We present to your attention short biography of Sergei Yesenin. We will tell you briefly about the main thing from the short but bright life of the wonderful Russian poet, whose name is on a par with, and.
Sergei Aleksandrovich Yesenin was born in 1895 in the village of Konstantinovo, Ryazan province. His parents were peasants, and besides Sergei, they had two daughters: Ekaterina and Alexandra.
In 1904, Sergei Yesenin entered the zemstvo school in his native village, and in 1909 he began his studies at the parish school in Spas-Klepiki.
Having a hot-tempered and restless character, Yesenin came to Moscow on an autumn day in 1912 in search of happiness. First, he got a job in a butcher shop, and then began working in the printing house of I.D. Sytin.
Since 1913, he became a volunteer student at the University named after A. L. Shanyavsky and made friends with the poets of the Surikov literary and musical circle. I must say that this had higher value in the further formation of the personality of the future star in the horizon of Russian literature.
Special features of Sergei Yesenin Sergei Yesenin's first poems were published in children's magazine"Mirok" in 1914.
This seriously influenced his biography, but after a few months he left for Petrograd, where he made important acquaintances with A. Blok, S. Gorodetsky, N. Klyuev and other outstanding poets of his time.
Yesenin reads poetry to his mother After a short time, a collection of poems called “Radunitsa” was published. Yesenin also collaborates with Socialist Revolutionary magazines. The poems “Transfiguration”, “Octoechos” and “Inonia” are published in them.
After three years, that is, in 1918, the poet returned to, where, together with Anatoly Mariengof, he became one of the founders of the Imagists.
Having started writing the famous poem “Pugachev,” he traveled to many significant and historical places: the Caucasus, Solovki, Murmansk, Crimea, and even got to Tashkent, where he stayed with his friend, the poet Alexander Shiryaevets.
It is believed that it was from Tashkent that his performances began before the public at poetry evenings.
IN short biography It is difficult for Sergei Yesenin to contain all the adventures that happened to him during these travels.
In 1921, a serious change occurred in Yesenin’s life, as he married the famous dancer Isadora Duncan.
After the wedding, the couple went on a trip to Europe and America. However, soon after returning from abroad, the marriage to Duncan broke up.
The last few years of his life, the poet worked hard, as if he had a presentiment of his imminent death. He traveled a lot around the country and went to the Caucasus three times.
In 1924, he traveled to Azerbaijan, and then to Georgia, where his works “Poem of the Twenty-Six”, “Anna Snegina”, “Persian Motifs” and a collection of poems “Red East” were published.
When the October Revolution occurred, it gave the work of Sergei Yesenin a new, special strength. Singing love for the motherland, he, one way or another, touches on the theme of revolution and freedom.
It is conventionally believed that in the post-revolutionary period there were two great poets: Sergei Yesenin and. During their lifetime, they were stubborn rivals, constantly competing in talent.
Although no one allowed themselves to make vile statements towards their opponent. Compilers of Yesenin’s biography often quote his words:
“I still love Koltsov, and I love Blok. I’m just learning from them and Pushkin. What can you say about Mayakovsky? He knows how to write - that’s true, but is this poetry, poetry? I don't love him. He has no order. Things climb on top of things. From poetry there should be order in life, but with Mayakovsky everything is like after an earthquake, and the corners of all things are so sharp that it hurts the eyes.”
On December 28, 1925, Sergei Yesenin was found dead in the Leningrad Angleterre Hotel. According to the official version, he hanged himself after being treated for some time in a psychoneurological hospital.
It must be said that, given the poet’s long-term depression, such a death was not news to anyone.
However, at the end of the twentieth century, thanks to lovers of Yesenin’s work, new data from the biography and death of Yesenin began to emerge.
Due to the length of time, it is difficult to establish the exact events of those days, but the version that Yesenin was killed and then only staged a suicide looks quite reliable. We will probably never know how it really happened.
Yesenin's biography, like his poems, is filled with a deep experience of life and all its paradoxes. The poet managed to feel and convey on paper all the features of the Russian soul.
Undoubtedly, he can be safely classified as one of the great Russian poets, called a subtle connoisseur of Russian life, as well as an amazing artist of words.
You don't love me, you don't regret me,
Am I not a little handsome?
Without looking in the face, you are thrilled with passion,
He placed his hands on my shoulders.
Young, with a sensual grin,
I am neither gentle nor rude with you.
Tell me how many people have you caressed?
How many hands do you remember? How many lips?
I know they passed by like shadows
Without touching your fire,
You sat on the knees of many,
And now you're sitting here with me.
Let your eyes be half closed
And you're thinking about someone else
I don’t really love you very much myself,
Drowning in the distant dear.
Don't call this ardor fate
A frivolous hot-tempered connection, -
How I met you by chance,
I smile, calmly walking away.
Yes, and you will go your own way
Sprinkle joyless days
Just don’t touch those who haven’t been kissed,
Just don’t lure those who haven’t been burned.
And when with another in the alley
You'll walk by chatting about love
Maybe I'll go for a walk
And we will meet again with you.
Turning your shoulders closer to the other
And leaning down a little,
You will tell me quietly: “Good evening!”
I will answer: “Good evening, miss.”
And nothing will disturb the soul,
And nothing will make her tremble, -
He who loved cannot love,
You can't set fire to someone who's burned out.
Brief biography of Sergei Yesenin.
