blood:
The appeal of Esenin’s tender, crooning poems (he wrote mostly of love, nature, and animals) was greatly enhanced by his tragic fate. This made him the most universally popular twentieth-century poet in Russia. Still, the Esenin phenomenon remained local, and even in Russia some connoisseurs (for example, Akhmatova) regarded his poetry skeptically.
Prince Dmitri Svyatopolk-Mirsky (perhaps the finest Russian literary critic of the twentieth century, writing as D. S. Mirsky in English after he emigrated), while noting in 1926 that Esenin “had many bad poems and almost no perfect ones,”14 nevertheless lauded his poetry’s special charm and touching appeal and also his specifically national longing, for which unsophisticated (but also many quite sophisticated) readers in Russia still adore Esenin.
Foreigners who wish to peek into the soul of eternal Mother Russia must read Esenin in the original, since the translations fail to convey his essential Russianness. For all the seeming simplicity of his most famous poems, some of which have become folk songs, Esenin remains a mysterious figure. His political, aesthetic, and religious views form a tangle of unresolved contradictions.
One can find statements by Esenin for and against the old Russia, the Soviet regime, the Bolsheviks, the West, and America. He has poems that are tender, misogynistic, sad, brutish, imbued with religious feeling, and blasphemous. His admirers included the last Russian empress, Maria Fedorovna, and the militant Bolshevik Trotsky. The empress told Esenin that his poetry was “beautiful but very sad.” Esenin replied that so was all of Russia.15
Gorky recalled the first time he saw Esenin in Petrograd in 1915: “Curly-haired and blond, in a light blue shirt, a long coat with a fitted waist and soft boots that gathered at the ankles, he was very much like a saccharine postcard.”16 Ten years later Esenin looked very different: the blond hair had faded, his heavy drinking muddied his once bright blue eyes, and the angelic face had turned ashen gray. He had had countless brief affairs and three notorious marriages.
His first wife was Zinaida Raikh, who later married Meyerhold and was brutally murdered in her apartment in 1939, soon after the director’s arrest; the murder—there were seventeen knife wounds in her body—was never solved. His second wife was a granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy, and the third, the great American dancer Isadora Duncan, who came in 1921 to revolutionary Moscow to start a school of “free dance.” Duncan was eighteen years older than Esenin and obviously madly in love with him, always cuddling up to him in public, which embarrassed the poet. He would curse at her and even hit her, but nevertheless, he was proud of his marriage.
Esenin traveled through Europe with Duncan and even came to the United States. Upon his return in 1923, Esenin, deeply offended by the Americans’ total lack of interest in his poetry, wrote: “The supremacy of the dollar has destroyed any striving in them for complicated issues. The American is totally involved in
But the achievements in “art of manufacture,” as Esenin called it—the Brooklyn Bridge, the neon lights on Broadway, the radio broadcasting Tchaikovsky—made a strong impression on him (as it had on Mayakovsky, who first came to the United States in 1925): “When you see or hear all that, you are amazed by the possibilities of mankind and you are ashamed that back in Russia people still believe in an old man with a beard and pray for his mercy.”18 In 1923, electricity was more important than God for Esenin. In that respect, at that moment he was closer to Chekhov and Gorky than to Leo Tolstoy.
Esenin’s death in 1925 stunned Russia; a wave of copycat suicides swept the country. The Communists were worried. Their culture arbiter Bukharin was not thrilled by Esenin: “Ideologically Esenin represents the most negative traits of the Russian countryside and the so-called national character: brawls, an enormous inner lack of discipline, and an idolization of the most backward form of social life.”19
But the poet’s undisputed popularity made Bukharin panicky: “How does Esenin capture the youth? Why are there ‘Esenin’s widows’ clubs among the young people? Why do Young Communist League members often have a copy of Esenin’s poems under their
As to be expected, the Soviet state fought Esenin’s influence, which they called Eseninism, with repressive measures: lovers of Esenin’s poetry were expelled from college and the Komsomol and in the years before World War II and even later, you could get a sentence in the prison camps for having and distributing handwritten copies of Esenin’s “hooligan” works.
The Soviets “purged” the circle of Esenin’s friends; one of the poet’s mentors, the “Scythian” Ivanov-Razumnik, was first banned from publication and then arrested. He survived purely by accident. Ivanov-Razumnik, citing a private conversation with Esenin in 1924, explained that the poet’s suicide was “the result of his inability to write and breathe in the oppressive atmosphere of the Soviet paradise.”20
The other New Peasant poets, close comrades- in-arms of Esenin, suffered a dramatic fate as well. Stalin’s antipeasant policy was detailed in 1929 (the year he declared The Great Watershed), soon after the national celebrations of his fiftieth birthday, which cemented the cult of personality of the new Soviet leader.
Stalin announced the end of NEP and the start of the first industrial Five-Year Plan, with mass collectivization of agriculture. The millions of peasants who refused to join
It was obvious which path was chosen; a violent change was imposed on the Russian peasantry—in the words of Solzhenitsyn, “an ethnic catastrophe.” Stalin’s “liquidation of kulaks as a class” brought indescribable suffering and led to a famine. The ruthless policy also destroyed the cultural ideologues of the peasantry, the poets Nikolai Klyuev, Sergei Klychkov, Petr Oreshin, and their younger follower, the talented Pavel Vasilyev, who was touted as the new Esenin. Charged with “counterrevolutionary” sympathy for kulaks, they all perished.
In the declassified transcripts of Klyuev’s interrogation after his arrest in February 1934, the poet describes collectivization as “the state’s violence against the people, spurting blood and fiery pain…. I regard collectivization with mystical horror, as an invasion of demons.”22 Klyuev also declared stubbornly: “My opinion is that the October revolution sent the country into a vale of suffering and disasters and made it the most miserable in the world, and I expressed that in my poem, ‘There are demons of plague, leprosy, and cholera.’”23
Many literati (including Akhmatova and Joseph Brodsky) considered Klyuev a better poet than Esenin. Like him,
