Sergei Yesenin

when i was a child you could buy a portrait of Sergei Yesenin not just in bookstores, but all over town. It was a famous photograph of the poet with a pipe in his mouth, a contemplative look in his eyes, and magnificent curls. The photograph had been reproduced on some soft, synthetic material and given a glossy finish. It came equipped with a table-top backing so that it could stand in a place of prominence in the home, perhaps in the china cabinet among porcelain elephants.

This portrait with its interesting design absolutely captivated me and I repeatedly begged my parents to buy one. Their refusals hid a poorly concealed disgust. It took a few years before I was able to appreciate how revolting the triumphant banality of this glossy little portrait was.

Beginning in the 1960s, a cult of Yesenin literally swept the country. It was the second edition of his work that was causing all the uproar. The first edition had come out during the 1920s, when the young heartthrob with the wavy, golden locks was on everyone’s lips. Some liked his early, semi-pagan verse, others reveled in the rumors about his wives and lovers, his endless drunken brawls, and his trips across Europe and America with his best-known wife – the American dancer Isadora Duncan. The Soviet authorities enthusiastically welcomed Yesenin’s later “pro-Soviet” verse and turned a blind eye to his earlier anti-Bolshevik pronouncements. They needed someone from the countryside in their camp.

There were a number of stereotypical images of Yesenin, one more primitive and vulgar than the next. Valentin Katayev, in his autobiographical story My Diamond Crown, christened Yesenin a prince, offering the following description of their first meeting:

How little he resembled, at first glance, the young peasant poet, the natural, whose image had long since taken shape in my imagination when I read his poetry: the Nesterovesque¹ youth, almost a boy, a novice, amidst a forest of slender young birch trees treading with a light foot and a knapsack on his back through the secluded wilds of the hermits’ refuge…Or the devil-may-care country boy with an accordion over his shoulder. Or even Vanka the Key Keeper,² the angry rival from the cover of an old-fashioned picture book. In other words, whatever images I may have had, none of them matched what I saw: a young man, I would even say a gentleman, dressed in the latest Parisian fashion, a pale gabardine suit, the jacket with a tailored waist and the pants with a well-ironed pleat, new shoes of foreign manufacture, everything brand new, although his new felt hat with a broad moire ribbon was not indented at the crown and sat neatly on his head with the top sticking out like a little pot. Out from under that Parisian hat peered the face of a Russian cherub with rosy cheeks and blue eyes as gentle as a maiden’s, yet in it I noticed a dangerous impishness, a certain wariness: it was as if he was trying to figure out where I stood in regard to him – enemy or friend? How was he supposed to behave with me? A typical Russian peasant trait.

The literary critic Vladislav Khodasevich, who included a sketch of Yesenin in his memoirs, Necropolis, believed that, throughout his life, Yesenin repeatedly fell under the sway of people who in many ways defined and sometimes distorted his poetry. When he first arrived in St. Petersburg from the countryside, he fell in with a group that called itself the “peasant poets,” dressed like costume-party country bumpkins and played the balalaika. Later he started associating with socialist revolutionaries, and then, after the revolution, tried to join Bolshevik circles. He was always seeking the outer limit, and in many ways that was what doomed him.

“He kept bad company,” Khodasevich recalled of the Yesenin of 1918, “mainly young people close to the left socialist revolutionaries and Bolsheviks, rather ignorant, but people who felt decisively that they were ready to reorganize the world. There was endless philosophizing, always in an extremist spirit. These people were living large. They did not eat much, but they drank a lot. It was hard to tell if they were passionate believers or passionate blasphemers. They would go to prostitutes to preach revolution – and beat them.” It was during this period that Yesenin supposedly offered to show a woman he was interested in how the secret police carried out their executions (he had a lot of friends in the Cheka).

Every generation has its idols. Akhmatova called Alexander Blok “the tragic tenor of the epoch.” In some sense Yesenin was also a tenor, a notorious lover of hysterical women who sometimes paid no attention to his poetry, looking only at his golden curls and his restaurant revelry. Yesenin’s suicide, alas, just served to reinforce the vulgar romantic image.

By the 1930s the poet was essentially banned. He was not studied in schools, there were no new editions of his works, and if he was mentioned at all, it was critically. On the other hand, there was no one who had not heard of him. This was when he began to be wildly popular among criminals. Varlam Shalamov, who loved Yesenin but hated thugs as only those who have spent many years in labor camps can, had a keen sense of the many features linking Yesenin’s poetry with the criminal underworld – the reckless cruelty, the lamentations over his own ruined life, love for his mother combined with scorn for all other women. In the camps, a new image of Yesenin was forged, and as millions of criminals returned to freedom, they spread it throughout the country.

After Stalin’s death, when Yesenin was again “permitted,” proclaimed a classic, and taught in schools, his image took on a strange duality that blended Yesenin the “tenor” – the seductive voice of love and tenderness – with Yesenin the thug. Whenever people gathered to recite poetry someone was sure to read “Ты жива еще, моя старушка” (“You are still alive my old woman”) and sing “Клен ты мой опавший” (“My fallen maple”).

Yesenin’s native village of Konstantinovo, near Ryazan, became a place of pilgrimage for school groups, lonely women, and intellectuals seeking the “real Rus.” Among these intellectuals (or rather pseudo-intellectuals, of the same sort that surrounded Yesenin before the revolution and believed that Russia could only be understood with the help of vodka, blackened boots, birch trees, and hatred for “the other”) there arose ludicrous theories that Yesenin had not committed suicide, but was killed.

Until the 1970s, this idea had not occurred to anyone and absolutely nobody proposed such theories in the 1920s, although there were debates over why Yesenin committed suicide. Did he take his life under the influence of drunkenness and delirium tremens, or because he truly despaired having lost his connection with village life and never felt at home in the city? Or perhaps he wanted to believe in the Bolsheviks yet could not ignore the horrors they were perpetrating.

What started as whispers in the seventies began to be openly discussed and written about in the nineties: the idea that Yesenin was killed by Chekists, every last one of whom, on top of everything else, turn out to be a Jew. Recently, in 2005, the entire country was glued to its television screens, gushing tears over a made-for-television treatment of Yesenin’s life, where the poet was played by Sergei Bezrukov, best known for his role as a criminal kingpin in the popular Brigade series. Here, we saw Yesenin done in by hook-nosed commissars. Suddenly, the hare-brained fantasy of a handful of chauvinists had been accepted as fact.

Poor, poor Sergei Alexandrovich. He was not a bad poet, perhaps even first-rate, and we have turned him into a whole series of images – the golden-haired peasant son, the debaucher, the drunk, the hellbender, the friend of thieves, the innocent victim of a Jewish conspiracy.

Whatever happened to the poet? He has been almost entirely lost in the shuffle, hidden beneath the gloss.

1. Mikhail Nesterov (1862–1942) was a religious symbolist painter best known for his work,
The Vision of Young Bartholomew (fragment inset, right). 

2. Ванька-ключник, a character from a Russian epic who seduces the wife of his lord and is hung.