Sergei Aleksandrovich Yesenin was born on September 21 (October 4), 1895 in the village of Konstantinovo, Ryazan province, in the family of peasant Alexander Yesenin. The mother of the future poet, Tatyana Titova, was married against her will, and soon she and her three-year-old son went to live with her parents. Then she went to work in Ryazan, and Yesenin remained in the care of his grandparents (Fyodor Titov), an expert on church books. Yesenin’s grandmother knew many fairy tales and ditties, and, according to the poet himself, it was she who gave the “impetus” to write the first poems.
In 1904, Yesenin was sent to study at the Konstantinovsky Zemstvo School, and then to a church teacher’s school in the city of Spas-Klepiki.
In 1910-1912 Yesenin wrote quite a lot, and among the poems of these years there are already fully developed, perfect ones. Yesenin's first collection "Radunitsa" was published in 1916. The song-like composition of the poems included in the book, their ingenuously sincere intonations, the melodic tone that refers to folk songs and ditties are evidence that the umbilical cord connecting the poet with the rural world of childhood was still very strong at the time of their writing.
The very name of Radunitsa’s book is often associated with the song structure of Yesenin’s poems. On the one hand, Radunitsa is the day of remembrance of the dead; on the other hand, this word is associated with a cycle of spring folk songs, which have long been called Radovice or Radonice vesnyanki. In essence, one does not contradict the other, at least in Yesenin’s poems, distinguishing feature of which there is a hidden sadness and aching pity for everything living, beautiful, doomed to disappear: May you be forever blessed that you have come to flourish and die... The poetic language already in the early poems of the poet is original and subtle, the metaphors are sometimes unexpectedly expressive, and the person ( the author) feels, perceives nature as alive, spiritual (Where there are cabbage beds... Imitation of a song, The scarlet light of dawn was woven on the lake..., The flood licked the mud with smoke..., Tanyusha was good, there was no more beautiful thing in the village...).
After graduating from the Spaso-Klepikovsky School in 1912, Yesenin and his father came to Moscow to work. In March 1913 Yesenin again went to Moscow. Here he gets a job as an assistant proofreader at the printing house of I.D. Sytin. Anna Izryadnova, the poet’s first wife, describes Yesenin in those years: “His mood was depressive - he is a poet, no one wants to understand this, the editors do not accept him for publication, his father scolds that he is not doing business, he has to work: He was reputed to be a leader, attended meetings, distributed illegal literature. Pounced on books, read all my free time, spent all my salary on books, magazines, did not think at all about how to live...". In December 1914, Yesenin quit his job and, according to the same Izryadnova, “devotes himself entirely to poetry. He writes all day long. In January, his poems are published in the newspapers Nov, Parus, Zarya...”
Izryadnova’s mention of the spread of illegal literature is associated with Yesenin’s participation in the literary and musical circle of the peasant poet I. Surikov - a very motley collection, both aesthetically and political relations(its members included Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Bolshevik-minded workers). The poet also attends classes at the Shanyavsky People's University - the first in the country educational institution, which could be attended free of charge by volunteers. There Yesenin receives the basics of a humanitarian education - he listens to lectures on Western European literature and Russian writers.
Meanwhile, Yesenin’s verse becomes more confident, more original, and sometimes civic motives begin to occupy him (Kuznets, Belgium, etc.). And the poems of those years - Marfa Posadnitsa, Us, Song of Evpatia Rotator - are both a stylization of ancient speech and an appeal to the sources of patriarchal wisdom, in which Yesenin saw both the source of the figurative musicality of the Russian language and the secret of the “naturalness of human relations.” The theme of the doomed transience of existence begins to sound loudly in Yesenin’s poems of that time:
I meet everything, I accept everything,
Glad and happy to take out my soul.
I came to this earth
To leave her quickly.
It is known that in 1916 in Tsarskoe Selo Yesenin visited N. Gumilev and A. Akhmatova and read them this poem, which struck Anna Andreevna with its prophetic character. And she was not mistaken - Yesenin’s life really turned out to be both fleeting and tragic...
Meanwhile, Moscow seems cramped to Yesenin; in his opinion, all the main events of literary life take place in St. Petersburg, and in the spring of 1915 the poet decides to move there.
In St. Petersburg, Yesenin visited A. Blok. When he didn’t find him at home, he left him a note and poems tied in a village scarf. The note was preserved with Blok’s note: “The poems are fresh, clean, vociferous...”. So, thanks to the participation of Blok and the poet S. Gorodetsky, Yesenin became accepted into all the most prestigious literary salons and drawing rooms, where he very soon became a welcome guest. His poems spoke for themselves - their special simplicity, combined with images that “burn through” the soul, the touching spontaneity of the “village boy”, as well as the abundance of words from the dialect and the ancient Russian language had a bewitching effect on many makers of literary fashion. Some saw in Yesenin a simple young man from the village, endowed by fate with a remarkable poetic gift. Others - for example, Merezhkovsky and Gippius, were ready to consider him the bearer of the saving, in their opinion, for Russia, mystical folk Orthodoxy, a man from the ancient sunken "City of Kitezh", in every possible way emphasizing and cultivating religious motifs in his poems (Child Jesus, Scarlet darkness in the heavenly mob. Clouds from the foal) (Neighing like a hundred mares.).
At the end of 1915 - beginning of 1917, Yesenin's poems appeared on the pages of many metropolitan publications. At this time, the poet became quite close to N. Klyuev, a native of Old Believers peasants. Together with him, Yesenin performs in salons to the accordion, dressed in morocco boots, a blue silk shirt, belted with a gold cord. The two poets really had a lot in common - longing for the patriarchal village way of life, a passion for folklore and antiquity. But at the same time, Klyuev always deliberately fenced himself off from modern world, and the restless, future-oriented Yesenin was irritated by the feigned humility and deliberately moralizing unctuousness of his “friend-enemy.” It is no coincidence that several years later Yesenin advised in a letter to one poet: “Stop singing this stylized Klyuev Rus': Life, the real life of Rus' is much better than the frozen picture of the Old Believers...”
