Introduction
The poetry of real great thoughts and feelings is always truly folk, always conquers our hearts with the harsh truth of life, inextinguishable faith in Man. “My lyrics are alive with one big love, love for the motherland. The feeling of the motherland is the main thing in my work ”- this is the main thing that Sergei Yesenin highlights in his poetry, in which he sees her pathos, civic aspiration. How deeply, selflessly one must love the Motherland, what civic courage, wisdom and fortitude of the soul one must possess in order to reflect so confessively and uncompromisingly on one’s own future fate and at the same time how prophetically far-sighted and striving to dream of a steel future for peasant Russia.
Field Russia! Enough
Drag along the fields!
It hurts to see your poverty
And birches and poplars.
The larger the artist, the larger his work, the more original his talent, the more contradictory his era, the more difficult it is sometimes for contemporaries to appreciate his true contribution to the spiritual life of the nation, to reveal all the facets of his talent. For Yesenin, nature is the eternal beauty and eternal harmony of the world. Gently and caringly, without any external pressure, nature heals human souls, relieving the tension of inevitable earthly overloads. This is how we perceive the poet's poems about our native nature, this is how, sublimely - enlightened, they affect us.
The feather grass is sleeping. Dear plain,
And the lead freshness of wormwood.
No other homeland
Do not pour my warmth into my chest.
The poet, as it were, tells us all: stop, at least for a moment, break away from your daily bustle, look around you, at the world of earthly beauty surrounding us, listen to the rustle of meadow grasses, the song of the wind, the voice of the river wave. Living, quivering pictures of nature in Yesenin's poems not only teach to love and preserve the world of earthly beauty. They, like nature itself, contribute to the formation of our worldview, the moral foundations of our character, moreover, our humanistic worldview. The world of man and the world of nature in Yesenin's poetry are one and indivisible. Hence - the "flood of feelings" and the wisdom of thought, their natural fusion, participation in the figurative flesh of the verse; hence the insight, the moral height of Yesenin's philosophical lyrics. The poet is well aware that the removal of man from nature, and even more so the conflict with it, brings irreparable damage and moral damage to society.
§1.Childhood and youth of the poet
Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin was born on September 21, 1895. in the village of Konstantinov, Ryazan province, on the banks of the Oka. Born into a peasant family. From the age of two, due to the poverty of his father and the large number of his family, he was given up for education to a rather prosperous grandfather. Grandfather was an Old Believer, a man of strict religious rules, he knew well Holy Bible. He loved his grandson very much. On Saturdays and Sundays, he told him the Bible and sacred history. But already in childhood, a wider influence also made itself felt - the element of folk art in which the boy grew up. In addition to his grandfather, the boy was introduced to folk art by his grandmother. She told stories. He did not like some fairy tales with bad endings, and he remade them in his own way. Thus, the spiritual life of the boy took shape under the influence of sacred history and folk poetry. The boy lived freely and carefree. He was not familiar with the early hardships of peasant labor. He was rarely at home, especially in spring and summer, he grew up in the bosom of Ryazan's wild nature. He fished, disappeared all day with the boys on the banks of the river. Childhood passed among the fields and steppes. Here that great love for native nature was born, which later nourished his poetic imagination. Even in early childhood, Yesenin had a sincere and heartfelt pity for all living things. His love for animals remained with him throughout his life. When it was time to study, the boy was sent to Konstantinovskaya primary school. Yesenin's teaching was easy. The certificate of graduation from the school said: "Sergey Alexandrovich Yesenin in the month of May of this 1909 successfully completed a course at the Konstantinovsky Zemstvo 4-year school." Then he entered the Spas-Klepikovskoe School. Those who graduated from it had the right to teach in primary school general education schools, to serve in civilian institutions.
The lessons of Russian literature were interesting and mother tongue. Here Yesenin was surrounded mainly by peasant youth, who were drawn to knowledge, independently reflecting on life, looking for their place in it. It is here, in the Spas-Klepikovskaya school, that Yesenin's poetic path begins. After graduating from this school with honors, he left it as a "teacher of the literacy school." In the summer of 1912 Yesenin moved to Moscow, for some time he served in a butcher's shop, where his father worked as a clerk. Yesenin was completely left to himself, there was no thinking environment, there was no person who could become an adviser and mentor. Father could not become such a person for Yesenin. Purely material calculations obscured the spiritual life of the young man from him. There was estrangement between them. There was a gap between father and son.
§2.Literary debut
In search of a livelihood, Yesenin has been working in a bookstore since the autumn of 1912. But at the beginning of 1913. this store is closed, Yesenin goes to Konstantinovo for a short time and returns to Moscow in March. This time he gets a job at the printing house of the famous publisher I.D. Sytin, where he worked until the summer of 1914. During this period, he joined the revolutionary workers and was under police surveillance. The craving for self-education leads him in 1913 to the Moscow People's University named after A.L. Shanyavsky. The purpose of the university was to expand the scope of higher education in Russia, to make it accessible to the poor, democratic strata. The university has grown and grown rapidly. Teaching was carried out at a high level. Yesenin studied at the historical and philosophical department, the program of which included political economy, the theory of law, and the history of new philosophy. Yesenin studied at the university for about a year and a half, which was not an easy task. One of the poet's contemporaries, writer Semyon Fomin, in his memoirs, argued that from the very first literary steps, Yesenin had no weak poems. He allegedly immediately began to write bright, original, strong things.
This is not true. At first, Yesenin also came out with pale, inexpressive, imitative poems, like, for example, such
Red dawn lit up
In the dark blue sky
The band appeared clear
In its golden brilliance.
But for all the primitiveness of such lines, they came from what they saw, experienced. Only two years pass, and the poet’s feeling, having gained depth, will spill out already in Yesenin’s own, unearthly verse: “The scarlet light of dawn wove out on the lake ...” In Russian boldly, sweepingly, mischievously shaking his golden curls, he entered the chamber of Russian poetry, to stay there forever. Composing poetry from childhood (mainly in imitation of A.V. Koltsov, I.S. Nikitin, S.D. Drozhnik), Yesenin finds like-minded people in the Surikov Literary and Musical Circle. The composition of the circle was rather mixed. Organizationally, the circle took shape in 1905. Yesenin was brought to the "Surikov Circle" at the beginning of 1914 by his Moscow acquaintance S.N. Koshkarov. Yesenin was accepted into the circle. The beginning young poet had a literary environment. Exhibitions were arranged literary works, literary collections were published, the literary and public magazine “Friend of the People” was published. Yesenin quickly got used to the situation that prevailed in the circle. The young man was quite strongly captured by the socio-political activities of the Surikovites. Yesenin's new position naturally gave rise to new thoughts and moods in him. Back in 1912, he tried to write a poetic declaration, which he gives the program name "Poet".
That poet, who destroys enemies,
Whose native truth is the mother,
Who loves people like brothers
And I'm ready to suffer for them.
Yesenin's stay in the "Surikov Circle" did not mean that he had become a conscious revolutionary. But it helped him get away from loneliness, attached to the team of working people, made him involved in social life. Yesenin's spiritual awakening took place here. Yesenin's completely independent life begins in 1914, when his name is already quite often found on the pages of literary and art magazines. Yesenin's first printed poems are poems about Russian nature. Pictures of the seasons, fairy-tale motifs were the best suited for children's magazines, where Yesenin mainly placed them. It was mainly published in two of them, Protalinka and Mirok.
"Birch", "Bird cherry", "Powder" - these are the names of Yesenin's poems of 1914. In the spring of 1915, Yesenin arrived in Petrograd, where he met A.A. Block, S.M. Gorodetsky, A.M. Remisov and others, approaches N.A. Klyuev, who had a significant influence on him. Their joint performances with poems and ditties, stylized as a "peasant", "folk" style (Yesenin is a golden-haired young man in an embroidered shirt and morocco boots) were a great success.
§3.Collection Radunitsa
The poet was only twenty years old when the first book of his poems appeared. The collection "Radunitsa" was published in early 1916. "Radunitsa" - enthusiastically welcomed by critics, who found a fresh stream in it, noting the author's youthful spontaneity and natural taste.
Many poems are associated with the name of the collection, inspired by religious ideas and beliefs, well known to Yesenin from the stories of his grandfather and from the lessons of the law of God at the Spas-Klepikovskaya school. Such poems are characterized by the use of Christian symbolism.
I see - in a blueberry board,
On light-winged clouds
Beloved mother is coming
With a pure son in her arms...
In verses of this type, even nature is painted in religious-Christian tones. However, such verses much more often come from Yesenin not from the Gospel, not from canonical church literature, but precisely from those sources that were rejected by the official church, from the so-called "detached" literature - apocrypha, legends. Apocrypha means secret, hidden, secret. The Apocrypha were distinguished by great poetry, richness of thought, proximity to fairy-tale fantasy. An apocryphal legend underlies such, for example, Yesenin's poem, which is filled with not at all religious, but worldly-philosophical content:
The Lord went to torture people in love,
He went out as a beggar to a kuluzhka.
Old grandfather on a dry stump, in an oak tree,
Zhamkal gums stale donut.
After all, this is not so much Christian as purely human morality. The old man shows human kindness, and the image of Christ only shades it, emphasizes the humanistic idea. In the first place is not the idea of God, but the idea of humanity. The words of Yesenin and his Jesus and Mikolah were spoken by him after the revolution, but this was not a belated attempt to justify himself to Soviet readers. Even when Yesenin wrote poems with a religious shell, he was in a far from religious mood. Religiosity in Yesenin's poems manifests itself in different ways in different periods of his life. creative activity. If in verses of 1914. Yesenin's ironic attitude to religion is quite easily captured, but later, in 1915-1916, the poet creates many works in which the religious theme is taken, so to speak, seriously. The victory of real life over religious legends is very tangible in Radunitsa. A significant part of this collection is poems coming from life, from knowledge of peasant life. The main place in them is occupied by a realistic depiction of rural life. Unremarkable peasant everyday life in the hut flows peacefully. But he shows the village from only one, everyday side, without touching on the social processes that took place in the peasant environment. Yesenin was undoubtedly familiar with the social life of the village. And it cannot be said that he did not make attempts to reflect it in his poems. But material of this kind did not succumb to his truly poetic incarnation. It suffices to cite such verses, for example:
It's hard and sad for me to see
How my brother dies.
And I try to hate everyone
Who is at enmity with his silence.
Here Yesenin has not yet found his own voice. These verses are reminiscent of a bad transcription of Surikov, Nikitin and other peasant poets. On the other hand, one cannot ignore what the poet himself admitted when he said that he “comes not from the ordinary peasantry”, but from the “upper layer”. Yesenin's first childhood and youthful impressions were reflected in Radunitsa. These impressions were not connected with the severity of peasant life, with forced labor, with the poverty in which the "ordinary" peasantry lived and which gave rise to a sense of social protest. All this was not familiar to the poet from his own life experience, was not experienced and felt by him. The main lyrical theme of the collection is love for Russia. In poems on this topic, Yesenin's real and apparent religious hobbies, decrepit Christian symbols, and all the attributes of church literature immediately faded into the background. In the poem "Swarm you, my dear Russia ..." he does not refuse such comparisons as "huts - in the robes of the image", mentions the "Meek Savior", but the main thing and the main thing is different.
