Sergei Yesenin was born in the village of Konstantinovo, Ryazan Region (on the border with Moscow). His father, Alexander Yesenin, was a butcher in Moscow, and his mother, Tatyana Titova, worked in Ryazan. Sergei spent most of his childhood in Konstantinovo, in the house of his grandfather and grandmother. In 1904-1909 he studied at primary school, and in 1909 he was sent to the parish school in the village of Spas-Klepiki. His first known poems date from this period. Yesenin wrote them at the age of 14.
Sergey Yesenin. Photo of 1922
After completing his studies in the summer of 1912, Sergei went to his father in Moscow, where he worked for a month in the same store with him, and then got a job in a publishing house. Having already realized that he had a poetic gift, he got in touch with Moscow artistic circles. In the spring of 1913 Yesenin became a proofreader in one of the largest printing houses in Moscow (Sytin) and made the first contacts with revolutionaries from the Social Democratic Labor Party, as a result of which he came under police surveillance.
In September 1913 Yesenin entered the Shanyavsky People's University at the Department of History and Philosophy, and in January 1914 met one of his colleagues, proofreader Anna Izryadnova. His poems began to appear in magazines and on the pages of Golos Pravda, the predecessor newspaper of the Bolshevik Pravda.
The beginning of the war with Germany (1914) found Sergei Yesenin in the Crimea. In the first days of August, he returned to Moscow and resumed work in the printing house of Chernyshev, but soon left there to devote himself to writing. Sergei also left his girlfriend Izryadnova, who had just given birth to his first child.
Yesenin spent most of 1915 in Petrograd, which was then the heart of Russian cultural life. great poet Alexander Blok introduced him to literary circles. Yesenin became friends with the poet Nikolai Klyuev, met with Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Nikolai Gumilyov, Marina Tsvetaeva, who highly appreciated his works. For Yesenin, a long series began public speaking and concerts, which lasted until his death.
In the spring of 1916, his first collection, Radunitsa, was published. In the same year, Yesenin was mobilized into the ambulance train number 143. He received this preferential form of military conscription thanks to the patronage of friends. I listened to his concerts myself Empress Alexandra Feodorovna... Gravitating more to poetry than to war, Yesenin was arrested in August for 20 days for being too late from one leave of absence.
Sergei Yesenin and the revolution
Secrets of the Century - Sergei Yesenin. Night in Angleterre
The murder version has many indirect confirmations. The examination of the corpse and the medical report of the suicide were made with excessive and incomprehensible haste. The related documents are unusually short. The time of Yesenin's death in some medical documents is indicated on December 27, in others - in the morning of the 28th. Bruises are noticeable on Sergei's face. Prominent government agents were present at Angleterre that night. The persons who witnessed the poet's suicide soon disappeared. His ex-wife, Zinaida Reich, was killed in 1939 after she announced that she was going to tell Stalin everything about Yesenin's death. The famous poems written in blood were not found at the place of the poet's death, but for some reason they were given to Wolf Ehrlich on December 27.
Sergei Yesenin on his deathbed
The mystery of the death of Sergei Yesenin has not yet been solved, but everyone knows that in those troubled years, poets, artists and artists hostile to the regime were either shot, or rushed to the camps, or too easily committed suicide. In the books of the 1990s, other information appeared that undermined the version of suicide. It turned out that the pipe on which Yesenin was hanging was located not horizontally, but vertically, and traces of the rope that connected them were visible on his hands.
In 1989, under the auspices of the Gorky Institute of World Literature, the Yesenin Commission was created under the chairmanship of the Soviet and Russian Yesenin scholar Yu.L. Prokushev (former secretary of the Moscow Regional Committee of the Komsomol, who later came to the Literary Institute from a party position). Having investigated the then widespread hypotheses about the murder of Yesenin, this commission stated that:
The now published "versions" about the murder of the poet with the subsequent staged hanging, despite some discrepancies ..., are a vulgar, incompetent interpretation of special information, sometimes falsifying the results of the examination.