And this “real life of Rus'” carried Yesenin and his fellow travelers on the “ship of modernity” further and further. In full swing. First World War, alarming rumors are spreading across St. Petersburg, people are dying at the front: Yesenin serves as an orderly at the Tsarskoye Selo military sanitary hospital, reads his poems in front of Grand Duchess Elizaveta Feodorovna, in front of the Empress. Which causes criticism from its St. Petersburg literary patrons. In that “deaf child of the fire” that A. Akhmatova wrote about, all values, both human and political, were mixed, and the “coming boor” (the expression of D. Merezhkovsky) outraged no less than the reverence for the reigning persons. .
At first, in the turbulent revolutionary events, Yesenin saw hope for quick and profound transformations of his entire previous life. It seemed that the transformed lands and sky were calling out to the country and man, and Yesenin wrote: O Rus', flap your wings, / Put up a new support! / With other times. / A different steppe rises... (1917). Yesenin is filled with hopes of building a new, peasant paradise on earth, a different, fair life. The Christian worldview at this time is intertwined in his poems with atheistic and pantheistic motives, with admiring exclamations to the new government:
The sky is like a bell
The month is a language
My mother is my homeland,
I am a Bolshevik.
He writes several short poems: Transfiguration, Fatherland, Octoechos, Ionia. Many lines from them, which sometimes sounded defiantly scandalous, shocked contemporaries:
I'll lick the icons with my tongue
Faces of martyrs and saints.
I promise you the city of Inonia,
Where the deity of the living lives.
No less famous are the lines from the poem Transfiguration:
The clouds are barking
The golden-toothed heights roar...
I sing and cry:
Lord, calve!
In these same revolutionary years, during times of devastation, famine and terror, Yesenin reflects on the origins imaginative thinking, which he sees in folklore, in ancient Russian art, in the “nodal connection of nature with the essence of man”, in folk art. He sets out these thoughts in the article Keys of Mary, in which he expresses hope for the resurrection of secret signs ancient life, to restore harmony between man and nature, while still relying on the same village way of life: “The only wasteful and sloppy, but still the keeper of this secret was the village, half-broken by latrines and factories.”
Very soon Yesenin realizes that the Bolsheviks are not at all who they would like to pretend to be. According to S. Makovsky, art critic and publisher, Yesenin “understood, or rather, sensed with his peasant heart, with his pity: that it was not a “great bloodless” thing that happened, but a dark and merciless time had begun...” And so Yesenin’s mood of elation and hope gives way to confusion and bewilderment at what is happening. Peasant life is being destroyed, hunger and devastation are spreading across the country, and the regulars of former literary salons, many of whom have already emigrated, are being replaced by a very diverse literary and semi-literary public.
In 1919 Yesenin turned out to be one of the organizers and leaders of the new literary group- imagists. (IMAGENISM [from the French image - image] is a trend in literature and painting. It arose in England shortly before the war of 1914-1918 (its founders were Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, who broke away from the futurists), developed on Russian soil in the first years of the revolution. Russian The imagists made their declaration at the beginning of 1919 in the magazines "Sirena" (Voronezh) and " Soviet country"(Moscow). The core of the group was V. Shershenevich, A. Mariengof, S. Yesenin, A. Kusikov, R. Ivnev, I. Gruzinov and some others. Organizationally, they united around the publishing houses "Imaginists", "Chikhi-Pikhi", bookstore and the well-known Lithuanian cafe "Pegasus's Stall". Later, the Imagists published the magazine "Hotel for Travelers in Beauty", which ceased at issue 4 in 1924. Soon after this, the group disbanded.
The Imagist theory is based on the principle of poetry and proclaims the primacy of the “image as such.” Not a word-symbol with an infinite number of meanings (symbolism), not a word-sound (cubo-futurism), not a word-name of a thing (Acmeism), but a word-metaphor with one specific meaning is the basis of art. “The only law of art, the only and incomparable method is the identification of life through the image and rhythm of images" ("Declaration" of the Imagists). The theoretical justification of this principle comes down to the likening of poetic creativity to the process of language development through metaphor. The poetic image is identified with what Potebnya called the “internal form of the word.” “The birth of the word of speech and language from the womb of the image,” says Mariengof, “predetermined once and for all the figurative beginning of future poetry.” “We must always remember the original image of the word.” If in practical speech the “conceptuality” of a word displaces its “imagery,” then in poetry the image excludes meaning and content: “eating meaning by an image is the way of development of the poetic word” (Shershenevich). In this regard, there is a breakdown of grammar, a call to agrammaticality: “the meaning of a word lies not only in the root of the word, but also in the grammatical form. The image of the word is only in the root. By breaking grammar, we destroy the potential power of the content, while maintaining the same power of the image” (Shershenevich , 2Х2=5). The poem, which is an agrammatic “catalog of images,” naturally does not fit into the correct metrical forms: “vers libre of images” requires “vers libre” rhythmic: “Free verse is the integral essence of imagist poetry, distinguished by the extreme sharpness of figurative transitions” (Marienhof) . “A poem is not an organism, but a crowd of images; one image can be taken out of it and ten more inserted” (Shershenevich)).