If the holy army shouts:
"Throw you Russia, live in paradise!"
I will say: “There is no need for paradise,
Give me my motherland."
Even if we assume that “Savior” and “Holy Army” are taken here not in a conditional, but in the literal sense, then the love for the native land, the victory of life over religion, sounds all the stronger in these verses. The strength of Yesenin's lyrics lies in the fact that in it the feeling of love for the Motherland is always expressed not abstractly and rhetorically, but concretely, in visible images, through pictures of the native landscape. But Yesenin's love for the Motherland was generated not only by sad pictures of impoverished peasant Russia. He saw the other one too: in joyful spring attire, with fragrant summer flowers, merry groves, with crimson sunsets and starry nights. And the poet did not spare colors in order to more vividly convey the richness and beauty of Russian nature.
"I pray for ala dawns,
I take communion by the stream."
§4. Great October in the work of S.A. Yesenin
Great October ... Yesenin saw in him the events that began new era. ("The second year of the first century" - so he designated the date of the release of three of his books - 1918). Already on the eve of it - after the February Revolution - the poet was full of joyful forebodings.
Oh Russia, oh steppe and winds,
And you are my stepfather's house!
On the golden line
Spring thunder nests, -
He exclaimed enthusiastically.
In the “small” (as he called it) poems “Comrade”, “Singing Call”, “Father”, “Oktoikh”, Yesenin, like many poets of that time, uses church vocabulary, biblical images. It was a time of grand gestures, oratorical intonations, solemn chants...
The poet rejoices, he is all in delight, admiration. His thoughts are about the happy and enduring hour of the fatherland.
You, your fogs
And sheep in the fields
I carry like a sheaf of oatmeal,
I am the sun in my arms...
Contemporaries who met the poet in those turbulent days recall his inner uplift, his desire to be in the midst of the people, absorbing everything that worried the most different people who opened their hearts to the wind of the revolution.
A few days after the October Uprising, Yesenin is present at the rally of "the intelligentsia and the people", listening to the speech of A.V. Lunacharsky. Looking around the crowded hall, he smiles:
Yes, it's an audience!
Meetings with Alexander Blok, whom he met upon his arrival in Petrograd (March 1915), are becoming more frequent. For all the difference in their paths to the revolution, their worldviews of poets were brought together by reflections on the fate of Russia, faith in its great future. The fact that Blok and Yesenin took the side of the insurgent people immediately separated many bourgeois writers from them. “Yesenin called, talked about yesterday’s “morning of Russia” in the Tenishevsky hall. Newspapers and the crowd shouted at his address, A. Bely and mine: "traitors." They don’t shake hands,” Blok enters in his notebook on January 22, 1918 and adds: “Gentlemen, you never knew Russia and never loved her!”
Yesenin could also address the same words to "gentlemen". He, a peasant son, was pleased to feel close to people who had broken the fetters of slavery. "My mother is the motherland, I am a Bolshevik." Although this statement in the mouth of Yesenin sounded too categorical, he did not compromise the truth of feelings one iota. It seemed to him that the revolution, having destroyed the old world, would immediately erect a “desired city”, the country of Inonia (from the word it is okay, good), a peasant paradise. In this country there are no taxes for arable land, all the land is peasant, "God's", there are no landowners, officials, priests, free cultivators live in abundance, practicing their "free" religion, worshiping their "cow god". Yes, the tsar and all his henchmen were expelled, the land became peasant land, the people became free. But the "earthly paradise", as it was portrayed in Yesenin's works, did not come. Economic ruin. Hunger. Lack of fuel. The offensive of the interventionists, the rampant White Guard and anarchist gangs ...
"Who is this? My Russia, who are you? Who? the poet asked in confusion, peering at the face of his native land disfigured by war and deprivation.
Oh, who, who to sing
In this frenzied glow of corpses?
And above this terrible vision, as in a time of troubles and misfortunes, “the death horn blows, blows” ... The city, extending its hand to the village, seems to the poet to be an iron monster, a “terrible messenger”, a soulless enemy of meadows and arable lands, of all living things. Yesenin's poems "Mares' ships", "Sorokoust", "Mysterious world, my ancient world..." are filled with anxious, heavy feelings and thoughts.
The field freezes in melancholy,
Choking on telegraph poles, -
In these verses, the very torment of the poet, as it were, takes on flesh and blood, becomes visible and therefore especially impressive. And this despair, this inner pain, was sometimes covered up by feigned arrogance, thoughtless bravado, cynicism. But a kind, sympathetic soul could not hide under any masks. And that is why the sigh is so natural and deep:
I love my homeland
I love my homeland very much.
The answer to the question: “Where does the rock of events take us?” - he should have been prompted by life itself and this feeling - stored in the heart, inescapable.
And so it happened.
5. Meeting with Isadora Duncan
Trips abroad
In 1921, during his stay abroad, A. Lunacharsky had a conversation with the American dancer Isadora Duncan, whose fame spread all over the world. Duncan (1878 - 1927) Irish by birth, was born in California, becoming an American subject. She was the originator new school dances that revived choreographic traditions ancient greece, plastic gymnastics. Duncan patiently studied ancient dance from images on ancient vases. She invited A. Lunacharsky to organize a dance school in Moscow, believing that the very spirit of free ancient dance corresponds to the mood prevailing in Soviet Russia. In 1921 Duncan arrived in Moscow. This decision of hers was completely disinterested. One of the spacious Moscow mansions was assigned to her school. She enthusiastically undertook to teach young people the ancient dance, began to develop a choreographic embodiment of such themes as the "Red Banner". It was relatively easy for Isadora Duncan to get used to the Moscow environment, since she had already toured Russia twice before. In the autumn of 1921, at the apartment of the artist G. Yakulov, she met Yesenin. They quickly got close. On May 2, 1922, their marriage was registered. By the time they met, Duncan was almost twice as old as Yesenin. This, of course, could not but affect their relationship. There were other circumstances that spoke of the unreliability of their rapid rapprochement. Duncan did not speak Russian, Yesenin did not know a single European language. In addition, their life views and habits were too different. All this involuntarily created the impression of the unnaturalness of their life together.
Duncan has been married several times. She had children whom she carefully raised. And both of them - a boy and a girl - died in Paris when the car in which they took a walk unexpectedly fell into the Seine. When she met with Yesenin, it seemed to her that his face was somewhat reminiscent of the features of her son. This gave her affection for Yesenin a somewhat painful character. Duncan was attentive to Yesenin, always worried about him. Yesenin broke up with Duncan in the autumn of 1923. In his last letter to her, he confessed: "I often remember you with all my gratitude to you." Yesenin's meeting with Duncan was one of the reasons for his trip abroad. Going on a tour of Europe and America, Duncan invited Yesenin with her. But in the decision of the poet to go abroad great importance There were also purely literary considerations.
May 10, 1922 Yesenin and Duncan went by plane to Germany. Obviously, in order to make it easier to obtain a visa from foreign officials, Yesenin and Duncan, already husband and wife, were forced to remarry abroad. Yesenin wrote on June 21, 1922 from Wiesbaden: “Isidora married me a second time and now to Duncan - Yesenin, but simply Yesenin. Soon his collection of poems was published in Berlin. The trip turned out to be restless for Yesenin. His words sound like a complaint: “If Isadora were not extravagant and gave me the opportunity to sit down somewhere. She, as if nothing had happened, rides in a car to Lübeck, then to Leipzig, then to Frankfurt, but to Weimar.
After visiting America, Yesenin again ended up in Paris. This time D. Merezhkovsky himself rushed at him. On June 16, 1923, he published an article in the Eclair newspaper in which he hysterically implored the French not to succumb to the propaganda of "representatives of the Bolshevik tyranny." Merezhkovsky also carried "Isadora Duncan and her husband, the muzhik Yesenin." He expressed the hope that Duncan "would not be able to infect Paris" with "his dance, embellished with propaganda", terrible details were reported about Yesenin, such as the fact that he tried to rob an American millionaire in a hotel.
Far from his homeland, Yesenin felt sad and lonely. Following Europe, Yesenin visited America. She seemed to him cramped, uncomfortable and soulless. Yesenin stayed in America for four months. Soon after their arrival in America, the troubles associated with Duncan's performances began, Duncan gave her speeches an agitational character: each time she performed the Internationale dance developed by her in Moscow, which sometimes ended with the intervention of the police. Yesenin defined this whole complex political operation in simple terms, saying in a letter that he and Duncan were "asked back."
§6.Return to Russia
In August 1923 Yesenin returned to Moscow. “I am most pleased with the fact that I returned to Soviet Russia,” he wrote shortly after his arrival from abroad. Everyone who at that time had to meet with Yesenin saw how the poet now peered especially intently into life, into the transformations that took place in his native land during his travels abroad. From America, as Mayakovsky noted, Yesenin returned "with a clear craving for the new." Lost in many respects for the poet's interest in his former literary connections. “It seems to me,” wrote one of the poet’s contemporaries, “that Yesenin, having traveled around Europe and America, began to suffocate in a narrow circle. Yesenin is increasingly trying to understand, comprehend what is happening in these years in Russia, around the world. Expanding horizons, the scope of his poetry. With joy, Yesenin now speaks in verse about his "epiphany", about that great historical truth, which is now more and more fully revealed to him:
I see everything
I clearly understand
That the era is new -
Not a pound of raisins for you.
These are lines from Stanzas, written in 1924. “In our literary construction with all the foundations on the Soviet platform,” Yesenin will say about his civic position even earlier, in the essay “Iron Mirgorod”, in the fall of 1923.
The theme of the two Russias - the outgoing and the Soviet, - already clearly indicated by Yesenin in his "return to his homeland", is further developed in his small poems, the names of which - "Soviet Russia" and "Departing Russia" - are full of deep inner meaning. These small poems, capacious and large-scale in thought, are perceived as ethical works of great social and social tension. The motif of the competition between the old and the new, outlined in the poem “Sorokous”, (“Red-maned colt” and “cast-iron train on its paws”) is developed in the verses of recent years: fixing the signs of a new life, welcoming “stone and steel”, Yesenin increasingly feels like a singer "golden log hut", whose poetry "is no longer needed here." Yesenin's trip to the countries of Western Europe and the USA (May 1922 - August 1923) made him think about many things. From a world where “Mr. Dollar is in terrible fashion,” where the soul was “surrendered as unnecessary to Smordyakovism,” he saw more clearly the meaning of the transformations in Soviet Russia. “...Life is not here, but with us,” he wrote with all certainty from Germany to his Moscow friend. He did not work abroad. And what lay down on paper was internally connected with memories of the fatherland. He could repeat Nekrasov's verses:
Not the heavens of someone else's homeland -
I composed songs for my homeland!
Such a "song to the motherland", Soviet Russia, was the monologue of Commissar Rassvetov from the unfinished dramatic poem "Country of Scoundrels", sketched in America. In "Steel" America, capitalism has devastated the soul of a person, putting a dollar, a profit, over everything. The world of acquisitiveness, chistogan gave rise to enterprising businessmen, businessmen.
These people are rotten fish
All of America is a greedy mouth.
But Russia... Here is the lump…..
If only the Soviet power.