However, it soon became clear that the "expertise" of Prokushev's commission boiled down to correspondence with various expert institutions and individual experts who even earlier expressed in the press their negative attitude towards the version of the murder of Yesenin... V.N.Solovyov, a criminal prosecutor of the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation, who participated in the work of the commission, later gave such an ambiguous description of its "specialists" and the conditions of the "investigation" conducted by them:
"These people worked within the strict framework of the law and are accustomed to realizing that any biased conclusion can easily transfer them from the office chair to the prison bunks, that you need to think hard before coughing."
The time of Yesenin's creativity is the era of sharp turns in the history of Russia. One of the most important milestones for any writer, reflected in creativity, was the revolution, which turned the whole way of life. Yesenin wrote in his autobiography: "I accepted the revolution, but with a peasant bias." It couldn't have been otherwise. Yesenin is not just a lyricist, he is a poet of great intelligence, deep philosophical reflections. The drama of his attitude, his intense search for truth, error and weakness - all these are the facets of great talent, but studying him creative way, we can safely say that Yesenin has always been true to himself in the main thing - in an effort to comprehend the difficult fate of his people. Yesenin responded to the revolution with the poems "Small post-revolutionary poems", among which the following works can be named: "Comrade" (1917), "Jordanian blue" (1919). With the help of allegorical images, Yesenin tries to comprehend revolutionary events, to understand what the revolution will lead to. There is a high proportion of the conventional in the poems, which allows Yesenin to convey the general atmosphere of the first revolutionary years.
The poem "Comrade" recreates the power of a revolutionary explosion. Yesenin's last poetic work is the tragic poem "The Black Man". The year and a half spent by the poet abroad was an exceptional period in his life: he did not write poetry, nothing inspired the poet away from native land... It was there that the idea of the tragic poem "The Black Man" arose. It was only abroad that Yesenin realized what tremendous changes were taking place in his homeland. He notes in his diary that, perhaps, the Russian revolution will save the world from a hopeless philistinism. After returning from abroad, Yesenin visits his native land. He is sad, it seems to him that the people do not remember him, that huge changes have taken place in the village, but in which direction, he could not determine. The poet writes:
That's the country! Why the hell am I yelling that I am friendly with the people.
My poetry is no longer needed here, And I myself am not needed here in the least. The peasant Komsomol is coming from the mountain, Poor Demyan's agitation is singing to the accordion, Singing the agitation of Poor Demyan, A cheerful cry announcing the dol.
These lines contain the motive of the uselessness of the “singer of the village” in the post-revolutionary years. As if the poet felt his future lack of demand. Indeed, in the years following his death, in school textbooks did not include Yesenin's lyrics, falsely accusing him of lack of ideas. The best poets deleted from literature. Even earlier, in the poem "I'm tired of living in my native land," he predicts his future:
I'm tired of living in my native land
Longing for buckwheat expanses,
I will leave my hut,
I will leave as a vagabond and a thief ...
And the month will float and float,
Dropping the oars on the lakes
And Russia will still live the same,
Dance and cry by the fence.
In the poetry of subsequent years, the motive of sadness, regret for the wasted forces, sounds more and more often, from his poetry there is a kind of hopelessness. In The Black Man, he writes tragic lines:
My friend, I am very, very sick,
I don't know where this pain came from
Roofing felts the wind rustles in an open field,
Either, like a grove in September, alcohol burns the brains.
So, in the post-revolutionary work of Yesenin, the theme of the motherland and the fate of the artist is revealed. In Yesenin's poetry, initially, love for the Motherland was love-pain because the age-old traditions that were the root of Russia are being destroyed.
The poet's desire to accept a new reality, post-revolutionary Russia, was reflected in the 1925 poem "Uncomfortable liquid moon ...". In this work, the poet writes about his new mood. On the one hand, he is delighted with a new, stone and steel, powerful country:
Now I like something else ... And in the consumptive light of the moon Through the stone and steel I see the power of my native country.