Their slogans would seem to be completely alien to Yesenin’s poetry, his views on the nature of poetic creativity. Consider, for example, the words from the Declaration of Imagism: “Art built on content... had to die from hysteria.” In Imagism, Yesenin was attracted by close attention to the artistic image; a significant role in his participation in the group was played by general everyday disorder, attempts to jointly share the hardships of the revolutionary time.
The painful feeling of duality, the inability to live and create, being cut off from folk peasant roots, coupled with the disappointment of finding a “new city - Inonia”, gives Yesenin’s lyrics a tragic mood. The leaves in his poems are already whispering “in an autumnal way”, whistling throughout the country, like Autumn, a Charlatan, a murderer and a villain and eyelids who have seen the light. Only death closes...
I the last poet villages - writes Yesenin in a poem (1920) dedicated to his friend the writer Mariengof. Yesenin saw that the old village way of life was fading into oblivion; it seemed to him that the living, natural was being replaced by a mechanized, dead life. In one of his letters in 1920, he admitted: “I am very sad now that history is going through a difficult era of the killing of the individual as a living person, because what is going on is completely different from the socialism that I thought about... The living thing is cramped in it, 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.”
At the same time, Yesenin is working on the poems Pugachev and Nomakh. He had been interested in the figure of Pugachev for several years, collected materials, dreamed of theatrical production. The surname Nomakh is formed on behalf of Makhno, the leader of the Insurgent Army during the Civil War. Both images are related by the motif of rebellion, rebellious spirit, characteristic of folklore robbers-truth-seekers. The poems clearly contain a protest against Yesenin’s contemporary reality, in which he did not see even a hint of justice. So the “country of scoundrels” for Nomakh is the region in which he lives, and in general any state where... if it is criminal here to be a bandit, / It is no more criminal than to be a king...
In the fall of 1921, the famous dancer Isadora Duncan arrived in Moscow, with whom Yesenin soon married.
The couple goes abroad, to Europe, then to the USA. At first, Yesenin’s European impressions lead him to believe that he “has fallen out of love with impoverished Russia, but very soon both the West and industrial America begin to seem to him a kingdom of philistinism and boredom.
At this time, Yesenin was already drinking heavily, often falling into a riot, and his poems increasingly featured motifs of hopeless loneliness, drunken revelry, hooliganism and a ruined life, which partly related some of his poems to the genre of urban romance. It is not without reason that while still in Berlin, Yesenin wrote his first poems from the Moscow Tavern cycle:
They drink here again, fight and cry.
Under the harmonics of yellow sadness...
The marriage with Duncan soon broke up, and Yesenin again found himself in Moscow, unable to find a place for himself in the new Bolshevik Russia.
According to contemporaries, when he went on a drinking binge, he could terribly “cover up” the Soviet government. But they did not touch him and, after holding him for some time in the police, they soon released him - by that time Yesenin was famous in society as a folk, “peasant” poet.
Despite his difficult physical and moral condition, Yesenin continues to write - even more tragic, even deeper, even more perfect.
Among the best poems of his last years are Letter to a Woman, Persian motifs, short poems: Vanishing Rus', Homeless Rus', Return to the Motherland, Letter to Mother (Are you still alive, my old lady?.), We are now leaving little by little to that country where it is quiet and grace...
And, finally, the poem “The golden grove dissuaded”, which combines the truly folk song element, and the skill of a mature poet who has experienced a lot, and the aching, pure simplicity for which people who are completely far from fine literature loved him so much:
The golden grove dissuaded
Birch, cheerful language,
And the cranes, sadly flying,
They don’t regret anyone anymore.
Whom should I feel sorry for? After all, everyone in the world is a wanderer -
He will pass, come in and leave the house again.
The hemp plant dreams of all those who have passed away
With a wide moon over the blue pond...
On December 28, 1925, Yesenin was found dead in the Leningrad Angleterre Hotel. His last poem - “Goodbye, my friend, goodbye...” - was written in this hotel in blood. According to the poet's friends, Yesenin complained that there was no ink in the room, and he was forced to write in blood.
According to the version accepted by most of the poet’s biographers, Yesenin, in a state of depression (a month after treatment in a psychoneurological hospital), committed suicide (hanged himself). Neither contemporaries of the event, nor in the next few decades after the poet’s death, other versions of the event were expressed.
In the 1970-1980s, mainly in nationalist circles, versions also arose about the murder of the poet followed by the staging of his suicide: motivated by jealousy, selfish motives, murder by OGPU officers. In 1989, under the auspices of the Gorky IMLI, the Yesenin Commission was created under the chairmanship of Yu. L. Prokushev; at her request, a series of examinations were carried out, which led to the following conclusion: “the now published “versions” of the murder of the poet with the subsequent staging of hanging, despite some discrepancies... are a vulgar, incompetent interpretation of special information, sometimes falsifying the results of the examination” (from the official response Professor in the Department of Forensic Medicine, Doctor of Medical Sciences B. S. Svadkovsky at the request of the chairman of the commission Yu. L. Prokushev). In the 1990s, various authors continued to put forward both new arguments in support of the murder version and counterarguments. A version of Yesenin’s murder is presented in the series “Yesenin”.
He was buried on December 31, 1925 in Moscow at the Vagankovskoye cemetery.
Works of Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin, uniquely bright and deep, has now firmly entered our literature and enjoys enormous success among numerous Soviet and foreign readers.
The poet's poems are full of heartfelt warmth and sincerity, passionate love for the boundless expanses of his native fields, the “inexhaustible sadness” of which he was able to convey so emotionally and so loudly.