In "steel" Russia, Soviet power, socialism will elevate a person, because in the name of his happiness and is built new life- "there will be what anyone needs in the republic." The poet clearly likes Commissar Rassvetov, a convinced communist, collected, strong-willed person who knows what he stands for, what he fights for. He liked that the “former” considered him a “Bolshevik agent”, a “Red propagandist”, an “employee of the Cheka”. A decisive step was taken abroad to drive away the "black man". Drive away the ominous creation of "Moscow Tavern", spiritual confusion, tragic delusions. Thinking about his native land, his life, his "heart drank blood with sobering brew." The first words he said at home were: "Most satisfied with the fact that he returned to Soviet Russia." Lyricism is the strongest side of Yesenin's talent.
Glory to Yesenin was brought not by poems, but by his lyrical poems. Even in the best of his poems, Anna Snezhina, the lyricist prevailed over the epic poet. Until today, there is an opinion that Yesenin's love lyrics are isolated from the era, devoid of any signs of time, that it has no connection with the public biography of the poem, but only with narrowly personal facts. From this point of view, Yesenin appears as a “pure lyricist” completely immersed in himself. His love lyrics were never divorced from the general moods and thoughts that owned the poet, it was always conditioned by his social views, which powerfully left their imprint on his most intimate poems. This confusion, depressed state, pessimistic thoughts then left a tragic imprint on the poet's love lyrics. Here are the characteristic lines of one of the poems of this cycle:
Sing, sing. On the damn guitar.
Your fingers dance in a semicircle.
Would choke in this frenzy,
My last, only friend.
By the beginning of 1923, Yesenin's desire to get out of the crisis in which he found himself becomes noticeable. Gradually, he finds more and more solid ground, a deeper awareness of Soviet reality, begins to feel not adopted, but a native son of Soviet Russia. This was most strongly reflected not only in political, but also in love lyrics.
It was to 1923 that his poems belong, in which he first writes about true, deep love, pure, bright and truly human.
A blue fire swept
Forgotten relatives gave.
The first time I then about love,
For the first time I refuse to scandal.
You can't ignore the line:
"For the first time I sang about love." After all, Yesenin wrote about love in the Moscow Tavern. This means that the poet himself did not recognize the true love that he wrote about in his gloomy cycle of poems. At this time (1923-1925), one persistent motive appears in his works, to which he repeatedly returns - the poet judges true love more strictly, which should not be confused with random impulses:
Don't call this ardor fate
Frivolous quick-tempered connection, -
How by chance I met you
I smile calmly dispersing.
In Persian Motives, Yesenin, by the power of his poetic imagination, created a really tangible atmosphere of the East: Yesenin, as it were, constructs it from his personal impressions of the Soviet East and book ideas about the ancient East. This conditional East is designated as Persia. At the heart of "Persian motives" are the impressions of his long trips around the Caucasus (Tiflis, Batumi, Baku). Lyrics of such great poets as Ferdowsi, Omar Khayyam, Saadi occupied a prominent place in the book. Their lyrics contain a lot of life experience. The favorite theme of famous lyricists is the theme of love, warmed by a feeling of friendship and respect for a woman. This is love without fatal passions that incinerate the soul. Such is the general atmosphere of ancient Persian lyrics; it also occupies a dominant position in Yesenin's Persian Motives. Let us recall one of the most characteristic poems of the cycle:
I asked the money changer today
What gives a ruble for half a fog,
How to tell me for a lovely lady
In Persian gentle "I love" ..?
In addition, "Persian Motifs" has internal relationships with Persian material. So, for example, Yesenin writes: "If a Persian composes a bad song, It means that he is never from Shiraz." This is an adaptation of a Persian proverb that Yesenin knew well and used in one of his letters: “And it’s not for nothing that Muslims say: if he doesn’t sing, then he’s not from Shumu, if he doesn’t write, then he’s not from Shiraz.” We remember that during his trip abroad to the West, Yesenin wrote almost nothing. He was tormented by homesickness, the Western world seemed to him antipoetic. Yesenin created "Persian motifs" in completely different conditions: he was in the Soviet East, he was close to the romantic and poetic world of Eastern life. Yesenin deepens this principle. He has a birch "girl", "bride", she is the personification of everything pure and beautiful. The poet speaks of her in the way that one can only speak of a person, endows her with specific human signs “Green-haired, in a white skirt there is a birch tree over a pond.” In some of Yesenin's poems, we even meet with the facts of a "biography", with the "experiences" of a birch:
green hair,
girl breast,
O thin birch,
What did you look into the pond?
This principle of the image unusually brings nature closer to man. This is one of the strongest aspects of Yesenin's lyrics - he kind of makes a person fall in love with nature. The work of Yesenin in the last two years of his life leaves no doubt that the poet has found solid ground under his feet. Contemporary criticism of Yesenin noted the emerging process of the poet's spiritual recovery. Significant changes in the inner appearance of the poet were also noticeable in his desire to finally break with the unhealthy life that darkened life, to overcome old habits, to subordinate his actions to reason. In the poems of the same 1925, we quite often find a direct expression of Yesenin's love and affection for life, a cheerful mood, and peace of mind. This, for example, can be judged at least by his poetic confessions:
"Again I came to life and again I hope
Just like in childhood, for the best destiny,
“I still love this life,
I fell in love so much, as if at the beginning,
"And the earth is dearer to me every day."
§7. Death of a poet
The most dangerous thing was that, as a result of a constant overstrain of forces, signs of Yesenin's mental imbalance began to appear. Extreme suspiciousness began to develop in him: he constantly feels the threat of neurasthenia, angina pectoris, transient consumption, it seems to him that he is being watched, even an attempt is made on his life, painful fantasies begin to appear in him. In the medical report of the psychiatric clinic of Moscow University dated March 24, 1924. it was said that he "suffered from a severe neuropsychiatric illness, expressed in severe attacks of mood disorder and obsessive thoughts and drives." Benislavskaya became a close person, friend, comrade, assistant for Yesenin. Benislavskaya's participation in the fate of Yesenin especially increased in 1924-1925. During Yesenin's frequent absences from Moscow, Benislavskaya was in charge of all his literary affairs: she published his works in the periodical press. With great interest, Benislavskaya treated each new work of Yesenin, expressed her opinions about them to him. Her assessments were impartial in nature, and Yesenin reckoned with them. During his departures from Moscow, Yesenin learned all the literary news mainly from Benislavskaya, who was interested in modern literature and was well versed in it. He travels three times to the Caucasus, travels to Leningrad several times, seven times to Konstantinovo. Nature, dearly beloved by the poet, for which he always found bright, joyful colors and tones, more and more often becomes gloomy, sad and ominous in his poems:
Snowy plain, white moon,
Our side is covered with savannah.
And birch trees in white are crying through the forests
Who died here? Died? Am I myself?
There are thoughts that the creative time has ended, poetic forces have dried up, it begins to seem to the poet that "Talyanka has lost her voice, Having forgotten how to talk." Disbelief in one's own strength was the most terrible thing for Yesenin. But even in this difficult state, Yesenin still struggled with himself. In moments of enlightenment, he expressed the hope that he would cope with the situation in which he fell. In an effort to break out of the darkness that surrounded him, he tried to turn the tide of events, decisively change his life.
Trying to start again family life, On September 18, 1925, the marriage of Yesenin and Sofya Andreevna Tolstaya (the granddaughter of L.N. Tolstoy) was registered. For a short life together with Yesenin, Tolstaya did a lot: she sought to tear Yesenin away from an unhealthy environment, to establish a family hearth. And yet their life together did not go well. Apparently, it was not easy for Yesenin to get used to a new, orderly life. And so the marriage falls apart. His departure from Moscow is like an escape. He hurriedly collects things, telegraphs his Leningrad friend V. Erlich “Immediately find two or three rooms. On the 20th I am moving to live in Leningrad. Even in Moscow, it was decided that the sisters would move to Yesenin in Leningrad. In order for everyone to settle down, Yesenin asked to find two or three rooms. Arriving in Leningrad on December 24, Yesenin drove from the station to V. Erlich and, not finding him at home, left a note on the back of which he wrote a cheerful impromptu. Yes, indeed, he went to Leningrad to live, not to die. However, everything that gave hope, the desire to believe in the future of the poet, which caused the joy of true friends, collapsed on the night of December 27-28. That night, Yesenin committed suicide at the Angleterre Hotel. He hung himself on a steam heating pipe, not making a loop out of the rope, but wrapping it around his neck. With one hand he held on to the pipe - perhaps in the last moments the thought of life still flashed through him. But it was already too late. Yesenin died not from suffocation, but from a rupture of the cervical vertebrae.
The tragic death of the poet, of course, was associated with his unbalanced state of mind. It occurred in one of the most severe attacks of melancholy and pessimism.
Conclusion
True poetry is always deeply human. She conquers our hearts with love for a person, faith in the best impulses of his soul; it helps a person in the most tragic moments of his life. Poetry wages an eternal battle for Man! Great artists are always great humanists. Like an unquenchable fire, they carry through the centuries their unshakable love and faith in man, that his future is bright and beautiful. In their creative essence, in their convictions and ideas, they are great thinkers and revolutionaries of the spirit; they constantly and persistently listen to the beating of the people's heart, to the mighty breath of their homeland, sensitively catching the growing peals of new revolutionary storms and upheavals. The deeply national basis of Yesenin's poetry always worried Alexei Tolstoy. After Yesenin's death, he wrote: “A great national poet has died. He has already knocked on all the walls. He burned his life like a fire. He burned before us. His poetry is, as it were, the scattering of the treasures of his soul by both handfuls. I believe that the nation should wear mourning for Yesenin. “Big and expensive we have all lost. It was such an organic fragrant talent, this Yesenin, this whole gamut of simple and wise poems - it has no equal in what is before our eyes, ”wrote Alexander Serafimovich about his friend. Many poets, whose lyre sounded after Yesenin, experienced the joy of the first meeting with his poems, each of them in their souls. “Own Yesenin,” each of them said his lively, excited word about the great poet. Yesenin's poetry is close and dear to all the peoples of our country. His poems sound like different languages, for example: Georgian and Kazakh, Moldovan and Uzbek.
Admiration for Yesenin is heard in the words of the Lithuanian poet Justinas Marcinkevičius: “Yesenin is a miracle of poetry. And like any miracle, it's hard to talk about it. A miracle must be experienced. And you have to believe in him. The miracle of Yesenin's poetry not only convinces, but always excites, as a manifestation of a great human heart. Filled with love for people, for a person, for the beauty of the earthly earth, to be imbued with sincerity, kindness, a feeling of constant concern for the fate of not only their compatriots, but also the peoples of other countries and nations, Yesenin's humanistic poetry actively lives and acts today, helping to preserve and governance of world peace. Yesenin's deeply humane, freedom-loving, highly patriotic poetic word now reaches the hearts of millions of people in all corners of our planet, awakening in them all the best human traits, uniting them morally, spiritually, helping them to know and discover even more fully the poet's homeland - the country October Revolution, the first country of socialism, which gave the world the most "humane person". “The man of the future will read Yesenin in the same way as people read him today. The strength and fury of his verse speak for themselves. His poetry cannot grow old. Eternally young blood of eternally living poetry flows in their veins. Esenin's work is very contradictory and heterogeneous, sometimes hopelessly sad and hopeless, sometimes cheerful and laughing. It seems to me that it is precisely in the lyrics that everything that makes up the soul of Yesenin's creativity is expressed. And these are pictures of Russian nature filled to the brim with unfading freshness - a “flood” of the most secret human feelings and desires.
