolution brings freedom to all the peoples of Russia, with its victory “the Kalmyk and the Tatar will smell their desired city.” For the first time here the poet comes so close to the idea of the international solidarity of the rebels:
As a dark army, as a friendly army, We are going to unite the whole world. We walk, and the cloud of gorillas melts with the dust of the blizzard.
In “The Heavenly Drummer” there are almost no images inspired by Christian poetics (“The heart is a candle at mass” - this and two or three other similar images are probably the only ones you will find in the entire poem). With all the planetary, cosmic aspiration of the images of “The Heavenly Drummer,” their basis is vitally real. This applies to the expanded metaphorical image of the “sun-drum”, which plays an important ideological and compositional role in the poem, and to the image of the “white herd of gorillas”, etc.
“The Heavenly Drummer” can easily be considered one of the significant phenomena of civil poetry in the first years of the revolution. This wonderful poem by Yesenin is in tune with the excitedly anxious rhythm of Blok’s poem “The Twelve”:
Revolutionary step up! The restless enemy never sleeps! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Forward, forward, forward, Working People! -
and the fighting, oratorical intonation of Mayakovsky’s “Left March”:
Let them surround themselves with a hired gang, let the steel pour out with lei, - Russia will not be under the Entente. Left! Left! Left!
Each of these three poets hated the old order, which had been destroyed by the revolution. With all the ideological and artistic originality of their works about the revolution, they were united in the main thing - in genuine concern for the fate of the rebellious Russia and hatred of its enemies.
Many new important facts the creative biography of the poet, new documents and materials about Yesenin’s literary and social activities during the years of the revolution have become known only in our days.
Here are forgotten newsreels from 1918. Just a few meters of documentary tape. The images, faded with time, are all covered in a web of some white stripes and scratches.
On the screen is Sergei Yesenin. Here he is in front of us. Alive. Unique.
It is shot in close-up. In his entire appearance there is amazing naturalness and simplicity. All of him seems to glow from within.
He is surrounded by people on all sides. There are many, many of them, especially young people. They came to the opening of the monument to the poet Alexei Koltsov.
In those days, the young Republic of Soviets was preparing to solemnly celebrate the first anniversary of the Great October Revolution.
It was a heroic time, but incredibly difficult. The threat of intervention and blockade loomed over the country. Devastation made itself felt more and more. It would seem, what kind of monuments can we talk about at such a time? But in three months the impossible was done: not only were dozens of monument projects created and approved, but the monuments themselves were manufactured and installed!
Sunday, November 3. In the squares and streets of Moscow, urgent preparations are underway for the October days.
There is some kind of high spirits in the street crowds; Everywhere telegrams from the morning newspapers are hotly discussed, the names of the heroes of the day are heard: the poets Shevchenko, Koltsov, Nikitin, the activist french revolution Robespierre.
The monument to Koltsov was opened by the chairman of the Moscow Council of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies; as stated in Izvestia, he was replaced by the "futurist poet" Yesenin. The memoirs of the writer Ivan Belousov have been preserved about this speech by Yesenin. “At the opening of the monument to Koltsov,” he says, “Sergei Yesenin, young, perky, reads his poem, standing at the foot of the monument. And just as I now see his figure with his head raised boldly, I hear his voice throwing new words into the crowd:
O Rus', flap your wings, Put up a different support! A different steppe rises with different names. Along the blue valley, Between heifers and cows, Your Alexey Koltsov walks in a golden row...
Yesenin's figure rises above the crowd, which listens to him with great attention. It seems that people have lifted and are holding the poet in their arms." *
* (Belousov I. Unique flower. - In the collection: In memory of Yesenin. M.: Publishing house of the All-Russian Union of Poets, 1926, p. 139.)
It is this significant moment at the monument to Koltsov that we see on the old documentary tape.
Then, in 1918, for the grand opening of the Kremlin memorial plaque, together with M. Gerasimov and S. Klychkov, Yesenin wrote “Cantata”.
Of its three parts, Yesenin owns the second, which rightfully became the basis of the entire work *.
