Born September 21 (October 3) 1895 in the village. Konstantinovo, Ryazan province in a peasant family.

Education in the biography of Yesenin was received at the local zemstvo school (1904-1909), then until 1912 - in the class of the parish school. In 1913 he entered the Shanyavsky City People's University in Moscow.

The beginning of the literary path

In Petrograd Yesenin reads his poems to Alexander Blok and other poets. Moves closer to a group of "new peasant poets", and he himself is carried away by this direction. After the publication of the first collections (Radunitsa, 1916), the poet became widely known.

In the lyrics, Yesenin could psychologically approach the description of landscapes. Another theme of Yesenin's poetry is peasant Russia, love for which is felt in many of his works.

Since 1914, Sergei Aleksandrovich has been published in children's publications, writes poems for children (poems "The Orphan", 1914, "Pobirushka", 1915, the story "Yar", 1916, "The Tale of Petya the Shepherd ...", 1925 .).

At this time, real popularity comes to Yesenin, he is invited to various poetic meetings. Maxim Gorky wrote: “The city greeted him with the same admiration as a glutton meets strawberries in January. His poems began to praise, excessively and insincerely, as hypocrites and envious people can praise. "

In 1918-1920 Yesenin is fond of imagism, publishes collections of poems: "Confessions of a Hooligan" (1921), "Tresryadnitsa" (1921), "Brawler's Poems" (1923), "Moscow Kabatskaya" (1924).

Personal life

After meeting the dancer Isadora Duncan in 1921, Yesenin soon marries her. Prior to that, he lived with A.R. Izryadnova (had a son Yuri with her), Z.N. Raikh (son Konstantin, daughter Tatyana), N. Volpina (son Alexander). After the wedding with Duncan, he traveled to Europe, USA. Their marriage turned out to be short - in 1923, the couple broke up, and Yesenin returned to Moscow.

The last years of life and death

In the further work of Yesenin, Russian leaders were very critically described (1925, "The Country of Scoundrels"). In the same year in Yesenin's life, the publication "Soviet Russia" was published.

In the fall of 1925, the poet marries L. Tolstoy's granddaughter, Sofya Andreevna. Depression, alcohol addiction, pressure from the authorities caused the new wife to put Sergei in a neuropsychiatric hospital.

Then, in the biography of Sergei Yesenin, there was an escape to Leningrad. And on December 28, 1925, Yesenin died, his body was found hanged at the Angleterre Hotel.

Chronological table

Other biography options

• Option 2 is more concise for a talk or class message

• Yesenin was well educated, read a lot, but did not know languages \u200b\u200bat all. With his wife, Isadora, he could not speak English, and she barely spoke Russian. Living abroad, he communicated with foreigners with the help of an interpreter.
• Yesenin became a father quite early - at the age of 18. The first child from a civil marriage with Anna Izryadnova was the son Yuri, who was shot on false charges of attempting to kill Stalin in 1937.
• Yesenin's ideological literary opponent was, of course, Mayakovsky, who belonged to the Futurists. Poets could publicly belittle each other's work, but each of them had a high opinion of the other's talent.
• Until now, the mystery of the death of the poet remains unsolved. In addition to the suicide version, there is also an assumption of political murder, which was staged as a suicide.
• see all

Yesenin - Sergei Alexandrovich (1895-1925), Russian poet. From the first collections ("Radunitsa", 1916; "Rural Hourly", 1918) he appeared as a subtle lyricist, a master of a deeply psychologized landscape, a singer of peasant Rus, an expert on the folk language and folk soul. In 1919-23 he was a member of the Imagist group. A tragic attitude and emotional confusion are expressed in the cycles "Mares' 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 Russia" (1925), the poem "Anna Snegina" (1925), Yesenin strove to comprehend "the commune reared Rus", although he continued to feel like a poet of ”,“ Golden log hut ”. Dramatic poem "Pugachev" (1921).

Childhood and youth

Born into a peasant family, as a child he lived in the family of his grandfather. Among Yesenin's first impressions are spiritual poems sung by the wandering blind people and grandmother's tales. After graduating with honors from the Konstantinovskoe four-grade school (1909), he continued his studies at the Spas-Klepikovskaya teacher's school (1909-12), from which he graduated as a "teacher of the literacy school." In the summer of 1912, Yesenin moved to Moscow, for some time he served in a butcher shop, where his father worked as a salesman. After a conflict with his father, he left the shop, worked in publishing, then in the printing house of ID Sytin; during this period he joined the revolutionary-minded workers and was under police surveillance. At the same time, Yesenin studied at the historical and philosophical department of Shanyavsky University (1913-15).

Literary debut and success

From childhood, composing poetry (mainly in imitation of A. V. Koltsov, I. S. Nikitin, S. D. Drozhzhin), Yesenin acquires like-minded people in the "Surikov literary and musical circle", of which he became a member in 1912. He began to publish in 1914 in Moscow children's magazines (debut poem "Birch"). In the spring of 1915 Yesenin arrives in Petrograd, where he meets A. A. Blok, S. M. Gorodetsky, A. M. Remizov, N. S. Gumilyov, and others, becomes close to N. A. Klyuev, who had a significant influence on him ... Their joint performances with poems and ditties, stylized in the "peasant", "folk" manner (Yesenin appeared to the public as a golden-haired fellow in an embroidered shirt and morocco boots), were a great success.

Military service

In the first half of 1916, Yesenin was drafted into the army, but thanks to the efforts of his friends, he received an appointment ("with the highest permission") as an orderly in the Tsarskoye Selo military ambulance train No. 143 of Her Imperial Majesty Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, which allows him to freely visit literary salons, to visit at receptions with patrons of the arts, performing at concerts. At one of the concerts in the infirmary, to which he was seconded (here the empress and the princess sisters of mercy served), he meets with the royal family. At the same time, together with N. Klyuev, they perform, dressed in ancient Russian costumes, made according to V. Vasnetsov's sketches, at the evenings of the Society for the Revival of Artistic Russia at the Feodorovsky town in Tsarskoe Selo, and are also invited to Moscow to the Grand Duchess Elizabeth. Together with the royal couple in May 1916, Yesenin visited Evpatoria as a train attendant. This was the last trip of Nicholas II to the Crimea.

"Radunitsa"

The first collection of Yesenin's poems "Radunitsa" (1916) was enthusiastically welcomed by the critics, who found in it a fresh stream, which noted the author's youthful spontaneity and natural taste. In the verses of "Radunitsa" and subsequent collections ("Dove", "Transfiguration", "Rural Hours", all 1918, etc.), a special Yesenin "anthropomorphism" is formed: animals, plants, natural phenomena, etc. are humanized by the poet, forming together with people connected by roots and all of their nature with nature, a harmonious, holistic, wonderful world. At the junction of Christian imagery, pagan symbolism and folklore stylistics, pictures of Yesenin Rus, painted with a subtle perception of nature, are born, where everything: a burning stove and a dog's zakut, unmown hayfields and swamp swamps, the hubbub of mowers and snoring of the herd becomes the object of the reverent, almost religious feeling of the poet (“I I pray at the ala dawn, I take Communion by the stream ").

The revolution

At the beginning of 1918 Yesenin moved to Moscow. Having met the revolution with enthusiasm, he wrote several small poems ("The Jordanian Dove", "Inonia", "Heavenly Drummer", all 1918, etc.), imbued with a joyful foreboding of the "transformation" of life. Theomachist moods are combined in them with biblical imagery to indicate the scale and significance of the events taking place. Yesenin, glorifying the new reality and its heroes, tried to correspond to the time ("Cantata", 1919). In later years he wrote "The Song of the Great Campaign", 1924, "Captain of the Earth", 1925, and others). Reflecting on "where the fate of events takes us", the poet turns to history (the dramatic poem "Pugachev", 1921).

Imagism

Searches in the sphere of imagery bring Yesenin closer to A.B. Mariengof, V.G. Shershenevich, R. Ivnev, at the beginning of 1919 they united into a group of Imagists; Yesenin becomes a regular at the "Stable of Pegasus" literary cafe of the imagists at the Nikitsky Gate in Moscow. However, the poet only partly shared their platform - the desire to clear the form from the "dust of content." His aesthetic interests are directed to the patriarchal rural way of life, folk art, the spiritual fundamental principle of the artistic image (treatise "The Keys of Mary", 1919). Already in 1921 Yesenin appeared in the press with criticism of the "buffoonery for the sake of the antics" of his "fellow" principals. Gradually, pretentious metaphors disappear from his lyrics.

"Moscow tavern"

In the early 1920s. in Yesenin's poems, motifs of “life torn apart by a storm” appear (in 1920, the marriage with ZN Reich, which had lasted about three years, broke up), drunken prowess, replaced by anguished melancholy. The poet appears as a hooligan, brawler, drunkard with a bloody soul, hobbling "from brothel to brothel", where he is surrounded by "a stranger and laughing rabble" (collections "Confession of a Hooligan", 1921; "Moscow Kabatskaya", 1924).

Isadora

An event in Yesenin's life was a meeting with the American dancer Isadora Duncan (autumn 1921), who six months later became his wife. A joint trip to Europe (Germany, Belgium, France, Italy) and America (May 1922 August 1923), accompanied by noisy scandals, shocking antics of Isadora and Yesenin, exposed their "misunderstanding", aggravated by the literal lack of a common language (Yesenin did not speak foreign languages , Isadora learned several dozen Russian words). Upon returning to Russia, they parted.

Poems of recent years

Yesenin returned to his homeland with joy, a sense of renewal, the desire "to be a singer and a citizen ... in the great states of the USSR." During this period (1923-25) his best lines were created: the poems "The golden grove dissuaded ...", "Letter to the mother", "We are now leaving a little ...", the cycle "Persian motives", the poem "Anna Snegina" and others. The main place in his poems still belongs to the theme of the motherland, which now takes on dramatic shades. The once united harmonious world of Yesenin Rus' bifurcates: “Soviet Rus” “Departing Rus”. The motive of the competition between the old and the new, outlined in the poem "Sorokoust" (1920) ("red-maned foal" and "on the paws of a cast-iron train"), is being developed in the poems of recent years: fixing signs of a new life, welcoming "stone and steel", Yesenin more and more feels like a singer of a "golden log hut", whose poetry "is no longer needed here" (collections "Soviet Russia", "Soviet Country", both 1925). Autumn landscapes, summing up motives, farewells became the emotional dominant of the lyrics of this period.

Tragic ending

One of his last works was the poem "The Country of Scoundrels" in which he denounced the Soviet regime. After that, he was harassed in the newspapers, accusing him of drunkenness, fights, etc. The last two years of Yesenin's life were spent in constant travel: hiding from prosecution, he traveled to the Caucasus three times, several times traveled to Leningrad, seven times to Konstantinovo. At the same time, he is once again trying to start a family life, but his alliance with S.A. Tolstoy (the granddaughter of L. N. Tolstoy) was not happy. At the end of November 1925, due to the threat of arrest, he had to go to a neuropsychiatric clinic. Sophia Tolstaya made an agreement with Professor P.B. Gannushkin about the poet's hospitalization to a paid clinic at Moscow University. The professor promised to provide him with a separate ward where Yesenin could do literary work. The GPU and police officers ran off their feet in search of the poet. Only a few people knew about his hospitalization in the clinic, but informants were found. On November 28, the Chekists rushed to the director of the clinic, Professor P.B. Gannushkina and demanded the extradition of Yesenin, but he did not give up his countryman for reprisal. The clinic is being monitored. After waiting for the moment, Yesenin interrupts the course of treatment (he left the clinic in a group of visitors) and on December 23 he leaves for Leningrad. On the night of December 28, at the Angleterre Hotel, Sergei Yesenin was killed by faked suicide.

Yesenin's autobiography of May 14, 1922

I am the son of a peasant. Born in 1895 on September 21 in the Ryazan province. Ryazan district. Kuzminskaya volost. From the age of two, due to the poverty of his father and the large family, he was given to be raised by a rather wealthy maternal grandfather, who had three adult unmarried sons, with whom I spent almost all my childhood. My uncles were mischievous and desperate guys. For three and a half years, they put me on a horse without a saddle and immediately put me into a gallop. I remember that I went crazy and very tightly held the withers. Then I was taught to swim. One uncle (Uncle Sasha) took me into the boat, drove away from the shore, took off my linen and, like a puppy, threw me into the water. I clumsily and frightenedly splashed my hands, and until he choked, he kept shouting: “Eh, bitch! Where are you good for? " "Bitch" he had an affectionate word. After about eight years, for another uncle, I often replaced the hunting dog, swimming in the lakes for shot ducks. I was very well trained to climb trees. No one of the boys could compete with me. For many who were disturbed by rooks to sleep at noon after plowing, I removed nests from birches for a dime apiece. Once it broke, but very successfully, scratching only the face and stomach and breaking the jug of milk that was carrying to the mowing grandfather.