Bibliography
1. Selected poems - M .: "Spark", 1925
2. "Birch calico" - M .:, GIZ, 1925
3. S. Yesenin. Image, poetry, era - 1979
4. S. Yesenin. Poems and poems - 1988
5. S. Yesenin. Collected works in five volumes: T 1-Sh, fiction – 1966-1967
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In 1904, Yesenin went to the Konstantinovsky Zemstvo School, after which in 1909 he began his studies at the parochial second-class teacher's school (now the S. A. Yesenin Museum) in Spas-Klepiki. At the end of school, in the fall of 1912, Yesenin left home. He went to Moscow, worked in a butcher's shop, and then - in the printing house of I. D. Sytin. In 1913, he entered the historical and philosophical department of the Moscow City People's University named after A. L. Shanyavsky as a volunteer. He worked in a printing house, was friendly with the poets of the Surikov Literary and Musical Circle.
small digression
Thirty or forty years ago, all enthusiastic girls and even some young men Soviet Union with spiritual trepidation, they discovered the poets of the early twentieth century: S. Yesenin, A. Blok, the lyric V. Mayakovsky. The more advanced read Akhmatova, Gumilyov, Tsvetaeva, and some even Balmont and Kuzmin. Love for the poetry of the "Silver Age", to put it mildly, was not encouraged by the school curriculum, and for especially strong enthusiasm one could even get into a conversation with the State Security Committee, and forever lose love for literature. But how beautiful and desirable were the verses of these decadents and renegades. How much was alien in them, far from the dullness of the everyday life of socialist life. How much longing for the unfulfilled and premonitions of a global catastrophe. It is strange that now these verses are almost not in demand, although a century later the society still has the same cocaine frenzy and a vague desire for a great rebellion, which will invariably end in great bloodshed. Texts containing "many letters", unfortunately, are not read by the population. But I so want to believe that the next generations will discover both the “beautiful lady” and the “gray-eyed king”, and hope dies last.We continue about Yesenin
In 1912, after graduating from school, Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin went to work in Moscow. There he gets a job at the printing house of I.D. Sytin as an assistant proofreader. Work in the printing house allowed the young poet to read many books, made it possible to become a member of the literary and musical Surikov circle. The first common-law wife of the poet, Anna Izryadnova, describes Yesenin of those years as follows: “He was known as a leader, attended meetings, distributed illegal literature. He pounced on books, read all his free time, spent all his salary on books, magazines, did not at all think about how to live ... ".
In 1913, S. A. Yesenin entered the Faculty of History and Philosophy of the Moscow City People's University. Shanyavsky. It was the country's first free university for volunteers. There, Sergei Yesenin listened to lectures on Western European literature and Russian poets.
But, in 1914, Yesenin quit his job and studies, and, according to Anna Izryadnova, devotes himself entirely to poetry. In 1914, the poet's works were first published in the children's magazine Mirok. In January, his poems begin to be published in other magazines and newspapers. In the same year, S. Yesenin and A. Izryadnova had a son, Yuri, who was shot in 1937.
In 1915, Yesenin came from Moscow to Petrograd, read his poems to A. A. Blok, S. M. Gorodetsky and other poets. In January 1916, Yesenin was called to war and, thanks to the efforts of his friends, he was appointed ("with the highest permission") as an orderly in the Tsarskoye Selo military hospital train No. 143 of Her Imperial Majesty the Empress Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. At this time, he became close to a group of "new peasant poets" and published the first collections ("Radunitsa" - 1916), which made him very famous. Together with Nikolai Klyuev, he often performed, including in front of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and her daughters in Tsarskoe Selo. In 1915-1917, Yesenin maintained friendly relations with the poet Leonid Kannegiser, who later killed the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, Uritsky.
Yesenin's move to Moscow
In early 1918 Yesenin moved to Moscow. Encouraged by the revolution, he writes several small poems ("Jordan Dove", "Inonia", "Heavenly Drummer", all 1918, etc.), imbued with a joyful foreboding of the "transformation" of life. God-fighting moods are combined in them with biblical imagery to indicate the scale and significance of the events taking place. Yesenin, singing the new reality and its heroes, tried to match the time ("Cantata", 1919). In later years, he wrote "Song of the Great Campaign", 1924, "Captain of the Earth", 1925, etc.). Reflecting on "where the fate of events is taking us," the poet turns to history (dramatic poem "Pugachev", 1921).
At 21, Yesenin writes a poem about the passing youth
The theme of the poem is the theme of the outgoing youth, youth. The main idea - farewell to youth - is a poignant feeling to which the author sings a song. The general emotional tone of the poem is elegiac, sad, but without despondency. It is created thanks to the elements of poetics.Special selection of vocabulary. Already the beginning of the poem carries a hint of farewell. The repeated negative construction with "not" reinforces this connotation. In addition, the expressions “my life”, “wandering spirit”, as it were, explode, do not delay the elegiac mood.
The central stanzas are an appeal to one's heart, a little "touched by a chill" and to one's own life. Rhythmically, the text is built quite clearly, this is facilitated by the pentameter trochee.
The poem is rich in metaphors, just like youth, youth is generous with events and joy. Quite unexpectedly, life is compared to a rider on a "pink horse". “Pink”, as an epithet, absorbs both unrealizable, violent dreams that are characteristic of youth (seeing life “in a pink light”, wearing “pink glasses” that embellish reality), and the color of the dawn. But in the next stanza, the color scheme changes the palette. The color of dreams, youth and youth turns into the copper color of maple leaves (such an association involuntarily suggests itself - about a person who has experienced a lot, seen a lot, they say "copper pipes have passed").
Five feet in a poem make the text smooth, soft. This is also facilitated by the female open rhyme, which is present in the first and third lines of quatrains. Alternating with male rhyme in the second and fourth lines, the author creates a cross rhyme, which gives clarity and completeness to the work. Such a construction of the text once again emphasizes the idea that youth is fleeting, and life in the perishable world, the complexities of which are not noticed in youth, is replacing the “resonant spring early”.
The poem is elegant in its sound organization. The consonants "l", "m", "n" give softness and smoothness to the sound.
Thus, the main components of poetics correspond to the emotional tone, theme, idea of the poem. Thanks to a special selection of vocabulary, a simple construction of phrases, a peculiar sound selection, S. Yesenin's poem resonates in the hearts of readers of various ages. No wonder many of Yesenin's works, including this one, became popular songs in their time.
Homecoming
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 the son Alexander was born. The newspaper "Izvestia" published the poet's notes about America "Iron Mirgorod".In 1924, Yesenin again became interested in traveling around the country, traveled to his homeland in Konstantinovo many times, visited Leningrad several times a year, then there were trips to the Caucasus, to Azerbaijan.
In one of the last poems, “The Country of Scoundrels,” Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin writes very sharply about the leaders of Russia, which entails criticism and a ban on the poet’s publications.
In 1924, creative differences and personal motives prompted S. A. Yesenin to break with Imagism and leave for the Transcaucasus.
Episodes of life
Despite the fact that the last years of his life, Yesenin abused alcohol, he did not write poetry while drunk. The poet's memoirists also talk about this. Once Yesenin confessed to his friend: “The desperate fame of a drunkard and a bully follows me, but these are just words, and not such a terrible reality.”Dancer Duncan
Dancer Duncan fell in love with Yesenin almost at first sight. He, too, was very interested in her, despite the tangible difference in age. Isadora dreamed of glorifying her Russian husband and took him with her on a tour - through Europe and America. Yesenin explained his scandalous behavior during the trip in his usual manner: “Yes, I made a row. I needed them to know me, so they would remember me. What, I'm going to read poetry to them? Poems for Americans? I would only become ridiculous in their eyes. But to drag the tablecloth with all the dishes from the table, to whistle in the theater, to violate the traffic order - this is clear to them. If I do this, I am a millionaire. I mean, 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.
Unsuccessful marriage with Sophia
In the autumn of 1925, Yesenin married Leo Tolstoy's granddaughter Sophia, but the marriage was not successful. At this time, he actively opposed Jewish dominance in Russia. The poet and his friends are accused of anti-Semitism, for which they were supposed to be shot. Yesenin spent the last year of his life in illness, wandering and drunkenness. Due to heavy drinking, S. A. Yesenin stayed for some time in the neuropsychiatric clinic of Moscow University. However, due to persecution by law enforcement agencies, the poet was forced to leave the clinic. On December 23, Sergei Yesenin leaves Moscow for Leningrad. Stays at the Angleterre Hotel. Death of poet
In this hotel, in room number 5, on December 28, 1925, Sergei was found dead.Law enforcement agencies did not open a criminal case, despite the fact that the body showed signs of violent death. Until now, officially there is 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 suicide. Such a crime is attributed to people who worked in those years in the OGPU. But for now, all this remains just versions.
The great poet managed for his such short life leave to the descendants living on Earth, an invaluable legacy in the form of their poetry. A subtle lyric poet with knowledge of the people's soul masterfully described peasant Russia in his poems. Many of his works have been set to music, resulting in excellent romances.
The best poems of Yesenin:
1ST OF MAY 
There is music, poetry and dancing,
There are lies and flattery...
Let me be scolded for stanzas -
They have truth.
I saw a holiday, a holiday of May -
And amazed.
I was ready to bend, hugging
All virgins and wives.
Where will you go, who will you tell
On someone's "henna"
What in the solar yarn bathed
Balakhani?
Well, how can you not carve a hymn in your heart,
Do not fall into a shiver?
Walked, sang forty thousand
And they drank too.
Poems! poems! Not very left!
I'm sorry! I'm sorry!
We drank to the health of oil
And for the guests.
And, raising my first glass,
With one nod
I drank on this May holiday
For the Council of People's Commissars.
The second glass, so, not very
Lie down in the rubber
I drank proudly for the workers
Under someone's speech.
And I drank my third glass,
Like some khan
For not bending in a wheeze
The fate of the peasants
Drink, heart! Just don't point blank
To destroy life ...
That's why I drank the fourth
Only for you.
Oh, how many cats in the world,
You and I will never count them.
The heart dreams of sweet peas,
And the blue star is ringing.
Will I wake up, in delirium or awake,
I only remember from a distant day -
A kitten was purring on the couch,
Looking at me indifferently.
I was still a child then
But jump to grandmother's song
He rushed like a young tiger cub,
On the ball she dropped.
Everything is gone. I lost my grandmother
And a few years later
They made a hat out of that cat
And our grandfather wore it out.
Yesenin's holiday: features of the celebration
In the modern calendar, you can find a huge number of holidays, both Orthodox and Christian, celebrated at the official level. However, to our great regret, there is no celebration of events dedicated to the anniversaries of the greatest figures of art and poetry. I would like to tell you about one of these holidays in more detail. This is about Yesenin's holiday.Bazaar and flower laying
This holiday takes place in the poet's homeland, namely in the village of Konstantinovo, Ryazan region, and is celebrated on the writer's birthday - October 3, since 1985. Every year it gathers a huge number of admirers of the work of this wonderful artist from all over the Russian Federation.
