The beginning of the 20th century in Russian literature was marked by the emergence of a whole galaxy of various movements, trends, and poetic schools. The most outstanding movements that left a significant mark in the history of literature were symbolism (V. Bryusov, K. Balmont, A. Bely), acmeism (A. Akhmatova, N. Gumilyov, O. Mandelstam), futurism (I. Severyanin, V. Mayakovsky , D. Burliuk), imagism (Kusikov, Shershenevich, Mariengof). The work of these poets is rightly called the lyricism of the Silver Age, that is, the second most important period of the heyday of Russian poetry. However, along with the above authors, the history of art of that time also included others who did not belong to any particular school, original and bright poets, and first of all, Sergei Yesenin, whose work stands apart in the motley and diverse world of poetry at the beginning of the century.

The complex and interesting fate of the poet, many travels, changes in places and lifestyles, combined with a creative approach to understanding reality, determined the richness and variety of themes and motifs in Yesenin’s lyrics. His childhood and youth were spent in the village of Konstantinovo, on the banks of the Oka, in a peasant family; The main theme of Yesenin’s early lyrics “naturally becomes the description of nature, native paintings, landscapes imbued with warmth, close from childhood, acquaintances, loved ones. At the same time, the poet personifies many natural phenomena, sees in them a living, intelligent principle, attributes the qualities of animals to plants:

"Where the cabbage beds are

The sunrise pours red water,

Little maple baby to the uterus

The green udder sucks."

Such imagery, the brightness of metaphors and comparisons will be characteristic of Yesenin’s subsequent work, but in the early lyrics it has a fresh, joyful, innovative character, which gives the poems a special touching and expressiveness. For the poet, native nature is an eternal source of admiration and inspiration; the description of the simplest and most everyday scenes in his perception becomes magical, fabulous, alluring (“Birch”, “Powder”). Just as touching as he treats landscapes in general, Yesenin treats each specific element of his native life, be it a tree branch looking through the window, household utensils or even an animal: many of Yesenin’s poems are dedicated specifically to animals (“Cow,” “Fox,” “ Son of a bitch"). The poet’s youthful perception of life is bright, joyful; in the early poems the theme of love also appears (“The scarlet color of dawn was woven on the lake...”), perceived with the same cheerfulness and freshness. Love for Yesenin in this period is some kind of romantic, fragile state of mind, his beloved is not a girl, but a vision, a symbol: the lyrical hero describes mainly not her, but his feelings and experiences, and in a youthfully romantic and touching way :

“...With a sheaf of your oat hair

You belong to me forever."

It is characteristic that love and nature in Yesenin’s early lyrics are interconnected and inseparable. All the variety of motives for describing nature (landscape sketches, poems about animals, everyday scenes) develops into one, global theme that is important for understanding all of Yesenin’s lyrics - the theme of the Motherland; One of the first in the poet’s understanding of it was the poem “Go you, my dear Rus'.” The poet confesses his love to his Motherland and actually puts it above paradise, above heavenly life:

“If the holy army shouts:

Toss Rus', live in paradise!”

I will say: “There is no need for heaven,

Give me my homeland."

Religious and Christian motifs appear in the poem, mainly associated with church paraphernalia. (“The huts are in the vestments of the image”, “Your meek Savior smells of apple and honey in the churches.”) The poet imagines Rus' as only Christian, this motif is developed in the poem “The hewn horns began to sing” (1916):

"And to the limestone of the bell towers

The hand involuntarily crosses itself.

In the same poem, the poet uses characteristic color painting:

About Rus' - raspberry field

And the blue that fell into the river..."

When describing his native village, Yesenin usually uses blue, blue, green colors (the poet himself said: “...Russia! Dew and strength and something blue...”).

Moving to Moscow, a scandalous life, somewhat feigned behavior, and shocking behavior determined the divergence and duality of Yesenin’s themes: on the one hand, it was the shocking lyrics (“I purposely walk unkempt...”), on the other, memories of his native village and life in it as about the brightest period. The theme of the Motherland is developed in the poems “Letter to Mother”, “Soviet Rus'”, “Leaving Rus'”, “Return to the Motherland”. The poet perceives the revolutionary transformations that took place in the village with a degree of tragedy; after all, bygone times are irrevocable, and so is a bright, carefree life; Yesenin feels the loss of connection with his native land, where now “Poor Demyan’s agitations are sung”:

“The language of my fellow citizens has become like a foreign language to me,

I’m like a foreigner in my own country.”

The people do not perceive Yesenin as a poet, but Yesenin calls himself “the last poet of the village.” The author enhances the feeling of tragedy with direct comparisons emphasizing the change in ideals:

« Sunday villagers

They gathered at the volost, as if they were going to church...

(“Soviet Rus'”) »

“And now my sister is divorcing me,

Having opened the pot-bellied “Capital” like the Bible...

("Homecoming") "

Love is one of the necessary conditions for human happiness, and a person’s understanding of the essence of happiness usually changes with age, as well as the understanding of love. In his early poems, Yesenin describes happiness as the state of the soul of a person who sees his home, his beloved girl and mother:

"Here it is, stupid happiness

With white windows to the garden!

Along the pond as a red swan

A quiet sunset floats."

"...my quiet joy -

Loving everything, wishing for nothing.

(At the same time.) "

However, over time, the poet comes to a deeper, philosophical understanding of the essence of happiness and the meaning of human life. Philosophical motives appear in the lyrics. The poems of recent years reflect Yesenin’s thoughts about his life (probably the poet had a presentiment of his end): he does not regret the past times, accepts with philosophical calm and wisdom the fact that “We are all, all of us in this world are perishable.” Yesenin’s true masterpieces are the poems “The golden grove dissuaded...” and “I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry...”. Their meaning and main ideas are similar:

“The golden grove dissuaded

Birch, cheerful language..."

"Fades covered in gold,

I won't be young anymore."

The similarity even appears in the images; the poet feels that youth is irretrievably gone, there is no way to the past, and every person will someday leave this world, as he once came into it. Yesenin again conveys this harmonious, calm perception of life through images of nature, symbolic ones at that: “the grove” is the hero’s whole life, his fate; youth is always associated with blue or lilac flowers (“lilac blossoms of the soul”), old age with rowan berries, and all life is conveyed through figurative comparison:

“It’s like I’m in the echoing early morning

He rode on a pink horse. »

And the last, dying poem of the poet also belongs to philosophical lyrics; it, as it were, completes, puts an end to the end of a short but stormy creative journey:

“Dying is nothing new in this life,

But life, of course, is not newer. »

(“Goodbye, my friend, goodbye”)

Indeed, Yesenin lived a short but very bright life, tragic in many ways; For a long time, the poets who worked after the revolution faced difficult trials, first of all, the oppressive problem of choice, which was very difficult for many to solve. And Yesenin, who called himself “the last poet of the village,” found it extremely difficult to continue creating under conditions of censorship, surveillance, and mistrust. But even in such a short period of time, the poet managed to understand, comprehend and express so much in poetic form that the literary legacy left by him, multifaceted, combining many motifs, images, themes, ideas, remains a monument to the talent of the Russian peasant poet, “the last poet of the village”, Sergei Aleksandrovich Yesenin.

Yesenin's childhood and adolescence. Sources of impressions and their meaning in the poet’s lyrical work. The role of the church-teacher school in the formation of Yesenin’s worldview. First appearances in print. Analysis of Yesenin's early poems (1910-1914). Yesenin's letters to his school friend Grisha Panfilov. The poet's connections with the workers of the printing house "T-va I. D. Sytin", Surikov poets, professors and students of the People's University named after. A. L. Shanyavsky. Democratic tendencies in Yesenin’s early poetry.

1

The poetry of early Yesenin is heterogeneous and unequal. In it, sometimes completely opposite poetic traditions collide and the poet’s unequal social aspirations are clearly visible. Often in the past and not overcome in our time, attempts to pull this contradictory creativity to any one series of poems, to highlight one, albeit very sonorous, motive, one, even often repeated mood, have more than once led researchers to unacceptable extremes.

Taken as a whole, in all its glaring dissimilarity, Yesenin’s poetry with captivating emotional power, in many large and small shades, surprisingly truthfully reveals the socio-psychological world of which it could only have been the product.

In a strong fusion of sonorous, cheerful melodies, close to the Russian heart, and dazzlingly bright colors with the insipid, motionless and not alien to the peasant asceticism of religion, Yesenin’s poetry was born, and its roots were deeply rooted in the native and familiar element from childhood.

Like many during his apprenticeship, Yesenin did not escape sometimes close to him, and sometimes random, foreign influences. And yet, the motives of his lyrics invariably flourished on the same soil: now unbridled daring and serene joy, now meek humility, and now despondency and hopeless sadness.

Yesenin's poetry captured the peculiar syncretism of peasant psychology in its complex inconsistency: in childhood and in decrepitude, in infantile impulses into the foggy distance and in dead immobility, in constant glances at the centuries-old traditions of patriarchal antiquity.

This “ancient, mysterious world,” of course, was not closed in on itself; the trends of the revolutionary era freely and violently burst into it and, colliding with ancient concepts, struck sparks for future “fires and rebellions.”

Did the aspiring poet manage to catch the trends of the new time? Did he see the flashes of the already rising glow, did he hear the peals of thunder, or did he drown them out with annoying religious chants and the thick ringing of bells of “patriarchal Russia praying until it sweated”?

In Yesenin’s early poems there are many rich, bright pictures of his native nature, close to him from the cradle. Do they obscure the vibrant social life of the Russian village, or are the moods of the pre-revolutionary peasantry discernible in the multicolored poetry of Yesenin’s lyrics?

The range of these complex questions has attracted the attention of researchers for decades, and yet, complete and comprehensive answers to them have not yet been given.

In his early youth, Yesenin did not have to experience the beneficial influence of people who clearly distinguished the paths of social development. Therefore, the ideas of popular struggle, which inspired and inspired Russian literature, were not the source of his early lyrics, from which, for many reasons, some motifs characteristic of Russian literature of those years fell out. But as a poet, Yesenin had the gift of an amazingly subtle feeling and truthfully reproducing the world around him. All in the sounds of his native land, Yesenin caught and conveyed their temporary tonality in beautiful poems. His poetry “smells of life,” and these smells are intoxicating with the aroma of his native fields.

Fidelity to reality and closeness to the traditions of national oral poetry more than once helped the poet to overcome the vagueness and vagueness of his own ideals. But, weakened by the lack of a revolutionary orientation, Yesenin’s lyrics were inferior in this regard to the loud voices of the poets of “Star” and “Pravda” and especially the poetry of D. Bedny. But even when the poet experienced the alien influences of decadent literature that flourished in the salons of the northern capital, his poetry often opposed its disembodied, deadening pathos. Yesenin was not swallowed up by Klyuev’s condomism, the hypocritical monastic asceticism to which the Olonets guslar inclined him.

Yesenin came to literature with great talent and without specific social aspirations. What touches did the poetry of early Yesenin leave in the motley and complex picture of Russian literature of the pre-revolutionary era?

Yesenin's earliest poems were created based on childhood impressions and dated 1910. In subsequent years, the poet experienced various influences. In his poetry, however, the melodies of his native land sounded steadily, acquiring a more or less definite form of poetic expression. Therefore, it would be legitimate to single out the poet’s pre-revolutionary work in a special period with the designation early, marked by the publication of the first collection of poems “Radunitsa”, the lyrical suite “Rus”, the poem “Marfa Posadnitsa”, as well as the story “Yar” and the stories “By the White Water” , "Bobyl and Druzhok". During these same years, the poet created “The Legend of Evpatiy Kolovrat, of Khan Batu, the Three-Handed Flower, of the Black Idol and Our Savior Jesus Christ” and a book of poems “Dove”, published in 1918 *.

* (See S. Yesenin. Radunitsa. Pg., 1916; his own. Rus. "Northern Notes". Pg., 1915, No. 7, 8; his own. Marfa Posadnitsa. "The Cause of the People", April 9, 1917; his own. Yar. "Northern Notes", February - May 1916; his own. By the white water. "Exchange Gazette", morning. released August 21, 1916; his own. Bobyl and Druzhok. "Good Morning", 1917, No. 1; his own. The Legend of Evpatiy Kolovrat. "Voice of the working peasantry", June 23, 1918)

Yesenin is one of those few Russian poets whose childhood was deprived of the beneficial influence of high culture, did not breathe the stormy air of liberation ideas, and did not know heroic examples of revolutionary fortitude. The early years of the future poet were spent far from active social struggle, in the depths of which a new Russia was being born.

Growing up in the wilderness of Meshchera forests under the monotonous noise of pine and birch trees, under the quiet rustle of grasses and splashes of the “bosom waters,” Yesenin was not familiar with the music of the revolution, and in his first poems one does not hear the fighting melodies, to the accompaniment of which the twentieth century entered into life and revolutionary literature declared itself.

The poet spent his childhood in a family far from the trends of modern times. He was born on September 21 (October 3), 1895 and for the first 14 years he lived in his native village of Konstantinov, which even in the era of 1905 was not distinguished by the activity of revolutionary sentiments.

The son of a peasant, Yesenin did not experience the heavy burden of village life, which the Russian farmer bore for centuries under the sad songs of his fathers and grandfathers, accompanying him from cradle to grave. Unlike many of his peers, the poet did not know either the grueling peasant labor or its calloused poetry, and poverty and deprivation did not darken his childhood.

That is why Yesenin was not so close to the labor song of the plowman, which sounded loudly in the poetry of A. Koltsov and illuminated it with that infrequent joy that befell the peasant when Mother Earth, soaked in tears and sweat, rewarded him for hard labor.

It was not by chance that Yesenin excluded the work of N. Nekrasov from his genealogy, which he traced back to A. Koltsov *. Yesenin's early poetry does not contain high and clearly expressed Nekrasov ideological ideas, depth of depiction of people's life, or citizenship. In this it was also inferior to the poetry of A. Koltsov, I. Nikitin, and sometimes to the poetry of I. Surikov, which had a great influence on the poet.

* (See the poem by S. Yesenin. "Oh Rus', flap your wings...".)

Yesenin has many things in common with these poets, but in his early lyrics he failed to develop the strongest motives of their work. The share of the poor, which worried A. Koltsov, fell out of the poetry of S. Yesenin, which was not close to the long-term traditions of Russian labor song. And yet, the attractiveness of Yesenin’s poetry lies in its blood connection with the national life, everyday life, psychology and spiritual world of the Russian person.

And although the poet was excluded from the work activities of his fellow villagers, he knew their life and psychology well and received from them a deep, inexhaustible love for their Motherland, for the unfading beauty of its nature, and the legends of “deep antiquity.” These childhood impressions and affections, however, were invariably accompanied by other, no less vivid, but not so poetic and attractive impressions. In the early years of his life, the poet more than once witnessed senseless drunken carnage, for some reason covered in the romance of heroism and special village prowess, heard rude abuse, observed unjustified cruelty, and himself often came to his home “with a broken nose.”