Among the boys, I have always been a horse breeder and a great fighter, and I always walked around in scratches. Only one grandmother scolded me for mischief, and my grandfather sometimes provoked me into fist and often said to my grandmother: “You are with me, you fool, do not touch him. It will be stronger this way. " Grandma loved me with all her might, and her tenderness knew no bounds. On Saturdays, they washed me, cut my nails and corrugated my head with hot oil, because not a single comb took curly hair. But the oil did not help much either. I always yelled good obscenities and even now I have some unpleasant feeling by Saturday. On Sundays I was always sent to Mass and. to check that I was at mass, they gave 4 kopecks. Two kopecks for the prosphora and two for the removal of the parts to the priest. I bought a prosphora and instead of a priest made three marks on it with a penknife, and for the other two kopecks I went to the cemetery to play pig with the guys.

This is how my childhood went. When I grew up, they really wanted to make a rural teacher out of me, and therefore they sent me to a closed church-teacher's school, after graduating from which, at the age of sixteen, I had to enter the Moscow Teachers' Institute. Fortunately, this did not happen. The methodology and didactics were so sick of me that I didn't even want to listen. I began to write poetry early, about nine years old, but I consider my conscious creativity to be 16-17 years old. Some of the poems of these years are included in Radunitsa.

at the age of eighteen I was surprised, having sent my poems to magazines, that they were not published, and suddenly I burst into Petersburg. They made me very welcome there. The first one I saw was Blok, the second was Gorodetsky. When I looked at Blok, sweat dripped from me, because for the first time I saw a living poet. Gorodetsky introduced me to Klyuev, about whom I had never heard a word before. With Klyuev, we struck up, with all our internal strife, a great friendship, which continues to this day, despite the fact that we have not seen each other for six years. He now lives in Vytegra, writes to me that he eats bread with chaff, washed down with empty boiling water and prays to God for a shameful death.

During the years of war and revolution, fate pushed me from side to side. I have traveled far and wide across Russia, from the Arctic Ocean to the Black and Caspian Sea, from the West to China, Persia and India. The best time in my life is 1919. Then we lived the winter in 5 degrees of room cold. We didn't have a log of firewood. I have never been a member of the RCP, because I feel much more to the left. My favorite writer is Gogol. Books of my poems: "Radunitsa", "Dove", "Transfiguration", "Rural Hourly", "Treyadnitsa", "Confessions of a Hooligan" and "Pugachev". Now I am working on a big thing called "The Country of Rascals." In Russia, when there was no paper there, I printed my poems together with Kusikov and Mariengof on the walls of the Strastnoy Monastery, or simply read somewhere on the boulevard. The best admirers of our poetry are prostitutes and bandits. We are all in great friendship with them. The communists do not like us because of a misunderstanding. For this to all my readers my lowest greetings and a little attention to the sign: "They ask you not to shoot!"

Yesenin's autobiography from 1923

Born in 1895 on October 4. The son of a peasant of Ryazan province, Ryazan district, village of Konstantinov. Childhood was spent among fields and steppes.

Grew up under the glory of grandmother and grandfather. My grandmother was religious, she dragged me around the monasteries. At home I collected all the crippled people who sing spiritual poems in Russian villages from "Lazar" to "Mikola". Grew up mischievous and naughty. There was a fighter. My grandfather sometimes forced him to fight to be stronger.

He started composing poetry early. The grandmother gave jolts. She told stories. I didn’t like some fairy tales with bad ends, and I reworked them in my own way. He began to write poetry, imitating ditties. I believed in God a little. He didn't like going to church. At home they knew this and, in order to test me, they gave 4 kopecks per prosphora, which I had to carry to the altar to the priest for the ritual of taking out the parts. The priest made 3 cuts on the prosphora and took 2 kopecks for this. Then I learned to do this procedure myself with a penknife, and 2 kopecks. he put it in his pocket and went to play in the cemetery with the boys, to play grandmother. Once the grandfather guessed. There was a scandal. I fled to another village to see my aunt and did not show up until the time when they were forgiven.

He studied at a closed teacher's school. At home they wanted me to be a rural teacher. When I was taken to school, I missed my grandmother terribly and once ran home more than 100 miles away on foot. The houses were scolded and taken back.

After school, from 16 to 17 he lived in the village. For 17 years he left for Moscow and entered the Shanyavsky University as a volunteer. At the age of 19, he came to St. Petersburg passing to Revel to see his uncle. I went to Blok, Blok brought him to Gorodetsky, and Gorodetsky to Klyuev. My poems made a great impression. All the best magazines of that time (1915) began to print me, and in the fall (1915) my first book, Radunitsa, appeared. Much has been written about her. All with one voice said that I was a talent. I knew this better than anyone else. For "Radunitsa" I released "Dove", "Transfiguration", "Rural Hourly", "Maria's Keys", "Tresryadnitsa", "Confessions of a Hooligan", "Pugachev". Soon "Country of scoundrels" and "Moscow tavern" will be out of print.

Extremely individual. With all the foundations on the Soviet platform.

In 1916 he was called up for military service. With some patronage of Colonel Loman, the Empress's adjutant, he was granted many benefits. He lived in Tsarskoye not far from Razumnik Ivanov. At the request of Loman, he once read poetry to the Empress. After reading my poems, she said that my poems are beautiful, but very sad. I told her that all of Russia is like that. Referred to poverty, climate, etc. The revolution found me at the front in one of the disciplinary battalions, where I ended up for refusing to write poetry in honor of the king. He refused, consulting and seeking support in Ivanovo-Razumnik. In the revolution he left the army of Kerensky without permission and, living as a deserter, worked with the Social Revolutionaries not as a party member, but as a poet.

When the party split, he went with the left group and in October was in their fighting squad. He left Petrograd together with the Soviet regime. In Moscow at the age of 18 he met with Marienhof, Shershenevich and Ivnev.

The urgent need to implement the power of the image prompted us to publish a manifesto of the Imagists. We were the pioneers of a new era in the era of art, and we had to fight for a long time. During our war, we renamed the streets in our names and painted the Passionate Monastery in the words of our poems.

1919-1921 traveled across Russia: Murman, Solovki, Arkhangelsk, Turkestan, Kyrgyz steppes, Caucasus, Persia, Ukraine and Crimea. In 22 he flew by airplane to Konigsberg. Traveled all over Europe and North America. Most pleased with the fact that he returned to Soviet Russia. What next will be seen.

Yesenin's autobiography of June 20, 1924

I was born in 1895 on September 21 in the village of Konstantinov, Kuzminskaya volost, Ryazan province. and Ryazan uez. My father is a peasant, Alexander Nikitich Yesenin, my mother is Tatyana Fedorovna.

He spent his childhood with his maternal grandfather and grandmother in another part of the village, which was called. Matovo. My first memories date back to the time when I was three or four years old. I remember a forest, a big ditch road. Grandmother goes to the Radovetsky monastery, which is about 40 versts from us. I, grabbing her stick, can hardly drag my legs from fatigue, and grandmother keeps repeating: "Go, go, berry, God will give happiness." Blind people who wander through the villages often gathered at our homes, sang spiritual poems about a beautiful paradise, about Lazar, about Mikola and about the groom, the bright guest from the unknown city. The nanny is an old woman who took care of me, told me fairy tales, all those fairy tales that all peasant children listen to and know. My grandfather sang to me old songs, so viscous, mournful. On Saturdays and Sundays, he told me the Bible and the sacred story.

My street life was not like my home life. My peers were mischievous guys. With them, I climbed together in other people's gardens. I ran away for 2-3 days in the meadows and ate fish with the shepherds, which we caught in small lakes, first muddying the water with our hands, or broods of ducklings. After, when I returned, I often flew.

In the family we had a seizure uncle, except for my grandmother, grandfather and my nanny. He loved me very much, and we often went with him to the Oka to water the horses. At night, the moon stands upright in the water in calm weather. When the horses drank, it seemed to me that they were about to drink the moon, and I was glad when it swam away from their mouths together with the circles. When I was 12 years old, I was sent to study from a rural zemstvo school to a teacher's school. My family wanted me to be a village teacher. Their hopes extended to the institute, fortunately for me, which I did not get into.

He began writing poetry at the age of 9, learned to read at 5. At the very beginning, village ditties had an influence on my work. The period of study did not leave any traces on me, except for a strong knowledge of the Church Slavonic language. This is all I have endured. The rest was done by himself under the guidance of a certain Klemenov. He introduced me to new literature and explained why it is necessary to be afraid of the classics in some way. Of the poets, I liked Lermontov and Koltsov the most. Later I turned to Pushkin.

1913 I entered the Shanyavsky University as a volunteer. After staying there for 1.5 years, I had to go back to the village for financial reasons. At this time I had a book of poems written "Radunitsa". I sent some of them to Petersburg magazines and, receiving no answer, drove off myself. I came and found Gorodetsky. He gave me a warm welcome. Then almost all poets gathered at his apartment. They started talking about me, and they started to print me almost like hot cakes.

I published Russian Thought, Life for All, Mirolyubov's Monthly Journal, Northern Notes, etc. It was in the spring of 1915. And in the fall of the same year, Klyuev sent me a telegram to the village and asked me to come to him. He found me the publisher M.V. Averyanov, and a few months later my first book, Radunitsa, was published. It was published in November 1915 with a note in 1916. During the first period of my stay in St. Petersburg, I often had to meet with Blok, with Ivanov-Razumnik. Later with Andrey Bely.

I met the first period of the revolution sympathetically, but more spontaneously than consciously. In 1917 my first marriage to Z. N. Reich took place. In 1918, I parted with her, and after that my wandering life began, like all Russians in the period 1918-21. Over the years, I have been in Turkestan, the Caucasus, Persia, Crimea, Bessarabia, the Orenburg steppes, the Murmansk coast, Arkhangelsk and Solovki. 1921 I married A. Duncan and left for America, having previously traveled all over Europe, except Spain.

After abroad, I looked at my country and events differently. I don't like our barely cooled nomad. I like civilization. But I really don't like America. America is the stench where not only art disappears, but in general the best impulses of humanity. If today they are heading for America, then I am ready then to prefer our gray sky and our landscape: a hut, a little rooted in the ground, a spinning, a huge pole sticks out of a spinning bar, a skinny horse waving its tail in the wind in the distance. This is not like skyscrapers, which have given only Rockefeller and McCormick so far, but this is the very thing that raised Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Lermontov and others in our country. First of all, I love the identification of the organic. For me, art is not an intricacy of patterns, but the most necessary word of the language with which I want to express myself. Therefore, the Imaginism movement founded in 1919, on the one hand - by me, and on the other - by Shershenevich, although formally turned Russian poetry along a different channel of perception, but did not give anyone else the right to claim talent. Now I deny all schools. I think that a poet cannot adhere to a certain school. This binds him hand and foot. Only a free artist can bring free speech. That's all, short, schematic, as regards my biography. Not everything is said here. But I think it is too early for me to sum up any results for myself. My life and my work are still ahead.

"About myself". October 1925

Born in 1895, on September 21, in the Ryazan province, Ryazan district, Kuzminskaya volost, in the village of Konstantinovo. At the age of two, he was given to be raised by a rather wealthy maternal grandfather, who had three adult unmarried sons, with whom I spent almost all of my childhood. My uncles were mischievous and desperate guys. For three and a half years, they put me on a horse without a saddle and immediately started to gallop. I remember that I went crazy and very tightly held the withers. Then I was taught to swim. One uncle (Uncle Sasha) took me into the boat, drove away from the shore, took off my linen and, like a puppy, threw me into the water. I clumsily and fearfully splashed my hands, and, until he choked, he kept shouting: “Eh! Bitch! Well, where are you good for? .. "" Bitch "he had an affectionate word. After about eight years, for another uncle, I often replaced a hunting dog, swam in the lakes for shot ducks. He climbed trees very well. Among the boys, he was always a horse breeder and a great fighter and always walked around in scratches. For mischief, only one grandmother scolded me, and my grandfather sometimes provoked me to the fist and often said to my grandmother: "You, you fool, do not touch him, he will be so much stronger!" Grandma loved me with all her urge, and her tenderness knew no bounds. On Saturdays, they washed me, cut my nails and corrugated my head with hot oil, because not a single comb took curly hair. But the oil did not help much either. I have always yelled good obscenities and even now I have some unpleasant feeling by Saturday.

This is how my childhood passed. When I grew up, they really wanted to make a rural teacher out of me, and therefore they sent me to a church teacher's school, after graduating from which I was supposed to enter the Moscow Teachers' Institute. Fortunately, this did not happen.

I started writing poetry early, about nine years old, but I attribute my conscious creativity to the age of 16-17. Some poems of these years are included in Radunitsa. At the age of eighteen I was surprised, having sent my poems to magazines, that they were not published, and went to Petersburg. They made me very welcome there. The first one I saw was Blok, the second was Gorodetsky. When I looked at Blok, sweat dripped from me, because for the first time I saw a living poet. Gorodetsky introduced me to Klyuev, about whom I had never heard a word before. With Klyuev, we struck up a great friendship for all our internal strife. During these years I entered the Shanyavsky University where I stayed for only a year and a half, and again left for the village. At the University, I met the poets Semenovsky, Nasedkin, Kolokolov and Filipchenko. Of the contemporary poets, I liked Blok, Bely and Klyuev most of all. Bely gave me a lot in terms of form, and Blok and Klyuev taught me lyricism.

