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/ Biographies / Yesenin S. A.
Yesenin S. A.
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YESENIN, SERGEY ALEXANDROVICH Russian poet, (1895-1925).
Sergey 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 left for her parents.
Then she went to work in Ryazan, and Yesenin was left in the care of his grandparents, a connoisseur of church books.
Yesenin's grandmother knew a lot of songs, fairy tales and ditties, and, according to the poet himself, it was she who gave the "pushes" to write his first poems.
In 1904, Yesenin was sent to study at the Konstantinovsky Zemstvo School, and then to the church teacher's school in the town of Spas Klepiki.
In 1910-1912 Yesenin wrote quite a lot, and among the poems of these years there are already quite established, perfect ones.
The first collection of Yesenin Radunitsa was published in 1916.
The song stock of the poems included in the book, their artlessly sincere intonations, the melody referring 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 a day of commemoration of the deceased; on the other hand, this word is associated with a cycle of spring folk songs, which have long been called radovitsky or Radonitsky vesnyanki.
In fact, one thing does not contradict the other, at least in Yesenin's poems, the distinctive feature of which is a secret sadness and aching pity for everything living, beautiful, doomed to disappear: Be you forever blessed that it has come to proclaim and die…
The poetic language already in the poet's early poems is peculiar and subtle, metaphors are sometimes unexpectedly expressive, and the person (the author) feels, perceives nature alive, spiritualized (Where cabbage beds.., Imitation of a song, The scarlet light of dawn was woven on the lake..., the flood licked the mud with smoke..., Tanyusha was good, there was no more beautiful in the village...).
After graduating from the Spaso Klepikov 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 of those years as follows: "He was in a decadent mood – he was a poet, no one wants to understand this, the editorial offices do not accept the press, his father scolds that he is not engaged in business, he needs to work...
He was reputed to be an advanced, attended meetings, distributed illegal literature.
He attacked books, read all his free time, spent all his salary on books, magazines, did not think at all how to live...".
In December 1914, Yesenin quits his job and, according to the same Izryadnova, " gives himself up entirely to poetry.
He writes all day long.
In January, his poems are published in the newspaper "Nov", "Parus","Zarya"...".
The mention of the distribution of illegal literature is connected with the participation of Yesenin in the literary and musical circle of the peasant poet I. Surikov – a very motley collection, both aesthetically and politically (its members were both social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Bolshevik minded workers).
The poet also goes to the classes of the People's University of Shanyavsky – the first educational institution in the country that could be visited free of charge by free listeners.
There Yesenin receives the basics of humanitarian education – he listens to lectures on Western European literature, about Russian writers.
Meanwhile, Yesenin's verse is becoming more confident, more original, and sometimes civil motives begin to occupy it (The Blacksmith, Belgium, etc.).
And the poems of those years Marfa Posadnitsa, Us, the Song about Yevpatiya Kolovrat are both stylization for ancient speech, and an appeal to the sources 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, / I am glad and happy to take out my soul.
/ I have come to this land / To leave it as soon as possible.
(1914).
It is known that in 1916, in Tsarskoye Selo, Yesenin visited N. Gumilev and A. Akhmatova and read 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 tight 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 village handkerchief.
The note was preserved with the Block's note: "The 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 in combination with the" burning "images of the soul, the touching spontaneity of the" village boy", as well as the abundance of words from the dialect and the Old Russian language had a fascinating effect on many leaders of literary fashion.
Some saw in Yesenin a simple young man from the village, who by a stroke of fate was endowed with a remarkable poetic gift.
Others – for example, Merezhkovsky and Gippius, were ready to consider him the bearer of the mystical folk Orthodoxy, which, in their opinion, is saving for Russia, a man from the ancient sunken "City of Kitezh", emphasizing and cultivating religious motives in his poems in every possible way (Jesus the baby.., Scarlet darkness in the heavenly blackness.., Clouds from the sky / 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 the Old Believers ' peasants.