Yesenin had a large stock of childhood impressions, but they were extremely contradictory. The “other world” was intricately woven into the poet’s fragile ideological consciousness, emerging from the frequent and skillful stories of pilgrims, as well as from church books, the meaning of which his grandfather persistently explained to his grandson. These unequal impressions of childhood, which formed the basis of the poet’s first poetic experiments, were the source of the contradictory heterogeneity of his early poetry, in which the sounds and colors of a full-blooded life shimmer loudly and dazzlingly brightly, or nasal monastic voices are heard.

Later, recalling his childhood, Yesenin invariably emphasizes the dissimilarity of his first impressions. “My first memories date back to the time when I was three or four years old. I remember a forest, a large ditch road. My grandmother goes to the Radovetsky Monastery, which is about 40 miles from us. I grabbed her stick, barely dragging my legs from fatigue, and my grandmother kept saying: “Go, go, little berry, God will give you happiness.” Often blind men, wandering through the villages, gathered at our house and sang spiritual poems about a beautiful paradise, about Lazar, about Mikol and about the groom, a bright guest from an unknown city. .. Grandfather sang me old, drawn-out, mournful songs. On Saturdays and Sundays, he told me the Bible and sacred history."

* (Sergey Yesenin. Autobiography, 1924. Collection. op. in five volumes, vol. 5, pp. 15-16. See also the autobiography “Sergei Yesenin”, 1922; "Autobiography", 1923; "About myself", 1925.)

The thick religious flavor of the life surrounding the boy was also created by the church, which raised its cross over the expanses of the Oka waters and grew into the loam of the right bank steep river right in front of the windows of the house where the poet was born. And nearby are the monasteries - Poshchupovsky, Solotchinsky, the cathedral in Ryazan, and in the surrounding villages there are many churches and little churches with their own altar services, monks and nuns, “saints”. Across the vast floodplain of the Oka, the brilliance of skyward Christian symbols - crosses - spread far away, and for centuries it hummed from the annoying bass of bells, calling into the divine bosom.

And next to this ghostly life, which persistently poisoned the boy’s consciousness, wonderful pictures of his native nature opened before his eyes. The village of Konstantinovo is located on a steep, steep bank of a spacious Russian river, which, freed from winter constraints, spills its hollow waters here for many kilometers. In summer, a fragrant carpet of endless meadows, dissected by many streams and rivulets, oxbow lakes and lakes, blooms in the floodplain. On the left side of the Oka stretches the mighty Meshchera forest, on the right - the endless steppe - Rus' "without end and without edge", about which songs and fairy tales were written.

And the poet heard a lot of songs and fairy tales in his childhood. “The nanny is an old woman who looked after me, told me fairy tales, all those fairy tales that all peasant children listen to and know.” * In his autobiographies, the poet sharply contrasts the religious influence of his grandfather and grandmother with what he calls “street” influence. “My street life was similar to that at home. My peers were mischievous guys. With them I climbed into other people’s gardens. I ran away for 2-3 days into the meadows and ate with the shepherds the fish that we caught in small lakes...” **.

* (Sergey Yesenin. Autobiography, 1924, vol. 5, pp. 15-16.)

** (Sergey Yesenin. Autobiography, 1924, vol. 5, p. 16.)

Religious ideas about heavenly paradise, divine gardens, and the asceticism of saints collided in the minds of the future poet with the tangible beauty of reality.

The poet inherited the duality of perception of the world from childhood from his fellow villagers and relatives, in whose spiritual atmosphere his first ideas about life were formed. The features of this naive worldview, which went back centuries, but was close to the Russian patriarchal peasant, Yesenin fully revealed later in his poetic treatise “The Keys of Mary”, as well as in a letter to R.V. Ivanov-Razumnik: “The poet must always expand his vision above in a word. After all, if we write in Russian, then we must know that before our images of double vision... there were images of double feeling: “Mary light the snow” and “play the gully”, “Avdotya moisten the threshold.” These are images of the calendar style , which our Great Russian created from that double life, when he experienced his days in two ways, churchly and everyday.

Mary is the church day of St. Mary, and “light up the snow” and “make the ravines play” is an everyday day, the day of snow melting, when streams gurgle in the ravine" *.

* (Unsent letter to R.V. Ivanov-Razumnik, 1921; V - 148, 149.)

Of course, such an understanding of the worldview and traditions of the poetic creativity of the peasantry arose in the poet at the time of his maturity, when he not only had rich experience in versification, but also acquired certain theoretical knowledge that allowed him to distinguish the principles of creating images of “double vision” and “double feeling.” And yet Yesenin expressed here what was close to him from childhood and was embodied already in the first book of poems, the poetics of which are also heterogeneous and reflect the influence of various poetic elements. Often these influences are fleeting, external. In such poems one can discern the poet’s transient, unstable mood, and they fall out of the poetic structure inherent in him already in the early period, which is based on folk image-making.

The poet's deep connection with folklore is not interrupted throughout his life, and it is not shaken by numerous literary influences. The forms of this connection are different and undergo complex evolution.

Proximity to the poetic traditions of peasant folklore is the most stable feature of the poetics of early Yesenin, which is in organic kinship with the range of themes that attracted the poet and the peculiarities of his worldview. The “literary lessons” of his grandfather and the Spas-Klepikovskaya school, which the poet graduated from in 1912, did not make any changes to the spiritual world that had developed in the rural community. It is not for nothing that, remembering school, the poet wrote: “The period of study did not leave any traces on me, except for a strong knowledge of the Church Slavonic language. This is all that I took away” (V - 16).

Of course, the closed church-teachers' school expanded the poet's range of knowledge, including literary ones. She, however, protected her students from the non-church pathos of the ideas of the twentieth, revolutionary century. Her task was to educate students in the spirit of patriarchal religious antiquity. Twice a day, the pupils listened to prayers and sermons, from whom they trained teachers close in spirit to the Orthodox Church.

And, of course, it was no coincidence that this school was located in a secluded place, far from major roads, in the very depths of the Meshchera forests, in a village surrounded by swamps and swamps that even daredevil hunters did not dare to cross. And when the future poet was allowed to see his parents, he made his way home in a roundabout way, where he was met and escorted by sometimes gloomy and silent, sometimes piously ringing towers of monasteries and churches. And along the way, a copper bass burst into the noise of the forests, the rustle of grass and the mysterious chorus of bird voices.

The poet, however, was more attracted to songs, fairy tales, and ditties that had long existed in his homeland, and, overcoming religious influences, he began his work by imitating folklore. “I started composing poems early. My grandmother gave me impetus. She told fairy tales. I didn’t like some fairy tales with bad endings, and I remade them in my own way. I started writing poems, imitating ditties. I had little faith in God. I didn’t like going to church,” - Yesenin writes in his autobiography (V - 11), contrasting the origins of his creativity with religious influences.

And although these words belonged to a mature poet, who was scolded by critics for his adherence to religion, he told the truth in them. And later, repeatedly returning to the origins of his poetry, trying to understand the true and deep influences, Yesenin will repeat these words many times: “Village ditties had an influence on my work at the very beginning” (V - 16). “The poems were accompanied by songs that I heard around me, and my father even composed them” (V - 23).

Folk psychology, the life of the Russian village, and the traditions of its poetic creativity had such a great influence on the future poet that they allowed him to resist persistent desires to introduce him to religion. Many of the poems he created after graduating from the church teaching school (before 1915) contain not only polemics with the church, but also a hostile, ironic attitude towards it, and this is the best evidence of the poet’s deep differences with the hopes that his grandfather and Ryazan bishop.

The poems of these years have a purely earthly, everyday perception of the world and there are no serious attempts in them to imitate the sacred commandments. Religious symbolism and biblical imagery, familiar to the poet from childhood, are absent in his poetry of 1910-1912, and by 1915 he created poems that affirm the beauty of earthly life and the charm of his native nature.

Perky and vociferous, these poems are opposed to monastic humility and meekness, in them a multi-colored and joyful world appears. Everything in it lives, breathes, develops, and this polyphonic movement alone is in conflict with the peace characteristic of the religious worldview. The poet notices the dew on the nettles, and hears the song of the nightingale, and across the river - the beater of the sleepy watchman. The Yesenin winter sings and hoots over the thicket of the shaggy forest, the blizzard spreads like a silk carpet, the blizzard knocks on the shutters with a mad roar and gets angrier, and the chilled and hungry sparrows dream of the beautiful spring under the snowy whirlwinds. The Yesenin dawn weaves a scarlet cloth on the lake, the bird cherry tree sprinkles snow, the lightning ungirds its belt in foamy streams * .

* (See the poems: “It’s already evening. Dew...”, “Winter is singing and calling...”, “The scarlet light of dawn is woven on the lake...”, “The bird cherry is pouring snow...”, “Dark night, I can’t sleep...", "The flood licked the mud with smoke...".

Note: the poem “Where the Cabbage Beds...”, dated by the poet in 1910, is not discussed here. This date should not be considered reliable: the quatrain was written no earlier than 1919. In its original version it was part of the poem "Hooligan".

Then you see how the maple without looking back comes out to the glass of the swamps. And the little maple tree sucks on the uterus' wooden udder.

In Yesenin’s youthful poems one can already hear the independent voice of the future great poet, passionately loving and keenly feeling his native nature in many, often subtle shades. The poetic image in them is simple, transparent, devoid of pretentiousness. The metaphor has not yet gained force, but its features are already noticeable. The lyrical feeling, however, is shallow, devoid of great experiences, and arises as a response to the sounds and overflows of nature.

The most commonly used means of expression are epithet, simple comparisons, and rarely metaphor. Each stanza usually contains a small picture that arises from direct observations and the desire to convey the sensations and experiences caused by them.

It's already evening. Dew Glistens on the nettles. I'm standing by the road, leaning against a willow tree. There's a big light from the moon right on our roof. Somewhere I hear the song of a nightingale in the distance. It's nice and warm, like by the stove in winter. And the birches stand like big candles. (I - 55)

A quiet, moonlit evening, the familiar sounds and colors of nature evoked feelings of joy in the poet, and the rays of the moon that fell on the tops of the birches lit them “like big candles,” and they made it feel warm, like in a home near the stove. By the way, the “big candles” in this poem are one of the typical cases of the poet’s frequent and most secular use of religious words.

Direct observations underlie another poem:

You fed the horse with handfuls of water on the reins, Reflecting, the birch trees broke in the pond. I looked from the window at the blue scarf, the black curls were ruffled by the breeze. In the flickering of foamy streams, I wanted to tear a kiss from your scarlet lips with pain. But with a sly smile, splashing on me, you rushed off at a gallop, jingling with your bits. In the yarn of sunny days, time has woven a thread... They carried you past the windows to bury you. And under the weeping of the requiem, under the incense canon, I kept imagining a quiet, uninhibited ringing. (I - 59)

From direct observations, the epithet (watchman) appears in these poems sleepy, forest shaggy, sparrows playful, ringing quiet relaxed, light of dawn scarlet, yearning cheerful, pine resinous, run undulating, jets foamy, forest green, dawn poppy, fur raspberry). And even if some of these epithets are not original, they are taken from everyday life, just like Yesenin’s first metaphors: “ winter is calling", "in the yarn of sunny days time has woven a thread", "the scarlet light of dawn woven on the lake", "the yellow reins dropped by the month" and etc.

It is important to note that in the poetic means of this series of poems there is no orientation towards biblical imagery. They are deprived of it as well as of religious motives and church ideas. Yesenin’s metaphors come from the deep traditions of folk poetry and are based on the likening of nature to ordinary everyday, everyday phenomena (time weaves a thread, the month drops its rays-reins, and itself, like a leisurely rider, moves across the night sky).

The specificity and clarity of the poetic vision is expressed by the most everyday everyday vocabulary; the dictionary is simple, it rarely uses bookish, much less abstract, words and expressions. This language was used by fellow villagers and fellow countrymen. Sometimes there are religious words that the poet uses to express his purely secular ideas.

In the poem “The Smoke Floods...” the haystacks are compared to churches, and the mournful singing of the wood grouse with a call to the all-night vigil.

And yet one cannot see the poet’s religiosity in this. He is far from her and paints a picture of his native land, forgotten and abandoned, flooded, cut off from the big world, left alone with the dull yellow moon, the dim light of which illuminates the haystacks, and they, like churches, surround the village at the spinning mills. But unlike churches, the haystacks are silent, and for them the wood grouse, with mournful and sad singing, calls for an all-night vigil in the silence of the swamps.

The grove is still visible, which “covers the bareness with blue darkness.” That’s all the low-key, joyless picture created by the poet, all that he saw in his native land, flooded and covered with blue darkness, devoid of the joy of people.

And this motive of regret about the poverty and deprivation of his native land will pass through the early work of the poet, and the ways of expressing this deeply social motive in pictures of nature, seemingly neutral to the social aspects of life, will be increasingly improved.

In the poem "Kaliki" Yesenin expressed his attitude towards religion in a sharp, ironic form. He calls the wandering saints, “who worship the Most Pure Savior” and sing poems “about the sweetest Jesus,” buffoons, putting a negative meaning in this word. Their song about Christ is listened to by nags and echoed by loud-voiced geese. And the wretched saints hobble past the cows and tell them their “suffering speeches,” at which the shepherdesses laugh.

No, this is not mischief, as one famous critic put it, referring to the poem “Kaliki,” but a clear hostility towards the ministers of the cult and a denial of those commandments that the Spas-Klepikovsky clergy strenuously hammered into their disciples.

In the poems “Imitation of a Song”, “Under the wreath of forest daisies...”, “Tanyusha was good...”, “Play, play, little Talyanochka...”, “Mother walked through the forest in a swimsuit...” the gravitation is especially noticeable poet to the form and motives of oral folk art. Therefore, they contain a lot of traditional folklore expressions like: " feverish separation", How " treacherous mother-in-law", "I'll fall in love, I'll take a look", V " dark tower", braid - " snake killer", "blue-eyed guy".

Folklore methods of constructing a poetic image are also used. “It’s not the cuckoos who are sad—Tanin’s relatives are crying” (a type of image well known to the poet from Russian folk songs and “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”).

But not only does the poet use the folklore form and create his images on its basis, he makes folklore the subject of his poetry, the source of the themes of many poems, preserving the social meaning of folk art. “Tanyusha was good...” is a song about a girl’s difficult fate, about wild customs in the pre-revolutionary village, about a life ruined in the prime of life (“Tanya has a wound on her temple from a dashing flail”).