Sergei Yesenin entered our literature as an outstanding lyricist. It is in the lyrics that everything that makes up the soul of Yesenin’s creativity is expressed. It contains the full-blooded, sparkling joy of a young man who is rediscovering a wonderful world, subtly feeling the fullness of earthly charm, and the deep tragedy of a person who has remained for too long in the “narrow gap” of old feelings and views. And if in the best poems of Sergei Yesenin there is a “flood” of the most intimate , the most intimate human feelings, they are filled to the brim with the freshness of pictures of native nature, then in his other works there is despair, decay, hopeless sadness. Sergei Yesenin is, first of all, a singer of Rus', and in his poems,
sincere and frank in Russian, we feel the beating of a restless, tender heart. They have a “Russian spirit”, they “smell of Russia”. They absorbed the great traditions of national poetry, the traditions of Pushkin, Nekrasov, Blok. Even in love lyrics Yesenin's theme of love merges with the theme of the Motherland. The author of "Persian Motifs" is convinced of the fragility of serene happiness away from native land. And the main character of the cycle becomes distant Russia: “No matter how beautiful Shiraz is, it is no better than the expanses of Ryazan.” Yesenin greeted the October Revolution with joy and warm sympathy. Together with Blok and Mayakovsky, he took her side without hesitation. The works written by Yesenin at that time (“Transfiguration”, “Inonia”, “Heavenly Drummer”) are imbued with rebellious sentiments. The poet is captured by the storm of the revolution, its greatness and strives for something new, for the future. In one of his works, Yesenin exclaimed: “My motherland, I am a Bolshevik!” But Yesenin, as he himself wrote, perceived the revolution in his own way, “with a peasant bias,” “more spontaneously than consciously.” This left a special imprint on the poet’s work and largely predetermined his future path. The poet's ideas about the goal of the revolution, the future, and socialism were characteristic. In the poem "Inonia" he paints the future as a kind of idyllic kingdom of peasant prosperity; socialism seems to him a blissful "peasant paradise." Such ideas were reflected in other works of Yesenin of that time:
I see you, green fields,
With a herd of dun horses.
With a shepherd's pipe in the willows
Apostle Andrew wanders.
But the fantastic visions of peasant Inonia, naturally, were not destined to come true. The revolution was led by the proletariat, the village was led by the city. “After all, the socialism that is coming is completely different from what I thought,” Yesenin states in one of his letters of that time. Yesenin begins to curse the “iron guest”, bringing death to the patriarchal village way of life, and to mourn the old, passing “wooden Rus'”. This explains the inconsistency of Yesenin’s poetry, which went through a difficult path from the singer of patriarchal, impoverished, dispossessed Russia to the singer of socialist Russia, Leninist Russia. After Yesenin’s trip abroad and to the Caucasus, a turning point occurs in the poet’s life and work and a new period is designated. It makes him fall in love with his socialist fatherland more deeply and deeply and evaluate everything that happens in it differently.”...I fell in love even more. into communist construction,” Yesenin wrote upon returning to his homeland in the essay “Iron Mirgorod.” Already in the cycle “Love of a Hooligan,” written immediately upon arrival from abroad, the mood of loss and hopelessness is replaced by hope for happiness, faith in love and the future. A wonderful poem “A blue fire swept up...”, full of self-condemnation, pure and tender love, gives a clear idea of the new motives in Yesenin’s lyrics:
A blue fire began to sweep,
Forgotten relatives.
For the first time I sang about love,
For the first time I refuse to make a scandal.
I was all like a neglected garden,
He was averse to women and potions.
I stopped liking singing and dancing
And lose your life without looking back.
Yesenin's work is one of the bright, deeply moving pages in the history of Soviet literature. Yesenin's era has receded into the past, but his poetry continues to live, awakening a feeling of love for his native land, for everything close and different. We are concerned about the sincerity and spirituality of the poet, for whom Rus' was the most precious thing on the entire planet...
Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin. Born on September 21 (October 3), 1895 in the village of Konstantinovo, Ryazan province - died on December 28, 1925 in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). Great Russian poet, representative of new peasant poetry and lyrics, as well as imagism.
Born in the village of Konstantinovo, Kuzminsky volost, Ryazan district, Ryazan province, into a peasant family.
Father - Alexander Nikitich Yesenin (1873-1931).
Mother - Tatyana Fedorovna Titova (1875-1955).
Sisters - Ekaterina (1905-1977), Alexandra (1911-1981).
In 1904, Yesenin went to the Konstantinovsky Zemstvo School, after which in 1909 he began his studies at the parish second-grade teacher's school (now the S. A. Yesenin Museum) in Spas-Klepiki. After graduating from school, in the fall of 1912, Yesenin left home, then arrived in Moscow, worked in butcher shop, and then - in the printing house of I. D. Sytin. In 1913, he entered the historical and philosophical department of the Moscow City People's University named after A. L. Shanyavsky as a volunteer student. He worked in a printing house and was friends with the poets of the Surikov literary and musical circle.
In 1914, Yesenin's poems were first published in the children's magazine Mirok.
In 1915, Yesenin came from Moscow to Petrograd, read his poems to S. M. Gorodetsky and other poets. In January 1916, Yesenin was drafted into the war and, thanks to the efforts of his friends, he received an appointment (“with the highest permission”) as an orderly on the Tsarskoe Selo military hospital train No. 143 of Her Imperial Majesty the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. At this time, he became close to the group of “new peasant poets” and published the first collections (“Radunitsa” - 1916), which made him very famous. Together with Nikolai Klyuev he often performed, including before Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and her daughters in Tsarskoe Selo.
In 1915-1917, Yesenin maintained friendly relations with the poet Leonid Kannegiser, who later killed the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, Uritsky.