But at the same time, an image of poor and impoverished Russia appears in the poem, at which the poet cannot look calmly:
Field Russia! Enough to drag the plow through the fields! It hurts to see your poverty And birches and poplars.
Yesenin is a poet who did not stop loving his country, did not abandon it. He tried to accept the new world, although he did not feel such enthusiasm for revolutionary changes as, say, Mayakovsky. But Yesenin did not succeed. Patriarchal Russia was too close to him.
The beginning of the twentieth century is one of the turning points in the history of not only Russia, but all of humanity. The revolution became for all the strongest shock that put an end to the old world and announced the creation of a new world. But this new, bright world was so ghostly and distant, and the reality was so ambiguous, complex and harsh!
Sergei Yesenin happened to live and create in this difficult, turbulent time. And his perception of the events taking place is captured in poetry.
“The poet of the village”, Yesenin expected from the revolution, first of all, the benefit of the Russian village, and at first he reacted positively to it. However, how unnatural, not in Yesenin's way, words similar to agitation rhymes sound insincere:
The sky is like a bell
The month is the language
My mother is my homeland
I am a Bolshevik.
("Jordanian Dove")
But very soon Yesenin's revolutionary fuse went out: he saw that the promised new, happy world was not at all what he dreamed of. A terrible disappointment poisoned the cheerful and bright poet. Returning to Rodi-nu after a long separation, he speaks of the revolution in not at all happy words: “That hurricane has passed. Few of us survived ”(“ Soviet Rus ”). In confusion, the poet realizes: "The language of fellow citizens has become like a stranger to me, // In my country I am like a foreigner." The rude speech of the revolutionaries cuts the poet's ear:
“We already have him - this way and that way, -
Bourgeois entogo ... which ... in the Crimea ... "
And the maples wrinkle the ears of the long branches,
And the women groan in the silent semi-darkness.
Instead of sincere folk songs, kind courtyards
ditties, lyrical romances, people “sing agitation.
foot Demyan ". Stunned, dumbfounded Yesenin did not
believes that this is his Russia, his beloved Russia!
That's the country!
What the hell am I
Shouted in verse that I am friends with the people? " -
exclaims the poet in confusion and rage. After all, this is not the kind that he knew! It's not that!
Unpleasantly, if not with horror, Yesenin looks at how the thundering, iron, stinking city is approaching its beautiful, picturesque, pure nature, undermining greenery and flowers, destroying all harmony God's peace: "He is walking, he is walking, the terrible messenger of the Fifth bulky thicket aches", "Here he is, here he is with an iron belly, Pulls five fingers to the throats of the plains" ("Forty-mouth"). And the poet is scared, and painful, and suffocates his impotent rage: "Damn you, bad guest!"
But, just as a sincerely loving person forgives his beloved any sin, accepts it for what it is, so Yesse-nin does not renounce his beloved Motherland, he agrees to follow her chosen path:
I will accept everything.
I accept everything as is.
Ready to follow the broken tracks.
I will give my whole soul to October and May,
But I will not give up the sweet lyre.
The last line of this stanza contains all Yesenin's sincerity: he cannot, from the bottom of his heart, honestly praise the revolution! Never in her address will such sweet words spill from his lips, which he has reserved for that other Russia!
My poetry is no longer needed here
And, perhaps, I myself am not needed here either. -
Yesenin concludes sadly. But on the other hand, he needs it - a dear, beloved Motherland, and he will forever remain faithful to her - that very "sixth part of the land with the name of the short" Rus "."
There is no problem "Yesenin and the revolution" as such, - writes the author of the Yesenin section in the reference book for students N. Zuev. According to his concept, Yesenin was neither a revolutionary nor a singer of the revolution. It's just that when the world splits, the crack goes through the poet's heart.
According to the memoirs of contemporaries, "Yesenin accepted October with indescribable enthusiasm; and accepted it, of course, only because he was already internally prepared for it, that all his inhuman temperament was in harmony with October"
Yesenin himself laconically wrote in his autobiography: "During the years of the revolution he was completely on the side of October, but he took everything in his own way, with a peasant bias." The last reservation is not accidental, and later it will make itself felt. But the first period of the revolution, which gave the peasants land, was indeed greeted by the poet with sympathy. Already in June 1918, "The Jordanian Dove" was written with the well-known lines:
The sky is like a bell
The month is the language
My mother is my homeland
I am a Bolshevik.