The poem “Tanyusha was good...” can serve as an example of the aspiring poet’s skillful handling of oral folk art. The poem contains many folk words, expressions, images and is built on the basis of a folk song, but the hand of the future master is felt in it. Here, the poet very successfully uses psychological parallelism, which was often used in folk art to express grief, unhappiness, and sadness. In the spirit of the song tradition, Yesenin combined it with a cheerful ditty tune. His Tanyusha, having learned about her beloved’s betrayal, although she “turned pale like a shroud, turned cold like dew, her braid developed like a soul-destroying snake,” nevertheless finds the strength to adequately answer him: “Oh, you, blue-eyed guy, no offense I’ll tell you, I came to tell you: I’m marrying someone else” (I - 68).

Yesenin’s poems that we named above are devoid of unfruitful influences and they clearly express a craving for topics that are near and dear to the Russian reader.

2

Feeling like “the grandson of the Kupala night who grew up to maturity, born with songs in a grass blanket,” the poet created many paintings of Russian nature, but landscapes are not the only merit of his even the earliest poetry.

From the very beginning, social motives and themes penetrated into it, which, we repeat, were in conflict with the aspirations of the poet’s official educators. And this is the great power of influence on him from the oppressed, illiterate, laboring and impoverished Ryazan village, which more than once rose up with stakes, pitchforks and scythes against its oppressors.

For too long, our criticism has diligently searched for the sources of the inconsistency of the mature Yesenin in the religiosity, humility, meekness, and piousness of the village, in the pre-revolutionary conditions of which he grew up; the figure of the pious grandfather also stuck out immensely. Meanwhile, even in the poet’s early poems there is neither humility, nor meekness, nor piety. “Intoxicated joy” resounds loudly in them, overshadowed by the consciousness of abandonment and isolation from the big world.

Of course, in these years (1910-1914) the poet experienced various literary influences, and they will be discussed, but poems created from living impressions of childhood do not give the right to identify Yesenin of these years with Yesenin of St. Petersburg.

Criticism did not take this into account. Even Voronsky, who knew the poet’s work and life very well, could not dismember “Radunitsa”, and in his negative assessment of it he singled out poems created after the poet breathed the air of the capital’s reactionary philosophy. “Yesenin’s Rus' in the first books of his poems is humble, drowsy, dense, stagnant, meek, - a Rus' of praying prayers, bell ringing, monasteries, icons, canons, kitezhnaya... By the force of what has been said, his poetic works of the period under review are artistic and reactionary.” Voronsky explains this development of Yesenin by the influence of the “decomposing” and “softening grandfather’s inoculation.” “And “Radunitsa”, and “Dove”, and “Three Rows”, and many other poems of the poet are colored and imbued with the church, religious spirit” *.

* (A. Voronsky. Sergey Yesenin. Literary portrait. In the book: A. Voronsky. Literary critical articles. M., "Soviet Writer", 1963, pp. 244, 245, 247, 248.)

In a later article, “About the Departed,” Voronsky softened and somewhat revised his assessments of Yesenin’s work, but he still assessed the early cycle of poems incorrectly: “The first cycle of his poems was rustic-idyllic, colored by churchliness” *.

* (A. Voronsky. About the departed. In the book: Sergei Yesenin. Collection poems, vol. I. M.-L., GIZ, 1926, p. XVIII.)

In the pre-revolutionary Ryazan village there were not only idylls. The flame of the liberation struggle flared up in it, and the peasant movement seriously alarmed the eminent secular and spiritual nobility.

The Ryazan region in Tsarist Russia was truly abandoned, the poorest among the poor. It was a peasant's land. Peasants here made up 94% of the total population of the province *.

* (We took all digital data from the work of V.I. Popov “The Peasant Movement in the Ryazan Province in the Revolution of 1905-1907.” "Historical Notes", 1954, No. 49, pp. 136-164. Further digital data is given without reference to this work.)

But in this peasant land, the peasants accounted for only half of the best lands of the province, the other half was in private ownership, the peasant allotment per capita in the Ryazan province was lower than in its neighboring provinces *, and equaled on average one tithe, and in in a number of villages it was even lower. The price of renting land was growing rapidly, as were taxes. In 1904, redemption payments alone amounted to 50% of all taxes on the population of the province.

* (Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Kaluga, Oryol.)

Literacy was extremely low, medical care was almost non-existent *. It is no coincidence that the indicators of impoverishment of peasants in the province grew steadily and were higher than the national average. Poor peasants - 63.6 versus 59.5%, middle peasants - 17.7 versus 22%. In 1905, the peasants of the Ryazan province lacked two million pounds of grain to sow their fields. Because of hunger and poverty, they went to work in the cities and moved to other parts of the country or fell into the bondage of kulaks and landowners.

* (9 doctors and 11 paramedics per 100,000 population.)

This was the Yesenin region on the eve of the first Russian revolution, which unfolded there with particular force. In 1905-1907, 515 peasant uprisings were registered in the Ryazan province. And although they were scattered and isolated, suppressed by the force of power and weapons, they were not distinguished by meekness and humility. The peasants burned the landowners' estates, took away livestock and grain, and cut down forests. There was open resistance to the authorities, there were executions of the rebels, and all this created an atmosphere in the Ryazan province that was far from condomism and monasticism.

It is impossible not to take into account the revolutionary sentiments of the peasants, as other critics do. After all, they played a significant role in awakening the consciousness of many peasant writers.

But the revolutionary wave only briefly captured the northern districts of the province, in one of which the poet was born and lived, and in them there were fewer landowners, and the peasants’ plots were higher, and class contradictions were not so acute. That’s why out of 515 protests by peasants in the Ryazan province, only 8.8% took place in the northern districts.

The severity of the revolutionary struggle was weakened in the minds of the future poet by the fact that his work began during the years of Stolypinism and the general decline in revolutionary activity, ideological confusion in the ranks of the creative intelligentsia, Vekhovism and God-seeking, in the years when decadent fashions flourished. “The reaction manifested itself in all areas of public life, in science, philosophy, art. Tsarism carried out frantic chauvinistic agitation. Militant clericalism was active. Among the intelligentsia, counter-revolutionary sentiments, renegade ideas, a passion for mysticism and religion became widespread... The intense struggle subsided for a while in the village" * .

* ("History of the CPSU". M., Gospolitizdat, 1960, p. 126.)

The conditions were quite suitable for the implementation of the ideas of the owners of the Spas-Klepikovsky church-teacher school, which, let’s say, is idealized by some of our critics, regardless of the opinion of a mature poet about it. She did everything to eradicate the memory of the revolution in the minds of her students. It is no coincidence that neither Yesenin, nor his teachers and classmates, in their memoirs and letters dating back to their years at school, said anything about their impressions of the long and difficult struggle of the Ryazan peasantry in the era of 1905-1907.

And these memories were alive both among the clergy and among the intelligentsia. The poet mentions the victims of the 1905 revolution only in 1913 in a letter to Grisha Panfilov, in which he gives another fair description of the spiritual atmosphere of Spas-Klepikov: “I don’t know that you’re holed up there in Klepiki, it’s time to break free. Really? aren't you oppressed by that suffocating atmosphere? Here at least you can talk to someone and have something to listen to" (V - 106). And these are not memories, but the living impressions of a poet who has just graduated from school.

In Grisha Panfilov’s friendly school circle, they were very keen not only on early Gorky, but also on Nadson and Tolstoyism. Yesenin also had a great interest in Tolstoy’s philosophy. The validity of these words is confirmed by letters, poems, and autobiographies of the poet himself. The poems of the Klepikovsky period are not distinguished by life-affirming pathos *. Deprived of deep feelings and experiences, they are still very weak both artistically and ideologically. They, however, characterize the literary mood of the students of the Spas-Klepikovskaya school, who listened to them with enthusiasm, and the imitative and weak poem “Stars” even received an enthusiastic assessment from the literature teacher E. M. Khitrova **.

* (See the poems: “Stars”, “Memory”, “My Life”, “What has passed cannot be returned”, “Night”, “Sunrise”, “To the Dead”, “Drops”, “Poet”.)

** (See note to this poem (I - 335).)

Most of the poems of 1910-1912 contain pessimistic motives that were not alien to the poet at that time, borrowed, in particular, from Nadson along with an arsenal of poetic means:

As if my life is doomed to suffering; Grief and melancholy blocked my path; As if life with joy was forever separated, My chest was exhausted from melancholy and from wounds. (I - 74)

Unhappy people, killed by life, With pain in your soul you live out your life. Dear past, not forgotten by you, You often call it back. (I - 83)

The arsenal of these means includes such cliches, devoid of Yesenin’s specificity and imagery: “life is a lot of suffering,” “an unenviable lot,” “a soul languishing with melancholy and grief,” “foggy distance,” “sighs and tears,” “magical, sweet dreams ", "life is a deception." Even nature becomes pale, its colors fade, shades disappear: “Suddenly a thunderstorm will come, strong thunder will roar and destroy magical, sweet dreams”; “Pearl drops, beautiful drops, how beautiful you are in the golden rays”; "The stars are clear, the stars are high." Neither “pearl drops”, nor “red dawn”, nor “dark blue sky” can be compared with the images of nature created by the poet later:

The dawns are blazing, the mists are smoking, There is a crimson curtain above the carved window. (I - 85)

Lightning loosened the belt in foamy streams. (I - 67)

Bird cherry trees are pouring snow, Greenery is in bloom and dew. In the field, leaning towards shoots, rooks walk in a stripe. (I - 62)

In 1910-1912, Yesenin failed to create any significant works. In his work of these years there is a lot of submission to fate, Tolstoyan non-resistance, and complaints about “villainous fate.” It is imitative in a student's way.

These influences might not have existed if there had been a sensitive and understanding teacher next to the young poet. But this did not happen. No one noticed the deep springs of Yesenin’s talent. For too long, the poet developed alone, groping his way into poetry, until he met Blok, who appreciated Yesenin’s talent and helped him as a poet. But this was already in 1915.

As for the Spas-Klepikovskaya school, it came as a surprise when, two or three years after its graduation, the name of Yesenin became the property of all-Russian literature. Having arrived at school with the talent and living soul of a poet, Yesenin left it with a “strong knowledge of the Church Slavonic language” and with Tolstoy’s ideas no less firmly ingrained in his mind, which he later had to overcome.

3

Yesenin's best poems of 1910-1914 attract with the freshness and richness of pictures of nature, drawn boldly and sweepingly. The reader is captivated by the nakedness and sincere sincerity of the feelings expressed by the poet.

During these years, however, Yesenin has vague ideas about the true purpose of poetry. His work is intimate, not inspired by the high ideas of the century, his lyrical feeling is unstable, limited to a range of intimate themes and experiences, his aesthetic ideal is not clear, his thoughts are contradictory. The poems of these years are unequal. They are full of energy and optimism (“It’s already evening. Dew...”, “Winter is singing and calling...”, “Weaved on the lake...”, “The bird cherry is pouring snow...”, “The night is dark, can’t sleep..."), then sorrowful and sad, inspired by thoughts about the transience of life ("Imitation of a song", "Under a wreath of forest daisies...", "Tanyusha was good...", "Memories", "To the Dead ").

The ambiguity of public positions is clearly expressed in Yesenin’s poems about the poet. In the first of them, “He is pale. He is thinking of a terrible way...” (1910-1911), the theme of the social role of art is completely absent, and the fate of the poet seems to Yesenin joyless, lonely, tragic.

He is pale. Thinks in a scary way. Visions live in his soul. The blow of life has crushed the chest, And the cheeks have drunk doubt. His hair is tangled in clumps, his high forehead is wrinkled, but his beauty, clear from dreams, burns in thoughtful pictures. He sits in a cramped attic, The stub of a candle hurts his eyes, And the pencil in his hand Conducts secret conversations with him. He writes a song of sad thoughts, He catches in his heart the shadow of the past. And this noise, this spiritual noise... It will blow away tomorrow for a ruble. (I - 70)

In another poem, “That poet who destroys enemies” (1912), Yesenin understands the social purpose of the artist this way:

He is the poet who destroys his enemies, whose dear truth is his mother, who loves people like brothers and is ready to suffer for them. (I - 82)

In comparison with the first poem, the theme of art is taken deeper here, but the abstractness of judgments is not overcome, the criteria are very general and vague, and this characterizes Yesenin’s state of mind in those years. To the question that tormented him about the role of art in the life of the people during these years, he was never able to find a clear and specific answer.

In a letter to Grisha Panfilov from Moscow, he asks a friend to help him with this: “I want to write “The Prophet”, in which I will stigmatize the blind crowd, stuck in vices. If you have any other thoughts stored in your soul, then I ask you to give them to me, as for the necessary material. Show me which way to go so as not to blacken myself in this sinful host. From now on I give you an oath, I will follow my “Poet”. Let humiliation, contempt and exile await me. I will be firm, as my prophet will be, drinking a glass full of poison for the holy truth with the consciousness of a noble feat" (V - 92).

“Bringing shame to the blind crowd, mired in vices” - all this is more romantic than a clear understanding of the goal. And although Yesenin asks to “bless him for his noble work” and does not want to “blacken himself in this sinful host,” he is ready to endure “humiliation, contempt and exile,” his ideas about the poet and poetry are still vague and far from the ideas firmly established in advanced Russian literature.

Of course, we are talking about a young man who had just left school, isolated by living conditions and school from the progressive movement of his time, groping his way into literature, alone, deprived of ideological support. Education in the Klepikovsky “school in the spirit of Christian morality did little to contribute to the correct solution of such complex and acute problems. In discussions about the purpose of the poet, Yesenin surpassed his teachers. But there is no reason to overestimate his youthful ideas, as is sometimes done in critical literature.

The instability and uncertainty of Yesenin’s worldview are also visible from other letters to his school friend: “I have changed in my views, but the beliefs are the same and are even more deeply rooted in the depths of my soul. For personal convictions, I stopped eating meat and fish, whimsical things, like: chocolate, cocoa, I don’t drink coffee and I don’t smoke tobacco... I also began to look at people differently. A genius for me is a man of word and deed, like Christ. All the others, except Buddha, are nothing more than fornicators who fell into the abyss of depravity" (V - 92, 1913).

In this mixture of religions there is a noticeable kinship with the ideal of the poet, “ready to suffer for people” and “love them as brothers.”

A touch of Tolstoyism, Christianity, and Buddhism is present in the letter with a message about agitation among the workers: “Recently I organized agitation among the workers with letters. I distributed among them the monthly magazine “Lights” with a democratic direction” (V - 93). It is hardly worth attaching great importance to the poet’s social activities and agitation during this period. Moreover, his literary sympathies are extremely doubtful: “Of course, I have sympathies for such people (after Christ and Buddha - P. Yu.), such as Belinsky, Nadson, Garshin and Zlatovratsky, etc. But how Pushkin, Lermontov, Koltsov, Nekrasov - I don’t recognize. You, of course, know the cynicism of A. Pushkin, the rudeness and ignorance of M. Lermontov, the lies and cunning of Koltsov, the hypocrisy, gambling and cards and oppression of the servants of N. Nekrasov, Gogol is the real the apostle of ignorance, as Belinsky called him in his famous letter. And you can even judge Nekrasov by Nikitin’s poem “To the Accuser Poet” (V - 92, 93).