I Through the fog of bloody death, Through suffering and sadness We lead, believe, believe, Golden heights and distances. We call everyone who was offended yesterday, Passed by a dashing fate, From smoky factories, black huts into a bright battle. Let our life and hard work be the last tribute. Believe, believe, there, beyond the borders of the Dawns, new ones are blooming. II Sleep, beloved brothers. Again the native land Unshakable army Moves under the walls of the Kremlin. New conceptions in the world, The glow of red lightning... Sleep, beloved brothers, In the light of imperishable tombs. The sun stands like a golden seal as a guard at the gate... Sleep, beloved brothers, the people are moving past you towards the dawns of the universe. III Come down from the cross, crucified people, Transform yourself, cursed enemy, You are threatened by fate with retribution For every wrong step you take. In the last battle there is no mercy, But there, beyond victory, We are glad to accept you into our arms, Forgiving the captivity of many years. Roar, earth, with the last storm, Call for battle, call for a feast, Let a new day shine in the azure, Transforming the old world.
In "Cantata" the poet addresses the heroes of the revolution who died in the October battles. Their ashes rest on the steppes of the gray Kremlin. In thought, bowing his head at the “imperishable tombs,” the poet conducts an excited, heartfelt conversation with the faithful sons of the Motherland. He speaks to them as if on behalf of the people themselves:
Sleep, beloved brothers, Again the native land Unshakable armies are moving under the walls of the Kremlin.
The “glow of red lightning” of the torch of Freedom, which was lit in people's heart veterans of the revolution. For the poet, they are “beloved brothers,” whose just cause is continued by the people boldly marching “towards the dawn of the universe.”
The solemn and majestic “Cantata” can be safely attributed to the significant phenomena of civil lyricism in the first years of the revolution.
"Cantata" was created by Yesenin with the participation of Mikhail Gerasimov not by chance. Facts show that in the fall of 1918 Yesenin showed a clear interest in the work of the Proletkult poets, and above all in Mikhail Gerasimov. Yesenin highlights and positively evaluates the poems of this poet in his article about two collections of proletarian writers published in 1918 *. The article shows how closely Yesenin followed the formation of new literature, the work of its most notable representatives, how fair the poet’s judgments and comments were.
* (Yesenin's article talks about the collection "Firewing Plant", Ed. Moscow Proletkult, 1918, and "Collection of Proletarian Writers", ed. M. Gorky, A. Serebrov, A. Chapygin. Pg., Parus Publishing House, 1918. The article, written shortly after the publication of these books, was not published during Yesenin’s lifetime. Her draft autograph has been preserved (except for the first page). We first talked about this article in 1957 on the pages of the almanac “Literary Ryazan” (book 2). Later, the article was included in the Collected Works of S. A. Yesenin.)
Yesenin has always been dear and close to the spiritual riches created by the people in the past. He constantly showed a keen interest in oral poetry, artistic experience classical writers. And he could not remain indifferent to the polemical attacks of the Proletkultists against the classics of world art. “Before us,” notes Yesenin, “we have quite loud, but empty lines of the poet Kirillov:
In the name of our tomorrow we will burn Raphael, We will trample the flowers of art.
It is already known that when an empty barrel moves, it rattles louder. We cannot, of course, not see and understand that this is said for the sake of the blessing of the future. Here there is not that criminal herostratism in relation to Sophia of the futurists with the almost yesterday's wolfish wisdom of the century according to Nietzsche's akathists, but nevertheless this is said without any internal justification, with only a consumptive indication of what is coming "tomorrow" and that " we will be full."
Anyone who feels that America exists somewhere, and only feels it, without trying and without knowing from which sides to place his feet on it, is still far from the shadow of Columbus."
Yesenin correctly noted that the poems of many Proletkult poets, filled with the “collective spirit” and the “call of whistles,” are rhetorical, abstract and conventional and recreated only the figure of the “external proletarian” and that “those who came to the gardens of iron and granite entwined in the springs to the solemn call beeps, we’re still completely mute.” That is why, in Yesenin’s opinion, those of the writers of the “proletarian group” who were able to largely avoid these shortcomings and “foresee the coming of a new revelation” deserve all support, because, the poet notes, “we value on earth not what “is” , but “as it will be.” That is why, Yesenin emphasizes, “Mikhail Gerasimov, who stands out from this entire proletarian group, is so sweet as a bright link, brightly throwing out from his flesh the song of not the external proletarian, but the one who is hidden in the box of muscles under the definition.” I "and was filled with the wisdom of his native backwater of iron."