Yesenin's acquaintance with Anatoly Mariengof and his active participation in the Moscow group of imagists dates back to 1918 - early 1920s.
During the period of Yesenin’s passion for imagism, several collections of the poet’s poems were published - “Treryadnitsa”, “Confession of a Hooligan” (both 1921), “Poems of a Brawler” (1923), “Moscow Tavern” (1924), the poem “Pugachev”.
In 1921, the poet, together with his friend Yakov Blumkin, traveled to Central Asia, visited the Urals and Orenburg region. From May 13 to June 3, he stayed in Tashkent with his friend and poet Alexander Shiryaevets. There Yesenin spoke to the public several times, read poems at poetry evenings and in the houses of his Tashkent friends. According to eyewitnesses, Yesenin loved to visit the old city, teahouses of the old city and Urda, listen to Uzbek poetry, music and songs, and visit the picturesque surroundings of Tashkent with his friends. He also made a short trip to Samarkand.
In the fall of 1921, in the workshop of G. B. Yakulov, Yesenin met a dancer, whom he married six months later. After the wedding, Yesenin and Duncan traveled to Europe (Germany, France, Belgium, Italy) and to the USA (4 months), where he stayed from May 1922 to August 1923. The Izvestia newspaper published Yesenin’s notes about America “Iron Mirgorod”. The marriage to Duncan ended shortly after their return from abroad.
In the early 1920s, Yesenin was actively involved in book publishing, as well as selling books in a bookstore he rented on Bolshaya Nikitskaya, which occupied almost all of the poet’s time. In the last years of his life, Yesenin traveled a lot around the country. He visited the Caucasus three times, went to Leningrad several times, and Konstantinovo seven times.
In 1924-1925, Yesenin visited Azerbaijan, published a collection of poems in the Krasny Vostok printing house, and was published in a local publishing house. There is a version that here, in May 1925, the poetic “Message to the Evangelist Demyan” was written. Lived in the village of Mardakan (a suburb of Baku). Currently, his house-museum and memorial plaque are located here.
In 1924, Yesenin decided to break with imagism due to disagreements with A. B. Mariengof. Yesenin and Ivan Gruzinov published an open letter about the dissolution of the group.
Sharply critical articles about him began to appear in newspapers, accusing him of drunkenness, rowdy behavior, fights and other antisocial behavior, although the poet, by his behavior (especially last years life) sometimes himself gave grounds for this kind of criticism. Several criminal cases were opened against Yesenin, mainly on charges of hooliganism; The Case of Four Poets, associated with the accusation of Yesenin and his friends of anti-Semitic statements, is also known.
Soviet authority was worried about Yesenin’s health. Thus, in a letter from Rakovsky dated October 25, 1925, Rakovsky asks “to save the life of the famous poet Yesenin - undoubtedly the most talented in our Union,” suggesting: “invite him to your place, treat him well and send with him to the sanatorium a comrade from the GPU, who I wouldn’t let him get drunk...” On the letter is Dzerzhinsky’s resolution addressed to his close comrade, secretary, manager of the affairs of the GPU V.D. Gerson: “M. b., could you study?” Next to it is Gerson’s note: “I called repeatedly but could not find Yesenin.”
At the end of November 1925, Sofya Tolstaya agreed with the director of the paid psychoneurological clinic of Moscow University, Professor P. B. Gannushkin, about the poet’s hospitalization in his clinic. Only a few people close to the poet knew about this. On December 21, 1925, Yesenin left the clinic, canceled all powers of attorney at the State Publishing House, withdrew almost all the money from the savings book and a day later left for Leningrad, where he stayed at No. 5 of the Angleterre Hotel.
In Leningrad last days Yesenin's life is marked by meetings with N.A. Klyuev, G.F. Ustinov, Ivan Pribludny, V.I. Erlikh, I.I. Sadofyev, N.N. Nikitin and other writers.
Personal life of Sergei Yesenin:
In 1913, Sergei Yesenin met Anna Romanovna Izryadnova, who worked as a proofreader in the printing house of the I. D. Sytin Partnership, where Yesenin went to work. In 1914 they entered into a civil marriage. On December 21, 1914, Anna Izryadnova gave birth to a son named Yuri (shot on false charges in 1937).
In 1917, he met and on July 30 of the same year got married in the village of Kiriki-Ulita, Vologda province, with a Russian actress, the future wife of director V. E. Meyerhold. The groom's guarantors were Pavel Pavlovich Khitrov, a peasant from the village of Ivanovskaya, Spasskaya volost, and Sergei Mikhailovich Baraev, a peasant from the village of Ustya, Ustyanskaya volost, and the bride's guarantors were Alexey Alekseevich Ganin and Dmitry Dmitrievich Devyatkov, a merchant's son from the city of Vologda. The wedding took place in the building of the Passage Hotel. From this marriage were born a daughter, Tatyana (1918-1992), a journalist and writer, and a son, Konstantin (1920-1986), a civil engineer, football statistician and journalist. At the end of 1919 (or at the beginning of 1920), Yesenin left the family, and Zinaida Reich, who was pregnant with her son (Konstantin), was left with her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Tatyana. On February 19, 1921, the poet filed for divorce, in which he undertook to provide for them financially (the divorce was officially filed in October 1921). Subsequently, Yesenin repeatedly visited his children adopted by Meyerhold.
From his first collections of poetry (“Radunitsa”, 1916; “Rural Book of Hours”, 1918) he appeared as a subtle lyricist, a master of deeply psychologized landscapes, a singer of peasant Rus', an expert vernacular and the people's soul.