Later, Yesenin will dramatically change his opinion about the great Russian writers, call Gogol “beloved” (V - 9), and appreciate Lermontov, Koltsov, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy. In his early years, his ideas about them are unstable, and his philosophical and ideological views are eclectic, vague, and devoid of active citizenship.

Yesenin’s passion for religion dates back to 1913: “...at present I am reading the Gospel and I find a lot that is new for me... Christ is perfection for me. But I do not believe in him as much as others. They believe out of fear that what will happen after death? But I am pure and holy, as a person gifted with a bright mind and a noble soul, as a model in the pursuit of love for one’s neighbor. Life... I cannot understand its purpose, and Christ also did not reveal the purpose of life." (V - 95). The poet believes not only in the “bright mind and noble soul of Christ,” but also in the afterlife. Turning to Grisha, he notes: “You yourself once said: “Still, I think that after death there is another life.” Yes,” Yesenin admits, “I think too, but why is it life?” (V - 95). The words of a friend cited by Yesenin also characterize the worldview of Grisha Panfilov, which is also often overestimated in critical literature, which unconditionally affirms the democratic mood of young friends.

Undoubtedly, ideas of serving society were discussed in Panfilov’s school circle, and they were close to Yesenin, but these are rather the ideas of Christian service, which came to life with renewed vigor in the poet’s mind in the first year of his stay in Moscow. “Yes, Grisha,” he inspires Panfilov, “love and pity people, and criminals, and scoundrels, and liars, and sufferers, and righteous people. You could and can be any of them. Love the oppressors and do not stigmatize, but discover caressing the life illnesses of people" (V - 100).

Instead of the denunciation of the “crowd stuck in the vices” declared in the plan of the “Prophet”, the treatment of social ills with affection is proclaimed here, quite in the spirit of Tolstoy’s non-resistance to evil through violence. These are the results of the education of the Spas-Klepikovskaya church-teachers school. This is how Yesenin arrived in Moscow in the summer of 1912.

The poet was brought to the city by the desire to find a way into great literature and try his hand at poetry. He did not have any connections in literary circles, his name was not known in the press. Cut off from his native rural element, Yesenin found himself in the first months of his life in a city foreign to him in an atmosphere of spiritual isolation. Strife began with his father, followed by a rift; he had to leave his job in the office of the merchant Krylov. Life was difficult and not at all the way the young man wanted. Having lost his father's support, the poet found himself in an even more difficult situation. Instead of literary studies, I had to think about a piece of bread every day.

The poet’s own impressions of his stay in Moscow also do not coincide with their assessment in some critical works *, and therefore they need to be sorted out. “...You look at life and think: are you living or not? It flows too monotonously, and as soon as it’s a new day, the situation becomes more unbearable, because everything old becomes disgusting, you long for the new, the better, the pure, and this is the old something too vulgar" (V - 89, 1912); “The devil knows what it is. Life in the office is becoming unbearable. What should I do? I’m writing a letter, and my hands are trembling with excitement. I have never experienced such depressing torment” (V - 94, 1913); “Dark clouds have gathered over my head, lies and deceit are all around. Sweet dreams are shattered, and everything is carried away by the rushing whirlwind in its nightmarish whirlpool. Finally, I have to say that life is truly an “empty and stupid joke” (I - 104, 1913) ; "...You have to make trouble with your funds. I don’t know how I’ll hold on, but I have so little strength” (V - 106, 1913); “All formed hopes collapsed, darkness shrouded both the past and the present” (V - 106, 1913).

* (See Yu. Prokushev. Yesenin's youth.)

To the number of the poet’s unhappy moods expressed in letters to a friend, one should add unflattering assessments of the people he met in the city. “Moscow is a soulless city, and everyone who strives for the sun and light mostly runs away from it...”; “People here are mostly wolves out of self-interest. They are happy to sell their own brother for a penny” (V - 108, 1913); “Exhausted, I sit down to write. Lately I, too, have fallen off my feet. My nose has been bleeding heavily” (V - 109, 1914); “Something is sad, Grisha. It’s hard. I’m alone, alone around, alone and there’s no one I can open my soul to, and people are so petty and wild” (V - 110, 1914).

These are Yesenin’s own impressions of his stay in Moscow. Mental unsettlement and dissatisfaction find expression in a number of poems of these difficult days for the poet. There is neither exuberant cheerfulness in them, nor colorful pictures of native nature, and the world seems gloomy and boring to Yesenin, devoid of bright colors:

It's sad... Mental anguish, my heart is tormented and torn. Boring sounds don't give me time to breathe. You lie down, but the bitter thought still doesn’t go crazy, your head is spinning from the noise... What should I do? And My soul itself languishes. There is no consolation in anyone. You walk barely breathing. It's dark and wild all around. Share, why are you given? There is nowhere to lay your head. Life is both bitter and poor. It's hard to live without happiness. (I - 86)

“The boring sounds of time” can also be heard in other poems sent to Grisha Panfilov. Weak artistically and not intended for publication, these poems clearly express the inner world of the poet, who has not yet found like-minded people in the city and willingly turns to the sad motifs of Nadson’s poetry, about the purchase of whose works he informs a friend *.

* (See letters from Konstantinov, February - March 1913 (V - 98).)

It would be incorrect to explain Yesenin’s depressed mood by deep thoughts about the fate of the Motherland, which worried the Russian intelligentsia at that time, who painfully experienced the defeat of the revolution of 1905-1907 and were entering a period of a new upsurge of the liberation movement. Such an explanation would be incorrect, even if we take into account Yesenin’s connections with the revolutionary-minded workers of the printing house of the I. D. Sytin Partnership, where the poet worked for some time in the proofreading room.

S. Yesenin among the workers of the printing house of the I. D. Sytin Partnership

Spiritually, Yesenin was not prepared for active revolutionary work, and the letters we examined to Panfilov speak eloquently about this. In some of them, the poet reports about the arrest of workers, about his participation in the labor movement, about police surveillance of him and about the search they carried out in his apartment. And although these facts of Yesenin’s biography correspond (to a certain extent) to reality, it would be risky to exaggerate them. In one of his letters (1913) he writes: “Firstly, I am registered among all the professionals, and secondly, I had a search, but so far everything ended well” (V - 108).

Recently, researchers have especially often referred to this place in the letter to emphasize the poet’s involvement in the revolutionary movement. And indeed, when he was a proofreader at a printing house, Yesenin participated in work meetings and distributed the magazine “Lights,” which had a democratic orientation. It is impossible to consider this as conscious revolutionary activity coming from internal motives. And this is best said in the letter itself, which is usually quoted in its first part, and yet its end is eloquent, and we have to write it out again: “Have you read Ropshin’s novel “That Which Wasn’t” from the era of 5 years . A very wonderful thing. This is where in reality the unbridled boyishness of the revolutionaries of 5 years is. Yes, Grisha, after all, they pushed freedom back 20 years. But an encore with them, let them eat dumplings with poppy seeds on their entourage" (V - 108, 109).

We will not dwell on all the nuances of Yesenin’s statement, we will only emphasize that the slanderous novel by B. Savinkov (Ropshin) pleased him, who considered himself a “registered professional,” and he called the revolutionary feat of the fighters of 1905-1907 “unbridled boyishness.” It is impossible to combine this with conscious revolutionary activity.

Since 1962, a new document has been included in the literature about Yesenin - “Letter of Fifty” *, and reports from detectives who were spying on Yesenin in November 1913 were also discovered. These materials are presented in sufficient detail in the book by Yu. Prokushev **, and there is no need to quote them again. Let us only note that the letter from “five groups of class-conscious workers of the Zamoskvoretsky district” sharply condemned the schismatic activities of the liquidators and the anti-Leninist position of the newspaper “Luch”.

* (See the message of L. Shalginova “Letter of Fifty and Yesenin”. "New World", 1962, No. 6, pp. 278-279.)

** (See Yu. Prokushev. Yesenin's youth, pp. 137, 138, 143-156.)

Among the fifty signatures under the letter is Yesenin’s signature, which gave the police, into whose hands the document fell, the basis to establish careful surveillance of it. There is, however, nothing in the police reports that would confirm the poet’s conscious and active participation in the revolutionary movement, and no such materials were found during the search. Obviously, Yesenin’s signature on the document also cannot be considered a manifestation of conscious revolutionary activity. All his thoughts in Moscow were aimed at finding ways into literature. And in this main endeavor, he did not receive the expected support and soon left his job at the printing house. Thus, having encountered the workers of the city for the first time, Yesenin became neither a singer of the revolutionary struggle nor a conscious revolutionary. These connections did not leave deep traces in his early poetry. The poet did not include the poems “At the Grave” and “Blacksmith”, which reminded (and even then dully) of this connection, in his first collection “Radunitsa”, never remembered them and did not include them in subsequent editions of his works *. Let us also note that in none of his autobiographies did the poet recall his participation in the revolutionary movement.

* (The poem "Blacksmith" was first published in the newspaper "The Path of Truth" on May 15, 1914.)

This does not mean at all that the short-term work in the team of Sytyns, who waged an organized struggle for their rights, did not have any influence on the poet at all and was not useful for him. Having breathed the air of the printing house, Yesenin begins to think more and more about life, strives to comprehend its meaning, somehow define himself in it, realize its complexity and disorder. In Yesenin’s work of these years, democratic tendencies intensified and new themes emerged that expanded the range of his poetry. The poem "Martha Posadnitsa" contains a condemnation of the despotism of Tsar Ivan III and glorification of the Novgorod freemen. In the poems “Patterns”, “Mother’s Prayer”, “Heroic Whistle” Yesenin writes about the imperialist war.

Under the influence and with the help of the Sytyns, he enters the People's University named after. A.L. Shanyavsky, makes connections with the Surikovites and becomes a member of this circle. All this helps him expand and deepen his knowledge of his native literature, and get to know the new life of the city better. But all this does not open a wide path to print for him, who considered himself an established poet. And although in the Surikov circle the poet finds a literary environment close to him and personally meets a number of poets, his publishing plans are not moving forward, and he decides to leave Moscow and try his luck in the capital.

Back at the end of 1913, Yesenin wrote to Panfilov: “I’m thinking of running away to St. Petersburg at all costs... Moscow is not the engine of literary development, but it uses everything ready-made from St. Petersburg. There is not a single magazine here. Positively not a single one. There are, but which are only suitable for the trash heap, like “Around the World”, “Ogonyok” (V - 108).

A.R. Izryadnova, who knew Yesenin closely in those years, notes in her memoirs: “He was in a depressed mood, he is a poet, and no one wants to understand this, the editors do not accept him for publication.” *

* (Yu. Prokushev. Yesenin's youth, p. 115.)

Only in the last year of his stay in Moscow Yesenin was able to publish several of his poems in the magazines "Mirok", "Protalinka" and in the newspaper "Nov" *. Of course, children's magazines published poems taking into account the age and interests of their readers; the selection of works for them was limited. Unable to publish everything that had been created by this time, Yesenin submitted his first sketches of Russian nature paintings and the fairy tale “The Orphan” to the Mirok magazine. It was impossible to judge from them the content of the work of the poet entering literature, but already in them the reader could notice the freshness of his sensations of nature, the subtlety of his observations, the completeness of feelings, the simplicity and brightness of their poetic expression. The concreteness and transparency of images is especially clear in this poem, for example:

* ("Mirok" is a monthly illustrated magazine for families and elementary schools. In 1914, it published S. Yesenin’s poems “Birch”, “Porosha”, “Village”, “Easter Announcement”, “Good Morning”, “Orphan”, “Winter Sings and Calls”. "Protalinka" is a magazine for middle-aged children. In 1914, in issue No. 10, S. Yesenin published the poem “Mother’s Prayer.” On November 23, 1914, the newspaper “Nov” published the poem “The Heroic Whistle.” In an interesting message by S. Strievskaya “Isn’t this Yesenin?” ("Literary Russia" dated 14/X 1966, p. 11) it has been suggested that Yesenin's poems "On This Night" and "I Would Leave" were published in 1913 in No. 5 of the Moscow legal Bolshevik newspaper "Our Way" . S. Strievskaya, however, doubts Yesenin’s authorship, which has not yet been proven.)

The golden stars dozed off, the mirror of the backwater trembled, the light dawned on the river backwaters and blushed the mesh of the sky. The sleepy birch trees smiled, their silk braids disheveled. Green earrings rustle, And silver dews burn. Near the fence, overgrown nettles are dressed in bright mother-of-pearl And, swaying, whisper playfully: “Good morning!” (I - 99)

In this small sketch, one is captivated not only by the subtlety of observations, but also by the great poetic skill of the artist, who knows both sound writing and vowel harmony. Even in Russian poetry, rich in landscapes, there are few such pearls, and this is clear evidence of Yesenin’s persistent improvement of literary technique during his years in Moscow.

The absence of deep social motives is another feature of the poems published in 1914, which cannot be explained solely by the content and direction of the magazines in which the poet was published at that time.

In the poems “Mother’s Prayer” and “Heroic Whistle,” Yesenin touched on a pressing topic at that time - the attitude towards the imperialist war, which brought untold misfortunes to the Russian people. The ideological and artistic solution to the topic is not distinguished by either political maturity or the firmness of the author’s social positions. The poet thus reveals the feelings of a mother whose son “saves his homeland in a distant land”:

The old woman prays, wipes away her tears, And dreams bloom in the eyes of the tired. She sees a field, a field before a battle, Where her hero’s son lies killed. On the wide chest splashes blood like a flame, And in the frozen hands is the enemy banner. And she froze all over with happiness and grief, bowing her gray head in her hands. And sparse gray hairs covered the eyebrows, And tears fell from the eyes like beads. (I - 103)

There are a lot of tears in these lines, and when you first read the poem, you get the impression of the inconsolable grief of a mother who lost her son in a senseless war. The author's idea, however, is different. He forces the old woman to draw in her imagination the battlefield, “where her hero’s son lies killed” with an enemy banner in his hands. And when such dreams bloom in her tired eyes, she freezes with happiness and grief. As a mother, she feels sorry for her lost son, but she is happy that he died a hero’s death for his homeland. “Mother’s Prayer” reveals the ambiguity of the poet’s attitude towards the imperialist war; the poem is devoid of any condemnation of it. The same applies to the poem “The Heroic Whistle,” in which the poet, in an epic style, paints the image of a Russian peasant who, without regret or grief, sets off against the enemy and saves Russia:

A man gets up, washes himself from the ladle, talks affectionately with the poultry, washes himself, dresses up in bast shoes, and takes out his ploughshare and club. The man thinks on the way to the forge: “I’ll teach the filthy mug a lesson.” And as he walks, he pushes out of anger, and throws the torn homespun off his shoulders. The blacksmith made a pointed pike for the peasant, and the man sat down on a bucking nag. He rides along a motley road, Whistling a mighty song. The man chooses a more noticeable path, He drives, whistles, grins, The Germans see that the century-old oaks are trembling, Leaves are falling on the oaks from the whistling. The Germans threw away their copper caps, They were frightened by the heroic whistle... Victory holidays reign over Rus', The earth hums from the monastery bells. (I - 104, 105)

Such a depiction of the imperialist war is not only far from realism, but also close to false, Slavophile patriotism and was the result of the author’s unclear and unstable social positions on this pressing issue.