How does Yesenin conclude his article? He says:
“Ending these brief thoughts about the revealed faces with a collection of proletarian writers, we will still say that their path as a whole has not yet been outlined. Only the first milestones have been set, but it is already good that Gerasimov is going through their light to the sweetest communion of the mysteries.” .
In September 1918, Yesenin attended the All-Russian Conference of Proletkults *. At the same time, in the fall of the eighteenth year, Yesenin, in collaboration with the poets M. Gerasimov, S. Klychkov, N. Pavlovich, wrote the film script “Calling Dawns,” dedicated to the Great October Socialist Revolution.
* (This fact was reported to us at one time by M.P. Murashev, who took part in the work of the conference secretariat. This is what he said: “I was elected to the All-Russian Proletkult Conference, which took place in September 1918, from the Moscow Proletkult. As a writer with editorial experience, I was attracted to work in the secretariat of the conference. Two days before its opening, I met with Yesenin. "We talked. During the conversation, I invited him to the opening of the conference and gave him a guest ticket. I remember well that he was at the conference.")
The white autograph of the film script has been preserved, most of which was written in Yesenin’s hand*.
* (Of the 18 autograph pages of the Calling Dawns script, 11 (including the title page) were written by Yesenin. The autograph of the Calling Dawns script was unknown for a long time. In 1955, we discovered it among the materials of the Yesenin archive stored at the Gorky Institute of Literature, and together with one of the authors of the script, N.A. Pavlovich, prepared it for publication. It was first published in the almanac "Literary Ryazan" in 1957 (book 2).)
The film "Calling Dawns" was supposed to begin with a film showing the preparation of an armed uprising in Moscow.
Yesenin and his co-authors sought to develop a plot in the script that would make it possible to show the revolutionary transformation of Russia, primarily through the fates of people, the lives of each of whom in the historical October days are full of deep meaning.
“All of us,” says one of Yesenin’s co-authors, N.A. Pavlovich, “were very different, but we were all young, sincere, passionately and romantically accepted the revolution, did not live, but flew, surrendering to its whirlwind. Arguing about particulars , we all agreed that a new world era was beginning, which would bring transformation to everything - statehood, public life, family, art, and literature...
We were and felt like poets first and foremost, which is why the list of authors is marked “poets.” We wanted to give our realistic material precisely in a poetic “transformation”.
This lofty, transformative structure of feelings and images was especially dear to Yesenin. He proceeded from the real, the concrete, without inventing a person or situation, but as if poetically revealing them."
* (Pavlovich N. How the film script “Calling Dawns” was created. - Literary Ryazan, book. 2. Ryazan. Ed. gas. "Priokskaya Pravda", 1957, p. 301, 302.)
This desire to show the transformation of reality is reflected both in the compositional structure of the script and in its figurative system.
Four parts of the script "Calling Dawns": "Eve of the October Revolution" (1st part), "Transfiguration" (2nd), "Proletkult" (3rd), "To the front of the world revolution" (4th) - should, according to the authors, somehow reveal the most important stages revolutionary transformation of Russia.
One of the central places in the script is occupied by the image of the Bolshevik Sergei Nazarov. In the past, he was a worker, a participant in the 1905 revolution, and was in political exile during the period of reaction. After the February days, he returned to his homeland and plunged headlong into revolutionary work.
Among the characters in “Calling Dawns,” an important role is played by the “ordinary skilled worker” Pyotr Molotov, and his wife, a weaving factory worker Natasha Molotova, and the “stocky, angular in his movements” Mitriy Sakhovoy, who recently came to the factory from the village. In the October days we see all of them on the barricades of the revolution.
The fates of the intellectual Rybintsev, “a former officer in the tsarist wartime service,” and his wife, Vera Pavlovna, turned out differently. Only after severe trials were they able to break with the burden of the past and take the side of the rebellious people.
An important advantage of the script is its historicism and realism. “The material for “Calling the Dawns,” says N.A. Pavlovich, “was the Moscow Proletkult, and our real conversations, and utopian dreams, and, above all, the era itself, when the battles in the Kremlin were yesterday, a completely fresh memory.”