At the end of 1918 - beginning of 1919. the "Celestial Drummer" was created:
The stars are pouring with leaves
Into the rivers in our fields.
Long live the revolution
On earth and in heaven! ...
Yesenin's arrival to the Bolsheviks was perceived as an "ideological" step, and the poem "Inonia" was considered a vivid evidence of the sincerity of his godless and revolutionary hobbies.
In the same 1924, in a short poem "Departing Russia" Yesenin exclaimed with pain: "Friends! Friends! What a split in the country, What sadness in a merry boil! .." Envious of those "who spent their lives in battle, who defended the great idea ", the poet could not decide between the two warring camps, finally choose someone else's side. This is the drama of his position: "What a scandal! What a big scandal! I found myself in a narrow gap ..." Yes, instead of songs I heard cannonade ... "About the same and" Letter to a Woman ":
You didn't know
I'm in solid smoke
In a life torn apart by a storm
That's why I am tormented that I do not understand -
Where does the rock of events take us ...
From the tragic question, "Where is the fate of events taking us?" The pain of the soul for Russia and the Russian people drowned out and he drowned in wine. The memoirs of his contemporaries say about this: "Yesenin, squatting, absentmindedly stirred the burning out smut, and then, sullenly resting his unseeing eyes at one point, quietly began:
I was in the village. Everything collapses ... You have to be from there yourself to understand .. The end of everything
The fact that Yesenin's drunkenness had complex and deep reasons is also convinced by other memories:
“When I tried to ask him in the name of various“ good things ”not to drink so much and take care of myself, he suddenly came into a terrible, special excitement. didn’t drink, could I survive all that was? .. "And he walked, confused, gesticulating sweepingly, around the room, sometimes stopping and grabbing my hand. poem revolution october yesenin
The more he drank, the blacker and more bitterly he spoke about the fact that everything he believed in was waning, that his "Yesenin" revolution had not yet come, that he was all alone.
So, the poet's mental crisis in the early 1920s. largely due to his disappointment with the results of the revolution.
The poet wanted to forget himself in wine, "even for a moment" to get away from the questions that tormented him. Perhaps this is not the only reason, but one of the main ones. So Yesenin enters the tavern world with its suffocating atmosphere of drunken stupor, which then found a vivid embodiment in the "Moscow tavern" cycle
The poems of this cycle are distinguished by deliberately vulgar phraseology (...) Harsh intonations, monotonous motives of drunken prowess, replaced by deadly melancholy - all this testified to noticeable losses in Yesenin's artistic work. There was no longer in him that rainbow of colors that distinguished his previous poems - they were replaced by the dull landscapes of the night city, observed with the eyes lost person: crooked alleys, curved streets, tavern lights barely glowing in the fog ... Heartfelt sincerity, deep emotionality of Yesenin's lyric poems gave way to naked sensitivity, plaintive melodiousness of a gypsy romance
In July 1924, in Leningrad, Yesenin published a new collection of poems under the general title "Moscow tavern", including four sections: poems as an introduction to "Moscow tavern", actually "Moscow tavern", "Hooligan's love" and a poem as a conclusion.
The cycle "Hooligan's Love" included 7 poems written in the second half of 1923: "The blue fire swept around", "You are so simple as everyone else", "Let you be drunk by someone else", "Darling, let's sit next to you", "I'm sad look at you "," You do not torment me with coolness "," Evening black eyebrows raised. " They were all dedicated to the actress chamber theater Augusta Miklashevskaya, whom Yesenin met after returning from abroad. "Love for this woman is healing for the sick and devastated soul of the poet, she harmonizes it, enlightens and elevates it, inspires the author to be creative, makes him again and again believe in the significance of the ideal feeling"
After a long hiatus in Yesenin's work, the love theme sounded again in the cycle "Hooligan's Love" and, compared with the poems of his early youth, acquired a mature force. The poet will return to this theme in the very last period of his life and replenish it with new poetic masterpieces.