Yesenin's poems were published in Moscow and in other publications. In 1915, they were published in the magazines “Milky Way”, “Friend of the People”, “Parus”, “Good Morning” *. In the poems “Patterns” and “Belgium” the poet again turns to the theme of the imperialist war, but its artistic solution remains the same. In "Patterns" Yesenin repeated the "Mother's Prayer", and in "Belgium" one can hear the call to fight to the bitter end.

* (“Milky Way”, 1915, No. 2, February - “The reeds rustled over the backwater”; No. 3, March - “The scarlet color of dawn was woven on the lake.” "Friend of the People", 1915, No. 1, January - "Patterns", "Sail"; No. 2 - “O child, I wept for a long time over your fate.” "Good Morning", 1915, No. 5, 6, October - "Grandmother's Tales." In addition, the following poems were published in the Mirok magazine: “What is this?”, “Belgium”, “Bird cherry”.)

And the lot of righteousness will be fulfilled: Your enemy will fall at your feet and will pray with sorrow to Your broken altars. (I - 113)

Addressing Belgium and highly appreciating its “mighty, free spirit and courage,” the poet calls on it to punish the enemy. Later, Yesenin will reconsider his attitude towards the war, but his first responses about it do not give reason to see in him an opponent of the massacre started by the ruling elite.

Yesenin’s poem “The Blacksmith,” published in 1914 in the newspaper “The Path of Truth,” is not distinguished by the definiteness of social ideals. Having painted a picture of a stuffy, gloomy forge with a heavy and unbearable heat, where “the squealing and noise fills the head,” the poet advises the blacksmith to “fly with a playful dream into the sky-high distance”:

There in the distance, behind a black cloud, Beyond the threshold of gloomy days, The mighty brilliance of the sun flies above the plains of the fields. Pastures and fields are drowning in the blue radiance of the day, And over the arable land the greenery is happily ripening. (I - 98)

Happy arable land beyond the threshold of gloomy days, far behind a black cloud, in the sky-high distance - this is the whole meaning of the poem. What is the transcendental distance to which one must strive “from grief and adversity, shameful fear and hateful timidity”? The poet, unfortunately, does not answer the question that arises. Its transcendental distance is uncertain. However, the image of blacksmiths, “blowing the forges and forging boldly while the iron is hot,” was familiar to readers of Pravda, and it could evoke certain associations when reading the poem “The Blacksmith.” This may explain its publication in the newspaper.

Despite the fact that Yesenin was close to the revolutionary-minded workers' collective, he did not assimilate revolutionary ideology in Moscow and did not develop a system of views different from those with which he arrived in Moscow, although the range of his ideas about life expanded.

A poet by nature and way of perceiving the world, Yesenin turned out to be deaf to the impressions of city life, and it did not leave a single bright image in his mind. In his soul lived pictures of rural life, sounds and colors of nature, swamps and swamps, the hubbub of mowers, powders, spills, and the flowering of grasses.

With all this he came to Petrograd to A. Blok in March 1915 *.

* (The date of Yesenin’s first meeting with Blok is determined from Blok’s note: “Peasant of the Ryazan province, 19 years old, fresh, clear, vocal poetry, verbose language, came to me on March 9, 1915.” A. Blok. Notebooks (1901-1920). M., "Fiction", 1965, p. 567.)

Yesenin wanted to hear an assessment of his work from the lips of a great poet, whom he did not have to meet in Moscow. A. Blok not only highly appreciated Yesenin’s poems, but also helped him establish strong literary connections.

With the assistance of A. Blok and S. Gorodetsky, Yesenin received ample opportunities to publish his poems in the then most famous metropolitan magazines. If during the three Moscow years Yesenin published several of his poems with great difficulty, then already in the first months of his life in Petrograd they were accepted by the Monthly Journal, the newspaper Birzhevye Vedomosti, the magazine Russian Thought, Voice of Life, and Ogonyok. , "New Magazine for Everyone", "Northern Notes", "Niva" (supplement to the magazine), "The Whole World". The poet's name became well known, his poetry acquired an independent life.

Of course, if Yesenin did not have a bright talent, no recommendations would have helped him, and he would not have had such wild success in the literary circles of the capital. But the presence of undeniable talent is only one and, perhaps, not the main reason that can explain the attention given to the poet. The social basis of his poetry and the direction of his talent, devoid of political urgency, completely suited those who enthusiastically accepted him into their arms and saw in him a representative of the lower classes, a singer of pious peasant Rus'.

The poet did not find his literary name in those social strata of the Russian intelligentsia that expressed the true interests of his beloved Russia. Therefore, his natural poetic gift, not supported by the definiteness of social ideals, received one-sided development, and his poetry for a long time wandered along winding paths, far from the main road of the century. And this main result of Yesenin’s three-year life in Petrograd (1915-1917) is best confirmed by his works created by him in those years.

But before turning to them, it is necessary to at least briefly characterize other important issues.

The main theme of Yesenin's lyrics has always been love for Russia. And not the abstract admiration for the beauties of nature, characteristic of city dwellers, but a warm, living love for the countryside, for rural nature. His early lyrics are of a religious nature, and biblical images that are meaningful in their own way play a huge role in it. Russia appears as a promised land, sanctified from above, enjoying the direct patronage of God: My golden land! Autumn light temple!

Christianity in Yesenin's early lyrics is of a folk nature. Traditions come most likely not from the Bible, and not from the book culture of Orthodoxy, but from popular Orthodoxy. Purely formally, motives and images are used that are characteristic of the semi-apocryphal genre of “spiritual poems”, and indeed of folklore in general.

Since ancient times, popular Orthodoxy has been intricately intertwined with paganism. Christ himself can live in every beggar-vagrant, and he can be pitied as a brother:

And maybe I’ll pass by and not notice at the secret hour. That in the fir trees are the wings of a cherub, And under the stump is the hungry Savior.

All nature, as is typical for pagan consciousness, appears animated, mystically transformed, anthropomorphic. The title of his first book, “Radunitsa,” speaks about the paganism of early Yesenin. Radunitsa is a church holiday of remembrance of the dead, dating back to the pre-Christian celebration in honor of Rod, the ancestor deity. The Virgin Mary merges with the image of the mother goddess, the earth, the creative force of nature. Savior also appears almost as a pagan deity.

The lyrical hero of Yesenin’s early lyrics is an outspoken pagan:

Happy is he who is miserable in joy. Living without friend and enemy. He will pass along a country road, Praying for the haystacks and haystacks.

And the nature to which he prays becomes animated, endowed with qualities characteristic only of man, and the man himself dissolves in it and loses his personal qualities. Yesenin’s poems are a spell of nature; they are filled with direct appeals:

Green hairstyle, Girlish breasts, O thin birch tree. Why did you look into the pond?

Yesenin's early lyrics are very harmonious. It contains a holistic, harmonious picture of the world, which allows one to say something about nature that has not yet been said in literature before.

The connection with folk art is very important for Yesenin’s poetry. He uses song and ditty meters:

Play, play, Talyanochka, crimson furs. Come out to meet the groom in the outskirts, beauty, and this gives his lyrics a special musicality. Yesenin's early lyrics in artistic form express the worldview of a simple Russian peasant, but are not exhausted by it. but tells about universal human values ​​- love for one’s native nature, native country, and loved ones.

Yesenin is one of the most widely read poets in our time; he always remains modern because he is close to the people.

Yesenin’s poems became dear to me as soon as I entered the magical world of poetry. Since then, the versatility and originality of his work have never ceased to amaze me. Studying more deeply the life and work of the poet, I fell in love with him with all my soul.

Among Russian poets, S. A. Yesenin occupies a special place. His early poems are full of sounds, smells, colors. Girlish laughter rings, the “white chime” of birches is heard, willows are called, capercaillie cry “with ringing”, bells ring.

It was Ryazan nature that raised the sensitive, sympathetic, kind, beautiful in its simplicity poet S. Yesenin. Pictures of his native land are captured in his unforgettable, captivating poetry.

Sergey Yesenin. In the very sound of this name one can hear the melodiousness, the music of native expanses, the beauty of the people who created such a poet.

Literary and artistic analysis of the poem by S. A. Yesenin “The golden grove dissuaded.”

Almost every poet writes poems about nature, touches on the themes of friendship, love, the poet and the purpose of poetry, problems of relationship with the world. One way or another they dwell on the problem of life and death. And everyone solves it in their own way.

The work of Sergei Aleksandrovich Yesenin seems to me to be an amazingly pure source of folk poetry. You are amazed at the great and endless love that the poet had for his homeland, its vast expanses and nature.

No matter what he writes about, the image of his native land is invisibly present in his poems.

The beautiful, bright, sonorous and multi-colored lyrics of Sergei Yesenin are filled with high patriotism. Whatever the poet writes about, it’s all about Russia. She appears to the author either as a tender birch girl, or as a “blue who fell into the river,” or as meek and serene.

Analysis of the poem “Uncomfortable Liquid Lunarity...”, written in 1925.

Yesenin’s lyrical hero is fused with nature, in it he feels his roots, the roots of the human race. Nature, according to Yesenin, is full of mythological symbols, both pagan and Christian. Yesenin's mythological characters live in the real world.

It is impossible to imagine the tender, bright and melodious lyrics of S. A. Yesenin without the theme of love. At different periods of his life and work, the poet uniquely feels and experiences this beautiful, sublime and at the same time bitter feeling.

The poetry of Sergei Aleksandrovich Yesenin cannot be called monotonous, it is rather varied. At different stages of his life, Yesenin chooses completely different themes for his poems.

Having grown up in the wilderness of the Meshchera forests under the sound of pine and birch trees, under the quiet rustle of grasses and splashes of “bossal waters,” Yesenin was not familiar with the music of the revolution, did not experience the heavy burden of village life, but knew well the psychology of farmers.

Sergei Yesenin is an outstanding Russian poet, whose unique talent is recognized by everyone. From a young age, Russia lived in Yesenin’s heart, its sad and free songs, rural silence and girlish laughter, the grief of mothers who lost their sons in the war.

His poetry is, as it were, a scattering of the treasures of his soul with both handfuls. A. Tolstoy Yesenin's poems are a sincere confession of a romantic soul, attracting with spirituality and the desire to sing the best human feelings.

Why can you love your Motherland? Of course, this is a special topic: after all, everyone loves the Fatherland with their unique love. Why did such an extremely Russian poet like Yesenin love his native land?

The main theme of Yesenin's lyrics has always been love for Russia. And not the abstract admiration for the beauties of nature, characteristic of city dwellers, but a warm, living love for the countryside, for rural nature. His early lyrics are of a religious nature, and biblical images that are meaningful in their own way play a huge role in it. Russia appears as a promised land, sanctified from above, enjoying the direct patronage of God: My golden land! Autumn light temple!

Christianity in Yesenin's early lyrics is of a folk nature. Traditions come most likely not from the Bible, and not from the book culture of Orthodoxy, but from popular Orthodoxy. Purely formally, motives and images are used that are characteristic of the semi-apocryphal genre of “spiritual poems”, and indeed of folklore in general.

Since ancient times, popular Orthodoxy has been intricately intertwined with paganism. Christ himself can live in every beggar-vagrant, and he can be pitied as a brother:

And maybe I’ll pass by and not notice at the secret hour. That in the fir trees are the wings of a cherub, And under the stump is the hungry Savior.

All nature, as is typical for pagan consciousness, appears animated, mystically transformed, anthropomorphic. The title of his first book “Radunitsa” also speaks about the paganism of early Yesenin. Radunitsa is a church holiday of remembrance of the dead, dating back to the pre-Christian celebration in honor of Rod, the ancestor deity. The Virgin Mary merges with the image of the mother goddess, the earth, the creative force of nature. Savior also appears almost as a pagan deity.

The lyrical hero of Yesenin’s early lyrics is an outspoken pagan:

Happy is he who is miserable in joy. Living without friend and enemy. He will pass along a country road, Praying for the haystacks and haystacks.

And the nature to which he prays becomes animated, endowed with qualities characteristic only of man, and the man himself dissolves in it and loses his personal qualities. Yesenin’s poems are a spell of nature; they are filled with direct appeals:

Green hairstyle, Girlish breasts, O thin birch tree. Why did you look into the pond?

Yesenin's early lyrics are very harmonious. It contains a holistic, harmonious picture of the world, which allows one to say something about nature that has not yet been said in literature before.

The connection with folk art is very important for Yesenin’s poetry. He uses song and ditty meters:

Play, play, Talyanochka, crimson furs. Come out to meet the groom in the outskirts, beauty, and this gives his lyrics a special musicality. Yesenin's early lyrics in artistic form express the worldview of a simple Russian peasant, but are not exhausted by it. but tells about universal human values ​​- love for one’s native nature, native country, and loved ones.

Yesenin is one of the most widely read poets in our time; he always remains modern because he is close to the people.

Bibliography

To prepare this work, materials from the site http://ilib.ru/ were used

Introduction

There are names in Russian literature next to which any epithets seem inaccurate, weak or simply pompous. Such names include the name of Sergei Yesenin.

Yesenin lived only thirty years. But the mark he left in literature is so deep that it was not erased either by the prohibitions of his work by those in power, or by the deliberate smoothing over of the complexities of his creative path. The poetry of S. Yesenin has always lived in the heart and memory of our people, because it is rooted in the thickness of national life and grew from its depths. “In Yesenin’s poems,” the writer Yu. Mamleev rightly emphasized, “there is something elusive, but extremely significant, which makes his poetry an exceptional phenomenon, even going beyond the usual concept of genius. This “elusive” lies, in my opinion, in the fact that the entire ocean of Yesenin’s poetry, figurative, sound, intonation, directly comes into contact with the most profound, primordial, age-old levels of the Russian soul...”1.

In fact, Yesenin’s poetry is a symbol of national life and soul, which is why it has such an impact on Russian people, regardless of age, worldview and political leanings.