The holiday begins with a bazaar-exhibition of works by local craftsmen, which is usually held on the Central Square. Everyone can buy a variety of crafts made of wood, straw or take part in their creation as a souvenir or as a gift to someone.
Then people go to the monument to Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin to lay flowers. By the way, they say that if you hold on to the finger on the poet's right hand, it's good luck. Visitors very often use this ritual.
Continuation of the celebration
After laying flowers at the poet's monument, people visit local attractions: the school where Sergei Yesenin once studied, the balsamic poplar planted by the poet himself in 1924, and the State Museum-Reserve in honor of this writer, which hosts an exhibition from the museum's funds , holiday excursions.
Then the celebration is transferred to the theater and poetry venues, on the stages of which there are performances in honor of the birthday of this great figure, recitation of his poems by other poets and everyone.
This year, by the way, marks the 120th anniversary of the birth of the great Russian poet. And the people adequately honored the memory of this truly talented poet by organizing concerts, exhibitions and literary meetings throughout the country. And in the village of Konstantinovo itself, people honored the memory of the poet with folk festivals along the Oka River, poetic performances and theatrical performances. And the most striking event of this day was the staging of the play “Hooligan. Confession ”, in which such a famous artist as Sergey Bezrukov took part.
A few more verses
The ships are sailing
To Constantinople.
Trains leave for Moscow.
From human noise
Or from the osprey
Every day I feel
Longing.
I'm far away
Far abandoned
even closer
It looks like the moon.
Handfuls of water peas
Splashing Black Sea
Wave.
Every day
I come to the pier
I follow everyone
Who is not sorry
And I look harder and harder
And closer
Into the enchanted distance
Maybe from Le Havre
Ile Marseille
will sail
Louise il Jeannette,
that I remember
hitherto,
But which
Not at all.
The smell of the sea in the taste
Smoky bitter
May be,
Miss Mitchell
Or Claude
I will be remembered
In New York City,
After reading this thing translation.
All we are looking for
In this world of storm
Calling us
Invisible traces. 
Not from that
Like lamps with lampshades
Do jellyfish glow from the water?
Because
When meeting a foreigner
I'm under the violins
Schooner and ships
I hear a voice
Weeping hurdy-gurdy
Ile distant
The cry of the cranes.
Isn't that her?
Isn't she?
Well, maybe in life
Can you figure it out?
If now her
caught up
And sped away
Flared trousers.
Every day
I come to the pier
I follow everyone
Who is not sorry
And I look harder and harder
And closer
Into the enchanted distance
And others are here
They live differently.
And not without reason at night
A whistle is heard -
This means,
With the dexterity of a dog
A smuggler is on his way.
The border guard is not afraid
Fast.
The one he noticed will not go away
Enemy,
That's why so often
A shot is heard
On sea, salty
Shores.
But the enemy is alive
No matter how you blow it
Because it turns blue
All Batum.
Even the sea seems to me
Indigo
Under the tabloid
Laughter and noise.
And there is something to laugh
Cause.
After all, not so much
In the world of divas.
Walks crazy
old man,
Planting a rooster in the dark.
Laughing myself
I'm going back to the pier
I follow everyone
Who is not sorry
And I look harder and harder
And closer
Into the enchanted distance
It's hard and sad for me to see
How my brother dies.
And I try to hate everyone
Who is at enmity with his silence.
Look how he works in the field
Plows hard ground with a plow,
And listen to songs about grief,
What he sings, walking a furrow.
Or do you not have tender pity
To the sufferer of a plow with a harrow?
You see the death you yourself inevitable,
And you pass by him.
Help me to fight the wickedness
Filled with wine, and with need!
Or do not you hear, he is crying shares
In your song, walking the furrow?
Culinary preferences of Sergei Yesenin
In 2015, it was 120 years since the birth and 90 years since the death of one of the "golden voices" of Russian poetry - Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin. His poems are an unusual depth of love for the motherland. Nature and Yesenin are an inseparable whole. As a child, the future poet spent a lot of time on the banks of the river, where he collected duck eggs and from where he brought large crayfish. He loved to fish. The passion for fishing remained in the future. The poet also participated in peasant haymaking. The peasants had to feed well the mowers and the boys who helped them, who often remained to live in the field. For this, food was stored: bacon, eggs, cottage cheese, yogurt. The hostesses baked pancakes, dracheny. Cooked compotes. Everyone took care of the mowers, who had a hard time getting hay.After the First World War, people in the villages became impoverished and baked bread with the addition of sorrel, quinoa, and chaff.
It was not easy for the young poet in the capital, where he moved with a notebook of his poems. When Yesenin in 1915 came to the then-famous Alexander Blok, he did not notice in a conversation how he ate a bun. Blok also offered scrambled eggs. The young body did not have the strength to refuse treats.
Yesenin himself was a hospitable person. There were always guests in his house. Yesenin himself liked to get up at exactly 9 o'clock. By this time, a samovar was buzzing on the table, white rolls beloved by the poet beckoned with a delicious smell. Yesenin liked to have tea.
In the cafe of the Imaginists, Sergei Yesenin participated in a clubbing: they bought bread and sausage with money collected from their pockets, and sandwiches were made. There was no money for more. Poets were almost always hungry. Once, while talking, they also did not notice how they ate a large piece of butter without bread from the journalist L. Povitsky.
It so happened that, after all, Yesenin did not have his own house, which he dreamed of. It was hard for him. The manuscripts were in different places, they had to go back and forth, so in the poet's pocket there could be a bundle with something edible, for example, pickles. When Yesenin lived in Rostov in a service car, he always had a samovar on his table, the poet treated the guests to tea.
During a trip to Tashkent, I enjoyed eating fruit, shish kebabs, pilaf, drinking green tea there.
In Georgia, he tried dogwood juice, which he liked.
Before his death, Yesenin ended up in a hospital, from which he escaped. He went to the Mouse Hole Cafe. I ordered sausages there. stewed cabbage and beer.
Yesenin loved borscht with ears. Fans of the poet and Russian cuisine should know his recipe.
It is necessary to stew 200 grams of beets and two carrots until half cooked, after chopping them. Fry an onion with two tomatoes with flour. Add all of the above to the pot with boiled cabbage. Cook until cooked and add spices to taste.
Ears were preparing for borscht: boiled buckwheat porridge mixed with sautéed onions. Thinly rolled out the usual dough from water, flour, eggs, salt, cut rhombuses. The filling was placed in rhombuses. The edges moistened with the egg were splintered. These rhombuses were then baked in the oven. Borscht was served with ears, sour cream and herbs.
Another borscht was prepared with mushrooms. The beets baked in the oven were peeled and chopped into strips. Onions, carrots, parsley root were cut into strips before frying. All vegetables and mushrooms were poured with kvass, salted and boiled until tender. This is an old Pskov-style borscht - Pechersk.
Cooked borscht, which Sergei Yesenin loved, can be considered a tribute to the memory of a wonderful poet and a good person who did not have to get up for breakfast on December 28, 1925.
More poems
It smells of loose drachens;
At the threshold in a bowl of kvass,
Over turned stoves
Cockroaches climb into the groove.
Soot curls over the damper,
In the oven, the threads of popelits,
And on the bench behind the salt shaker -
Husks of raw eggs.
Mother with grips will not cope,
bending low,
The old cat sneaks up to the shawl
For fresh milk.
Restless chickens chuckle
Over the shafts of the plow,
In the yard I will have a slender dinner
The roosters are singing.
And in the window on the canopy are sloped,
From the fearful noise
From the corners puppies are curly
They crawl into collars.
In Horossan there are such doors,
Where the threshold is strewn with roses.
A pensive peri lives there.
In Horossan there are such doors,
But I couldn't open those doors.
I have enough strength in my hands
There is gold and copper in the hair.
Peri's voice is soft and beautiful.
I have enough strength in my hands
But I couldn't open the door.
And why? To whom should I sing songs?
If you became jealous Step,
If I couldn't open the door,
Courage is useless in my love.
Persia! Am I leaving you?
I'm parting with you forever
Out of love for my native land?
It's time for me to go back to Russia.
Goodbye, peri, goodbye,
Let me not be able to open the door,
You gave beautiful suffering
About you in my homeland I sing.
Goodbye, peri, goodbye.
The evening furrowed black eyebrows.
Someone's horses are standing in the yard.
Was it not yesterday that I drank away my youth?
Did I fall out of love with you not yesterday?
Don't snore, belated trio!
Our lives have gone by without a trace.
Maybe tomorrow a hospital bed
Will put me at ease forever.
Maybe tomorrow will be different
I'll leave healed forever
Listen to the songs of rain and bird cherry,
How does a healthy person live?
I will forget the dark forces
That tormented me, ruining.
Sweet look! Cute face!
Only one I will not forget you.
Let me love another
But with her, with her beloved, on the other,
I'll tell you about you dear
That once I called dear.
I'll tell you how the past flowed
Our life that was not the former ...
Are you my daring head
What have you brought me to?
Sergei Yesenin, his life and work is a unique phenomenon in Russian history, culture and literature. Interest in him over the years not only does not fade away, but also periodically flares up with renewed vigor. The most heated discussion in recent years has been over the circumstances of his death.
In recent decades, new evidence and documents have been discovered that not only do not fit into the official version of the poet's suicide, but also convincingly confirm its inconsistency, and, as an alternative, logically lead to the conclusion of a murder. Recently, a distinct “Stalinist trace” has been revealed in the crime against Yesenin, with the “Stalinist style” characteristic of such unsolved crimes. However, there is a huge force of inertia, both official government institutions and official cultural institutions, which does not allow an objective investigation within the framework of modern legislation.
2. In 1909, Sergei Yesenin studied at the parochial teacher's school with Spas-Klepiki. Today it is no longer a school, but a museum of S.A. Yesenin.
3. After graduating from school in 1912, Yesenin went to Moscow, where he worked in a butcher's shop.
4. Yesenin was married three times. His last wife, Sofya Andreevna Tolstaya, was the granddaughter of Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy.
5. Yesenin's second marriage was notable for the fact that his wife (American dancer) Isadora Duncan practically did not speak Russian, and Sergei Alexandrovich himself did not speak English at all. As a result, their marriage lasted a little over a year. In 1968, a British-French film dedicated to this dancer was released, which is called Isadora. The role of Yesenin went to a certain Zvonimir Chrnko.
6. Sergei Yesenin is one of the many Russian poets whose poems were used in songs. At various times, songs based on Yesenin's poems were performed by Alexander Malinin ("Zabava"), the Alpha group, Lyudmila Zykina ("Hear, the sleigh is rushing"), Nadezhda Babkina ("Golden Grove Dissuaded"), Galina Nenasheva "Birch", Nikolai Karachentsov (" Queen"), Oleg Pogudin, Nikita Dzhigurda, gr. Mongol Shuudan ("Moscow"), Vika Tsyganova, Zemfira and many others.
7. Being married, Sergei Yesenin had an affair on the side with the poetess and translator Nadezhda Volpin. From this union, their illegitimate son Alexander was born in 1924. The man lived a long, fruitful life and bore the double surname Yesenin-Volpin.
8. On December 28, 1925, Yesenin is found hanged on a heating pipe in his room at the Angleterre Hotel. A farewell note was also found, written in blood in the form of a poem "Farewell my friend, farewell ...". Sergei was buried in Moscow at the Vagankovsky cemetery.