* ()
Already the first episodes, which present a picture of a rally at a metallurgical plant, visibly emphasize the tense situation of the pre-storm October days in Moscow. The action unfolds widely and multifaceted. From Molotov's apartment in the "working quarter" it is transferred to the barricades on the streets of Moscow; from the Kremlin, where the White Guards were holed up, to the apartment of officer Rybintsev; from the Mossovet - to one of the districts of the city where a counter-revolutionary rebellion broke out; from the May Day demonstration - to the Moscow Proletkult; from a hostel commune - to one of the Red Army detachments, etc.
The second and third parts of “Calling Dawns” included the inclusion of documentary newsreels about “the combat life of the Tsaritsyn, Southern, and Dutov fronts,” the May Day demonstration of 1918 in Moscow, etc.
In the construction of the plot, the characterization of the characters, and the depiction of individual episodes in the script for "Calling Dawns" there was still a lot that was naive and artistically imperfect. The illustrative nature and well-known schematism of the solution to the October theme in the script are obvious and indisputable. But we must keep in mind that in 1919-1920 our film dramaturgy took its first steps, and the revolutionary theme was then revealed in cinema only in various kinds of propaganda films. They presented detailed political slogans, posters, abstracts of lectures or reports, accompanied by visual material on the screen. They have absolutely no game plot.
In another part of the propaganda films, the conflict was based on a direct, one-dimensional clash between representatives of the old and new worlds; They usually touched on some individual aspects of the revolutionary struggle. " Artistic embodiment the images in them were very imperfect. The fates of the heroes of the propaganda films only illustrated the positive idea underlying the picture."
* (Essays on the history of Soviet cinema. M.: Art. 1956, p. 56-62.)
Yesenin and his co-authors tried (almost the first) to reflect in the script “Calling Dawns” the main, characteristic conflicts of their time, to build the action on a game plot, and to reveal the October theme in an artistically multifaceted way. The Russian worker is the discoverer of the new world, the Bolsheviks are people with a clear goal of fighting for the bright future of Russia, the great feeling of fraternal solidarity of peoples, the thorny path of the intelligentsia to the “new shore”, the birth in the fire of revolution of truly human feelings and relationships between people - these are significant trends October era were reflected in the script "Calling Dawns".
For each of the heroes of the future film, Yesenin and his co-authors sought to outline specific individual traits, to give these images in movement, in development. “For Yesenin, as well as for us, his co-authors,” says N.A. Pavlovich, “it was important to show the rhythm and swiftness of this transformation of reality. So, Sakhova, this village bumpkin, becomes one of the nameless heroes of the revolution.
Officer Rybintsev goes over to the Bolsheviks, and his wife Vera Pavlovna becomes a different person and goes to the front with the worker’s wife, Natasha.” *
* (Pavlovich N. How the film script “Calling Dawns” was created, p. 302.)
All this allows us to talk about “Calling Dawns” as a fruitful attempt by Yesenin and his co-authors to create a script at the very beginning of the formation of Soviet cinema, which, despite all its artistic shortcomings, could become the basis for a film about the unforgettable fiery days of the revolutionary revival of Russia.
Now, when the true image of Sergei Yesenin as a patriotic poet and a faithful son of the motherland emerges more and more clearly and clearly, the fact of his active and direct participation in the creation of the October film script at the dawn of the revolution is especially significant. It helps us to better understand the ideological orientation and merits of Yesenin’s works, written by him shortly after the October Revolution.
It is important to note one more circumstance. Along with the works of civil and political poetry created by Yesenin in 1917-1918, the breath of the revolutionary thunderstorm also touched his poems, full of the finest insight into the world of Russian nature. Everything now excites the poet, everything warms his heart. Even winter, which at other times filled his soul with cold:
I'm wandering through the first snow, In my heart there are lilies of the valley of flaring strength. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . You are beautiful, oh white surface! A slight frost warms my blood! I just want to press the bare breasts of birch trees to my body.
In poems such as “I’m wandering through the first snow...”, “Oh, arable lands, arable lands, arable lands...”, “Oh, I believe, I believe, there is happiness!..”, “Here it is, stupid happiness. ..", "Oh muse, my flexible friend...", "Now my love is not the same...", "Green hairstyle...", "Here it is...", "Golden foliage began to spin ...", and in a number of others, at first glance, there are few signs of time. But the more we listen to their sound, the more clearly we perceive in them the poet’s new spiritual mood:
Oh, I believe, I believe, there is happiness! The sun hasn't gone out yet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ring, ring, golden Rus', worry, irrepressible wind.