In 1919-1923 he was a member of the Imagist group. A tragic attitude and mental confusion are expressed in the cycles “Mare’s Ships” (1920), “Moscow Tavern” (1924), and the poem “The Black Man” (1925). In the poem “The Ballad of Twenty-Six” (1924), dedicated to the Baku commissars, the collection “Soviet Rus'” (1925), and the poem “Anna Snegina” (1925), Yesenin sought to comprehend “the commune-raised Rus',” although he continued to feel like a poet of “Leaving Rus'” ", "golden log hut". Dramatic poem “Pugachev” (1921).
In 1920, Yesenin lived with his literary secretary Galina Benislavskaya. Throughout his life he met her several times, sometimes lived at Benislavskaya’s house, until his marriage to S. A. Tolstoy in the fall of 1925.
In 1921, from May 13 to June 3, the poet stayed in Tashkent with his friend, Tashkent poet Alexander Shiryaevets. At the invitation of the director of the Turkestan Public Library, on May 25, 1921, Yesenin spoke in the library at a literary evening organized by his friends in front of the audience of the “Art Studio”, which existed at the library. Yesenin arrived in Turkestan in the carriage of his friend Kolobov, a senior employee of the NKPS. He lived on this train throughout his stay in Tashkent, then on this train he traveled to Samarkand, Bukhara and Poltoratsk (present-day Ashgabat). On June 3, 1921, Sergei Yesenin left Tashkent and on June 9, 1921 returned to Moscow. By coincidence, most of the life of the poet’s daughter Tatyana was spent in Tashkent.
In the fall of 1921, in the workshop of G. B. Yakulov, Yesenin met the dancer Isadora Duncan, whom he married on May 2, 1922. At the same time, Yesenin did not speak English, and Duncan could barely express herself in Russian. Immediately after the wedding, Yesenin accompanied Duncan on tours in Europe (Germany, Belgium, France, Italy) and the USA. Usually, when describing this union, authors note its love-scandal side, but these two artists were undoubtedly brought together by their creative relationship. However, their marriage was brief, and in August 1923 Yesenin returned to Moscow.
In 1923, Yesenin became acquainted with the actress Augusta Miklashevskaya, to whom he dedicated seven heartfelt poems from the series “The Love of a Hooligan.” In one of the lines, the name of the actress is obviously encrypted: “Why does your name ring like August coolness?” It is noteworthy that in the fall of 1976, when the actress was already 85, in a conversation with literary critics, Augusta Leonidovna admitted that her affair with Yesenin was platonic and she did not even kiss the poet.
On May 12, 1924, Yesenin had a son, Alexander, after an affair with the poetess and translator Nadezhda Volpin - later a famous mathematician and figure in the dissident movement, Yesenin’s only living child.
On September 18, 1925, Yesenin married for the third (and last) time - to Sofya Andreevna Tolstoy (1900-1957), the granddaughter of L. N. Tolstoy, at that time the head of the library of the Writers' Union. This marriage also did not bring happiness to the poet and soon broke up. Restless loneliness became one of the main reasons for Yesenin’s tragic end. After the poet’s death, Tolstaya devoted her life to collecting, preserving, describing and preparing for publication Yesenin’s works, and left memoirs about him.
According to the memoirs of N. Sardanovsky and the poet’s letters, Yesenin was a vegetarian for some time.
Death of Sergei Yesenin:
On December 28, 1925, Yesenin was found dead in the Leningrad Angleterre Hotel. His last poem - “Goodbye, my friend, goodbye...” - according to Wolf Ehrlich, was given to him the day before: Yesenin complained that there was no ink in the room, and he was forced to write with his own blood.
According to the version that is now generally accepted among academic researchers of Yesenin’s life, the poet, in a state of depression (a week after finishing treatment in a psychoneurological hospital), committed suicide (hanged himself).
After a civil funeral service at the Union of Poets in Leningrad, Yesenin’s body was transported by train to Moscow, where a farewell ceremony was also held at the House of Press with the participation of relatives and friends of the deceased. He was buried on December 31, 1925 in Moscow at the Vagankovskoye cemetery.
Neither immediately after Yesenin’s death, nor in the next few decades after the poet’s death, no other versions of his death other than suicide were put forward.
In the 1970-1980s, versions arose about the murder of the poet, followed by the staging of Yesenin’s suicide (as a rule, OGPU employees are accused of organizing the murder). Investigator of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, retired colonel Eduard Khlystalov, contributed to the development of this version. The version of Yesenin’s murder has penetrated into popular culture: in particular, it is presented in artistic form in the television series “Yesenin” (2005).
In 1989, under the auspices of the Gorky IMLI, the Yesenin Commission was created under the chairmanship of the Soviet and Russian Yesenin scholar Yu. L. Prokushev; at her request, a number of examinations were carried out, which led to the following conclusion: “the now published “versions” of the murder of the poet with the subsequent staging of hanging, despite some discrepancies... are a vulgar, incompetent interpretation of special information, sometimes falsifying the results of the examination” (from the official response of Professor of the Department of Forensic Medicine, Doctor of Medical Sciences B. S. Svadkovsky to the request of the Chairman of the Commission Yu. L. Prokushev). Versions of Yesenin’s murder are considered late fiction or “unconvincing” by other biographers of the poet.
In 1912 he graduated from the Spas-Klepikovskaya teacher's school with a degree in literacy school teacher.
In the summer of 1912, Yesenin moved to Moscow and for some time served in a butcher shop, where his father worked as a clerk. After a conflict with his father, he left the shop and worked in book publishing, then in the printing house of Ivan Sytin in 1912-1914. During this period, the poet joined the revolutionary-minded workers and found himself under police surveillance.