9. Many are still arguing about the death of Sergei Yesenin. It is said that he could not hang himself, as there was no reason for this. Contemporaries note that on the eve of his death he was cheerful and cheerful, in addition, he was looking forward to the release of his new collection of poems.
10. Sergei Yesenin had his own Literary Secretary Galina Arturovna Benislavskaya, who for five years was engaged in all Yesenin's literary affairs, negotiated with the editors. She was very devoted and attached to Yesenin, and according to Sergei's friends, she wanted to be Yesenin's only close friend. She even accused the poet's friends and his sister Ekaterina of trying in every possible way to destroy their relationship. Almost a year after Yesenin's death (December 3, 1926), Galina Benislavskaya shot herself at his grave at the Vagankovsky cemetery. She also left suicide note, containing the following lines: "In this grave, everything is dear to me ..."
Brief biography of Sergei Yesenin.
Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin was born on September 21 (October 4), 1895 in the village of Konstantinovo, Ryazan province, in the family of a peasant Alexander Yesenin. The mother of the future poet, Tatyana Titova, was married against her will, and soon, together with her three-year-old son, she went to her parents. Then she went to work in Ryazan, and Yesenin remained in the care of his grandparents (Fedor Titov), a connoisseur of church books. Yesenin's grandmother knew many fairy tales and ditties, and, according to the poet himself, it was she who gave the "impulses" to write the first poems.
In 1904, Yesenin was sent to study at the Konstantinovsky Zemstvo School, and then a church teacher's school in the city of Spas-Klepiki.
In 1910-1912, Yesenin wrote quite a lot, and among the poems of these years there are already quite mature, perfect ones. Yesenin's first collection "Radunitsa" was published in 1916. The song warehouse of the poems included in the book, their ingenuously sincere intonations, the melody that refers to folk songs and ditties is evidence that the umbilical cord connecting the poet with the rural world of childhood was still very strong at the time of their writing.
The very name of the book Radunitsa is often associated with the song warehouse of Yesenin's poems. On the one hand, Radunitsa is the day of commemoration of the dead; on the other hand, this word is associated with a cycle of spring folk songs, which have long been called Radovitsky or Radonitsky stoneflies. In essence, one thing does not contradict the other, at least in Yesenin's poems, the distinguishing feature of which is hidden sadness and aching pity for everything living, beautiful, doomed to disappear: May you be blessed forever that it has come to flourish and die ... Poetic the language already in the early poems of the poet is peculiar and subtle, the metaphors are sometimes unexpectedly expressive, and the person (the author) feels, perceives nature as living, spiritualized (Where the cabbage beds ... Imitation of the song, The scarlet light of dawn wove out on the lake ..., The flood licked with smoke ill. ., Tanyusha was good, there was no more beautiful in the village. .).
After graduating from the Spaso-Klepikovsky School in 1912, Yesenin and his father came to Moscow to work. In March 1913, Yesenin again went to Moscow. Here he gets a job as an assistant proofreader in the printing house of I.D. Sytin. Anna Izryadnova, the poet's first wife, describes Yesenin in those years as follows: "He was in a depressive mood - he is a poet, no one wants to understand this, editorial boards are not accepted for publication, his father scolds that he is not doing business, he has to work: He was reputed to be a leader, attended meetings, distributed illegal literature, pounced on books, read all his free time, spent all his salary on books, magazines, did not at all think about how to live ... ". In December 1914, Yesenin quit his job and, according to the same Izryadnova, "gives himself all over to poetry. He writes all day long. In January, his poems are published in the newspapers Nov, Parus, Zarya ..."
The mention of Izryadnova, about the distribution of illegal literature, is associated with Yesenin's participation in the literary and musical circle of the peasant poet I. Surikov - a very colorful meeting, both in aesthetic and political respects (its members included Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Bolshevik-minded workers ). The poet also goes to classes at the Shanyavsky People's University - the first in the country educational institution which could be visited free of charge by volunteers. There, Yesenin receives the basics of a humanitarian education - he listens to lectures on Western European literature, on Russian writers.
Meanwhile, Yesenin's verse is becoming more confident, more original, sometimes civil motives begin to occupy him (Kuznets, Belgium, etc.). And the poems of those years - Marfa Posadnitsa, Us, the Song of Evpatiy Kolovratka - are both a stylization of ancient speech, and an appeal to the origins of patriarchal wisdom, in which Yesenin saw both the source of the figurative musicality of the Russian language, and the secret of "the naturalness of human relations." The theme of the doomed transience of being begins to sound in Yesenin's poems of that time in full voice:
I meet everything, I accept everything,
Glad and happy to take out the soul.
I came to this earth
To leave her soon.
It is known that in 1916 in Tsarskoye Selo Yesenin visited N. Gumilyov and A. Akhmatova and read to them this poem, which struck Anna Andreevna with its prophetic character. And she was not mistaken - Yesenin's life really turned out to be both fleeting and tragic ...
Meanwhile, Moscow seems close to Yesenin, in his opinion, all the main events of literary life take place in St. Petersburg, and in the spring of 1915 the poet decides to move there.
In St. Petersburg, Yesenin visited A. Blok. Not finding him at home, he left him a note and poems tied in a rustic scarf. The note was preserved with Blok's note: "Poems are fresh, clean, vociferous...". So, thanks to the participation of Blok and the poet S. Gorodetsky, Yesenin became a member of all the most prestigious literary salons and living rooms, where he very soon became a welcome guest. His poems spoke for themselves - their special simplicity, combined with images that “burn through the soul”, the touching immediacy of the “village boy”, as well as the abundance of words from the dialect and the Old Russian language, had a bewitching effect on many leaders of literary fashion. Some saw in Yesenin a simple young man from the village, endowed with a remarkable poetic gift by a twist of fate. Others - for example, Merezhkovsky and Gippius, were ready to consider him the bearer of the saving, in their opinion, for Russia, mystical folk Orthodoxy, a man from the ancient sunken "City of Kitezh", in every possible way emphasizing and cultivating religious motifs in his poems (Child Jesus, Scarlet darkness in the blackness of heaven., Clouds from the hare) (Neigh like a hundred mares.).
In late 1915 - early 1917, Yesenin's poems appeared on the pages of many metropolitan publications. At this time, the poet also converges quite closely with N. Klyuev, a native of Old Believer peasants. Together with him, Yesenin performs in the salons to the accordion, dressed in morocco boots, a blue silk shirt, girded with a gold lace. The two poets really had a lot in common - longing for the patriarchal village way of life, passion for folklore, antiquity. But at the same time, Klyuev always consciously fenced himself off from the modern world, and Yesenin, who was restless and aspiring to the future, was irritated by the feigned humility and deliberately didactic unctuousness of his "friend-enemy". It is no coincidence that a few years later, Yesenin advised a poet in a letter: "Stop singing this stylized Klyuev Rus: Life, the real life of Russia is much better than the frozen drawing of the Old Believers ..."
And this "real life of Russia" carried Yesenin and his fellow travelers on the "ship of modernity" farther and farther. In full swing. First World War, disturbing rumors are spreading around St. Petersburg, people are dying at the front: Yesenin serves as an orderly in the Tsarskoye Selo military hospital, reads his poems in front of the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, in front of the Empress. What causes criticism from his St. Petersburg literary patrons. In that "deaf breath of fire" about which A. Akhmatova wrote, all values, both human and political, turned out to be mixed, and the "coming boor" (D. Merezhkovsky's expression) revolted no less than reverence for the reigning persons .. .
At first, in the revolutionary turbulent events, Yesenin saw the hope for a speedy and profound transformation of his entire former life. It seemed that the transformed lands and sky were calling out to the country and man, and Yesenin wrote: O Rus, flap your wings, / Set up a different support! / With other times. / A different steppe rises... (1917). Yesenin is overwhelmed with hopes for building a new, peasant paradise on earth, a different, just life. The Christian worldview at that time is intertwined in his poems with theomachy and pantheistic motifs, with admiring exclamations addressed to the new government:
The sky is like a bell
The month is the language
My mother is the motherland
I am a Bolshevik.
He writes several short poems: Transfiguration, Otchar, Octoechos, Ionia. Many lines from them, sometimes sounding defiantly scandalous, shocked contemporaries:
I will lick on the icons with my tongue
Faces of martyrs and saints.
I promise you the city of Inonia,
Where the deity of the living lives.
No less famous are the lines from the poem Transfiguration:
The clouds are barking
The golden-toothed heights roar...
I sing and call:
Lord, recline!
In the same revolutionary years, in times of devastation, famine and terror, Yesenin reflects on the origins of figurative thinking, which he sees in folklore, in ancient Russian art, in the "nodal tie of nature with the essence of man", in folk art. He expresses these thoughts in the article Keys of Mary, in which he expresses hope for the resurrection of the secret signs of ancient life, for the restoration of harmony between man and nature, while relying on the same rural way of life: "The only wasteful and slovenly, but still the keeper of this secrets was a village half-broken by seasonal work and factories.
Very soon, Yesenin realizes that the Bolsheviks are not at all the ones they would like to pretend to be. According to S. Makovsky, an art critic and publisher, Yesenin “understood, or rather, felt with his peasant heart, with his pity: that it was not a“ great bloodless one ”, but a dark and merciless time began ... ". And now the mood of elation and hope is replaced by Yesenin's confusion, bewilderment before what is happening. Peasant life is collapsing, hunger and devastation are marching across the country, and the regulars of the former literary salons, many of whom have already emigrated, are being replaced by a very diverse literary and near-literary public.
In 1919, Yesenin turned out to be one of the organizers and leaders of a new literary group - the Imagists. (IMAGINISM [from the French image - image] is a trend in literature and painting. It arose in England shortly before the war of 1914-1918 (its founders were Ezra Pound and Windham Lewis, who broke away from the Futurists), it developed on Russian soil in the first years of the revolution. The Imagists published their declaration in the journals Sirena (Voronezh) and Sovietskaya Strana (Moscow) at the beginning of 1919. The core of the group was V. Shershenevich, A. Mariengof, S. Yesenin, A. Kusikov, R. Ivnev, and I. Gruzinov and some others. Organizationally, they united around the publishing house "Imaginists", "Chikhi-Pihi", a bookstore and the well-known Lithuanian cafe "Stall of Pegasus" in their time. number 4. Shortly thereafter, the group disbanded.
The theory of the Imagists is based on the principle of poetry, proclaiming the primacy of the "image as such". Not a word-symbol with an infinite number of meanings (symbolism), not a word-sound (cubo-futurism), not a word-name of a thing (acmeism), but a word-metaphor with one specific meaning is the basis of I. "The only law of art, the only and incomparable method is to reveal life through the image and the rhythm of images" ("Declaration" of the Imagists). The theoretical substantiation of this principle comes down to likening poetic creativity to the process of language development through metaphor. The poetic image is identified with what Potebnya called "the inner form of the word." "The birth of the word of speech and language from the womb of the image," says Mariengof, "predetermined once and for all the figurative beginning of future poetry." "You must always remember the original image of the word." If in practical speech the "conceptuality" of a word displaces its "figurativeness", then in poetry the image excludes meaning, content: "eating the meaning with the image is the way of development of the poetic word" (Shershenevich). In this regard, there is a breakdown of grammar, a call for agrammaticity: "the meaning of the word lies not only in the root of the word, but also in the grammatical form. The image of the word is only at the root. By breaking the grammar, we destroy the potential power of the content, while maintaining the former power of the image" (Shershenevich , 2×2=5). The poem, which is an agrammatic "catalog of images", naturally does not fit into the correct metrical forms: "vers libre of images" requires rhythmic "vers libre": "Free verse is the essential essence of Imagist poetry, which is distinguished by the extreme sharpness of figurative transitions" (Marienhof) . "A poem is not an organism, but a crowd of images, one image can be taken out of it, ten more can be inserted" (Shershenevich)).