In 1919, with a number of comrades, I published a manifesto of Imagism. Imagism was the formal school we wanted to establish. But this school had no soil under it and died by itself, leaving the truth behind an organic image. I would gladly refuse many of my religious poems and poems, but they are of great importance as the path of the poet to the revolution.

From the age of eight my grandmother dragged me around different monasteries, because of her all sorts of wanderers and wanderers always huddled with us. Various spiritual verses were sung. Grandfather opposite. Was not a fool to drink. On his part, eternal unmarried weddings were arranged. Later, when I left the village, I had to sort out my way of life for a long time.

During the years of the revolution, he was entirely on the side of October, but he took everything in his own way, with a peasant bias. In terms of formal development, now I am drawn more and more to Pushkin. As for the rest of the autobiographical information, they are in my poems.

Yesenin's life story

Some interesting facts from the life of Sergei Yesenin:

Sergei Yesenin graduated with honors in 1909 from the Konstantinovsky Zemstvo School, then from the Church Teachers' School, but after studying for a year and a half, he left it - the teaching profession attracted him little. Already in Moscow, in September 1913, Yesenin began attending the Shanyavsky People's University. A year and a half of the university gave Yesenin the foundation of education that he lacked so much.

In the fall of 1913, he entered into a civil marriage with Anna Romanovna Izryadnova, who worked with Yesenin as a proofreader in Sytin's printing house. On December 21, 1914, their son Yuri was born, but Yesenin soon left the family. In her memoirs Izryadnova writes: “I saw him shortly before my death. He came, he says, to say goodbye. When I asked why, he said: "I am washed away, I am leaving, I feel bad, I will probably die." He asked not to pamper, to take care of his son. " After Yesenin's death, the People's Court of the Khamovnichesky District of Moscow tried the case of recognizing Yuri as the poet's child. On August 13, 1937, Yuri Yesenin was shot on charges of preparing for an attempt on Stalin's life.

On July 30, 1917, Yesenin got married to the beautiful actress Zinaida Reich in the Church of Kirik and Ulita in the Vologda district. On May 29, 1918, their daughter Tatyana was born. Daughter, blond and blue-eyed, Yesenin loved very much. On February 3, 1920, after Yesenin parted ways with Zinaida Reich, their son Konstantin was born. One day he accidentally found out at the station that Reich was on the train with the children. A friend persuaded Yesenin to at least look at the child. Sergei reluctantly agreed. When Reich unclothed her son, Yesenin, barely looking at him, said: "Yesenins are never black ..." But according to contemporaries, Yesenin always carried photographs of Tatyana and Konstantin in his jacket pocket, constantly took care of them, sent them money. On October 2, 1921, the People's Court of Orel ruled to dissolve Yesenin's marriage to Reich. Sometimes he met with Zinaida Nikolaevna, at that time already the wife of Vsevolod Meyerhold, which aroused Meyerhold's jealousy. There is an opinion that of his wives, Yesenin loved Zinaida Reich most of all until the end of his days. Shortly before his death, in the late autumn of 1925, Yesenin visited Reich and the children. As he spoke to an adult with Tanechka, he was outraged by the mediocre children's books that his children read. Said: "You must know my poems." The conversation with Reich ended with another scandal and tears. In the summer of 1939, after Meyerhold's death, Zinaida Reich was brutally murdered in her apartment. Many contemporaries did not believe that this was pure crime. It was assumed (and now this assumption will more and more develop into confidence) that she was killed by agents of the NKVD.

On November 4, 1920, at the literary evening "The Trial of the Imagists," Yesenin met Galina Benislavskaya. Their relationship lasted with varying degrees of success until the spring of 1925. Returning from Konstantinov, Yesenin finally broke with her. It was a tragedy for her. Insulted and humiliated Galina wrote in her memoirs: “Because of the awkwardness and brokenness of my relationship with S.А. More than once I wanted to leave him as a woman, I only wanted to be a friend. But I realized that from S.A. I cannot leave, this thread cannot be broken ... "Shortly before the trip to Leningrad in November, before going to the hospital, Yesenin called Benislavskaya:" Come to say goodbye. " He said that Sofya Andreevna Tolstaya would come too. Galina answered: "I don't like such wires." Galina Benislavskaya shot herself at Yesenin's grave. She left two notes on his grave. One is a simple postcard: “December 3, 1926. She killed herself here, although I know that after that even more dogs will be hanged on Yesenin ... But he and I don't care. In this grave for me everything is most precious ... ”She was buried in the Vagankovskoye cemetery next to the poet's grave.

Autumn 1921 - acquaintance with "sandals" Isadora Duncan. According to the memoirs of contemporaries, Isadora fell in love with Yesenin at first sight, and Yesenin immediately fell in love with her. On May 2, 1922, Sergei Yesenin and Isadora Duncan decided to consolidate their marriage according to Soviet laws, since they had a trip to America. They signed at the registry office of the Khamovniki Council. When they were asked what surname they chose, both wished to have a double surname - "Duncan-Yesenin". So it was written in the marriage certificate and in their passports. “Now I am Duncan,” Yesenin shouted when they went out into the street. This page of Sergei Yesenin's life is the most chaotic, with endless quarrels and scandals. They diverged many times and converged again. Hundreds of volumes have been written about Yesenin's novel with Duncan. Numerous attempts have been made to unravel the mystery of the relationship between these two such dissimilar people. But was there a secret? All his life Yesenin, deprived of a real close-knit family in childhood (his parents constantly quarreled, often lived apart, Sergey grew up with his maternal grandparents), dreamed of family comfort and peace. He constantly said that he would marry such an artist - everyone was gaping, and would have a son who would become more famous than him. It is clear that Duncan, who was 18 years older than Yesenin and constantly traveled on tour, could not create for him the family he dreamed of. In addition, Esenin, as soon as he was married, sought to break the fetters that bound him.

In 1920, Yesenin met and became friends with the poet and translator Nadezhda Volpin. On May 12, 1924, the illegitimate son of Sergei Yesenin and Nadezhda Davydovna Volpin was born in Leningrad - a prominent mathematician, a well-known human rights activist, he periodically publishes poetry (only under the name Volpin). A. Yesenin-Volpin is one of the founders (together with Sakharov) of the Human Rights Committee. Now he lives in the USA.

March 5, 1925 - acquaintance with Leo Tolstoy's granddaughter Sophia Andreevna Tolstaya. She was 5 years younger than Yesenin, the blood of the greatest writer in the world flowed in her veins. Sofya Andreevna was in charge of the library of the Writers' Union. On October 18, 1925, the marriage was registered with S.A. Tolstoy. Sophia Tolstaya is another unfulfilled hope of Yesenin to start a family. Coming from an aristocratic family, according to the memoirs of Yesenin's friends, very arrogant, proud, she demanded respect for etiquette and unquestioning obedience. These qualities of her were in no way combined with the simplicity, generosity, gaiety, and mischievous character of Sergei. They soon parted ways. But after his death, Sofya Andreevna swept aside various gossips about Yesenin, they said that he allegedly wrote in a state of drunken stupor. She, who had repeatedly witnessed his work on the verse, claimed that Yesenin took his work very seriously, never sat down at the table drunk.

On December 24, Sergei Yesenin arrived in Leningrad and stayed at the Angleterre Hotel. Late in the evening of December 27, the body of Sergei Yesenin was found in the room. A terrible picture appeared before the eyes of those who entered the room: Yesenin, already dead, leaning against the pipe of the steam heating, blood clots on the floor, things were scattered, on the table lay a note with Yesenin's dying verses “Goodbye, my friend, goodbye .. . ”The exact date and time of death have not been established.

Yesenin's body was transported to Moscow for burial at the Vagankovsky cemetery. The funeral was grandiose. According to contemporaries, not a single Russian poet was buried like that.

“It's so easy to leave this life,
Burn out thoughtlessly and painlessly.
But not given to the Russian poet
To die such a bright death.

In all, lead to a winged soul
Heavenly will open the frontiers
Or hoarse horror with a shaggy paw
From the heart, like from a sponge, he will squeeze life. "
Poem by Anna Akhmatova "In memory of Sergei Yesenin"

Biography

The biography of Sergei Yesenin is a controversial story of the life of the great Russian poet. It is difficult to find another person who would write about Russia with such love and at the same time pain. The difficult character of the poet, his rebelliousness, restlessness, tendency to outrageous and conflict created considerable difficulties in Yesenin's life. But even after his tragic departure, "street rake", "mischievous reveler" and "brawler" Yesenin, as he called himself, could forever remain in the hearts of those who once heard his poetry and fell in love with it.

Sergei Yesenin was born in the Ryazan region into a simple peasant family. Even as a child, he fell in love with reading, experiencing special feelings for Russian folklore, fairy tales, epics, ditties and for Russian poetry. Pushkin, Lermontov, Koltsov were Yesenin's favorite writers. As a young man, he moved to Moscow, where he worked in a printing house, and soon was accepted into the literary and musical circles of the capital and began to publish his poems. First, Moscow, and then Petrograd, welcomed Yesenin with open arms, he was considered "the messenger of the Russian village." Yesenin's personality also played an important role - he read his poems with such ardor, with such expression and sincerity that everyone - from ordinary people to eminent writers - fell in love with the golden-haired peasant poet.

Yesenin greeted the coming of power of workers and peasants with enthusiasm. But over time, delight was replaced by disappointment, fear, indignation. Due to his directness, the poet often became the object of supervision of the authorities, especially during the relationship between Sergei Yesenin and Isadora Duncan, an American dancer. When, finally, Yesenin openly expressed his sharp condemnation of the actions of the Soviet authorities in the poem "The Country of Scoundrels", a real persecution of the poet began. The already hot-tempered and addicted to alcohol poet was often provoked. Every scandalous episode of his biography was described in the newspapers. Yesenin was forced to hide - he lived in the Caucasus, in Leningrad, in Konstantinovo, where he was born. Yesenin's last wife, Sofya Tolstaya, in an attempt to save her husband from alcohol addiction and persecution, hospitalized him in a neurological clinic. Which Yesenin secretly left, allegedly in an attempt to leave the authorities, and went to Leningrad, where he stayed at the Angleterre hotel. Five days later, his body was found in the Angleterre issue. Yesenin's cause of death was suicide - the poet committed suicide by hanging himself on a pipe. His last words were a poem written in blood instead of ink:

Goodbye my friend, goodbye
My dear, you are in my chest.
The intended parting
Promises to meet ahead.

Goodbye my friend, no hand and no word
Do not be sad and not sadness of eyebrows, -
In this life, dying is nothing new
But living, of course, is not new. "

Yesenin's funeral took place on the last day of 1925 - December 31. Not a single Russian poet was seen off with such honors and scope - about two hundred thousand people came to Yesenin's funeral. Yesenin's death was a huge loss and shock for Russia.

Life line

October 3, 1895 Date of birth of Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin.
1904 g. Admission to the zemstvo school in Konstantinovo.
1909 g. Graduation from college, admission to a church teacher's school.
1912 g. Graduation from school with a diploma of a teacher of literacy, moving to Moscow.
1913 g. Marriage with Anna Izryadnova.
1914 g. The birth of Sergei Yesenin's son, Yuri.
1915 g. Acquaintance with Alexander Blok, joining the ambulance train.
1916 g. Release of the first collection of poems "Radunitsa".
1917 g. Marriage to Zinaida Reich.
1918 g. The birth of her daughter Tatiana.
1920 g. Birth of his son Constantine.
1921 g. Divorce from Zinaida Reich, acquaintance with Isadora Duncan, release of the collections "The Treader", "Confessions of a Bully".
May 2, 1922Marriage to Isadora Duncan.
1923 g. Release of the collection "Poems of the Brawler".
1924 g. Divorce from Isadora Duncan, the release of the poem "Pugachev", the collection "Moscow tavern", the birth of an illegitimate son from the translator and poetess Nadezhda Volpin.
September 18, 1925 Marriage with Sophia Tolstoy.
December 28, 1925 Date of death of Yesenin.
December 31, 1925 Yesenin's funeral.

Memorable places

1. The village of Konstantinovo, where Yesenin was born and where the Yesenin Museum-Reserve is today.
2. Museum of Yesenin (the former church-teacher's school, which Yesenin graduated from) in Spas-Klepiki.
3. Tsarskoe Selo, where Yesenin's regiment was quartered and where the poet spoke to Empress Alexandra.
4. House of Yesenin and Duncan in Moscow, where the couple lived and where Isadora's dance school was located.
5. Moscow State Museum of S. A. Yesenin.
6. Yesenin's house in Mardakan (now a memorial house-museum on the territory of the arboretum), where the poet lived in 1924-1925.
7. House-Museum of Sergei Yesenin in Tashkent, where he visited in 1921.
8. Monument to Yesenin in Moscow on Yeseninsky Boulevard.
9. Monument to Yesenin in Moscow on Tverskoy Boulevard.
10. Hotel "Angleterre", where Yesenin's body was found.
11. Vagankovskoe cemetery, where Yesenin is buried.

