Sergei Yesenin

• 1. Introduction

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  Sergei Yesenin was found dead on the 28th of December 1925 in his room at the Hotel Angleterre in Leningrad. He was thirty years old. The day before, he had cut his wrist and used his own blood to write a farewell poem. That poem, "Goodbye, my friend, goodbye," would go on to be quoted in a British heavy-metal album, set to music by composers in Germany and Ukraine, and taught to Russian schoolchildren for generations. How does a peasant boy from a small village in Ryazan County become the most celebrated and most controversial lyric poet in Russia? The answers lie in a life that moved from grandparents who raised chickens and told folklore to the salons of Petrograd, from a medical train at Tsarskoye Selo to the stages of New York and Paris. What drove Yesenin was a grief for a vanishing rural world. What drew others to him was his gift for making that grief sing.

• 2. The Village He Never Left

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  Yesenin was born in 1895 in the village of Konstantinovo in Ryazan Governorate, and by age two he had already been moved to a second village, Matovo, to live with his maternal grandparents, Fyodor Alexeyevich Titov and Natalya Yevtikhiyevna Titova. His parents were away earning wages, his father in Moscow and his mother in Ryazan, so it was the grandparents who shaped him first. The Titovs were relatively well-off peasants with three grown sons, and those sons became Yesenin's earliest companions. He later recalled learning to ride horses and swim, and being dragged along on duck hunts in the local ponds. His grandmother was deeply religious, carrying him to every monastery she visited, and her store of folklore fed his imagination before he could fully write. He started reading at five and writing verse at nine, drawing first on chastushkas, the short rhyming folk couplets that passed from mouth to mouth in Russian villages. By 1910 he had begun writing poetry systematically, and eight poems from that year were later preserved in his 1925 Collected Works. He tried to publish a first book in Ryazan in 1912, calling it "Volnye Dumy" (Free Thoughts), but no publisher would take it. That failure sent him to Moscow.

• 3. Petrograd and Sudden Fame

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  On the 8th of March 1915, Yesenin arrived in Petrograd, and the following day he knocked on the door of Alexander Blok, one of Russia's most respected poets, and read him verse. Blok described the young man as "a gem of a peasant poet" and called his verse "fresh, pure and resounding," even if "wordy." That single encounter opened doors across the literary world. Within months, Yesenin had met Nikolai Klyuev, Sergey Gorodetsky, Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova, and the painter Ilya Repin. Gorky, writing to Romain Rolland, captured the city's response with precise irony: "The city took to him with the delight a gourmet reserves for strawberries in winter. A barrage of praise hit him, excessive and often insincere." It was Klyuev who introduced Yesenin to the publisher Averyanov. In early 1916 Averyanov released Yesenin's debut collection, Radunitsa, packed with the spiritual village verse he had been accumulating since childhood. Yesenin and Klyuev developed a close and intimate friendship lasting several years; it is likely they became lovers. By the end of 1915, at barely twenty years old, Yesenin was the star of the capital's literary salons. The speed of that ascent would never leave him.

• 4. Revolution, Imaginism, and Dissent

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  In March 1917 Yesenin was briefly sent to a Warrant Officers School, then deserted Kerensky's army. He welcomed the February Revolution with genuine enthusiasm. "If not for it, I might have withered away on useless religious symbolism," he wrote. He also greeted the Bolsheviks, though he framed his support through a peasant lens rather than a party one. "In the Revolution I was all on the side of October, even if I perceived everything in my own peculiar way, from a peasant's standpoint," he recorded in his 1925 autobiography. By September 1918 he had co-founded, with Anatoly Marienhof and others, the literary movement of imaginism, which prized the image above all else. In January 1919 he signed the Imaginists' Manifesto. His description of the movement's audience, written in 1922, was characteristically blunt: "Prostitutes and bandits are our fans. With them, we are pals. Bolsheviks do not like us due to some kind of misunderstanding." Disillusion set in steadily. In an August 1920 letter to his friend Yevgeniya Livshits he wrote that he felt "very sad" because human individuality was being destroyed and the arriving socialism was nothing like the one he had imagined. In August 1924 he and fellow poet Ivan Gruzinov published a letter in Pravda announcing the end of the Imaginists. One of the movement's key poems from those years, the drama in verse Pugachov, came out in December 1921 to much acclaim.

• 5. Isadora Duncan and America

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  In the autumn of 1921, Yesenin met Isadora Duncan at the studio of painter Georgi Yakulov. Duncan was a Paris-based American dancer eighteen years his senior. She knew only a dozen words in Russian; he spoke no foreign language at all. They married on the 2nd of May 1922 and set off together on a tour of Europe and the United States. Yesenin's reaction to America was ferocious. In his 1922 autobiography he wrote: "America is a stinking place where not just art is being murdered, but with it, all the loftiest aspirations of humankind." He contrasted the skyscrapers that had "so far managed to produce nothing but Rockefeller and McCormick" with a Russia that had given birth to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, and Lermontov. By May 1923 the marriage was over and he was back in Moscow. That same year he became romantically involved with the actress Augusta Miklashevskaya, and dedicated several poems to her, including those in the Hooligan's Love cycle. Also in 1923, he had a son by the poet Nadezhda Volpina. That son, Alexander Esenin-Volpin, grew up to become a mathematician and a prominent activist in the Soviet dissident movement of the 1960s, living in the United States from 1972 until his death in 2016.

• 6. The Final Years

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  In January through April 1924, Yesenin was arrested and interrogated four times by authorities. In February he was admitted to the Sheremetev hospital and in March moved to the Kremlin clinic. His friend the poet Alexei Ganin, along with thirteen other writers, had been arrested earlier that year as alleged members of what appears to have been a fictitious organization called the Order of Russian Fascists; they were tortured and executed in March without trial. Despite the harassment, Yesenin kept writing and publishing. His collection Moskva Kabatskaya appeared that year, and in 1924-1925 he traveled to Azerbaijan, staying in the village of Mardakan, where a street and a museum house now carry his name. In early 1925 he married for the final time, to Countess Sophia Andreyevna Tolstaya, born in 1900, a granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy. In May 1925 his last major poem, Anna Snegina, appeared. He also compiled and edited his Works in three volumes; Gosizdat published them posthumously. On the 26th of December 1925 he cut his wrist and wrote his farewell poem in blood. He was buried on the 31st of December 1925 in Moscow's Vagankovskoye Cemetery, where a white marble sculpture marks his grave.

• 7. Afterlife and Influence

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  Yesenin's death set off a wave of copycat suicides among his mostly female admirers. Galina Benislavskaya, his former girlfriend and longtime secretary, killed herself at his graveside in December 1926. Vladimir Mayakovsky, enraged by what he saw as Yesenin's resignation, composed a poem addressed directly to him, countering the farewell poem's acceptance of death with lines insisting that "to mold life is more difficult." Mayakovsky himself died by suicide on the 14th of April 1930 at age thirty-six. Despite the elaborate state funeral, Stalin's and Khrushchev's governments banned parts of Yesenin's writing. Nikolai Bukharin's criticism contributed significantly to those suppressions. Only in 1966 were most of his works republished in the Soviet Union. During his lifetime, his poems had been translated into eighteen languages, including German, English, French, Japanese, and Yiddish; in total, 132 publications of lifetime translations covered forty-seven of his works. German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann included Yesenin's poetry in his Requiem fur einen jungen Dichter (Requiem for a Young Poet), completed in 1969. In 2008 the British metalcore band Bring Me the Horizon quoted the farewell poem in their track "It Was Written In Blood" from the album Suicide Season. The poem written in blood at the Hotel Angleterre keeps finding new ears.