What changes took place in the poet's attitude to the revolution and social ideas, the policy of the Bolsheviks? How is this reflected in creativity?
In the first post-revolutionary months, the poet was full of enthusiasm, hoping that now the age-old dream of the peasant about free, joyful patriarchal labor on his land would come true. In the spirit of the times, theomachic and god-building motives were briefly included in his 1918 poems. The real development of the revolution resulted in the destruction of all foundations of national life. All this led to changes in Yesenin's political position. The mood of his poems became different in 1920-1921.
In the small poems "Sorokoust", "Confessions of a Hooligan", poems of these years, the image of the "iron guest" appears, symbolizing the merciless destruction of the "dear, dear" living world.
In the poem "Mysterious World, My Ancient World ..." Yesenin reflects on the fate of the peasantry. The enemy wins, the peasant world is doomed:
The beast fell ... and from the cloudy depths
Someone will pull the trigger now ...
Suddenly a jump ... and a two-legged foe
Tearing fangs apart.
People's, peasant Russia resisted the forces of destruction to the end. In this poem, the poet speaks of his blood, mortal unity with this world, unity in love and hate.
Oh, hello to you, my beloved beast!
You are not given to the knife for nothing.
Just like you - I, Persecuted from everywhere,
I pass through the iron enemies.
Just like you - I'm always ready
And even though I can hear the victory horn,
But he will taste the enemy's blood My last, fatal leap.
Yesenin was a man of integral emotional experience. And the state of his soul was determined primarily by the perception of what was happening on his native land. Lyric and philosophical miniatures, poems of a different genre and stylistic affiliation acquire a sadly elegiac sound:
Now I have become more stingy in desires,
My life, or did you dream about me?
As if I rode a pink horse in a springy early spring.
("I do not regret, do not call, do not cry…")
The important image of this poem is consonant with the central one in Sorokoust: “ pink horse"-" red-mane colt ". The fate of the homeland and the poet's state of mind are inseparable. He sang, "when my land was sick," he could express unhealthy moods himself. But he did not lose his moral guidelines. And this made it possible to hope for understanding and forgiveness.
I want at the last minute To ask those who will be with me -
So that for all my grievous sins,
For disbelief in grace They put me in a Russian shirt Under the icons to die.
("I have one fun left ...")
After returning from abroad in the life of the poet there was a short period of revival of hopes for an end to the social storm. Peace, rest I wanted not only lyric hero Yesenin's poems, but to the whole people.
Attempts to peer into life new Russia, to comprehend their own place in it are reflected in the poems "Return to the Motherland", "Letter to a Woman", "Soviet Russia". Very contradictory feelings fill Yesenin's lyric poems in 1924-1925.
He is gladly ready to capture the signs of a reviving life: "Ineffable, blue, gentle ... / My land is quiet after storms, after thunderstorms ..." But the sad confidence that there is no place for him in a new life is growing.
One of the best in terms of the depth of feeling and the perfection of its poetic embodiment was the poem "Dissuaded the golden grove ...". It is written in the manner traditional for Yesenin. The life of the soul of a lyric hero
merged with the natural world. The rustle of withering leaves, the noise of the autumn wind, the cries of birds flying away speak better than words about the state and feelings of the hero. He sees no consolation in his own past and present:
I am full of thoughts about a cheerful youth,
But I am not sorry for anything in the past.
And only the nature of the native land still gives peace to the tormented spirit, calls for understanding, forgiveness, farewell:
As a tree quietly drops its leaves,
So I drop the sad words.
And if the time, sweeping by the wind,
Will rake them all into one unnecessary lump ... Say so ... that the golden grove Dissuaded with a sweet tongue.
Searched here:
- Yesenin's attitude to the revolution
- Yesenin attitude to the revolution