Episodes of life

Despite the fact that the last years of his life Yesenin abused alcohol, he did not write poetry drunk. The poet's memoirists say the same. Once Yesenin confessed to his friend: "The desperate glory of a drunkard and a hooligan follows me, but these are only words, and not such a terrible reality."

Dancer Duncan fell in love with Yesenin almost at first sight. He, too, was very fond of her, despite the palpable age difference. Isadora dreamed of glorifying her Russian husband and took him on a tour of Europe and America. Yesenin explained his scandalous behavior during the trip in his usual manner: “Yes, I made a scandal. I needed them to know me, to remember me. What, will I read poetry to them? Poems to Americans? I would only become ridiculous in their eyes. But to pull off the tablecloth with all the dishes from the table, to whistle in the theater, to disrupt the traffic order - they understand that. If I do this, I am a millionaire. So I can. So respect is ready, and glory and honor! Oh, they remember me better than Duncan! " In fact, Yesenin quickly realized that abroad he was only "Duncan's husband" for everyone, broke off relations with the dancer and returned home.

Assumptions that the death of Sergei Yesenin was violent appeared many years after the death of the poet. The author of the version of the murder and its popularization was the Moscow investigator Eduard Khlystalov - his point of view on what happened to the poet is shown in the serial film "Yesenin". Other researchers found it unconvincing.

Covenant

“In thunderstorms, in storms, in everyday coldness,
With bereavements and when you are sad
Seeming smiling and simple -
The highest art in the world. "

A plot from the cycle "Historical Chronicles" dedicated to Sergei Yesenin

Condolences

“Let's not only blame him. All of us - his contemporaries - are more or less to blame. This was a precious person. I had to fight harder for him. We should have helped him more like a brother. "
Anatoly Lunacharsky, revolutionary, statesman

“The end of Yesenin grieved, grieved, usually, humanly. But at once this end seemed completely natural and logical. I found out about this at night, grief, it must have remained grief, it must have been scattered by the morning, but in the morning the newspapers brought the dying lines: "In this life, dying is not new, but living is certainly not new." ... After these lines, Yesenin's death became a literary fact. "
Vladimir Mayakovsky, poet

"He lived terribly and died terribly."
Anna Akhmatova, poet

Introduction

There are names in Russian literature, next to which any epithets seem inaccurate, weak or trite pompous. Such names include the name of Sergei Yesenin.

Yesenin lived only thirty years. But the trace left by him in literature is so deep that it was not erased either by the prohibitions of his work by those in power, nor by the deliberate smoothing of the complexities of the creative path. The poetry of S. Yesenin has always lived in the heart and memory of our people, because it is rooted in the thickness of national life, grew out of its depths. “In Yesenin's poems,” the writer Y. Mamleev rightly emphasized, “there is something elusive, but extremely significant, which makes his poetry an exceptional phenomenon, even going beyond the usual concept of the genius. This "elusive" consists, in my opinion, in the fact that the entire ocean of Yesenin's poetry, figurative, sound, intonational, directly comes into contact with the deepest, primordial, age-old levels of the Russian soul ... "1.

Indeed, Yesenin's poetry is a symbol of national life and soul, which is why it has such an effect on the Russian person, regardless of age, worldview and political predilections.

Probably, each of us has in our souls his own image of Yesenin, a poet and a person, his favorite poems. But for all the selectivity of tastes and sympathies, we, the readers, are especially close and dear to what constitutes the core of Yesenin's poetry - this is the sincere feeling of the Motherland, dear for him to Russia, "the country of birch calico."

“My lyrics,” Yesenin proudly admitted, “live by one great love - love for the Motherland. The feeling of the Motherland is the main thing in my work ”. Indeed, no matter what the poet wrote about both in the mournful and in the light periods of his life, his soul was warmed by the image of the Motherland. The filial feeling of love and gratitude to the country dear to his heart “with the short name“ Rus ”connects together all his creations - both love lyrics, and poems about nature, and a cycle of poetic messages to his family, and works with socio-political issues. Russia, Russia, Motherland, native land, native land - the most dear words and concepts for Yesenin, which are found in almost every of his works. In the sound of the word "Russia" he heard "dew", "power", "blue". Pains and hardships, joys and hopes of peasant Rus - all this was reflected in Yesenin's soulful and light, sorrowful and angry, sad and joyful lines. What happens in his native country, what awaits her tomorrow - these are the thoughts that have worried him persistently throughout his short life. This is the core of his poetry.

Its second feature is the utmost sincerity, depth and "flood of feelings." All Yesenin's work is a passionate diary of a naked and wounded heart. The poet himself admitted that he would like to "pour out my whole soul into words." It is difficult to find another poet who would express himself with such sincerity in poetry, turning them into a secret confession.

Yesenin's early work

To the heights of creativity S. Yesenin rose from the depths of village folk life. On the immense map of Russia, near Ryazan, among the Oka open spaces, there is the ancient village of Konstantinovo. Here on September 21 (October 3), 1895, the future great poet was born into a peasant family, here, in the countryside, the roots of his work.

Due to a quarrel between his parents, Yesenin lived for some time in the house of his grandfather F.A.Titov, who knew many spiritual verses and folk songs, read the Bible to his grandson. Yesenin owes his acquaintance with Russian oral folk poetry to his grandmother Natalya Evteevna, who opened to his grandson the magical world of fairy tales and legends. The upbringing of the aesthetic taste of the future poet was in no small measure facilitated by the singing gift of his mother, Tatyana Fedorovna, as well as the whole atmosphere of peasant life, the nature of central Russia.

The most important source of comprehending the power and beauty of the artistic word became for Yesenin Russian literature - the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Koltsov - which the future poet read, while studying at the Zemstvo four-year school, and then at the Spas-Klepikovskaya church-teacher's school.

Yesenin, according to him, began to write poetry at the age of eight. The future poet, in expressing his thoughts and feelings, relied on the creative experience of Pushkin, Lermontov, Koltsov, the idol of the then youth Nadson. At the same time, many of them already have their own vision of the rural world surrounding the teenager, in whose soul his own images and associations are born. This is the poem of 1910 "It's already evening ...", from which Yesenin counted his works:

It's already evening. Dew

Glitters on nettles.

I'm standing by the road

Leaning against the willow.

Great light from the moon

Straight to our roof.

Somewhere nightingale songs

I hear in the distance.

Good and warm

Like the stove in winter.

And the birches are standing

Like big candles.

And far beyond the river

It can be seen behind the edge,

Sleepy watchman knocks

With a dead mallet.

Before us is a picture of the world around us, seen through the eyes of an inexperienced child. Childlike spontaneity is felt here both in repeated comparisons, and in the absence of metaphors, and in the “stumbling” rhythm. It is rightly said that this work "is like the uncertain steps of a boy who has just begun to walk." However, the talent of the beginning poet is already visible in him.

Yesenin is even more independent in the following short poem:

Where there are cabbage beds

Red water pours the sunrise

Little maple womb

The green udder sucks.

Here, the most important features of the poet's work are already clearly visible: vivid metaphor, animation of nature, close connection with oral folk poetry.

Yesenin carried his love for folklore, of which he was a connoisseur and collector, throughout his life. Proudly calling himself the "peasant son", the "singer and herald" of the village, he traced his poetic lineage from nameless storytellers, guslars, accordionists, folk songwriters. “I began to write poetry, imitating ditties”, “The songs that I heard around me settled down to the verses,” “The spoken word has always played a much greater role in my life than other sources,” Yesenin would later emphasize more than once.

Oral folk art became the foundation on which the openwork edifice of Yesenin poetry arose. Especially often Yesenin uses such folklore genres as song and ditty, creating his own works on their basis. So, in the poem "Tanyusha was good, it was not more beautiful in the village" (1911), the plot first unfolds as in folk songs about the betrayal of a loved one: a description of the heroes and their conversation, during which it turns out that he is marrying another ("Are you goodbye , my joy, I will marry someone else ”). In folk songs, a girl in this situation either resigns herself or reproaches her lover for treason. Yesenin supplements this situation with a tragic denouement: the beloved kills Tanyusha, who married another in revenge:

Not the cuckoos are sad - Tanya's relatives are crying,

Tanya has a wound on her temple from a dashing brush.

Another early poem by Yesenin "Imitation of a Song" is also inspired by oral folk art. Folklore here is the situation itself: a meeting of a young girl at a well and a description of a suddenly flared up feeling: "I wanted to flicker foamy streams // From your scarlet lips with pain to break a kiss."

Based on round dance and play folk songs, Yesenin creates a poem "Under a wreath of forest chamomile ..." (1911), about how a fellow accidentally "dropped the ring of a cutie // In a stream of foamy waves." A ring or a ring in folk art symbolizes love. To lose them is to lose love. This determines the drama of Yesenin's poem, the hero of which decides from grief to "get married // With a chime wave."

The motives of folk ritual poetry were also embodied in other early poems by Yesenin "Bachelorette party", "On azure fabrics", "Lights are burning across the river", also bearing the stamp of a bright author's individuality.

The themes and poetics of folk ditties are also widely used in Yesenin's early work. The ditty rhythm is clearly perceptible in his poems "Tanyusha was good" and "Under the wreath of forest chamomile". A literary version of the ditty, consisting of several choruses, is the poem "Play, play a tagliano ..." (1912). From ditties, there is an appeal to a talianochka and a request to a beautiful girl to go out on a date and listen to the choruses ("pribaski") of the accordion player. And at the same time, the poet uses his individual means and methods of imagery ("The heart glows with cornflowers, the turquoise burns in it"), a ring composition of the romance type with a variable repetition of the opening lines at the end of the poem. Yesenin will also widely use the theme and rhythm of ditties in poems written in the mid-1910s: "On azure fabrics ...", "Dancer", "Lights are burning across the river", "Udalits" and others.

The aspiration of the novice poet to expand his life impressions led him in 1912 to Moscow. Here he becomes a student at the private university of A. L. Shanyaevsky, where he attends classes at the Faculty of History and Philology for a year and a half, and also participates in meetings of the Surikov literary circle, which brought together writers from the peasant environment. His stay in Moscow marked the beginning of his friendly and creative ties with the poets N. Klyuev, P. Oreshin, F. Nasedkin.

However, in his frantic striving for creative improvement, Yesenin very soon comes to the conclusion that Moscow, in his words, "is not the engine of literary development, but it uses everything that is ready from St. Petersburg." Therefore, on March 9, 1915, Yesenin moved to St. Petersburg and went straight from the station to A. Blok. The author of "Stranger" highly appreciated the work of the young poet, writing in his diary: "The poems are fresh, clean, vociferous, wordy language."

A. Blok introduced him to the poets S. Gorodetsky, L. Bely, P. Murashev, with whose assistance Yesenin actively enters the literary atmosphere of the capital.

Creativity of the 1910s

Since the mid-1910s, Yesenin's work has experienced an obvious upsurge: the imagery is improving, the rhythm is enriched, the poetic horizon is expanding. This can be clearly seen, in particular, in the poet's attitude to oral folk art.

If before Yesenin was attracted to folklore mainly by songs and ditties, now the range of interests is expanding: the poet uses fairy tales, legends, spiritual verses, and epics. Based on the Russian fairy tale "Morozko", he creates the poem "The Orphan" - about the unfortunate orphan Masha, who was blessed by Father Frost for suffering, honesty, kindness. The stylization of the epic was his poem "The Heroic Whistle" (1915), in which a simple peasant who went out to fight the enemy is depicted as an epic hero.

« Song of Evpatiy Kolovrat»

In 1912 Yesenin created the first large work - the poem "Song of Evpatiy Kolovrat". Starting from historical legends and from the wonderful monument of ancient Russian literature "The Tale of the Ruin of Ryazan by Batu", permeated with folk-poetic motives, Yesenin creates an impressive image of the defender of the Russian land, Evpatiy Kolovrat.

Kolovrat in Yesenin's poem is not a princely warrior, but a blacksmith who raised the people to defend the Ryazan land. He is portrayed as a "good light", an epic hero, as a "good fellow", and his sworn enemy "in the land of Khan Baty", also, as in epics, is vicious and insidious, sheds rivers of blood, "curses over the dead."

The poem "Song of Evpatiya Kolovrat" can hardly be attributed to the creative success of the author. It is stretched and loose in places compositionally. In an effort to convey the old and Ryazan flavor, the author sometimes abuses archaisms and dialectisms.

However, despite such flaws, the first Yesenin poem testifies to the poetic independence of the young author.

The poem is characterized by the lyrical coloring of events and the animation of nature: the poet vividly shows how the stars are alarmed (Shtoy, Russia fluttered, // Al does not hear the clang of abusive language? "), How horrified the month is and coughs up blood from the" spill ", etc.

"Martha Posadnitsa"

Yesenin's poem "Martha Posadnitsa" (1914) is devoted to the theme of the struggle of the Novgorod boyars with the Moscow principality. The poet here is on the side of the Novgorodians - defenders of liberty, although, as you know, in the history of the Russian state, their struggle against those who sought to unite the country was not at all progressive. The author was attracted “in this historical legend by the figure of a heroic woman, the widow of the Novgorod mayor Boretsky Martha, who leads and leads the struggle against the Moscow Tsar Ivan III.