O muse, my flexible friend, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Now would be a song of the wind And a gentle bai - For the fact that you have grown stronger, For the fact that you poured a bright holiday into my chest.
Yesenin is now increasingly reserved about the works of those peasant poets who, instead of showing folk life, paid a certain tribute to stylization, and continued to glorify the “non-existent Kitezh”. “... Stop singing,” Yesenin wrote in June 1920 to his friend the poet Alexander Shiryaevets, “to sing this stylized Klyuev Rus' with its non-existent Kitezh and stupid old women, we are not like it all comes out in your poems. Life, real the life of our Rus' is much better than the frozen picture of the Old Believers. All this, brother, was included in the coffin, so why sniff these rotten log remains? Let Klyuev sniff, it suits him, because he himself smells..."
October illuminated Yesenin’s poetry with a new light. “If it weren’t for the revolution,” Yesenin emphasized, “I might have dried up on unnecessary religious symbols.”
And although after his first “explosive” revolutionary verses and poems Yesenin had to endure and rethink a lot; although sometimes he still “clumsily whispered the pencil to the paper” about revolutionary news; although Yesenin was not immediately able to fully understand “where the fate of events is taking us”, in his work of the first years of October we will always cherish the desire to tell how “in place of the tsarshchina, the workers appeared with majestic power.” With his first poems dedicated to the revolutionary events of 1917 (“Comrade”, “Inonia”, “Heavenly Drummer”, “Cantata”, etc.), Yesenin seemed to be preparing the ideological and aesthetic foundation that would later help him overcome serious contradictions ( "Sorokoust", etc.) and create such poems as "Anna Snegina" and "Song of the Great March".
"Revolution with a peasant twist"
"Advent"
October 1917
"Transfiguration"
November 1917
"Inonia" late 1917
"Jordan Dove"
March 1918
In "Transfiguration"
- famous lines:
"The sky is like a bell,
Month is a language
Mother is my homeland
I am a Bolshevik."
At the opening of the monument to Koltsov in Moscow in 1918.
Zinaida Reich with Sergei Alexandrovich’s children Tatyana and Konstantin.
The most famous photograph. 1919
The head of Trotsky's train, Grigory Kolobov and S. Yesenin
With G. Kolobov, on the right A. Mariengof
S. Yesenin, A. Mariengof, Khlebnikov. Kharkiv 1920
The trip to the South greatly influenced Yesenin’s work.
The death of the village world during the years of war communism, surplus appropriation and civil war.
1919
Trip to the South
Impressions from what I saw along the way.
"Mare ships"- the impressions of the corpses of horses on which black crows sat were reflected in this wonderful poem. These corpses turned into ships on which the new Russia sails into the future. Hence the October wind in the poem. Evil October - absolutely new feature Yesenin's revolution.
"Hooligan"- Yesenin’s hooliganism is not harassment of citizens on the street, but shocking behavior that violates generally accepted norms.
"Sorokoust"- the title of the poem is associated with the forty-day commemoration of the deceased, with prayer on the fortieth day. The deceased here turns out to be a Russian village.
The immediate impression of what he saw on the way to the south was reflected in the poem.
A significant episode in one of Yesenin’s distant wanderings is connected with the poem “Sorokoust”.
“Here is a clear example of this. We were driving from Tikhoretskaya to Pyatigorsk, suddenly we heard screams, looked out the window, and what? We see a small foal galloping as fast as he can behind the locomotive. He gallops so much that it immediately became clear to us that for some reason he decided to overtake him. He ran for a very long time, but in the end he began to get tired, and at some station he was caught. An episode may be insignificant for someone, but for me it says a lot. A steel horse defeated a living horse. And this little foal was for me a visual, dear, endangered image of the village...”
(From the memoirs of a contemporary)
"Mare's Ships", "Confessions of a Hooligan", "Hooligan"
In these works a completely new poetics is born. It was called imagism. Imagism(from Latin imago - image) - a literary movement in Russian poetry of the 20th century, whose representatives stated that the goal of creativity is to create an image. Basics means of expression imagists - metaphor, often metaphorical chains comparing various elements two images - direct and figurative. The creative practice of Imagists is characterized by shocking and anarchic motives.