Their slogans, it would seem, are completely alien to Yesenin's poetry, his views on the nature of poetic creativity. What are, for example, the words from the Declaration of Imagism: "Art built on content ... should have perished from hysteria." In Imagism, Yesenin drew close attention to the artistic image, a significant role in his participation in the group was played by the general disorder of everyday life, attempts to share the hardships of the revolutionary time together.
The painful feeling of duality, the impossibility of living and creating, being cut off from the folk peasant roots, coupled with disappointment in finding a "new city - Inonia" give Yesenin's lyrics a tragic mood. The leaves in his poems are already whispering "in autumn", whistling all over the country, like Autumn, a charlatan, a murderer and a villain, and sighted eyes. Only death closes...
I am the last poet of the village - Yesenin writes in a poem (1920) dedicated to his friend the writer Mariengof. Yesenin saw that the former village life was disappearing into oblivion, it seemed to him that a mechanized, dead life was coming to replace the living, natural. In one of his letters in 1920, he admitted: “I am very sad now that history is going through a difficult era of killing the individual as a living person, because there is absolutely not the socialism that I thought about ... Closely in it is living, closely building a bridge to the invisible world, for they cut and blow up these bridges from under the feet of future generations.
At the same time, Yesenin was working on the poems Pugachev and Nomakh. He had been interested in the figure of Pugachev for several years, collecting materials, dreaming of a theatrical production. The surname Nomakh was formed on behalf of Makhno, the leader of the Insurgent Army during the Civil War. Both images are related by the motif of rebellion, a rebellious spirit, characteristic of folklore robbers-truth-seekers. The poems clearly sound a protest against contemporary reality, in which Yesenin did not see even a hint of justice. So the "country of scoundrels" for Nomakh is the region in which he lives, and in general any state where ... if it is criminal to be a bandit here, / That is no more criminal than to be a king ...
In the autumn of 1921, the famous dancer Isadora Duncan arrived in Moscow, with whom Yesenin soon married.
Spouses go abroad, to Europe, then to the USA. At first, European impressions lead Yesenin to the idea that he "has fallen out of love with impoverished Russia, but very soon both the West and industrial America begin to seem to him a kingdom of philistinism and boredom.
At this time, Yesenin was already drinking heavily, often falling into a rage, and in his poems the motifs of hopeless loneliness, drunken revelry, hooliganism and a ruined life, partly related to some of his poems with the genre of urban romance, sound more and more often. Not without reason, even in Berlin, Yesenin wrote his first poems from the Moscow Tavern cycle:
Again they drink here, fight and cry.
Under harmonica yellow sadness...
The marriage with Duncan soon broke up, and Yesenin again found himself in Moscow, not finding a place for himself in the new Bolshevik Russia.
According to contemporaries, when he fell into hard drinking, he could terribly "cover" the Soviet government. But they did not touch him and, having kept him for some time in the police, they soon released him - by that time Yesenin was famous in society as a folk, "peasant" poet.
Despite the difficult physical and moral condition, Yesenin continues to write - even more tragic, even deeper, even more perfect.
Among the best poems of his last years are a Letter to a woman, Persian motifs, small poems, Russia is leaving, Russia is homeless, Return to the Motherland, Letter to mother (Are you still alive, my old woman?.), We are now leaving little by little to that country where there is silence grace...
And, finally, the poem "The Golden Grove Dissuaded", which combines a truly folk song element, and the skill of a mature, experienced poet, and a poignant, pure simplicity, for which he was so loved by people who were far from elegant literature:
The golden grove dissuaded
Birch, cheerful language,
And the cranes, sadly flying,
No more regrets for anyone.
Whom to pity? After all, every wanderer in the world -
Pass, enter and leave the house again.
Hemp dreams about all the departed
With a wide moon over the blue pond...
On December 28, 1925, Yesenin was found dead in the Angleterre Hotel in Leningrad. His last poem - "Goodbye, my friend, goodbye ..." - was written in this hotel in blood. According to the poet's friends, Yesenin complained that there was no ink in the room, and he was forced to write in blood.
According to the version accepted by most of the poet's biographers, Yesenin, in a state of depression (a month after treatment in a psychoneurological hospital), committed suicide (hanged himself). Neither contemporaries of the event, nor in the next few decades after the death of the poet, other versions of the event were expressed.
In the 1970s and 1980s, mainly in nationalist circles, there were also versions about the murder of the poet, followed by a staged suicide: on the basis of jealousy, mercenary motives, murder by the OGPU. In 1989, under the auspices of the Gorky IMLI, the Yesenin Commission was established under the chairmanship of Yu. L. Prokushev; at her request, a number of examinations were carried out, which led to the following conclusion: “the now published ‘versions’ about the murder of the poet with subsequent staging of hanging, despite some discrepancies ... are a vulgar, incompetent interpretation of special information, sometimes falsifying the results of the examination” (from the official response professor at the department of forensic medicine, doctor of medical sciences B. S. Svadkovsky at the request of the chairman of the commission Yu. L. Prokushev). In the 1990s, various authors continued to put forward both new arguments in support of the murder version and counterarguments. The version of Yesenin's murder is presented in the TV series Yesenin.
He was buried on December 31, 1925 in Moscow at the Vagankovsky cemetery.
Creativity of Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin, uniquely bright and deep, is now firmly established in our literature and enjoys great success with numerous Soviet and foreign readers.
The poet's poems are full of heartfelt warmth and sincerity, passionate love for the boundless expanses of his native fields, the "inexhaustible sadness" of which he was able to convey so emotionally and so loudly.
Sergei Yesenin entered our literature as an outstanding lyricist. It is in the lyrics that everything that makes up the soul of Yesenin's creativity is expressed. It contains the full-blooded, sparkling joy of a young man who rediscovers the wonderful world, subtly feeling the fullness of earthly charms, and the deep tragedy of a man who has remained too long in the "narrow gap" of old feelings and views. And if in the best poems of Sergei Yesenin - "flood" of the most intimate , the most intimate human feelings, they are filled to the brim with the freshness of pictures of native nature, then in his other works - despair, decay, hopeless sadness. Sergei Yesenin is primarily a singer of Russia, and in his poems,
sincere and frank in Russian, we feel the beating of a restless tender heart. They have a "Russian spirit", they have a "smell of Russia". They absorbed the great traditions of national poetry, the traditions of Pushkin, Nekrasov, Blok. Even in Yesenin's love lyrics, the theme of love merges with the theme of the Motherland. The author of "Persian Motives" is convinced of the fragility of serene happiness away from his native land. And distant Russia becomes the main heroine of the cycle: "No matter how beautiful Shiraz is, it is no better than the expanses of Ryazan." Yesenin met the October Revolution with joy and ardent sympathy. Together with Blok, Mayakovsky, he took her side without hesitation. The works written by Yesenin at that time ("Transfiguration", "Inonia", "Heavenly Drummer") are imbued with rebellious moods. The poet is captured by the storm of the revolution, its greatness and rushes to the new, to the future. In one of his works, Yesenin exclaimed: "My Motherland, I am a Bolshevik!" But Yesenin, as he himself wrote, took the revolution in his own way, "with a peasant bias", "more spontaneously than consciously." This left a special imprint on the poet's work and largely predetermined his future path. Characteristic were the ideas of the poet about goals of the revolution future, about socialism. In the poem "Inonia" he draws the future as a kind of idyllic kingdom of peasant prosperity, socialism seems to him a blissful "peasant's paradise". Such ideas also affected other works of Yesenin of that time:
I see you, green fields,
With a herd of brown horses.
With a shepherd's pipe in the willows
Apostle Andrew is wandering.
But the fantastic visions of the peasant Inonia, of course, were not destined to come true. The revolution was led by the proletariat, the village was led by the city. "After all, there is absolutely not the socialism that I thought about," says Yesenin in one of the letters of that time. Yesenin begins to curse the "iron guest", bringing death to the patriarchal rural way of life, and mourn the old, outgoing "wooden Russia". This explains the inconsistency of Yesenin's poetry, who has gone through a difficult path from a singer of patriarchal, impoverished, destitute Russia to a singer of socialist Russia, Lenin's Russia. After Yesenin's trip abroad and to the Caucasus, a turning point occurs in the life and work of the poet and a new period is marked. It makes him fall in love with his socialist fatherland more strongly and more strongly and evaluate everything that happens in it in a different way. "... I fell in love even more in communist construction," Yesenin wrote on his return to his homeland in the essay "Iron Mirgorod". Already in the cycle "Love of a bully", written immediately upon arrival from abroad, the mood of loss and hopelessness is replaced by hope for happiness, faith in love and the future. love, gives a clear idea of the new motives in Yesenin's lyrics:
A blue fire swept
Forgotten relatives gave.
For the first time I sang about love,
For the first time I refuse to scandal.
I was all like a neglected garden,
He was greedy for women and potion.
Enjoyed singing and dancing
And lose your life without looking back.
Yesenin's work is one of the brightest, deeply moving pages in the history of Soviet literature. Yesenin's era has passed away, but his poetry continues to live, awakening a feeling of love for his native land, for everything close and different. We are concerned about the sincerity and spirituality of the poet, for whom Russia was the most precious thing on the entire planet...
Sergei Yesenin and his work
Sergei Yesenin is perhaps the most famous and widely read poet in our time.
In the sound of his name one can hear the melodiousness, the music of native expanses, the beauty of the people who created such a poet.
Sergei Yesenin - this name is familiar to everyone literally from the cradle.
Nobody will forget the lines:
Winter sings - calls out,
Shaggy forest cradles
The bell of a pine forest…
White birch
under my window
covered with snow,
Just silver...
The strength of Yesenin's talent is that a person and a poet are inextricably merged in it. .
All those feelings that Sergei Yesenin put into his works with such skill are perceived by readers without any difficulty. The spirit of folk life emanates from his poems, and the reason was that from early childhood the poet was close to the world of folk poetry.
And how many works have been set to music! Songs based on his poems are to the liking of all people. They are so lyrical and soulful.
Let's look deeper now. What still attracts me to Yesenin's poetry? In a nutshell, absolutely everyone. I love his poems for their simplicity, lyricism, melody, nationality. For those sincere feelings that Yesenin put into his works. For his great and immeasurable love for the Motherland with its birch groves, heavenly blue, wild peasant song, lake smoothness.
Yesenin passed a small but thorny life path. He stumbled, made mistakes, fell into populism—these are quite natural "costs" of youth. However, the poet was always on the lookout, on the road, at the sharp turns of history. All his personal experiences and failures recede before the main thing - love for the motherland. What is the most precious thing in life for a person? I would answer: "Motherland". And isn't it happiness to sing of her beauty! It is impossible to live on earth and not have a home, a mother, a Motherland. And you can't help but love her.