Compared to the previous poem, "Martha the Posadnitsa" is distinguished by a greater artistic maturity, which manifested itself, in particular, in the reproduction of everyday details and language of the 16th century. For example, the scene of the gathering of rifle regiments on the campaign against Novgorod is colorful, for example, fanned with the breath of antiquity. In this scene, the ringing noise of bells and the neighing of horses, the clinking of sabers and the sobs of women, the "command voice" and the exclamations of the archers merge together:

At the cathedrals of the Kremlin, the bells began to cry, archers from distant settlements gathered; The horses whinnied, sabers clinked.

The women wiped away their tears with their skirts, -

Someone will return to the house unharmed?

To the accompaniment of a vigorous march ("The peaks were shaking, the horses were stamping"), interrupted by the author's thoughts about the warriors leaving for battle, the Tsar of Mokovo shares his sinister plans with the Tsarina. Their conversation is described in folklore style, and at the same time makes it possible to imagine the everyday atmosphere of that era, family relations:

The king will say to his wife:

And there will be a feast on the red braga

I sent to woo disrespectful families,

I'll spread the pillows of their heads in the ravine.

You are my sir, - his wife whispers, -

My mind should judge you! ..

Unlike the first poem, "Martha the Posadnitsa" is not overloaded with dialectal and colloquial words, which makes her style more precise and clear.

"Us"

The real historical person is also reproduced by Yesenin in the poem "Us" (1914). Ataman Us least of all resembles Stepan Razin's associate, which he was in reality. Yesenin's hero is more like a character of folk robber songs. This dashing fellow is poeticized by the author:

On a steep mountain, near Kaluga, Us got married with a blue blizzard.

A pinchingly lyrical note is also brought into the narrative by the image of Usa's mother, whose son, by the hands of the boyars, laid his wild head near distant Kaluga.

The decrepit widow was longing for her son. Grieving day and night, sitting under the shrine. Now the second summer has come and passed. Snow on the field again, but it's still gone.

She sat down and snuggled, looks meekly meek ...

Who are you like, light-eyed youth? ..

- tears flashed over the withered mustache-

It is you, oh my son, watching Jesus! "

The hero of the poem is not accidentally compared here with Christ: many of Yesenin's works of these years are saturated with religious symbolism, Christian images and motives. At the beginning of 1913 Yesenin wrote to his school friend G. Panfilov: “At the present time I read the Gospel and find a lot new for me ... Christ is perfection for me, but I do not believe in him as much as others. Those believe out of fear of what will happen after death? And I am pure and holy, as in a person gifted with a bright mind and a noble soul, as an example in the pursuit of love for one's neighbor. "

Religious poems by Yesenin

The idea of \u200b\u200bthe divine origin of the world and man, faith in Christ permeates many poems by S. Yesenin of the 1910s.

I feel the rainbow of God

I have not lived in vain.

I worship the roadside

I fall on the grass.

Flame pours into the abyss of sight,

The joy of children's dreams is in the heart.

I believed from birth

The Bogoroditsyn Pokrov,-

the poet is recognized in the poem "I Feel the Rainbow of God ..." (1914). The author senses the "rainbow of God", that is, he foresees the joy of the Most Holy Resurrection, the new coming of Christ into the world for the salvation of people. And this colors his works in light major tones.

The images of Christ, the Mother of God, Saints Nicholas the Wonderworker, Yegoriy, the praying mantis going to “bow to love and the cross” occupy one of the most important places in the figurative system of Yesenin's poems, saturated with the author's faith in God's grace. In the world around, according to the poet's conviction, the Savior is invisibly present:

Between the pines, between the trees,

Between the birches of curly beads.

Under a wreath, in a ring of needles

I see Jesus

The feeling of the constant presence of Christ among people, characteristic of the Orthodox tradition, gives the Yesenin poetic cosmos a meaningful spiritual resilience. Christ, according to the author, brings love to the world, and people respond to him in the same way. In the poem "The Lord went to torture people in love ..." (1914), an old grandfather treats a poor beggar, not suspecting that Christ is in front of him:

The Lord came up, hiding sorrow and anguish:

Apparently, they say, you can't wake their hearts ...

And the old man said, stretching out his hand:

"On, chew ... little, you will be stronger."

In the person of this grandfather, the people whom the Lord came out to “torture in love,” thus passed the test for mercy and kindness.

The kenotic archetype of Yesenin's early poetry is the image of a wanderer who, in search of the city of God; walks "unhurried foot // Through the villages, wastelands." The Savior himself is depicted from the same perspective. Christ in the poet's poems is humble, self-deprecating, who has taken the "form of a slave", similar to the One Who, in Tyutchev's "slave form," "went out, blessing" the entire Russian land. The outward resemblance of Yesenin's pilgrims and the Savior is so close that the lyric hero is afraid not to recognize Him, accidentally pass by:

And in every poor wanderer

I will go to find out with longing.

Is it not anointed by God

Knocks with a birch bark stick.

And maybe I'll pass by

And I will not notice in the secret hour.

That in the firs are the wings of a cherub,

And under the stump is the hungry Savior.

Many Yesenin pictures of the surrounding world and peasant life are saturated with religious images. Nature in his works is sacralized. The entire earthly space is likened by the author to the Temple of God, where a continuous liturgy is performed, in which the lyrical hero is also a participant. "In the forest - a green church behind the mountain" - he "hears, as if at mass, the prayer of bird voices!" The poet sees how "they planted the grove with smoke under the dew", the dawn is burning. His fields are "like saints", "the dawn with a red prayer book // Prophesies the good news", peasant huts - "in the vestments of the image", "the black capercaillie calls for the all-night vigil", etc.

In the poem "Melted Clay Dries" (1914), the poet, by analogy with the Gospel parable about Christ's entry into Jerusalem "on a donkey", paints a picture of the Lord's appearance among the central Russian expanses dear to the author:

Last year's leaf in the ravine

Among the bushes - like a heap of copper.

Someone in a sunny sermyag

Rides a red colt.

Christ is depicted here with a hazy face ("his face is hazy"), as if grieving over the sins of people. The awakening spring nature greeted the Savior with jubilation: everything around will smell of willow and resin ”,“ at the forest analogion // Sparrow reads the psalter ”, and the pines and spruce sing“ Hosanna ”. For Yesenin, Russian nature is the abode of beauty and grace, being in it is tantamount to joining the divine beginning of life.

The liturgization of native nature, peasant life is one of the notable features of the problematics and poetics of the works of S. Yesenin of the 1910s, associated with the messianic-eschatological desire to comprehend the spiritual path of Russia:

And we will come across the plains

To the truth of the cross

By the light of a dove book

Water your mouth.

("Scarlet darkness of heavenly devil")

Poem "Rus"

Russia is seen by the poet as "a land dear to his heart," where "everything is blissful and holy," as a country concealing tremendous moral strength. In 1914 Yesenin created a "little poem" "Rus", dedicated to the theme of the First World War. The poet shows how a tragic event historically inexorably invades the settled life of the "meek homeland":

They led the sotskie under the windows

The militias go to war.

The women from the suburb were playing.

Crying cut through the silence.

The idea of \u200b\u200bthe unity and deep interconnection of natural and historical factors permeates the entire work. In Yesenin's understanding, the natural and social worlds mutually condition each other, forming an integral picture of national life. The poet shows how historical cataclysms (the outbreak of war) inevitably entail natural shocks:

Thunder struck, the cup of the sky is split.

Ragged clouds cover the forest.

On pendants made of light gold

The lamps of heaven swayed.

It is no coincidence that Yesenin saturates landscape paintings with temple symbols: he depicts war as an action of demonic forces directed against the divine harmony of the world.

The Russian village appears in the poem in the image of the grieving Eternal Femininity, which is close to the Orthodox consciousness - the "overwhelmed bride," "the crying wife," the mother awaiting the return of her son. The poet penetrates into the deep layers of the people's life, conveys the feeling of unity of people in the face of trouble, that communal, conciliar attitude, which is characteristic of the Russian people. The peasants in the poem together see off the militia to the war, together they listen to the reading of letters from the front from the lips of the only literate peasant woman, "Lushi's Chetnitsa", together they answer them: ("Then they took them out by letter").

The events of the war give rise to the feeling of an impending Apocalypse: "In the grove, the smells of incense were fancied, // The knocking of bones flashed in the wind ..." Still, both the author and his heroes firmly believe in the victory of good over the forces of evil, therefore yesterday's peaceful plowmen, peasant sons, are portrayed by the author as epic "good fellows", creators and defenders of the Russian land, its reliable "support in times of adversity." The lyricism is combined in the work with an epic beginning, the emotional subjectivity of the lyrical "I" of the narrator - with sketches of the life and everyday life of a peasant village during the war. Ten years later, the experience of creating a small lyric-epic poem "Rus" will be useful to Yesenin when working on one of his summit works - the poem "Anna Snegina".

The poem "Rus" is from beginning to end imbued with the author's filial love for the homeland and its people:

Oh you, Russia, my homeland is meek.

Only to you I love the shore.

In such descriptions of the meek, pious and dearly beloved Russia, there is so much sincerity and spontaneity that they often turn into passionate hymns to the glory of the Fatherland:

If the holy army clicks:

"Throw you Rus, live in paradise!"

I will say: “No need for paradise.

Give me my homeland! "

(Goy you, my dear Russia)

The image of the native country is formed in Yesenin's poetry from pictures and details of village life (In the Hut, 1914), from individual episodes of the historical past and modern life. But above all Russia for Yesenin is its nature. And the fire of the dawn, and the splash of the Oka wave, and the silvery light, the moon, and the beauty of a blossoming meadow - all this was transformed into verses full of love and tenderness for the native land:

But most of all love for the native land

It tormented me, tormented and burned, -

The poet is recognized.

Nature in Yesenin's poems

Virtually no poem by Yesenin is complete without pictures of nature. The poet's sensitive eyes, in love with the world around him, sees how “the bird cherry is poured with snow”, how “a pine tree is tied with a white kerchief”, how “the scarlet light of dawn has been woven on the lake”, and “a snowstorm is spreading around the yard // Like a silk carpet.

A quivering, heartfelt love for native nature in Yesenin's poems awakens high, bright feelings, tunes the reader's soul to waves of mercy and goodness, makes him look in a new way at familiar and from that seemingly imperceptible native places:

Beloved Land! Heart dreams

Skirts of the sun about the waters of the pubes.

I would like to get lost

In the greens of your hundred-bellies.

The poet seems to be telling us: break away at least for a minute from the everyday hustle and bustle, look around, listen to the rustle of grass and flowers, to the songs of the wind, to the voice of the river wave, peer into the starry sky. And the world of God in its complexity and enduring charm will open before you - a wonderful and fragile world of life, which must be loved and cherished.

Yeseninsky landscapes amaze with the richness of flora and fauna. We will not find such a variety of flora and fauna in any poet as in Yesenin. It is estimated that his poems include more than twenty species of trees and the same number of species of flowers, about thirty species of birds and almost all wild and domestic animals of central Russia in full artistic images.

The natural world of the poet includes not only the earth, but also the heavens, the moon, the sun, stars, dawns and sunsets, dew and fogs, winds and blizzards; it is densely populated - from nettle and burdock to bird cherry and oak, from bee and mouse to bear and cow.

The main feature of Yesenin's paintings and details of nature is their animation. For him, nature is a living creature that feels and thinks, suffers and rejoices: “the wood grouses are crying in the forest with bells,” “the moon butts the cloud with a horn,” “dark fir trees dream of the hubbub of mowers,” “like a blizzard bird cherry waving its sleeve.

Sometimes, as can be seen, for example, in the poem "The road thought about the red evening" (1916), a similar technique underlies the lyrical plot of the entire work.

The poem literally abounds in living, animated images from the natural world and village life: "The hut is an old woman with the jaw of the threshold // Chews the fragrant crumb of silence"; "Autumn cold, affectionate and meek // Haze creeps to the oatmeal yard"; "Dawn on the roof, poppy kitten, washes his mouth with his paw"; “Embracing the pipe, sparkles in the poveta // Green ash from the pink oven”, “Thin-lipped wind // 0 whispers to someone”, “Barley straw gently cools”, etc. This creates a voluminous, emotional picture of the living world.

Yesenin's nature is humanized, and man appears as a part of nature, so organically he is connected with the flora and fauna. The lyrical hero of his poems feels his fusion with nature, is dissolved in it: “the spring dawns twisted me into a rainbow”, “like a white snowflake in blue I melt”. "It's good with willow trees on the way // Guard dozing Russia", - Yesenin will say in the 1917 poem "Songs, songs, what are you shouting about ..."

This fusion of man and nature will become especially complete and organic in the poet's mature work, but it takes its origin in his early poetry. This perception of life is not a poetic device, but the most important aspect of his worldview.

Philosophy in Yesenin's lyrics

Like any great poet, Yesenin was not just a singer of his feelings and experiences. His poetry is philosophical, for it illuminates the eternal problems of being.

Yesenin early developed his own philosophical and aesthetic concept of the world and man, the origins of which are rooted in folk mythology and philosophy of Russian cosmism.