Probably, each of us has in our souls our own image of Yesenin, a poet and a person, our own favorite poems. But despite all the selectivity of tastes and sympathies, what is especially close and dear to us, readers, is what constitutes the core of Yesenin’s poetry - this is the sincere feeling of the Motherland, Russia, dear to him, “the country of birch chintz.”

“My lyrics,” Yesenin admitted proudly, “are alive with one great love - love for the Motherland. The feeling of the Motherland is fundamental in my work.” Indeed, no matter what the poet wrote about in both the sorrowful and bright periods of his life, his soul was warmed by the image of his Motherland. A filial feeling of love and gratitude to the country dear to his heart “with the short name “Rus”” binds together all his creations - love lyrics, poems about nature, a cycle of poetic messages to relatives, and works with socio-political issues. Rus', Russia, Motherland, native land, native side - the most dear words and concepts for Yesenin, which are found in almost every one of his works. In the sound of the word “Russia” he heard “dew”, “strength”, “blue”. The pains and hardships, joys and hopes of peasant Rus' - all of this was poured into Yesenin’s sincere and bright, mournful and angry, sad and joyful lines. What is happening in his native country, what awaits it tomorrow - these are the thoughts that haunted him throughout his short life. This is the core of his poetry.

Her second feature is extreme sincerity, depth and “flood of feelings.” All of Yesenin’s work is a passionate diary of a naked and wounded heart. The poet himself admitted that he would like to “throw out his whole soul into words.” It is difficult to find another poet who would express himself with such sincerity in poetry, turning them into an intimate confession.

Yesenin's early work

S. Yesenin rose to the heights of creativity from the depths of village folk life. On the vast map of Russia, near Ryazan, among the Oka expanses, there is the ancient village of Konstantinovo. Here, on September 21 (October 3), 1895, the future great poet was born into a peasant family; here, in the rural open spaces, are the roots of his work.

Because of a quarrel between his parents, Yesenin lived for some time in the house of his grandfather F.A. Titov, who knew many spiritual poems and folk songs, and read the Bible to his grandson. Yesenin owes his acquaintance with Russian oral folk poetry to his grandmother Natalya Evteevna, who opened the magical world of fairy tales and legends to her grandson. The development of the aesthetic taste of the future poet was greatly facilitated by the song gift of his mother, Tatyana Fedorovna, as well as the whole atmosphere of peasant life and the nature of central Russia.

The most important source of understanding the power and beauty of the artistic word for Yesenin was Russian literature - the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Koltsov - which the future poet read engrossed in while studying at the zemstvo four-year school, and then at the Spas-Klepikovsky church-teacher school.

Yesenin, according to his confession, began writing poetry at the age of eight. The future poet, in expressing his thoughts and feelings, relied on the creative experience of Pushkin, Lermontov, Koltsov, and the idol of the then youth, Nadson. At the same time, many of them already have their own vision of the rural world surrounding the teenager, in whose soul their own images and associations are born. This is the 1910 poem “It’s already evening...”, from which Yesenin based his works:

It's already evening. Dew

Glistens on nettles.

I'm standing by the road

Leaning against the willow tree.

There is great light from the moon

Right on our roof.

Somewhere the songs of a nightingale

I hear it in the distance.

Nice and warm

Like by the stove in winter.

And the birch trees stand

Like big candles.

And far beyond the river,

It can be seen behind the edge,

The sleepy watchman knocks

A dead beater.

Before us is a picture of the world around us, seen through the eyes of an inexperienced child. Childish spontaneity is felt here in repeated comparisons, in the absence of metaphors, and in the “stumbling” rhythm. It is rightly said that this work is “like the hesitant steps of a boy who has just begun to walk.” However, the talent of an aspiring poet is already visible in him.

Yesenin is even more independent in the following short poem:

Where the cabbage beds are

The sunrise pours red water,

Maple tree for the little womb

The green udder sucks.

Here the most important features of the poet’s work are already clearly visible: vivid metaphor, animation of nature, close connection with oral folk poetry.

Yesenin carried his love for folklore, of which he was an expert and collector, throughout his life. Proudly calling himself a “peasant son”, a “singer and herald” of the village, he traced his poetic ancestry to nameless storytellers, guslars, accordionists, and folk songwriters. “I began to write poems, imitating ditties,” “The poems were accompanied by songs that I heard around me,” “The spoken word has always played a much larger role in my life than other sources,” Yesenin would later emphasize more than once.

Oral folk art became the foundation on which the openwork edifice of Yesenin’s poetry grew. Yesenin especially often uses folk genres such as song and ditty, creating his own works based on them. Thus, in the poem “Tanyusha was good, there was no more beautiful thing in the village” (1911), the plot first unfolds as in folk songs about the betrayal of a loved one: a description of the heroes and their conversation, during which it turns out that he is marrying another (“Are you goodbye , my joy, I’m marrying someone else”). In folk songs, a girl in this situation either resigns herself or reproaches her lover for cheating. Yesenin complements this situation with a tragic ending: his beloved kills Tanyusha, who married someone else in revenge:

It’s not the cuckoos who are sad - Tanya’s relatives are crying,

Tanya has a wound on her temple from a dashing flail.

Another early poem by Yesenin, “Imitation of a Song,” was also inspired by oral folk art. The situation itself is folkloric here: the meeting of a young girl at a well and the description of a suddenly flared up feeling: “I wanted to tear a kiss from your scarlet lips with pain in the flickering of foamy streams.”

Based on round dance and play folk songs, Yesenin creates the poem “Under the wreath of forest daisies...” (1911), about how a fine fellow accidentally “dropped the cutie’s ring//Into the jets of a foamy wave.” A ring or ring in folk art symbolizes love. Losing them means losing love. This determines the drama of Yesenin’s poem, the hero of which decides out of grief to “marry//With the ringing wave.”

The motifs of folk ritual poetry were also embodied in Yesenin’s other early poems “Bachelorette Party”, “On Azure Fabrics”, “Lights Are Burning Across the River”, which also bear the stamp of the author’s bright individuality.

The themes and poetics of folk ditties are also used very widely in Yesenin’s early works. The ditty rhythm is clearly noticeable in his poems “Tanyusha was good” and “Under the wreath of forest daisies.” A literary version of a ditty, consisting of several choruses, is the poem “Play, play little girl...” (1912). From the ditties here there is an appeal to the little girl and a request to a beautiful girl to go out on a date and listen to the choruses ("additives") of the accordion player. And at the same time, the poet uses his individual means and techniques of imagery (“The heart glows with cornflowers, turquoise burns in it”), a ring composition of the romance type with variable repetition of the initial lines at the end of the poem. Yesenin would also widely use the theme and rhythm of ditties in poems written in the mid-1910s: “On azure fabrics ...”, “Dancer”, “Lights are burning across the river”, “Dare” and others.

The aspiring poet’s desire to expand his life impressions led him to Moscow in 1912. Here he becomes a student at the private university of A.L. Shanyaevsky, where he attends classes at the Faculty of History and Philology for a year and a half, and also participates in meetings of the Surikov Literary Circle, which united writers from the peasant environment. His stay in Moscow marked the beginning of his friendly and creative connections with the poets N. Klyuev, P. Oreshin, F. Nasedkin.

However, in his frantic desire for creative improvement, Yesenin very soon comes to the conclusion that Moscow, in his words, “is not the engine of literary development, but it uses everything ready from St. Petersburg.” Therefore, on March 9, 1915, Yesenin moved to St. Petersburg and went straight from the station to A. Blok. The author of “The Stranger” highly appreciated the work of the young poet, writing in his diary: “The poems are fresh, clean, vociferous, verbose language.”

A. Blok introduced him to the poets S. Gorodetsky, L. Bely, P. Murashev, with whose assistance Yesenin actively entered the literary atmosphere of the capital.

Creativity of the 1910s

Since the mid-1910s, Yesenin’s work has experienced an obvious rise: imagery is improved, rhythm is enriched, and the poetic horizon expands. This can be clearly seen, in particular, in the poet’s attitude to oral folk art.

If before Yesenin was attracted to folklore mainly by songs and ditties, now the range of interests is expanding: the poet uses fairy tales, legends, spiritual poems, and epics. Based on the Russian fairy tale “Morozko”, he creates the poem “The Orphan” - about the unfortunate orphan Masha, who was blessed by Santa Claus for her suffering, honesty, and kindness. A stylization of the epic was his poem “The Heroic Whistle” (1915), in which a simple peasant who went out to fight the enemy is depicted as an epic hero.

« Song about Evpatiya Kolovrat»

In 1912, Yesenin created his first major work - the poem “Song of Evpatiy Kolovrat.” Starting from historical legends and from the wonderful monument of ancient Russian literature “The Tale of the Ruin of Ryazan by Batu,” permeated with folk poetic motifs, Yesenin creates an impressive image of the defender of the Russian land Evpatiy Kolovrat.

Kolovrat in Yesenin’s poem is not a prince’s warrior, but a blacksmith who raised the people to defend the Ryazan land. He is depicted as a “good light”, an epic hero, as a “good fellow”, and his sworn enemy “in poverty Khan Batu”, also, as in the epics, is evil and treacherous, sheds rivers of blood, “curls over the dead”.

The poem “Song of Evpatiy Kolovrat” can hardly be considered one of the author’s creative successes. It is stretched out and in places compositionally loose. In an effort to convey the ancient and Ryazan flavor, the author sometimes abuses archaisms and dialectisms.

However, despite such flaws, Yesenin’s first poem testifies to the poetic independence of the young author.

The poem is characterized by the lyrical coloring of events and the animation of nature: the poet vividly shows how the stars are worried (Where is Rus' shaking, // Doesn’t he hear the clang of an oath?

"Marfa Posadnitsa"

Yesenin’s poem “Marfa the Posadnitsa” (1914) is dedicated to the theme of the struggle of the Novgorod boyars with the Principality of Moscow. The poet here is on the side of the Novgorodians - the defenders of freedom, although, as is known, in the history of the Russian state, their struggle against those who sought to unify the country was not at all progressive. The author was attracted “in this historical legend by the figure of a heroic woman, the widow of the Novgorod mayor Boretsky Martha, who leads and leads the fight against the Moscow Tsar Ivan III.

Compared to the previous poem, “Marfa Posadnitsa” is distinguished by greater artistic maturity, manifested, in particular, in the reproduction of everyday details and language of the 16th century. For example, the scene of the gathering of the Streltsy regiments for the campaign against Novgorod, covered with the breath of antiquity, is colorful. In this scene, the ringing noise of bells and the neighing of horses, the jingling of sabers and the sobs of women, the “voice of command” and the exclamations of the archers merge together:

On the Kremlin cathedrals the bells began to cry, archers from distant settlements gathered; The horses neighed, the sabers clanked.

The women wiped away tears with their skirts, -

Does anyone return to the house unharmed?

To the accompaniment of a cheerful march (“The peaks were shadowing, the horses were stomping”), interrupted by the author’s thoughts about the soldiers going to battle, the Tsar of Mokov shares his sinister plans with the Tsarina. Their conversation is described in folklore style, and at the same time makes it possible to imagine the everyday atmosphere of that era, family relationships:

The king will say to his wife:

And there will be a feast on red mash

I sent to woo discourteous families,

I’ll spread the pillows of everyone’s heads in the ravine.

“My lord,” my wife says, “

Is it my mind to judge you!..

Unlike the first poem, “Marfa the Posadnitsa” is not overloaded with dialect and colloquial words, which makes its style clearer and clearer.

"Us"

A real historical figure was also reproduced by Yesenin in the poem “Us” (1914). Ataman Us is least of all similar to the associate of Stepan Razin, which he really was. Yesenin's hero rather resembles a character from folk bandit songs. This daring fellow is poeticized by the author:

On a steep mountain, near Kaluga, Us was married to a blue blizzard.

The image of Usa’s mother, whose son laid down his violent head at the hands of the boyars near distant Kaluga, also brings a poignantly lyrical note into the narrative.

The decrepit widow was waiting for her son. Grieving day and night, sitting under the shrine. The second summer has come and gone. There's snow on the field again, but it's still gone.

She sat down and snuggled up, looking meekly, meekly...

Who do you look like, light-eyed youth?..

- tears sparkled over a withered mustache -

It is you, O my son, who looks like Jesus!”

It is no coincidence that the hero of the poem is compared here with Christ: many of Yesenin’s works of these years are full of religious symbolism, Christian images and motifs. At the beginning of 1913, Yesenin wrote to his school friend G. Panfilov: “Currently I am reading the Gospel and finding a lot that is new for me... Christ is perfection for me, but I do not believe in him as much as others. Do they believe out of fear of what will happen after death? And I am pure and holy, as a person gifted with a bright mind and a noble soul, as a model in the pursuit of love for one’s neighbor.”

Religious poems by Yesenin

The idea of ​​the divine origin of the world and man, faith in Christ permeates many of S. Yesenin’s poems of the 1910s.

I smell God's rainbow

I didn't live in vain.

I bow to the roadside

I fall down on the grass.

The flame pours into the abyss of vision,

In the heart is the joy of childhood dreams.

I believed from birth

To Bogoroditsyn Intercession,-

the poet admits in the poem “I smell God’s rainbow…” (1914). The author senses the “rainbow of God,” that is, he foresees the joy of the Holy Resurrection, the new coming of Christ into the world for the salvation of people. And this colors his works in light major tones.

Images of Christ, the Mother of God, Saints Nicholas the Wonderworker, Yegor, praying mantises going “to bow to love and the cross” occupy one of the most important places in the figurative system of Yesenin’s poems, saturated with the author’s faith in God’s grace. In the world around us, according to the poet, the Savior is invisibly present:

Between the pines, between the fir trees,

Between the birch trees there are curly beads.

Under the wreath, in the ring of needles

I imagine Jesus

The feeling of Christ’s constant presence among people, characteristic of the Orthodox tradition, gives Yesenin’s poetic cosmos meaningful spiritual vitality. Christ, according to the author, brings love to the world, and people respond to him in kind. In the poem “The Lord Came to Torture People in Love...” (1914), an old grandfather treats a poor beggar, not suspecting that Christ is in front of him:

The Lord approached, hiding sorrow and torment:

Apparently, they say, you can’t wake up their hearts...

And the old man said, holding out his hand:

“Here, chew... a little, you’ll be stronger.”

In the person of this grandfather, the people whom the Lord came out to “torture in love” thus passed the test of mercy and kindness.

The kenotic archetype of Yesenin’s early poetry is the image of a wanderer who, seeking the city of God; walks “at a leisurely pace//Through villages and wastelands.” The Savior himself is depicted from the same perspective. Christ in the poet’s poems is humble, self-abasing, taking on the “vision of a slave,” similar to the One who in Tyutchev’s “slave form” “went out blessing” the entire Russian land. The external resemblance between Yesenin’s wanderers and the Savior is so close that the lyrical hero is afraid of not recognizing Him, of accidentally passing by:

And in every wretched wanderer

I'll go find out with longing.