Together with him, Yesenin performs in salons under the accordion, dressed in morocco boots, a blue silk shirt, girded with a gold cord.
The two poets really had a lot in common – a longing for the patriarchal village way of life, a passion for folklore, antiquity.
But at the same time, Klyuev always consciously fenced himself off from the modern world, and the restless, aspiring to the future Yesenin was irritated by the feigned humility and deliberately moralizing unctuousness of his "friend of the enemy".
It is no coincidence that a few years later, Yesenin advised in a letter to a poet: "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 " further and further.
In the midst of the 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 sanitary hospital, reads his poems in front of the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, in front of the Empress.
What causes complaints from their St. Petersburg literary patrons.
In that "deaf smoke of the fire", about which A. Akhmatova wrote, all values, both human and political, were mixed up, and the "coming boor" (the expression of D. Merezhkovsky) outraged no less than reverence for the reigning personages…
At first, in the turbulent revolutionary events, Yesenin saw the hope for a speedy and profound transformation of his entire former life.
It seemed that the transformed earth and sky called out to the country and man, and Yesenin wrote: O Rus, flap your wings, / Put a different support!
/ With other times / Another steppe rises... (1917).
Yesenin is overwhelmed with hopes for building a new, peasant paradise on earth, a different, just life.
At this time, the Christian worldview is intertwined in his poems with God fighting and pantheistic motives, with admiring exclamations 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 small poems: the Transfiguration, the Father, the Octoechos, Ionia.
Many lines from them, which sometimes sounded defiantly scandalous, shocked contemporaries: I will lick the Faces of martyrs and saints on the icons with my tongue.
I promise you the city of Inonia, Where the deity of the living lives.
No less famous were the lines from the poem Transfiguration: The Oblaks are barking, the golden toothed high is roaring…
During the same revolutionary years, during the times of devastation, famine and terror, Yesenin reflects on the origins of imaginative thinking, which he sees in folklore, in ancient Russian art, in the "nodal ovary of nature with the essence of man", in folk art.
He expounds these thoughts in the article Keys of Mary, in which he expresses the 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 sloppy, but still the keeper of this secret was a village half broken by latrines and factories."
Very soon Yesenin realizes that the Bolsheviks are not at all who they would like to pretend to be.
According to S. Makovsky, an art critic and publisher, Yesenin " understood, or rather, felt it with his peasant heart, with his pity: that there was not a "great bloodless", 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.
The peasant life is being destroyed, famine and devastation are marching through the country, and a very diverse literary and near literary public is coming to replace the regulars of the former literary salons, many of whom have already emigrated.
In 1919, Yesenin was one of the organizers and leaders of a new literary group – the imagists.
Their slogans, it would seem, are completely alien to Yesenin's poetry, his views on the nature of poetic creativity.
What are the words from the Declaration of Imagism worth, for example:"Art built on content... should have perished from hysteria."
Yesenin's imagism attracted close attention to the artistic image, a significant role in his participation in the group was played by the general domestic disorder, attempts to share the hardships of the revolutionary time together.
A painful sense of duality, the inability to live and create, being torn away from the folk peasant roots, coupled with the disappointment of finding a "new city – Inonia" give Yesenin's lyrics tragic moods.
The leaves in his poems are already whispering "in autumn", they are whistling all over the country, like Autumn, A charlatan, a murderer and a villain, and only death Closes the enlightened minds…
I am the last poet of the village Yesenin writes in a poem (1920) dedicated to his friend the writer Marienhof.
Yesenin saw that the former village life was disappearing into oblivion, it seemed to him that a mechanized, dead life was replacing the living, natural life.
In one of the letters of 1920, he admitted: "I am very sad now that history is going through a difficult era of the mortification of the individual as a living person, because there is absolutely not the socialism that I thought about…
It is cramped for a living person who is building a bridge to the invisible world, because these bridges are being cut and blown up from under the feet of future generations."