The central concept of the philosophical views of the ancient Slavs was the image of a tree. The outstanding Russian scientist A. N. Afanasyev convincingly wrote about this in his book Poetic Views of the Slavs on the Priory (1868) (Yesenin searched for a long time and nevertheless acquired this book for his personal library).

The image of the tree personified world harmony, the unity of everything on earth. Comprehending his concept of the world, S. Yesenin wrote in the article "The Keys of Mary" (1918): "Everything from the tree is the religion of our people's thought (...) All porridge skates on the roofs, roosters on shutters, pigeons on the princely porch, flowers on the bed and body linen along with towels are not of a simple ornamental character, this is a great significant epic of the outcome of the world and the purpose of man. "

Yesenin's poetry from the very beginning was in many respects focused on this philosophy. That is why so often a person in his work is likened to a tree and vice versa.

Life in Yesenin's philosophical concept should be like a garden, well-groomed, clean, bearing fruit. The garden is a co-creation of man and nature, embodying the harmony of life, therefore this image is one of the most beloved in Yesenin's poetry: "It's good for the autumn freshness // Shake off the apple-tree soul with the wind", "Do anything to ring in the human garden", "Let's make noise like guests of the garden "," A clever gardener cuts off - autumn // My head is a yellow bush ", etc. and," We are with you, "Yesenin wrote to N. Klyuev," from the same garden - a garden of apple trees, rams, horses and wolves ... "

And this is not a declaration, it is a worldview based on the conviction of the interconnectedness and complementarity of the created world, the consubstantiality of world life. The entire Universe in the poet's view is a single huge garden: "on a branch of a cloud, like a plum, // a ripe star is flowing."

The world in Yesenin's poems is the world of living life, spiritualized and animated. Even plants feel pain, because, in his view, they are living beings:

The sickle cuts heavy ears.

How swans are cut under the throat ...

And then they carefully, without anger.

Heads on the ground

And with flails little bones

Knocked out of thin bodies.

No one would even think about it.

That straw is also flesh! ..

And the beasts for the poet are "lesser brothers". He invites them to come to him to share their grief: "Beasts, beasts, come to me, // Weep malice in the bowls of my hands!"

The harmonious unity of man with the world, with the cosmos is the main meaning of many of Yesenin's poems, his philosophy of being. Yesenin is convinced that the world is based on love and brotherhood: "We are all close relatives."

The violation of this harmony - both in the natural and in the social spheres - leads to the destruction of the world and the human soul. Yesenin knows how to show this process through an everyday situation.

Poem "Song of the Dog"

One of the most dramatic poems in this regard is "Song of the Dog", created in 1915. It became an event not only in Yesenin's work, but also in all Russian poetry. No one before Yesenin wrote about "our smaller brothers" with such tenderness and compassion, with such sincerity for drama. The poem tells how the dog-mother was taken away and drowned her children-puppies.

The Song of the Dog begins deliberately casually, like a sketch of everyday life, but this everydayness is poeticized: the poet informs about how the dog wheedled seven red puppies in the morning, how the matting on which the mother and her cubs lay, how "until the evening she their caress to ala, // Combing his tongue. "

And in the evening when the chickens

They sit on a six

The master came out gloomy,

I put seven of them in a sack.

The poet does not describe how the man drowned the puppies. We see only how "for a long, long time the water's unconsolidated surface trembled." The main attention is shifted to the image of a dog running after its owner through the snowdrifts in the vain hope of saving its children.

Human cruelty and indifference violate the harmony of life. Therefore, at the end of the poem, the action develops simultaneously in two planes, in two dimensions: concrete everyday and cosmic, because the harmony of the Universe is violated:

To the blue heights ringing

She looked, whining.

And the month slid thin

And hiding behind a hill in the fields

And dull, as from a handout,

When they throw a stone at her to laugh.

Dog eyes rolled

Gold stars in the snow.

The dog turns with his pain to the "blue heights", that is, to the entire Universe. The image “looked loudly” is very capacious.

The dog did not whine loudly, looking into the blue heights, but "gazed loudly ... whining": we seem to see "dog's eyes", the pain frozen in them, equal to the highest tragedy _ because the mother was deprived of her beloved children. And this tragedy can only be wept into the Universe, addressing the whole world.

The poet is convinced that life is not based on cruelty and indifference, but on the ideals of Christian love, brotherhood and mercy: "People, my brothers, people // We came not to destroy in the world, but to love and believe!"

Yesenin was especially worried about the violent violation of harmony, the laws of life in the public sphere, as happened in October 1917.

Yesenin and the October Revolution

He expressed these sentiments in his works "Oktoich", "Jordanian Dove", "Pantokrator", "Inonia", in which he sees the Russian village as a land of abundance, where "zealous fields *," herds of dun horses ", where" with a shepherd's bag the apostle Andrew wanders. "

However, as the civil war and the Red Terror escalated, Yesenin's illusory hopes for a revolution that would establish heaven on earth began to melt rapidly.

From messianic hopes, he goes on to a resolute denial of revolutionary violence, to perplexed questions: "Oh, who, then whom to sing // In this mad glow of corpses?" With bitterness, the poet remarks about himself: "Apparently, laughing at himself // I sang a song about a wonderful guest." Tragic notes associated with the sharp opposition of city and village penetrate into his work.

The revolutionary city, merciless in its relation to the village, or rather, the new government, which sends its emissaries from the city to requisition agricultural products, seems to the poet the worst enemy of the “country of birch calico” dear to his heart.

“Here he is, here he is with an iron belly, // Pulls five fingers to the throat of the plains,” Yesenin writes in the poem “Sorokoust” (19Z0), telling about the vain single combat of a red-maned foal with a train that is merciless in its rapid movement. An even more gloomy picture of the life of the village of the revolutionary period is drawn by the poet in his poem "The mysterious world, my ancient world ..." (1921):

The world is mysterious, my world is ancient,

You, like the wind, calmed down and sat down.

That will squeeze the village by the neck

Stone hands of the highway.

City, city! You are in a fierce battle

Baptized us as carrion and scum.

The field grows cold in melancholy.

Choking the telegraph poles.

Let it be tough for the heart

This is a song of animal rights! ..

... This is how hunters poison a wolf.

Clamping round-ups in a vice.

Yesenin is horrified by seas of blood, the class hatred of people, with whom he prefers to communicate with animals, because they are kinder and more merciful:

I'm not going anywhere with people. It is better to die together with you, Than to raise the earth with your beloved into a crazy neighbor.

Yesenin's work of the first revolutionary years can be called without exaggeration a poetic manifesto of a dying Russian village.

The gloomy, depressed state of the poet led to the appearance during this period of such works as "I am the last poet of the village", "Mares' ships", "Hooligan", "Confessions of a bully", "An owl counts in the autumn", "Moscow tavern", etc. In the center of them is the restless soul of Yesenin himself, who is in deep disagreement with the reality around him.

In them, basically, two interrelated motives develop: hostile, and sometimes hostile attitude to revolutionary reality and deep dissatisfaction with their own fate. These motives are embodied either in sad and dull tones ("My friend, my friend, the visions that have seen the light // Only death closes them"), then in hysterical bravado ("I am in all this rusty withering, // I will screw up my eyes and narrow my eyes") and in attempts to find oblivion in the tavern frenzy, for which the poet sometimes mercilessly castigates himself, calling himself a "bum", "rake", "lost", etc. The famous Yesenin mask of a hooligan became a form of protest against revolutionary reality, an escape from it.

But no matter how strongly the feeling of bitterness possessed him, Yesenin never broke ties with the social environment from which he came out, did not lose interest in the life of the Russian peasantry, in its past and present. Evidence of this is the poem "Pugachev" (1922).

Yesenin's interest in Pugachev is due to his keen attention to peasant Russia, to the struggle of the Russian peasantry for "holy freedom." The author's main task was to romanticize the peasant leader. The poet creates the image of a rebellious person, ready for self-sacrifice, detached from everything petty and ordinary folk lover of truth and truth-seeker. And for him this is the hope for the future.

Yesenin's creativity of the 20s

At the beginning of the 1920s, significant changes took place in Yesenin's worldview and work, associated with the desire to abandon pessimism and find a more stable view of the prospects for the revival of life in the country.

An important role in this evolution was played by the poet's trips abroad to Germany, Italy, France, Belgium and America. Yesenin was not at all seduced by the Western way of life, especially the American one. In the essay "Iron Mirgorod" he writes about the poverty of the spiritual life of the country, concluding that the Americans are "a primitive people from the side of internal culture," because "the dominion of the dollar has eaten in them all aspirations for any complex issues."

At the same time, he was struck by the industrial life of the West, the technical progress that he wanted to see in Russia. These sentiments were reflected in his poems "Stanza", "Uncomfortable liquid moon", "Letter to a woman", etc.

I like something else now

And in the consumptive light of the moon

Through stone and steel

I see the power of my native country!

Field Russia! Pretty

Heal with a plow on the scorches!

It hurts to see your poverty

And birches and poplars.

I don't know what will happen to me ...

Maybe I'm not fit for a new life.

But still I want steel

See poor, impoverished Russia

The last two years of his life, Yesenin is experiencing an unprecedented creative jack. During the years 1924-1425 he created about a hundred works, twice as many as in the six previous years. At the same time, Yesenin's poetry becomes more psychological, artistically more perfect, smoothness and melody, deep soulful lyricism are enhanced in it.

His poems are saturated with original epithets and comparisons, capacious, colorful metaphors taken from the natural world. Yesenin can be called a poet of metaphors, he sees the world metaphorically transformed.

The poet finds clear and vivid images, unexpected contrasts designed to show complex psychological experiences, the beauty and richness of the human soul and the surrounding world: "Golden foliage swirled in pinkish water on a pond // Like butterflies, a light flock flies to the star with a daze"; "I am on the first snow delirious, // In the heart of the lilies of the valley flashed forces"; "And the golden autumn // In the birches it reduces the juice, // For all those whom he loved and abandoned, // Leaves howling on the sand."

Yesenin comes in these years to that meaningful aesthetic simplicity and capacity, which is characteristic of Russian classical poetry. And during this period, in his poems, the motive of sadness, regret about the transience of youth and the inability to return to it often sounds. But nevertheless, despite the aching feeling of sadness, they do not have despair and pessimism: they are warmed by faith in the spiritual strength of a person, in their beloved Russia, the wise acceptance of the laws of being.

They contain not the former bitterly defiant bravado "I was left with only amusements / Fingers in my mouth yes * cheerful whistle"), not detachment from life ("Our life is kisses and into the pool"), but a deeply penetrating understanding of the corruption of everything earthly and the irreversibility of change generations. The opposition: "the immortality of nature" and "the finiteness of human life" - is overcome by Yesenin by the thought of a single law of being, to which both nature and man inevitably obey.

Yesenin's works are consonant with the mood that Alexander Pushkin once expressed: "My sorrow is light ..."

“I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry,” - this is how Yesenin begins, one of his famous poems, in which the poet combined two traditions that are most important for all of his work: folklore and mythological - a sense of the unity of man with nature - and literary, especially Pushkin ...

Pushkin's “lush wilting of nature” and “forests dressed in crimson and gold”, erased from the frequent use by Yesenin's predecessors, he fused into a single and contrasting image of golden wilting, which is interpreted simultaneously as a sign of autumn nature and as a state of the external (hair color) and the inner appearance of the lyrical hero.

The epithet "white" also acquires an additional semantic shade in Yesenin's poem: white is both flowering apple trees and the personification of purity and freshness. The image of youth is recreated here in a very peculiar way - the central image of the elegy: “As if I were echoing in springtime // I rode on a pink horse”.

Spring early is the beginning, the morning of life, the pink horse is a symbolic embodiment of youthful hopes and impulses. Combining in this image realistic specificity with symbolism, subjective with objective, the poet achieves plasticity of the image and emotional expressiveness.

Bright emotionality is conveyed to the poem by rhetorical questions and appeals. "Wandering spirit, you are less and less, less often ...", "My life, or I dreamed about you," the poet exclaims, conveying the inexorable run of time.

Equally perfect and original is another Yesenin masterpiece - “The golden grove dissuaded”. The image of a grove that speaks the cheerful language of birches is magnificent, but metaphor and animation here is not an end in itself, but a means of accurately realizing the idea: to reveal the complex psychological state of the lyric hero, his grief over the passing youth and acceptance of the laws of being.

The images of cranes, hemp, the month, the metaphor “mountain ash fire” that appear later give this sadness a cosmic character (“The hemp-dweller dreams of all the departed // With a broad month over a young pond.” Grief and sadness are balanced by the understanding of the need and justification of a generational change (“After all, everyone a wanderer in the world - // He will pass, come in and again leave home ") and satisfaction that life has not been lived in vain:

Mountain ash brushes will not burn off,

The grass will not disappear from yellowness.

Similar thoughts, feelings and moods permeate other Yesenin's poems of this time: “We are now leaving a little ...”, “Blue May. Glowing warmth ... "," Kachalov's dog ".