Isn't he anointed by God?

He knocks with a birch bark stick.

And maybe I'll pass by

And I won’t notice at the secret hour.

That there are cherub wings in the fir trees,

And under the stump - hungry Savior.

Many of Yesenin’s pictures of the surrounding world and peasant life are full of religious images. Nature in his works is sacralized. The author likens the entire earthly space to the temple of God, where a continuous liturgy is celebrated, of which the lyrical hero is also a participant. “In the forest - a green church behind the mountain” - he “listens, as if at mass, to a prayer service of bird voices!” The poet sees how “the grove was filled with smoke under the dew,” the dawn is burning. His fields are “like saints”, “the dawn is a red prayer book//Prophesies good news”, peasant huts are “in the vestments of an image”, “a black wood grouse is calling to the all-night vigil”, etc.

In the poem “The Melted Clay Dries” (1914), the poet, by analogy with the Gospel parable about Christ’s entry into Jerusalem “on a donkey,” paints a picture of the appearance of the Lord among the Central Russian expanses dear to the author:

Last year's leaf in a ravine

Among the bushes - like a heap of copper.

Someone in a sunny homespun

Rides on a red donkey.

Christ is depicted here with a foggy face (“his face is foggy”), as if grieving over the sins of people. The awakening spring nature greets the Savior with jubilation: everything around will smell of willow and resin,” “at the forest lectern // A sparrow reads the psalter,” and the pines and spruce trees sing “Hosanna.” Russian nature for Yesenin is an abode of beauty and grace; being in it is tantamount to communion with the divine principle of life.

The liturgization of native nature and peasant life is one of the remarkable features of the problematics and poetics of S. Yesenin’s works of the 1910s, associated with the messianic-eschatological desire to comprehend the spiritual path of Russia:

And we will come across the plains

To the truth of the cross

By the light of a book dove

Give your lips something to drink.

("The Scarlet Darkness of the Heavenly Devil")

Poem "Rus"

The poet sees Rus' as a “dear land” where “everything is good and holy,” a country concealing within itself enormous moral strength. In 1914, Yesenin created a “small poem” “Rus”, dedicated to the theme of the First World War. The poet shows how a tragic event historically inexorably invades the established life of the “meek motherland”:

The sotskys told under the windows

The militias go to war.

The women of the suburbs started giggling.

Crying cut through the silence all around.

The idea of ​​unity and deep interconnection of natural and historical factors permeates the entire work. In Yesenin’s understanding, the natural and social worlds mutually determine each other, forming a holistic picture of national life. The poet shows how historical cataclysms (the outbreak of war) inevitably entail natural shocks:

Thunder struck, the cup of the sky was split.

Ragged clouds cover the forest.

On light gold pendants

The lamps of heaven began to sway.

It is no coincidence that Yesenin imbues landscape paintings with temple symbolism: he depicts war as the action of demonic forces directed against the divine harmony of the world.

The Russian village appears in the poem in the image of the mourning Eternal Femininity, close to the Orthodox consciousness - a “weary bride”, a “crying wife”, a mother awaiting the return of her son. The poet penetrates into the deep layers of national life, conveys the feeling of unity of people in the face of trouble, that communal, cathedral attitude that is characteristic of the Russian people. In the poem, the peasants together accompany the militias to war, together listen to the reading of letters from the front from the lips of the only literate peasant woman, “Chetnitsa Lusha,” and together answer them: (“Then they brought out a letter for everyone”).

The events of the war give rise to a feeling of the impending Apocalypse: “In the grove one could smell the smell of incense, // The knocking of bones sparkled in the wind...” And yet, both the author and his heroes firmly believe in the victory of good over the forces of evil, therefore yesterday’s peaceful plowmen, peasant sons, are portrayed by the author as the epic “good fellows,” creators and defenders of the Russian land, its reliable “support in times of adversity.” Lyricism is combined in the work with an epic beginning, the emotional subjectivity of the lyrical “I” of the narrator is combined with sketches of the life and everyday life of a peasant village during the war. Ten years later, the experience of creating a small lyric-epic poem “Rus” would be useful to Yesenin when working on one of his pinnacle works - the poem “Anna Snegina”.

The poem “Rus” from beginning to end is permeated with the author’s filial love for the homeland and its people:

Oh, Rus', my meek homeland.

I cherish my love only for you.

There is so much sincerity and spontaneity in such descriptions of meek, pious and dearly beloved Rus' that they often turn into passionate hymns to the glory of the Fatherland:

If the holy army calls:

“Throw away Rus', live in paradise!”

I will say: “There is no need for heaven.

Give me my homeland!”

(Go away, my dear Rus')

The image of his native country is formed in Yesenin’s poetry from pictures and details of village life (“In the Hut”, 1914), from individual episodes of the historical past and modern life. But first of all, Russia for Yesenin is its nature. And the fire of dawn, and the splash of the Oka wave, and the silvery light, the moon, and the beauty of the flowering meadow - all this was poured into poems full of love and tenderness for the native land:

But most of all, love for the native land

I was tormented, tormented and burned, -

The poet confesses.

Nature in Yesenin's poems

Almost not a single poem by Yesenin is complete without pictures of nature. The poet’s sensitive eye, in love with the surrounding world, sees how “the bird cherry tree is pouring snow,” how “a pine tree is tied up like a white scarf,” how “the scarlet light of dawn is woven on the lake,” and “a snowstorm // is spreading across the yard like a silk carpet.”

The reverent, heartfelt love for native nature in Yesenin’s poems awakens high, bright feelings, attunes the reader’s soul to waves of mercy and kindness, makes us take a fresh look at familiar and seemingly invisible native places:

Favorite region! I dream about my heart

Stacks of the sun about the waters of the bosom.

I would like to get lost

In your hundred-ringing greens.

The poet seems to be telling us: take a break from the everyday bustle for at least a minute, look around, listen to the rustling of grass and flowers, the songs of the wind, the voice of a river wave, look into the starry sky. And God’s world will open before you in its complexity and enduring charm - a beautiful and fragile world of life that must be loved and protected.

Yesenin's landscapes amaze with the richness of flora and fauna. We will not find such a variety of flora and fauna in any poet as in Yesenin. It is estimated that his poems include more than twenty species of trees and the same number of flower species, about thirty species of birds and almost all wild and domestic animals in central Russia as full-fledged artistic images.

The poet’s natural world includes not only the earth, but also the heavens, the moon, the sun, stars, dawns and sunsets, dew and fog, winds and snowstorms; it is densely populated - from nettles and burdock to bird cherry and oak, from bees and mice to bears and cows.

The main feature of Yesenin’s paintings and details of nature is their animation. For him, nature is a living being that feels and thinks, suffers and rejoices: “in the forest, wood grouse are crying with the sound of bells,” “the moon is butting the cloud with its horn,” “dark spruce trees dream of the hubbub of mowers,” “the bird cherry tree is waving its sleeve like a blizzard.”

Sometimes, as can be seen, for example, in the poem “The Road Thought About a Red Evening” (1916), a similar technique underlies the lyrical plot of the entire work.

The poem is literally replete with living, animated images from the natural world and village life: “The hut-old woman with the jaws of the threshold // Chews the odorous crumb of silence”; “The autumn cold gently and meekly//Sneaks through the darkness towards the oat yard”; “Dawn on the roof, poppy kitten, washing his mouth with his paw”; “Hugging the pipe, sparkles in the air//Green ash from the pink stove”, “The thin-lipped wind//whispers to someone”, “The barley straw groans tenderly”, etc. Due to this, a three-dimensional, emotional picture of the living world is created.

Yesenin’s nature is humanized, and man appears as a part of nature, so organically is he connected with the flora and fauna. The lyrical hero of his poems feels united with nature, dissolved in it: “the spring dawns twisted me into a rainbow,” “like a white snowflake in the blue, I melt.” “It’s good to walk along the road with willow trees // To guard the dozing Rus',” Yesenin will say in his 1917 poem “Songs, songs, what are you shouting about...”

This fusion of man and nature will especially become complete and organic in the poet’s mature work, but it originates in his early poetry. This perception of life is not a poetic device, but the most important aspect of his worldview.

Philosophy in Yesenin's lyrics

Like any great poet, Yesenin was not just a singer of his feelings and experiences. His poetry is philosophical, because it illuminates the eternal problems of existence.

Yesenin early developed his own philosophical and aesthetic concept of the world and man, the origins of which are rooted in folk mythology and the philosophy of Russian cosmism.

The central concept of the philosophical views of the ancient Slavs was the image of a tree. The outstanding Russian scientist A. N. Afanasyev wrote convincingly about this in his book “Poetic Views of the Slavs on Nature” (1868) (Yesenin searched for a long time and finally acquired this book for his personal library).

The image of the tree personified world harmony, the unity of all things on earth. Understanding his concept of the world, S. Yesenin wrote in the article “The Keys of Mary*” (1918): “Everything from the tree is the religion of the thoughts of our people (...) All the porridge, skates on the roofs, roosters on the shutters, pigeons on the princely porch, flowers on the bed and underwear along with towels are not of a simple pattern, they are a great significant epic of the outcome of the world and the purpose of man.”

Yesenin's poetry from the very beginning was largely oriented towards this philosophy. That is why so often a person in his work is likened to a tree and vice versa.

Life in Yesenin’s philosophical concept should be like a garden - well-groomed, clean, bearing fruit. A garden is the co-creation of man and nature, personifying the harmony of life, therefore this image is one of the favorites in Yesenin’s poetry: “It’s good to shake off the apple tree soul with the wind in the autumn freshness,” “Do anything to ring in the human garden,” “Let’s make noise.” like guests of the garden,” “A clever gardener will cut off the yellow bush,” etc., “You and I,” Yesenin wrote to N. Klyuev, “are from the same garden - a garden of apple trees, sheep, horses and wolves...”

And this is not a declaration, this is a worldview, which is based on the conviction of the interconnection and inter-complementarity of the created world, the consubstantiality of world life. The entire Universe, in the poet’s mind, is one huge garden: “on a branch of a cloud, like a plum, // a ripe star is blooming.”

The world in Yesenin’s poems is a world of living life, spiritualized and animated. Even plants feel pain, because, in his view, they are living beings:

The sickle cuts heavy ears of corn.

How swans are cut to the throat...

And then carefully, without anger.

Heads lay on the ground

And small bones with flails

Knocked out of thin bodies.

It won't even occur to anyone.

That straw is also flesh!..

And animals for the poet are “little brothers.” He calls them to come to him to share their grief: “Beasts, beasts, come to me, // cry your anger into the cups of my hands!”

The harmonious unity of man with the world, with the cosmos, is the main meaning of many of Yesenin’s poems, his philosophy of existence. Yesenin is convinced that the world rests on love and brotherhood: “We are all close relatives.”

Violation of this harmony - both in the natural and in the social spheres - leads to the destruction of the world and the human soul. Yesenin knows how to show this process through an everyday situation.

Poem "Song of the Dog"

One of the most dramatic poems in this regard is “Song of the Dog,” created in 1915. It became an event not only in Yesenin’s work, but in all of Russian poetry. No one before Yesenin wrote about “our little brothers” with such tenderness and compassion, with such sincerity for drama. The poem tells the story of how a mother dog was robbed of her puppies and drowned.

“The Song of the Dog” begins deliberately everyday, like an everyday sketch, but this everydayness is poeticized: the poet informs about how a dog whelped seven red puppies in the morning, how the mats on which the mother and her cubs lie “golden”, how “until the evening she their las to ala, // Combing with his tongue.”

And in the evening, when the chickens

Sitting on the pole

The owner came out gloomy,

He put all seven of them in a bag.

The poet does not describe how the man drowned the puppies. We only see how “for a long, long time the unfrozen surface of the water trembled.” The main attention is transferred to the image of a dog running after its owner through the snowdrifts in the vain hope of saving its children.

Human cruelty and indifference disrupt the harmony of life. Therefore, at the end of the poem, the action develops simultaneously in two planes, in two dimensions: concrete everyday and cosmic, because the harmony of the Universe is broken:

Loudly into the blue heights

She looked, whining.

And the month slid thin

And hiding behind the hill in the fields

And deaf, as if from a handout,

When they throw a stone at her to laugh.

The dog's eyes rolled

Golden stars in the snow.

The dog addresses his pain to the “blue heights,” i.e., to the entire Universe. The image of “loudly looked” is very capacious.

The dog did not whine loudly, looking into the blue heights, but “looked loudly... whining”: we seem to see “the eyes of a dog”, the pain frozen in them, equal to the highest tragedy - after all, the mother was deprived of her beloved children. And this tragedy can only be cried into the Universe, turning to the whole world.

The poet is convinced that life rests not on cruelty and indifference, but on the ideals of Christian love, brotherhood and mercy: “People, my brothers, people, // We did not come to destroy in the world, but to love and believe!”

Yesenin was especially concerned about the violent violation of harmony and the laws of existence in the public sphere, as happened in October 1917.

Yesenin and the October Revolution

He expressed these sentiments in his works “Octoichus”, “Dove of Jordan”, “Pantocrator”, “Inonia”, in which he sees the Russian village as a land of plenty, where there are “grass fields*, “herds of dun horses”, where “with a shepherd’s bag Apostle Andrew wanders."

However, as the civil war and the Red Terror intensified, Yesenin’s illusory hopes for a revolution that would establish heaven on earth quickly began to fade.

From messianic hopes he moves on to a decisive denial of revolutionary violence, to perplexed questions: “Oh, who, who should we sing//In this mad glow of corpses?” With bitterness, the poet remarks about himself: “Apparently, I was laughing at myself // I sang a song about a wonderful guest.” Tragic notes pervade his work, associated with the sharp contrast between city and countryside.

The revolutionary city, merciless in its attitude towards the countryside, or more precisely, the new government, sending its emissaries from the city to requisition agricultural products, seems to the poet to be the worst enemy of his dear “country of birch chintz”.

“Here he is, here he is with an iron belly, // Pulling his fingers to the throat of the plains,” writes Yesenin in the poem “Sorokoust” (19Z0), telling about the futile combat of a red-maned foal with a train merciless in its rapid movement. The poet paints an even darker picture of village life during the revolutionary era in the poem “The Mysterious World, My Ancient World...” (1921):

Mysterious world, my ancient world,

You, like the wind, calmed down and sat down.

It will squeeze the village by the neck

Stone hands of the highway.

City, city! You're in a fierce fight

He dubbed us as carrion and scum.

The field freezes in long-eyed melancholy.

Choking on telegraph poles.

May the heart be stingingly stinging,

This is a song of animal rights!..

...This is how hunters poison a wolf.

Clamping in the vice of raids.