Motherland is the main theme in the work of Sergei Yesenin. Many poets tried to reveal it in their works. But, I think, no one was able to do it the way S. Yesenin did it. The poet proudly called himself a "peasant's son" and "a citizen of the village." His love for his native land, for his native land is especially dear. It stretched like a red thread through the life and work of the poet. It continues in us. Wherever we go, we are always drawn to our native, sweet places from childhood.
In Yesenin's poems, not only "Russia shines", not only the poet's quiet confession of love for her sounds, but also the person's faith in her future, the great future of his native people, is expressed:
Yesenin lyrical poet verse
Goy you, my dear Russia,
Huts - in the robes of the image ...
See no end and end
Only blue sucks eyes.
The poet wrote a lot of poems not only about the Motherland, but also about nature, about autumn, about birches that stand like "big candles", about snow-white bird cherry trees, about stooping willows, about thorny gloomy firs. I am fascinated by Yesenin's unique lyrics, understanding of all the subtleties of native nature and the ability to convey this in poetry. The verses about autumn are especially remarkable. Most of all I like the poem "Autumn". There is a wonderful line there:
The fields are compressed, the groves are bare,
Fog and damp from the water.
Wheel behind the blue mountains
The sun went down quietly.
The blasted road is slumbering.
She dreamed today
What is very, very little
It remains to wait for the gray winter ...
The poem depicts a picture of nature. But this is not just an autumn sketch. In the first two lines, the reader is presented with a picture of late autumn. It evokes a dull, sad, dreary mood.
All nouns in the poem are used in direct meaning, the poet simply lists what he sees: fields, groves, river, fog, dampness, and all these words are common, unpoetic. The first and second lines contain two simple, uncommon sentences that create a down to earth intonation. But in the third and fourth lines, the sun is likened to a wheel that rolled over the mountains, epithets arise: the mountains are blue, the sun is quiet. And the syntax becomes different: the sentence becomes common. This creates a calmer, smoother intonation. In addition, the picture takes on colors, a kind of beauty emerges in the autumn landscape, the mood begins to change. The poet transfers the feelings inherent in man to the phenomenon of nature (the road is alive, she is dozing, she dreamed). She experiences the same feelings as we do: she is sad, she dreams of the coming of a gray winter, which means that life does not stand still, and a foretaste of imminent changes is created, which we dream of together with nature.
S. Yesenin has always attracted a lot of people. Some loved him, others hated him. I think that it is impossible to treat poets with the usual yardstick with which they approach prudent people. They have rights that we simply do not have, because they are much higher and at the same time inexpressibly lower than each of the mortals.
The poems of Sergei Yesenin are thoughts woven in rhyme. These are soul-stirring experiences. And joy that makes you rejoice. Each conveys a separate feeling, mood.
When I read the poem "The Black Man", I felt scared and hurt from that hopeless loneliness that was in it. At first glance, it may seem that a person is lonely when there is no one next to him, but this feeling usually comes in a circle of many people:
What is loneliness?
What others don't understand
And poetry, and prophecy -
Pointless as smoke?
Maybe that's why Yesenin rushed about among people. I went to taverns and changed women. First there was Izryadnova, then Reich, who, in my opinion, was the only one he loved, then Duncan, Mikloshevskaya, Benislavskaya ... He fell in love quickly, was passionate in his hobbies, surrendering to them without a trace. Each love story in the poet's life is Yesenin's love lyrics from the same lips, but from a new angle. It is surprising that Yesenin, as the creator of love lyrics, is almost unknown to a wide audience. Think about what comes to mind when they say the name of this Russian poet. Birch groves, endless blue distances, earing fields and water meadows, Mother Russia and her picturesque villages. But for some reason, it is not customary to mention Yesenin's multifaceted love lyrics. But it is much stronger and more powerful than his "birch-calico" poetry, although the first one grew out of the second.
Yesenin's love lyrics are strong, like a gust of wind, disarming, like the first kiss, magical and miraculous, like a miracle of the birth of a new world. It is infinitely multi-layered: he sings about love enthusiastically, doomed, with hope, pain, despair, faith in a miracle and joy, bitterness and doubt. He sings about the "age of autumn", which is "more expensive than youth and summer." He sings about how "the feeling is overripe", about how in your beloved eyes you can see the sea "blazing with blue fire". “You don’t love me, don’t feel sorry for me” is one of my favorite Yesenin’s poems about love:
You don't love me, don't pity me
Am I a little handsome?
Without looking in the face, you are thrilled with passion,
Putting my hands on my shoulders.
Young, with a sensual grin,
I am not gentle with you and not rude.
Tell me how many have you caressed?
How many hands do you remember? How many lips?
I know they passed like shadows
Without touching your fire
To many you sat on your knees,
And now you're sitting here with me.
May your eyes be half closed
And you think of someone else
I myself do not love you very much,
Drowning in a distant road.
Don't call this ardor fate
Frivolous quick-tempered connection, -
How by chance I met you
I smile and calmly disperse.
Yes, and you will go your own way
Spread the gloomy days
Only unburned do not mani.
And when with another down the lane
You go talking about love
Maybe I'll go for a walk
And we will meet with you again.
Turning your shoulders closer to the other
And leaning down a little
You will tell me quietly: "Good evening ..."
I will answer: "Good evening, miss."
And nothing will disturb the soul
And nothing will make her shudder, -
Who loved, he cannot love,
Who is burned, you will not set fire to.
I think it is dedicated to the memory of a past love, perhaps a memory of a fleeting meeting. The poem is an appeal to a woman. Heroes are not bound by deep feelings. It can be seen that the heroine of the poem is a fatal and frivolous woman who sees her fate in the poet, and after parting talks about love with a new boyfriend. The lyrical hero is trying to change something, saying to the heroine:
Just don't touch the unkissed
Only unburned do not mani.
After all, he knows what her love is, what is the outcome and consequences of this feeling. It seems that everything is over, but one circumstance still continues to bind the heroes of the poem. They experienced love excitement in the past and are no longer capable of a deep feeling, they cannot fall in love again. The poem is permeated with a poignant feeling of sadness, because it shows a burnt heart that has spent, spent all its warmth. The fact that it was written shortly before his death adds to the feeling of anguish.
Sergei Yesenin is my favorite poet. Only I can call him my teacher and even my friend. When I read his poems, I feel that they carry the mood, the feelings that my soul is experiencing at the moment. The works are looking for answers to questions that concern me. In the lines written by Sergei Yesenin, each person can find consolation, a call to action, find himself, in the end. Having passed away at the age of 30, this remarkable poet left us a wonderful legacy. Yesenin's poetry, filled with love for man, for his native land, imbued with sincerity, utmost sincerity, kindness, is relevant and modern today. Probably, the lines from the poem "The Black Man" will help me all my life:
In thunderstorms, in storms
Into the hell of life
For severe loss
And when you're sad
To seem smiling and simple--
The highest art in the world.
Contemporaries recalled that Yesenin had an extraordinary personal charm, and his poems - magic power. Any interlocutor found in the poet, in his work something of his own, acceptable and beloved, and this is the secret of such a powerful influence of his poems. Today we can talk not only about the world fame of Yesenin's poetry, but also about its global significance. More and more new generations join the singer of Russia, comprehending the depth of his poetic world. The words of N. Tikhonov are fair: "Yesenin is eternal." And I want to finish with a line from the song of the Soviet singer Galina Nenasheva:
The spring wind sways the birch trees,
A cheerful drop is ringing,
As if reading Yesenin's poem
About the land he was in love with.
Yesenin, Sergei Alexandrovich, poet (October 3, 1895, the village of Konstantinovo, Ryazan province - 12/28/1925 Leningrad) (see his biography). Born into a peasant family, he grew up in the house of his grandfather, an Old Believer, in religious strictness. In 1912-15 he studied at the People's University of A. L. Shanyavsky in Moscow and worked as a proofreader.
In 1914, Yesenin's first poems appeared in magazines. In 1915, in Petrograd, Yesenin met with Blok and entered the local literary circles. block and Gorodetsky oriented him towards rapprochement with peasant poets, especially with N. Klyuev. The first collection of poems by Yesenin Radunitsa(1916) was received positively.
Sergei Yesenin in newsreels, 1918, 1921, Living voice of a Russian poet
In 1917, Yesenin was close to the left-wing socialist revolutionaries (Socialist-Revolutionaries). He welcomed the October Revolution from the point of view of spiritual uplift, full of messianic expectations, which were portrayed in the image of a peasant paradise. In 1919, during the Civil War, Yesenin moved to Moscow and joined the Imagist literary group. From time to time he indulged in revelry in the company of drunkards, prostitutes and drug addicts.
The meeting with the American dancer Isadora Duncan led to an unsuccessful marriage, scandals that were widely covered by the world press while Yesenin was abroad (May 1922 - August 1923). Yesenin was in despair, from which he could not be brought out by a temporary return to his native village (1924), as well as attempts to somehow adapt to communist reality. In December 1925 he was found dead in a hotel room in Leningrad. According to the official version, Sergei committed suicide, but there is a lot of evidence that he was killed on the orders of the authorities, dissatisfied with his latest anti-Soviet poem Country of villains.
During his lifetime, Yesenin was one of the most popular poets, but later party criticism consistently deleted him from Soviet literature. "Yeseninshchina" has become a negative concept. Only since 1955 his works began to be widely published again in the USSR.
Yesenin's innate lyrical talent, which manifested itself in the melancholy chanting of the old Russian village with its meadows, clouds, huts (for example, in a poem Russia) and combined with religious imagery, developed through various symbolist influences (Blok, Bely), but was strong enough to always remain himself. His early poems, which arose upon returning to the village after the first meeting with the city, include simple, very emotional ballads about animals, for example, Song of the dog(1915). WITH early years he also gives heartfelt samples of love lyrics (for example, Do not wander, do not crush in the crimson bushes ...).
Yesenin, like Blok and Bely, revolutionary events appear in connection with the ideas of Christianity, moreover, the religious element, manifested in the system of images, or, for example, in a poem Comrade in the description of Christ, has a dual character, up to blasphemy.
In a poem Inonia(1918), reminiscent of Chagall's paintings in its figurative language, Yesenin paints the peasant paradise he so desired, free from the enslaving influence of urban civilization. In search of revolutionary content, he turned to Russian history and created a lyrical drama Pugachev(1921), where linguistic eccentricity makes it very difficult to understand the allegories used by the poet.
Secrets of the Century - Sergei Yesenin. Night in Angleterre
Yesenin was by nature predisposed to melancholy; it was intensified by the disappointment from the process of urbanization and proletarianization taking place around, which were detrimental to the peasantry. Escape from reality into a wild life led to a different theme of his poems, written since 1920 and published in two collections - Confessions of a bully(1921) and Moscow tavern(1924). Yesenin feels that he, as a poet, has no place in Soviet Russia; the despair associated with this permeates his confessional lyrics.
In the last two years of his life, Yesenin's poetry, often narrative, rich in colors, sounds and unusual phrases, becomes more and more clear and simple. The discord that ruined his life and led him to a tragic end was deeply understood by thousands of young people who, like the poet, lost their roots and fell into the maelstrom of this flood: in verses full of confusion and loss, they saw own life heard their own complaints.