Imagism
The main features of imagism: - the primacy of the “image as such”; - image is the most general category that replaces the evaluative concept of artistry; - poetic creativity is the process of language development through metaphor;
In the fall of 1920, Mayakovsky, in a conversation with the writer Rurik Ivnev, then said: “All imagist declarations are sheer idle talk. I don't understand why you were drawn to them. Friendship with Yesenin? But you can be friends without platforms. Yes, in essence, neither you nor Yesenin are imagists, Shershenevich is an eclectic. So all your imagism fits into the Mariengof cylinder.”
With Anatoly Mariengof
Among friends - imagists
A. Mariengof
“The world is mysterious, my ancient world...”
In Yesenin’s poetry, a persistent image of a wolf being hunted by people appears. Such are the rebels, Pugachev, Makhno, the men of the Tambov uprising. In his fierce resistance, he is ready for the last leap, for the bloody battle, for the resistance. For Yesenin, this is both the Russian village and the world, cramped by the city.
Nestor Makhno is the famous organizer of the people's republic in Gulyai-Polye.
Alexander Antonov - leader of the Tambov peasant uprising against Soviet power. Yesenin was interested in his fate.
“I don’t regret it. I’m not calling, I’m not crying..."
One of the most famous poems again returns us to harmony, but this is no longer the original harmony of the pre-revolutionary era, but a tragic one, which went through the trials of the previous period.
Autumn and spring now appear in Yesenin’s work as antagonistic forces. “White apple trees smoke” is a distant past where there is no return. Spring and youth remained there. "Fading gold." “Leaves of copper” is both the coming autumn, but also hope for the copper of the monument. That is why copper flows from trees as metal from which monuments are made.
The last stanza sounds like Pushkin: “May you be blessed forever.”
The blessing of all living things for their fragility, fragility and mortality - this is the humanistic idea of the poem. For Yesenin, the main value of life is hidden in the opportunity to flourish for a short time.
1. The role of revolution in Yesenin’s work.
2. The meaning of the poem “Anna Snegina”
3. Heroes - antipodes: Proclus and Labutya.
4. Anna Snegina as a symbol of unnecessary, elusive beauty.
5. The poet’s ambivalent attitude towards the revolution.
The sky is like a bell
The month is a language
My mother is my homeland,
I am a Bolshevik.
A. A. Blok
The avalanche of revolution that swept across Russia left behind many memories. These memories and emotions - joyful, associated with hope for a new, bright future, and sad, associated with disappointment in it - remained with each participant and witness. Many poets and writers - contemporaries of the revolution - conveyed their feelings about it through their works, forever capturing the image of the revolution. There are such works in the works of S. A. Yesenin.
The poem “Anna Snegina” plays a special role in the poet’s work. It reflected both Yesenin’s personal experiences and his thoughts - forebodings about the future fate of post-revolutionary Russia. The author himself considered the poem programmatic, his best work. In many ways, the poem became biographical. The lyrical hero of the work, who received the same name as the author, Sergei, and on whose behalf the story is told, comes to his native village of Radovo in the interval between the two revolutions of 1917 - the February and October. He casually remarks: “Then Kerensky was caliph over the country on a white horse,” thereby letting the reader understand that Kerensky was caliph for an hour. The driver with whom Sergei returns home tells the hero about what happened in the village. The first picture he painted seems ideal:
We really don’t get into important things,
But still we are given happiness.
Our yards are covered with iron,
Everyone has a garden and a threshing floor.
Everyone has painted shutters,
On holidays, meat and kvass.
No wonder once a police officer
He loved to stay with us.
Residents of the village of Radovo, as the reader can learn from the same story, knew how to get along with the previous government:
We paid the dues on time,
But - a formidable judge - foreman
Always added to the quitrent
According to flour and millet.
And to avoid misfortune,
We had the surplus without any hardship.
If they are the authorities, then they are the authorities,
And we are just simple people.
However, the idyllic picture of the life of the Radov peasants was destroyed even before the revolution because of the inhabitants of the neighboring village of Krikushi, where “life... was bad - almost the entire village was plowing at a gallop with one plow on a pair of worn-out nags.” The chief among the screamers, Pron Ogloblin, in one of the meetings with the peasants of Radov, kills their chairman. The driver from Radov says the following about this:
Since then we have been in trouble.