Significant changes are observed in these years in the poet's love lyrics, which occupy a huge place in his work. In the works of this theme, Yesenin, with great skill, embodied the subtlest nuances of the human soul: the joy of meeting, the longing of separation, impulse, sadness, despair, grief.

Love in Yesenin's poetic world is a manifestation of natural forces in a person, a son of nature. She clearly fits into the natural calendar: autumn, spring are coupled with Yesenin with different psychological states of love feelings.

Love is likened / to the processes of awakening, flowering, flowering and withering / of Nature. It is primordial and inexhaustible, like nature itself. At the same time, love in Yesenin's understanding is far from simple. This primordial element is mysterious in its essence, shrouded in the highest mystery and "The one who invented your flexible body and shoulders // He put his mouth to the light secret."

The poetic world of love created by Yesenin was not, however, stable. The development of this theme is marked by the poet's complex, contradictory, dramatic searches for a life ideal and harmony of spiritual values.

One of the best early poems of the poet on this topic - "Do not wander, do not wrinkle in the crimson bushes ..." (1916). The image of the beloved is fanned here by the gentle beauty of Nature, created in the best traditions of oral folk art.

In essence, the whole poem is a portrait of a beloved, reflected in a pure mirror of nature, intricately woven against the background of the colors of a village evening from the purity and whiteness of snow, from scarlet juice of berries, from grains of ears and honeycombs:

With scarlet juice of berries on the skin,

Delicate, beautiful was

You look pink like a sunset

And, like snow, radiant and white.

During the creation of the "Moscow tavern" the dramatic, suppressed state of the poet left an imprint on the illumination of the theme of love: Yesenin in poems of this period depicts not a spiritual feeling, but an erotic passion, giving this a very specific explanation: "Is it possible now to love, // When in the heart erase the beast. " As Yesenin emerges from a critical state, his love lyrics again acquire light, sublime intonations and colors.

In 1923, a turning point for the poet, he wrote poems: "A blue fire swept around ...", "Darling, let's sit next to", in which he again sings true, deep, pure love. Now, more and more often, the appearance of the beloved is accompanied by Yesenin's epithets "dear", "sweetheart", the attitude towards her becomes respectful, sublime.

The defiant intonations and the coarse words and expressions associated with them disappear from the poems. The world of new, high feelings experienced by the lyrical hero is embodied in soft, soulful tones:

I will forget the dark forces.

That tormented me, ruining.

The look is affectionate! The look is cute!

Only one I will not forget you.

("Evening black eyebrows frowned")

Cycle of poems "Persian motives"

This new state of the poet was expressed with great force in the cycle of his poems "Persian Motives" (1924-1925), which were created under the impression of his stay in the Caucasus.

There is not even a trace of naturalistic details that diminished the artistic value of the "Moscow tavern" cycle. Poeticization of the light feeling of love is the most important feature of "Persian motives":

Cute hands - a pair of swans -

In the gold of my hair they dive.

Everything in this world of people

The song of love is sung and repeated.

Singing and I used to be far away

And now I sing about the same thing again.

That's why it breathes deeply

A word impregnated with tenderness.

But for Yesenin this cycle is characterized not only by a different - chaste - embodiment of the theme of love, but also by its rapprochement with another, the main theme for him: the theme of the Motherland. The author of "Persian Motives" is convinced of the incompleteness of happiness far from his native land:

No matter how beautiful Shiraz is,

It is no better than Ryazan's expanse.

Love in all its manifestations - for the Motherland, for the mother, for the woman, for nature - is the core of the poet's moral and aesthetic ideal. Yesenin comprehended it as the fundamental principle of life, as a system of spiritual values \u200b\u200bthat a person should live by.

"Anna Snegina"

Yesenin's largest work of the 1920s is the poem Anna Snegina (1925), which organically combined the epic illumination of a sharp turn in the life of the village with the heartfelt lyrical theme of love. The action of the poem takes place in the countryside, dear to the poet, where "the moon is like golden powder // Showered the distance of the villages", where "the mildew gives a smoke // On the white apple trees in the garden."

The basis of the work is a lyrical plot connected with the memories of the lyrical hero about his youthful love for the daughter of the landowner Anna Snegina. The image of a sixteen-year-old "girl in a white cape, personifying youth and beauty of life, illuminates the entire work with a gentle light. But lyricism, the poet's skill in depicting pictures of nature and the spiritual movements of the heroes is only one of the virtues of the poem]. Yesenin appears here not only as a subtle lyricist, but at the same time as a chronicler of turbulent and contradictory events in the countryside during the October Revolution.

One of the main themes of the poem is the theme of war. The war is condemned by the entire artistic structure of the poem, its various situations and characters: the miller and his wife, the driver, two tragedies in the life of Anna Snegina (the death of her husband as an officer and her departure abroad), the lyric hero himself, the love of life and the humanist, convinced that that "the earth is beautiful, // And there is a man on it." An eyewitness and participant in the war, he hates fratricidal carnage:

The war has consumed my whole soul.

For someone else's interest

I shot at my close body

And he climbed on his brother.

Unwillingness to be a toy in the wrong hands ("I realized that I am a toy") prompted the hero to defect from the front.

With the return to the places of his childhood and youth, he regains peace of mind. But not for long. The revolution disrupted the usual course of life, exacerbated many problems.

The herald of the revolutionary idea is the peasant Pron Ogloblin in the poem. Many researchers traditionally tend to consider him a positive hero, an exponent of the mood of the peasant masses and the poet himself. However, this is not quite true.

Pron evokes sympathy from the author because his life was cut short absurdly and cruelly: he was killed by the White Guards in 1920, and any terror, regardless of its color, aroused Yesenin's sharp rejection. Pron Ogloblin is the type of revolutionary who stands not with the people, but above them. And the revolution only contributed to the development of this leader's psychology in him. This is how he addresses the peasants, urging them to take the landlord's land:

Ogloblin stands at the gate

And I'm drunk in the liver and in the soul

The impoverished people are knocking.

Hey you!

Cockroach brat!

All to Snegina! ..

R - once and kvass!

Give, they say, your lands

Without any ransom from us! "

And immediately seeing me,

Reducing grumpy agility,

Said in genuine resentment:

The peasants still need to cook.

With even more sarcasm, Prona's brother, Labuta, is also a type of village “leader”. With the victory of the revolution, he found himself in a senior position, in the village council, and "with an important bearing" lives "not a callus."

Pron and Labute are opposed in the poem by the miller. It is kindness, mercy and humanity embodied. His image is permeated with lyricism and is dear to the author as a bearer of light folk principles. It is no coincidence that the miller in the poem constantly connects people. Anna Snegina treats him with confidence, the lyrical hero loves and remembers him, and the peasants respect him.

The events of the revolution thus receive ambiguous coverage in the poem. On the one hand, the revolution promotes the growth of the miller's self-awareness. On the other hand, it gives power to people like Labutya and defines the tragedy of people like Anna. The daughter of a landowner, revolutionary Russia did not need her. Her letter from emigration is permeated with acute nostalgic pain for her forever lost homeland.

In the lyrical context of the poem, the separation of the lyrical hero from Anna is a separation from youth, separation from the purest and brightest that happens to a person in the morning dawn of his life. But bright memories of youth remain with a person forever as a memory, like the light of a distant star:

They were far, lovely! ..

That image in me has not faded away.

We all loved these years

But that means they loved us too.

Like other works by Yesenin of the 1920s, the poem is distinguished by a careful selection of pictorial and expressive means. Along with metaphors, comparisons, epithets, the author makes extensive use of colloquial folk speech, vernaculars, very natural in the mouths of his heroes-peasants: “houses, honor, two hundred”, “buldyzhnik”, “edits yours in the drawbar”, etc.

Yeseninskaya color painting

Mature Yesenin is a virtuoso master of artistic form. The Yesenin color painting is rich and multifaceted. Yesenin uses color not only in a direct, but also in a metaphorical sense, contributing to the figurative illumination of his philosophical and aesthetic concept of life.

Especially often found in Yesenin's poetry blue and blue. This is not just the poet's individual affection for such colors. Blue and light blue is the color of the earth's atmosphere and water, it prevails in nature, regardless of the season. "Warm blue heights", "blue groves", "plain blue" - these are the frequent signs of nature in Yesenin's poems. But the poet is not limited to simple reproduction of the colors of nature.

These colors turn into capacious metaphors under his pen. Blue for him is the color of peace and silence. That is why it is so often found when the poet depicts morning and evening: "blue evening", "blue dusk", "blue evening light".

The blue color in Yesenin's poetics serves to denote space, breadth: "blue arable land", "blue space", "blue Russia". Blue and blue in their combination serve to create a romantic mood in the reader. “May my blue! June is blue! " - exclaims the poet, and we feel that the months are not just named here, here are thoughts of youth.

Scarlet, pink and red colors are quite often found in Yesenin. The first two symbolize youth, purity, purity, youthful impulses and hopes: “you yearn for the pink sky”, “I am burning with pink fire”, “As if I am echoing in springtime, // I rode on a pink horse”, “With scarlet juice of berries on my skin // Delicate, beautiful was ", etc.

Akin to scarlet and pink, red has a special semantic connotation in Yesenin's poetics. This is an alarming, restless color, as if the expectation of the unknown is felt in it. If the scarlet color is associated with the morning dawn, symbolizing the morning of life, then red hints at its imminent sunset: "the road is thinking about the red evening", "the red wings of the sunset are extinguished."

When a heavy and gloomy mood prevailed in Yesenin's works, black invaded his works: "The Black Man" is the name of his most tragic work.

The rich and capacious Yesenin's color painting, in addition to the picturesqueness and deepening of the philosophical nature of his lyrics, in many ways helps to enhance the musicality of the verse. S. Yesenin is one of the great Russian poets who developed a wonderful and unique tradition of Russian verse - melodiousness. His lyrics are permeated with song elements. "I was sucked in by the song captivity," the poet confessed.

The melodiousness of Yesenin's lyrics

It is no coincidence that many of his poems were set to music and became romances. He widely uses sound in his works. Yesenin's sound writing, generous and rich, reflects a complex, polyphonic picture of the surrounding world.

Most of the sounds in the poet's poems are called words. These are: the screeching of a blizzard and the hubbub of birds, the clatter of hooves and the cry of ducks, the clatter of cart wheels and a loud peasant noise. In his works we clearly hear how "a blizzard with a furious roar // Knocks on the hanging shutters" and "a titmouse shadows between the forest curls."

Yesenin often uses metonymy, that is, he calls not a sound, but an object for which it is characteristic: "Outside the window is the harmonica and the radiance of the month." It is clear that here we are not talking about the harmonica as an instrument, but about its melody. Metonymy is often complicated by a metaphor that conveys the nature of the movement and sound of the object. For example, in the poem "Burn, my star, do not fall" the fall of autumn leaves is conveyed by the word "crying":

And the golden autumn

Reduces sap in birches,

For everyone whom he loved and abandoned,

Leaves crying on the sand.

The nature of sounds in Yesenin's poetry correlates with the seasons. In the spring and summer, the sounds are loud, exultant, joyful: "In the gospel of the wind, intoxicating spring", "And with the chorus of the bird's prayer // Singing a bell hymn to them." In autumn, the sounds fade sadly: "In the autumn, the owl counts, the leaves whisper in the autumn," "the forest froze without sadness and noise."

Yesenin's verse is rich in instrumentation. The poet willingly uses assonances and alliterations, which not only give his works musicality, but also emphasize their meaning more clearly.

Yesenin sound images help to convey the psychological state of the lyric hero. The poet associates youth with the sounds of spring, a young perception of life, "a flood of feelings": "Spring sings in my soul."

The bitterness of loss, mental fatigue and disappointment are emphasized by the sad sounds of autumn and bad weather. Often, Yesenin's sounds merge with color, forming complex metaphorical images: "the sonorous marble of white stairs", "the blue star is ringing", "the blue clank of horseshoes", etc. And as a result of such sound and color associations, it appears again and again in his creativity, the image of the Motherland and the associated hope for the triumph of the bright beginnings of life: "Links, links, golden Russia."

The smoothness and melody of Yesenin's verse is greatly facilitated by rhythm. The poet began his career by testing all the syllabo-tonic scales and opting for chorea.

Russian classical poetry of the 19th century was predominantly iambic: iambics are used in 60-80% of the works of Russian poets. Yesenin chooses a troche, and a trochee of five feet, elegiac, giving the verse thoughtfulness, fluency, philosophical depth.

The melodiousness of Yesenin's chorea is created by an abundance of pyrrhicles and various melodious methods - anaphores, repetitions, and enumerations. He also actively uses the principle of the circular composition of poems, that is, the roll call and coincidence of beginnings and endings. The ring composition, typical of the romance genre, was widely used by Fet, Polonsky, Blok, and Yesenin continues this tradition.

Until the end of his life Yesenin continued to worry about the question of "what happened, what happened in the country."

Back in August 1920, the poet wrote to his correspondent Yevgenia Lifshits: "... Socialism is going on completely different from what I thought ... Closely alive in it."