At the same time, Yesenin is working on the poems Pugachev and Nomakh.
He had been interested in the figure of Pugachev for several years, collected materials, and dreamed of a theatrical production.
The surname Nomakh is formed from the name of Makhno, the leader of the Rebel Army during the Civil War.
Both images are related by the motif of rebellion, a rebellious spirit, characteristic of folklore robbers truth seekers.
In the poems, there is a clear protest against the modern reality of Yesenin, in which he did not see even a hint of justice.
So the" country of scoundrels " for Nomakh is the land in which he lives, and in general any state where ...if it is criminal to be a bandit here, / Then it is no more criminal than being a king…
In the autumn of 1921, the famous dancer Isadora Duncan arrived in Moscow, with whom Yesenin soon married.
The spouses go abroad, to Europe, then to the United States.
At first, European impressions lead Yesenin to the idea that he " fell out of love with poor 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 is already drinking heavily, often falling into a rampage, and in his poems there are more and more motifs of hopeless loneliness, drunken revelry, hooliganism and ruined life, which are partly related to some of his poems with the genre of urban romance.
It is not for nothing that even in Berlin Yesenin writes his first poems from the Moscow Kabatskaya cycle: They drink here again, fight and cry / To the harmonica yellow sadness…
The marriage with Duncan soon broke up, and Yesenin found himself back in Moscow, not finding a place for himself in the new Bolshevik Russia.
According to contemporaries, when he fell into binge drinking, he could terribly "cover" the Soviet government.
But they did not touch him and, after keeping him in the police for some time, they soon released him – by that time Yesenin was famous in society as a folk, "peasant" poet.
Despite his 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 leaving, Russia homeless, Return to the Homeland, A letter to his mother (Are you still alive, my old lady?..), We are now leaving little by little to that country where there is peace and grace…
And, finally,the poem was dissuaded by the golden grove, which combines both a truly folk song element, and the skill of a mature, much experienced poet, a painful, pure simplicity, for which people who were far from "elegant literature" loved him so much: The golden grove dissuaded him with a Birch, cheerful language, And the cranes, sadly flying, no longer regret anyone.
Who should I feel sorry for?
And, finally,the poem was dissuaded by the golden grove, which combines both the truly folk song element, and the skill of a mature, much experienced poet, and the aching, pure simplicity for which people who were far from "elegant literature" loved him so much: The golden grove dissuaded him with a Birch, cheerful language, And the cranes, sadly flying, no longer regret anyone.
Who should I feel sorry for?
After all, everyone in the world is a wanderer He will pass, come in and leave home again.
A linnet With a wide moon over a blue pond dreams of all the departed…
In 1925, Yesenin wrote the poem The Black Man terrible in his bitterness, despair, rejection of his own fate and the country in which he lived: ...
This man lived in the country of the most disgusting thugs and charlatans.
At the end of December 1925, Yesenin arrived from Moscow to Leningrad.
On December 27, he writes his last, dying poem with his own blood: Goodbye, my friend, goodbye, / My dear, you are in my chest...
It's not new to die in this life, / But life, of course, is not new.
And on the night of December 27-28, according to the poet V. Khodasevich, "he wrapped around his neck... a rope from a suitcase taken out of Europe, knocked out a stool from under his feet and hung facing the blue night, looking at St. Isaac's Square."
The posthumous fate of Yesenin's works in Soviet Russia is largely connected with the Bolshevik ideology.
A particularly noticeable role in the humiliation and practically prohibition of the poet's works was played by the Evil notes of N. Bukharin, where, in particular, he wrote: "Ideologically, Yesenin represents the most negative features of the Russian village, the so called "national character": bruising, the greatest internal indiscipline, the deification of the most backward forms of social life ...".
Until the mid 1950s, Yesenin was rarely published.
Many of his works were distributed in lists, passed around, songs were created based on Yesenin's poems, which were dearly loved and well known in the widest strata of society.
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