The reins rolled off happiness.
Almost three years in a row
We either have a death or a fire.
It should be noted that the beginning bad life peasants accounted for the first years of the World War. And then came the great February Revolution. At this moment, Sergei, who arrived home, learns that Pron Ogloblin, having returned from hard labor, again became the ideological leader of the peasants from Krikushin.
The lyrical hero himself, reflecting on the theme “How beautiful the earth is and the people on it,” is close to the peasant people, their aspirations and problems are close, although love for the local landowner Anna Snegina is still alive in Sergei’s heart. Together with Pron, Sergei arrives at her estate at a bad time for the heroine - she receives news of the death of her husband. The purpose of the visit is to try to take away the land of the landowners in favor of the peasants. Moreover, if Pron demands it rather rudely: “Give it back!.. I shouldn’t kiss your feet!” - then Sergei has the courage to stop the shouter: “Today they are not in the mood... Let’s go, Pron, to the tavern...”.
Pron is a reckless person. Sergei’s friend, speaking about him, clearly does not have much sympathy for him: “A bully, a brawler, a brute. He’s always angry with everyone, drunk every morning for weeks.” But the character of this character still attracts Sergei, because Ogloblin is a selfless peasant who stands up for the interests of the people. After the coup that happened in the first revolution, Pron promises: “I will be the first to set up a commune in my village right now.” But during civil war he dies and his brother Labutya comes in his place:
...Man - what's your fifth ace:
At every dangerous moment
A boaster and a devilish coward.
Of course, you have seen such people.
Fate rewarded them with chatter.
Yesenin, with an author’s digression, characterized this hero as follows: “People like this are always in sight. They live without callouses on their hands.” Indeed, he wore two royal medals and constantly boasted of imperfect exploits in the war. With the advent of the revolution he
...Of course, in the Council.
I hid the medals in the chest,
But with the same important posture,
Like some grizzled veteran,
He wheezed under a fusel jar
About Nerchinsk and Turukhan:
“Yes, brother! We have seen grief
But we were not intimidated by fear...”
Medals, medals, medals
His words rang.
He is the first to begin an inventory of the Onegins' estate: There is always speed in capture: - Give it! We'll figure it out later! The entire farm was taken to the volost with the housewives and livestock.
The most important thing for understanding this hero is the fact that during the execution of the bat by the Bolsheviks, Labutya hides, instead of protecting him. The poet feels that during the revolutions it was precisely such Labutis who survived, and not the Prons; it was the cowards who survived, and not the rude, but brave people. The poet was also worried that it was precisely such characters who most often found themselves not only in people’s power, but also played the first roles in the leadership of parties and the state. It is no coincidence that Labutya talks about an imaginary exile to the Turukhansk region. This is the very place where Stalin served his exile. The author of the poem also understood that under the government headed by Labutya, the peasants’ dreams of happiness in the image of the village of Radova would never come true. And the heroine of the poem, whose image personifies beauty, leaves Russia. At the end of the work, from the London letter received by the hero from Anna, the reader learns:
I often go to the pier
And, either for joy or fear,
I look among the ships more and more closely
On the red Soviet flag.
Now we have achieved strength.
My path is clear...
But you are still dear to me
Like home and like spring.
IN new Russia, who have turned into beggars Screamers, there is no place for beauty.
It is worth noting that villages with such names actually existed in native Yesenin Konstantinovsky district. Only they were not adjacent to each other. And they were located far from each other. Most likely, the author was interested in the telling names: Radovo, associated with the word “joy”, and Krikushi, reminiscent of “klikushi”, “to shout”.
In August 1920, the poet writes: “...What is happening is not the kind of socialism that I thought about, but definite and deliberate, like some island of Helena, without glory and without dreams. It’s cramped in it for the living, cramped in building a bridge to the invisible world, for these bridges are being cut down and blown up from under the feet of future generations.” Most likely, Yesenin foresaw the fact that the Soviet government would not be able to satisfy the peasant needs, but, on the contrary, would squeeze all the already liquid juices out of them. Therefore, like his heroine, Yesenin looked at the red flag not only with hope, but also with fear.