In 1913-1915, Yesenin was a volunteer student at the historical and philosophical department of the Moscow City People's University named after A.L. Shanyavsky. In Moscow, he became close to writers from the Surikov literary and musical circle - an association of self-taught writers from the people.
Sergei Yesenin wrote poetry since childhood, mainly in imitation of Alexei Koltsov, Ivan Nikitin, Spiridon Drozhzhin. By 1912, he had already written the poem “The Legend of Evpatiy Kolovrat, of Khan Batu, the Flower of the Three Hands, of the Black Idol and Our Savior Jesus Christ,” and also prepared a book of poems “Sick Thoughts.” In 1913, the poet worked on the poem "Tosca" and the dramatic poem "The Prophet", the texts of which are unknown.
In January 1914, in the Moscow children's magazine "Mirok" under the pseudonym "Ariston", the poet's first publication took place - the poem "Birch". In February, the same magazine published the poems "Sparrows" ("Winter Sings and Calls...") and "Powder", later - "Village", "Easter Annunciation".
In the spring of 1915, Yesenin arrived in Petrograd (St. Petersburg), where he met the poets Alexander Blok, Sergei Gorodetsky, Alexei Remizov, and became close to Nikolai Klyuev, who had a significant influence on him. Their joint performances with poems and ditties, stylized in a “peasant”, “folk” style, were a great success.
In 1916, Yesenin’s first collection of poems, “Radunitsa,” was published, enthusiastically received by critics, who discovered in it a fresh spirit, youthful spontaneity and the author’s natural taste.
From March 1916 to March 1917 Yesenin passed military service- initially in the reserve battalion located in St. Petersburg, and then from April he served as an orderly on the Tsarskoye Selo military ambulance train No. 143. After the February Revolution, he left the army without permission.
Yesenin moved to Moscow. Having greeted the revolution with enthusiasm, he wrote several short poems - “The Jordan Dove”, “Inonia”, “Heavenly Drummer” - imbued with a joyful anticipation of the “transformation” of life.
In 1919-1921 he was part of a group of imagists who stated that the purpose of creativity was to create an image.
In the early 1920s, Yesenin’s poems featured motifs of “storm-ravaged everyday life,” drunken prowess, giving way to hysterical melancholy, which was reflected in the collections “Confession of a Hooligan” (1921) and “Moscow Tavern” (1924).
An event in Yesenin’s life was a meeting in the fall of 1921 with the American dancer Isadora Duncan, who six months later became his wife.
From 1922 to 1923, they traveled around Europe (Germany, Belgium, France, Italy) and America, but upon returning to Russia, Isadora and Yesenin separated almost immediately.
In the 1920s, Yesenin's most significant works were created, which brought him fame as one of the best Russian poets - poems
“The golden grove dissuaded me…”, “Letter to my mother”, “Now we are leaving little by little…”, the cycle “Persian Motifs”, the poem “Anna Snegina”, etc. The theme of the Motherland, which occupied one of the main places in his work, acquired during this period dramatic shades. The once single harmonious world of Yesenin’s Rus' split into two: “Soviet Rus'” - “Leaving Rus'.” In the collections "Soviet Rus'" and "Soviet Country" (both - 1925), Yesenin felt like a singer of a "golden log hut", whose poetry "is no longer needed here." The emotional dominant of the lyrics were autumn landscapes, motives for summing up, and farewells.
The last two years of the poet’s life were spent traveling: he traveled to the Caucasus three times, went to Leningrad (St. Petersburg) several times, and to Konstantinovo seven times.
At the end of November 1925, the poet was admitted to a psychoneurological clinic. One of latest works Yesenin's poem "The Black Man", in which the past life appears as part of a nightmare. Having interrupted the course of treatment, Yesenin left for Leningrad on December 23.
On December 24, 1925, he stayed at the Angleterre Hotel, where on December 27 he wrote his last poem, “Goodbye, my friend, goodbye...”.
On the night of December 28, 1925, according to the official version, Sergei Yesenin committed suicide. The poet was discovered on the morning of December 28. His body hung in a noose on water pipe right under the ceiling, at a height of almost three meters.
No serious investigation was carried out, the city authorities from the local police officer.
A special commission created in 1993 did not confirm versions of other circumstances of the poet’s death, in addition to the official one.
Sergei Yesenin is buried in Moscow at the Vagankovskoye cemetery.
The poet was married several times. In 1917, he married Zinaida Reich (1897-1939), secretary-typist of the newspaper Delo Naroda. From this marriage a daughter, Tatyana (1918-1992), and a son, Konstantin (1920-1986), were born. In 1922, Yesenin married the American dancer Isadora Duncan. In 1925, the poet’s wife was Sofia Tolstaya (1900-1957), the granddaughter of the writer Leo Tolstoy. The poet had a son, Yuri (1914-1938), from a civil marriage with Anna Izryadnova. In 1924, Yesenin had a son, Alexander, from the poet and translator Nadezhda Volpin, a mathematician and activist in the dissident movement, who moved to the United States in 1972.
On October 2, 1965, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the poet’s birth, the State Museum-Reserve of S.A. was opened in the village of Konstantinovo in the house of his parents. Yesenin is one of the largest museum complexes in Russia.
On October 3, 1995, in Moscow, in house number 24 on Bolshoi Strochenovsky Lane, where Sergei Yesenin was registered in 1911-1918, the Moscow State Museum of S.A. was created. Yesenina.
The material was prepared based on information from RIA Novosti and open sources