Over time, this conviction grew stronger. About what happened in Russia after October 1917, Yesenin figuratively said in a poem of 1925 "Ineffable, blue, tender ...":

Like a triplet of horses frenzied

Swept all over the country.

Many of Yesenin's poems of the last years of his life are evidence of his painful thoughts about the results of the revolution, the desire to understand "where the fate of events takes us." Either he is skeptical of the Soviet regime, then "for the banner of freedom and light labor // Ready to go even to the Channel." Now for him "and Lenin is not an icon", then he calls him "the captain of the Earth." Either he claims that he "remained in the past ... with one foot", then he is not averse to "lifting his pants, // Run after the Komsomol."

"Homecoming", "Soviet Russia", "Homeless Russia" and "Leaving Russia"

In summer and autumn Yesenin creates his "little tetralogy" - the poems "Return to the Motherland", "Soviet Russia", "Homeless Russia" and "Leaving Russia".

In them, with his characteristic ruthless sincerity, he shows the sorrowful pictures of a devastated village, the collapse of the fundamental foundations of the Russian way of life.

In "Homecoming" it is "a bell tower without a cross" ("the commissar removed the cross"); rotten cemetery crosses, which "seem to be dead men in hand-to-hand combat, / / \u200b\u200bFrozen with outstretched hands"; discarded icons; Capital on the table instead of the Bible.

The poem is a poetic parallel to Pushkin's "I Visited Again": both there and here - the return to the homeland. But how different this return appears. In Pushkin - the image of the connection of times, the continuity of the ancestral and historical memory ("my grandson will remember me"). Yesenin has a tragic rupture in the relationship between generations: the grandson does not recognize his own grandfather.

The same motive sounds in the poem "Soviet Russia". "In his native village, in an orphaned land," the lyrical hero feels lonely, forgotten, unnecessary: \u200b\u200b"My poetry is no longer needed here, // And, perhaps, I myself am not needed here either."

“In my country, I am like a foreigner,” - this is how Yesenin perceived his place in post-revolutionary Russia. The testimony of the emigrant writer Roman Gulya is interesting in this regard.

Recalling one of his meetings with Yesenin in Berlin, Gul writes: “The three of us left the house of German pilots. It was five o'clock in the morning ... Yesenin suddenly muttered: “I won't go to Moscow. I will not go there while Leiba Bronstein rules Russia, ”that is, L. Trotsky.

The poet recreated the ominous appearance of Leon Trotsky in 1923 in a poetic drama under the characteristic title "The Country of Scoundrels". Trotsky is depicted here under the name of an employee of the red counterintelligence Chekistov, who declares with hatred: "There is no more mediocre and hypocritical, // Than your Russian plain man ... I swear and will stubbornly // Curse you even for a thousand years."

The genius singer of Russia, the defender and guardian of its national way of life and spirit, Yesenin, with his work, entered into a tragic collision with the policy of desecration, and in fact - the destruction of the country. He himself understood this perfectly.

In February 1923, on his way from America, he wrote to the poet A. Kusikov in Paris: “It’s sickening for me, the legitimate son of Russia, to be a stepson in my country. I can't, by God, I can't! At least shout the guard. Now, when only a horse-radish pipe was left of the revolution, it became clear that you and I were and will be that bastard on which you can hang all the dogs ”12.

Yesenin interfered, he had to be removed. He was persecuted, threatened with jail and even murder.

The poet's mood of the last months of his life was reflected in the poem "The Black Man" (1925), inspired by Pushkin's drama "Mozart and Salieri". The poem tells how a black man who lived in the country of the most disgusting thugs and charlatans began to appear to the poet at night. He laughs at the poet, mocks his poems. Fear and melancholy take possession of the hero, he is unable to resist the black man.

Death of Yesenin

Life in Moscow is becoming more and more dangerous for Yesenin. On December 23, 1925, trying to break away from his pursuers, the poet secretly leaves for Leningrad. Here, late in the evening of December 27 at the Angleterre Hotel, he was killed under mysterious circumstances. His corpse, in order to simulate suicide, was hung high under the ceiling on a belt from a suitcase.

The murder of the poet did not prevent the popularity of his works among readers. And then the ideologues of the new government made an attempt to distort and then ban his work.

The unsightly appearance of the poet began to be intensively penetrated into the mass consciousness: a drunkard, a libertine, a brawler, a mediocre poet, etc. N. Bukharin, the "favorite of the party", was especially zealous.

5 / 5. 1

Yesenin Sergei Alexandrovich (1895-1925) - the great Russian poet, his lyric poems represented the new peasant poetry, and later his work belongs to Imagism.

Childhood

One can hardly find a more Russian place in all of vast Russia than the Ryazan province. It was there, in the Kuzminskaya volost in the small village of Konstantinovo, that the genius poet Sergei Yesenin was born, who loved his Rus to an aching pain in his heart. Only a real son of the Russian land, who turned out to be a little boy, born on October 3, 1895, can so deeply love the Motherland, devote his whole life and work to it.

The Yesenin family was a poor peasant. The head of the family, Alexander Nikitich, as a child, sang in the choir at the church. And in adulthood, he served in a Moscow butcher shop, so he was at home on short visits on weekends. Such a fatherly service in Moscow served as a reason for discord in the family, mother Tatyana Fedorovna began to work in Ryazan, where she got along with another man, Ivan Razgulyaev, from whom she later gave birth to a son, Alexander. Therefore, it was decided to send Seryozha to be raised by a prosperous old believer-grandfather.

And so it happened that Sergei's earliest childhood was spent in the village with his maternal grandparents. Three more sons lived with their grandfather and grandmother, they were not married, and the poet's carefree childhood passed with them. Something, but despair and mischief, these guys were not busy, so already at the age of three and a half they put their little nephew on a horse without a saddle and galloped into the field. And then there was training in swimming, when one of the uncles put little Seryozha with him in a boat, sailed away from the shore, took off his clothes and, like a dog, threw him into the river.

The first, not yet fully conscious, poetry Sergei began to compose at an early age, the impetus for this was his grandmother's fairy tales. In the evenings before going to bed, she told a lot of their little grandson, but some had a bad end, Seryozha did not like it, and he rewrote the ending of the tales in his own way.

The grandfather insisted that the boy begin to learn to read and write early. Already at the age of five, Seryozha was learning to read religious literature, for which he received the nickname Seryoga-monk among rural children, although he was known as a terrible fidget, a fighter and his whole body was constantly bruised and scratched.

And the future poet really liked it when his mother sang. Already in adulthood, he loved listening to her songs.

Study

In 1904, when the boy was 9 years old, he was sent to the Konstantinovsky Zemstvo School. The education was four years old, but Yesenin studied for 5 years. Despite his excellent academic performance and constant reading of books, his behavior was unsatisfactory, for which he was left for the second year. And he passed the final exams with solid "A" marks.

By this time, Yesenin's parents met again, and his sister Katya was born. Mom and Dad wanted Sergei to become a teacher, so after the zemstvo school they took him to a church teacher's school in the village of Spas-Klepiki. During this period, he wrote his first poems:

• "Memories",
• "Stars",
• "My life".

A little later, he compiled two manuscript collections of poems, his early work was distinguished by a spiritual orientation. During the holidays, Sergei visited his parents in Konstantinovo. Here he often visited the house of a local priest, who had an excellent church library, Seryozha used it, perhaps this played a role in the direction of his first works. In 1911, Sergei had a second sister, Alexander.

Moving to Moscow

In 1912, Sergei graduated from the Spaso-Klepikovskaya school, received a diploma as a "teacher of the literacy school" and immediately left for Moscow. He did not become a teacher, first he got a job in a butcher's shop, then entered the Kultura bookselling partnership, where he served a little in the office, after that he got a job as an assistant proofreader in a printing house. Working in such a position, he had the opportunity to fully engage in what he loved - reading books and writing poetry. Having a little free time, Yesenin joined the Surikov Literary and Musical Association, and also began to freely listen to lectures at the historical and philosophical department at Moscow University named after Shanyavsky.

In 1913, at work, Sergei met Anna Izryadnova, who worked there as a proofreader. They began to live without formalizing their relationship, and in 1914 the couple had a boy, Yura (in 1937 he was falsely accused and shot). At the same time, the children's magazine "Mirok" published poems by Sergei Yesenin, this was the first publication of the poet.

Petrograd, military service and marriage

Soon, Yesenin left his common-law spouse with a child and in 1915 left for Petrograd, where he met the poets Gorodetsky and Blok, he read his poems to them. There he was called to war, but his new friends bothered and knocked out an appointment for the aspiring poet in the Tsarskoye Selo military ambulance train, which belonged to the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. During this service, Yesenin became especially close to the so-called new peasant poets.

In 1916, the first collection of poems by the poet "Radunitsa" was published, which brought him popularity. Yesenin was often invited to Tsarskoe Selo, where he read his poems to the empress and her daughters. These were beautiful lyrical works about Russian nature and old Russia, which emerged in his memory from maternal songs and grandmother's tales.

In 1917 Yesenin met the actress Zinaida Reich, whom he soon got married in the church of the Vologda province, and then the wedding took place in the St. Petersburg hotel "Passage". In marriage, two children were born - blue-eyed and blond daughter Tanya, and son Kostya. However, Sergei left this family when his wife was still pregnant with her second child. In 1921, they officially filed for divorce.

Imagism

During this period, largely due to his acquaintance with the poet Anatoly Mariengof, Yesenin became interested in such a direction in poetry as imagism. Several of his new collections were released:

• "Confessions of a Bully"
• "Treryadnitsa"
• "Poems of a Brawler"
• "Moscow tavern",
• poem "Pugachev".

In 1921, Yesenin went to travel to Central Asia, visited Tashkent, Bukhara and Samarkand, then went to the Orenburg region and the Urals. He walked around the neighborhood and admired the nature of the local area, listened to local music and poetry, took part in literary evenings, where he read his poems to the public.

Isadora Duncan

Returning from Tashkent, at the end of 1921 at his friend Yakulov's, Sergei met Isadora Duncan, a famous dancer from America. The poet did not know English, Isadora could not express herself freely in Russian, nevertheless, feelings flared up between them, and very serious ones, because after six months they were married. When he read his poems to her, she did not understand the words, but she characterized it like this: “I listened to them because it was music, and I felt in my heart that they were written by a genius”.

Communicating only in the language of gestures and feelings, they were so fascinated by each other that they amazed even the poet's closest friends with their novel, because Isadora was 18 years older than Sergei. In the spring of 1922, Duncan had a long tour of Europe, where her Sergei Alexandrovich went with her, as Yesenina Isadora always called.

The poet visited France and Belgium, Germany and Italy, then lived in the USA for quite a long time. However, there he realized that here he is considered only a shadow of the great Isadora, he began to get too carried away with alcohol, which led to a quick break between the spouses. As Duncan herself said: “I took Yesenin away from Russia in order to save his talent for humanity. I let him go back, because I understood: he cannot live without Russia ".

Return to Russia

At the end of the summer of 1923, Sergei Yesenin returned to his homeland. Here the poet had another short affair with the translator Nadezhda Volpin, from whom his son Alexander was born. The newspaper "Izvestia" published the poet's notes about America "Iron Mirgorod".

In 1924, Yesenin again began to get carried away with traveling around the country, many times went to his homeland in Konstantinovo, several times a year he visited Leningrad, then there were trips to the Caucasus, to Azerbaijan.

Returning to Moscow, Yesenin increasingly began to argue with Mariengof, disagreements began between them and Sergei announced that he was leaving imagism. After that, he increasingly became the hero of local newspapers, which wrote about his fights, drunkenness and debauchery.

In the fall of 1925, he officially married for the third time, Sophia Tolstaya, the granddaughter of the writer Lev Nikolaevich, became his wife. But the marriage did not work out initially, the poet's constant drunkenness led to quarrels. His condition was worried not only by his wife, but also by the Soviet authorities. At the end of autumn, Sophia decided the question of Yesenin's hospitalization in a Moscow psychoneurological clinic, only the poet's closest relatives knew about this. But he escaped from the clinic, took all the money from the book in the savings bank and went to Leningrad, where he settled in the Angleterre hotel.

The death of the poet and the memory of him

In this hotel, in room No. 5, on December 28, 1925, Sergei was found dead.
The law enforcement agencies did not initiate a criminal case, despite the fact that the body bore signs of a violent death. Until now, there is officially only one version - suicide. It is explained by the deep depression in which the poet was in the last months of his life.

Yesenin was buried on the last day of the outgoing 1925 in Moscow at the Vagankovsky cemetery.

In the 80s, versions appeared and began to develop more and more that the poet was killed and then staged a suicide. Such a crime is attributed to people who worked in those years in the OGPU. But so far, all this is so and remains only versions.

During such a short life, the great poet managed to leave his descendants living on Earth an invaluable legacy in the form of his poetry. A subtle lyricist with knowledge of the soul of the people masterfully described peasant Russia in his poems. Many of his works are set to music, excellent romances turned out.

Grateful Russia remembers its genius poet. Monuments to Sergei Yesenin have been erected in many cities, and house-museums have been opened and operate in Konstantinovo, Spas-Klepiky, in St. Petersburg and Voronezh, Tashkent and Baku.