Yesenin is horrified by the seas of blood, the class hatred of people, to communication with whom he prefers communication with animals, because they are kinder and more merciful:

I won't go anywhere with people. It’s better to die together with you, Than with your beloved to lift the earth into a crazy neighbor’s stone.

Yesenin’s work in the first revolutionary years can be called, without exaggeration, a poetic manifesto of the dying Russian village.

The poet’s gloomy, depressed state led to the appearance during this period of such works as “I am the last poet of the village”, “Mare’s ships”, “Hooligan”, “Confession of a hooligan”, “An owl is owling in autumn”, “Moscow tavern”, etc. At their center is the restless soul of Yesenin himself, who is in deep discord with the reality around him.

They mainly develop two interrelated motives: a hostile and sometimes hostile attitude towards revolutionary reality and deep dissatisfaction with their own fate. These motives are embodied either in sad and despondent tones (“My friend, my friend, visions that have become clear // Only death closes”), then in hysterical bravado (“I’m going to die for all this rusty death, // I’ll squint my eyes and narrow them”) and in attempts to find oblivion in the tavern frenzy, for which the poet sometimes mercilessly flagellates himself, calling himself a “boon,” “a rake,” “lost,” etc. The famous Yesenin mask of a hooligan became a form of protest against revolutionary reality, an escape from it.

But no matter how strongly the feeling of bitterness possessed him, Yesenin never broke ties with the social environment from which he came, and did not lose interest in the life of the Russian peasantry, in its past and present. Evidence of this is the poem “Pugachev” (1922).

Yesenin’s interest in Pugachev is due to his keen attention to peasant Russia, to the struggle of the Russian peasantry for “holy freedom.” The author's main task was to romanticize the peasant leader. The poet creates the image of a rebellious, ready for self-sacrifice, detached from everything petty and ordinary folk truth-seeker and truth-seeker. And this is hope for the future for him.

Yesenin's creativity of the 20s

In the early 20s, significant changes took place in Yesenin’s worldview and creativity, associated with the desire to abandon pessimism and gain a more stable view of the prospects for the revival of life in the country.

An important role in this evolution was played by the poet’s foreign trips to Germany, Italy, France, Belgium and America. Yesenin was not at all seduced by the Western way of life, especially the American one. In the essay “Iron Mirgorod,” he writes about the poverty of the country’s spiritual life, concluding that the Americans are “a primitive people in terms of their internal culture,” because “the dominion of the dollar has eaten away in them all aspirations for any complex issues.”

At the same time, he was struck by the industrial life of the West and the technological progress that he wanted to see in Russia. These sentiments were reflected in his poems “Stanzas”, “Uncomfortable Liquid Moon”, “Letter to a Woman”, etc.

I like something different now

And in the consumptive light of the moon

Through stone and steel

I see the power of my native country!

Field Russia! Enough

Heal yourself with a burning plow!

It hurts to see your poverty

And birches and poplars.

I don't know what will happen to me...

Maybe I’m not fit for this new life.

But I still want steel

See poor, beggarly Rus'

The last two years of his life Yesenin experienced an unprecedented creative jack. During 1924-1425 he created about a hundred works, twice as many as in the six previous years. At the same time, Yesenin’s poetry becomes more psychological, artistically more perfect, its smoothness and melody, deep soulful lyricism are enhanced.

His poems are filled with original epithets and comparisons, succinct, colorful metaphors taken from the natural world. Yesenin can be called a poet of metaphors; he sees the world metaphorically transformed.

The poet finds clear and vivid images, unexpected contrasts designed to show complex psychological experiences, the beauty and richness of the human soul and the surrounding world: “Golden foliage swirled in the pinkish water of the pond // Like butterflies, a light flock of butterflies flies breathlessly towards a star”; “I’m wandering through the first snow, // In my heart there are lilies of the valley of flaring strength”; “And the golden autumn//The sap in the birch trees diminishes,//For all those whom he loved and abandoned,//The leaves cry howling on the sand.”

Yesenin came in these years to that meaningful aesthetic simplicity and capacity that is characteristic of Russian classical poetry. And during this period, his poems often contain a motif of sadness, regret about the transience of youth and the impossibility of returning to it. But still, despite the nagging feeling of sadness, there is no despair and pessimism in them: they are warmed by faith in the spiritual strength of man, in their beloved Rus', and wise acceptance of the laws of existence.

They contain not the former bitterly defiant bravado “I have only fun / Fingers in my mouth and * a cheerful whistle”), not detachment from life (“Our life is kisses and a whirlpool”), but a deeply insightful understanding of the perishability of everything earthly and the irreversibility of change generations. The opposition: “immortality of nature” and “finitude of human life” is overcome by Yesenin by the thought of a single law of existence, to which both nature and man inevitably obey.

Yesenin’s works are consonant with the mood that A. S. Pushkin once expressed: “My sadness is bright...”

“I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry,” - this is how Yesenin begins, one of his famous poems, in which the poet combined two traditions that were most important for his entire work: folklore-mythological - the feeling of the unity of man with nature - and literary, primarily Pushkin's .

Pushkin’s “magnificent withering of nature” and “forests dressed in crimson and gold”, erased from frequent use by Yesenin’s predecessors, he fused into a single and contrasting image of golden withering, which is interpreted simultaneously both as a sign of autumn nature and as an external state (hair color) and the internal appearance of the lyrical hero.

The epithet “white” also acquires an additional semantic connotation in Yesenin’s poem: the white color is both blooming apple trees and the personification of purity and freshness. The image of youth is recreated here in a very unique way - the central image of the elegy: “As if I were in the echoing early spring // I rode on a pink horse.”

Spring early is the beginning, the morning of life, the pink horse is the symbolic embodiment of youthful hopes and impulses. Combining in this image realistic specificity with symbolism, the subjective with the objective, the poet achieves plasticity of the image and emotional expressiveness.

Rhetorical questions and appeals also impart vivid emotionality to the poem. “Wandering spirit, you are becoming less and less frequent...”, “My life, or did I dream of you,” the poet exclaims, conveying the inexorable passage of time.

Equally perfect and original is another Yesenin masterpiece - “The Golden Grove Dissuaded”. The image of a grove speaking the cheerful language of birches is magnificent, but metaphor and animation here is not an end in itself, but a means of accurately implementing the plan: to reveal the complex psychological state of the lyrical hero, his grief over his passing youth and acceptance of the laws of existence.

The subsequent images of cranes, hemp, the moon, and the metaphor of the “rowan bonfire” give this sadness a cosmic character (“The hemp tree dreams of all those who have passed away // With a wide moon over the young pond.” Grief and sadness are balanced by an understanding of the necessity and justification of a change of generations (“After all, everyone a wanderer in the world - //He will pass, come and leave home again") and satisfaction that life was not lived in vain:

Rowan brushes will not burn off,

Yellowness will not make the grass disappear.

Yesenin’s other poems of this time are permeated with similar thoughts, feelings and moods: “Now we are leaving little by little...”, “Blue May. Glowing warmth...", "To Kachalov's Dog."

Significant changes were observed during these years in the poet’s love lyrics, which occupy a huge place in his work. In works on this topic, Yesenin with magnificent skill embodied the subtlest nuances of the human soul: the joy of meetings, the melancholy of separation, impulse, sadness, despair, grief.

Love in Yesenin's poetic world is a manifestation of natural forces in man, the son of nature. It clearly fits into the natural calendar: autumn and spring are associated with Yesenin’s different psychological states of love.

Love is likened / to the processes of awakening, blossoming, blossoming and fading / of Nature. It is pristine and inexhaustible, like nature itself. At the same time, love in Yesenin’s understanding is far from simple. This primordial element is mysterious in its essence, shrouded in the highest mystery, and “He who invented your flexible figure and shoulders // put his lips to the bright secret.”

The poetic world of love created by Yesenin was, however, not stable. The development of this theme is marked by the poet’s complex, contradictory, dramatic search for a life ideal and harmony of spiritual values.

One of the poet’s best early poems on this topic is “Do not wander, do not crush in the crimson bushes...” (1916). The image of the beloved is covered here with the gentle beauty of Nature, created in the best traditions of oral folk art.

In essence, the entire poem is a portrait of a beloved, reflected in the pure mirror of nature, intricately woven against the background of the colors of a village evening from the purity and whiteness of snow, from the scarlet juice of berries, from grains of ears of corn and honeycomb:

With scarlet berry juice on the skin,

She was tender and beautiful

You look like a pink sunset

And, like snow, radiant and white.

During the creation of “Moscow Tavern,” the poet’s dramatic, depressed state also left an imprint on the coverage of the theme of love: Yesenin in the poems of this period depicts not a spiritual feeling, but an erotic passion, giving this a very specific explanation: “Is it possible to love now, // When in the heart is erased from the beast.” As Yesenin emerges from a critical state, his love lyrics again acquire light, sublime intonations and colors.

In the turning point year for the poet, 1923, he wrote the poems: “A blue fire has begun to sweep ...”, “Darling, let’s sit next to each other,” in which he again sings of true, deep, pure love. Now, more and more often, Yesenin’s image of his beloved is accompanied by the epithets “dear”, “sweetheart”, the attitude towards her becomes respectful and exalted.

Defiant intonations and the rude words and expressions associated with them disappear from the poems. The world of new, high feelings experienced by the lyrical hero is embodied in soft, soulful tones:

I will forget the dark forces.

That they tormented me, destroying me.

The appearance is affectionate! Cute look!

The only one I won’t forget is you.

(“Evening dark eyebrows furrowed”)

Cycle of poems “Persian motives”

This new state of the poet was reflected with great force in the cycle of his poems “Persian Motifs” (1924-1925), which were created under the impression of his stay in the Caucasus.

There is not a trace of naturalistic details here that reduced the artistic value of the “Moscow Tavern” cycle. The poeticization of the bright feeling of love is the most important feature of “Persian Motifs”:

Dear hands - a pair of swans -

They dive into the gold of my hair.

Everything in this world is made of people

The song of love is sung and repeated.

Peya and I are once far away

And now I’m singing about the same thing again.

That's why he breathes deeply

A word imbued with tenderness.

But Yesenin in this cycle is characterized not only by a different - chaste - embodiment of the theme of love, but also by bringing it closer to another, main theme for him: the theme of the Motherland. The author of “Persian Motifs” is convinced of the incompleteness of happiness far from his native land:

No matter how beautiful Shiraz is,

It is no better than the expanses of Ryazan.

Love in all its manifestations - for the Motherland, for the mother, for the woman, for nature - is the core of the poet’s moral and aesthetic ideal. It is interpreted by Yesenin as the fundamental principle of life, as a system of spiritual values ​​by which a person should live.

"Anna Snegina"

Yesenin’s largest work of the 1920s is the poem “Anna Snegina” (1925), which organically combined epic coverage of a sharp turning point in the life of the village with the heartfelt lyrical theme of love. The action of the poem takes place in the rural expanses dear to the poet, where “the moon showered the distance of the villages with golden powder,” where “the dew gives off smoke // On the white apple trees in the garden.”

The basis of the work is a lyrical plot associated with the lyrical hero’s memories of his youthful love for the landowner’s daughter Anna Snegina. The image of a sixteen-year-old “girl in a white cape, personifying the youth and beauty of life, illuminates the entire work with a gentle light._But the lyricism, the poet’s skill in depicting pictures of nature and the emotional movements of the heroes is only one of the advantages of the poem] Yesenin appears here not only as a subtle lyricist, but at the same time as a chronicler of turbulent and controversial events in the countryside during the October Revolution.

One of the main themes of the poem is the theme of war. The war is condemned by the entire artistic structure of the poem, its various situations and characters: the miller and his wife, the driver, two tragedies in the life of Anna Snegina (the death of her officer husband and her departure abroad), the lyrical hero himself, a lover of life and a humanist, convinced that that “the earth is beautiful, // And there is a man on it.” An eyewitness and participant in the war, he hates fratricidal massacre:

The war has eaten away at my soul.

For someone else's interest

I shot at a body close to me

And he climbed onto his brother with his chest.

The reluctance to be a toy in the hands of others (“I realized that I am a toy”) prompted the hero to desert from the front.

Returning to the places of his childhood and youth, he regains peace of mind. But not for long. The revolution disrupted the usual course of life and exacerbated many problems.

The herald of the revolutionary idea in the poem is the peasant Pron Ogloblin. Many researchers traditionally tend to consider him a positive hero, an exponent of the sentiments of the peasant masses and the poet himself. However, this is not quite true.

Pron evokes sympathy from the author because his life was cut short absurdly and cruelly: he was killed by the White Guards in 1920, and any terror, regardless of its color, aroused sharp rejection in Yesenin. Pron Ogloblin is the type of revolutionary who stands not with the people, but above them. And the revolution only contributed to the development of this leader’s psychology in him. This is how he addresses the peasants, urging them to take away the landowners' lands:

Ogloblin stands at the gate

And drunk in the liver and in the soul

The impoverished people are dying.

Hey you!

Cockroach spawn!

All to Snegina!..

R - once and for all!

Give me your lands, they say

Without any ransom from us!”

And immediately seeing me,

Reducing the grumpy agility,

He said in genuine offense:

The peasants still need to be cooked.”

Pron’s brother, Labutya, also a type of village “leader,” is depicted with even greater sarcasm. With the victory of the revolution, he found himself in a managerial position in the village council, and “with an important bearing” he lives “without a callus on his hands.”

Pron and Labute are opposed in the poem by the miller. This is kindness, mercy and humanity embodied. His image is permeated with lyricism and is dear to the author as a bearer of bright folk principles. It is no coincidence that the miller in the poem constantly connects people. Anna Snegina trusts him, the lyrical hero loves and remembers him, and the peasants respect him.

The events of the revolution thus receive ambiguous coverage in the poem. On the one hand, the revolution contributes to the growth of the miller's self-awareness. On the other hand, it gives power to people like Labutya and determines the tragedy of people like Anna. The daughter of a landowner, she turned out to be not needed by revolutionary Russia. Her letter from emigration is permeated with acute nostalgic pain for her forever lost homeland.

In the lyrical context of the poem, the separation of the lyrical hero from Anna is a separation from youth, separation from the purest and brightest that happens to a person in the morning dawn of his life. But bright memories of youth remain with a person forever as a memory, like the light of a distant star:

They were distant and dear!..

That image has not faded away in me.

We all loved during these years,

But that means they loved us too.

Like other works of Yesenin of the 1920s, the poem is distinguished by a careful selection of visual and expressive means. Along with metaphors, comparisons, epithets, the author widely uses colloquial folk speech, vernacular, very natural in the mouths of his peasant heroes: “there are almost two hundred houses,” “cobblestone,” “it eats yours in the drawbar,” etc.

Yesenin color painting

Mature Yesenin is a virtuoso master of the artistic form. Yesenin's color painting is rich and multifaceted. Yesenin uses color not only in a literal, but also in a metaphorical meaning, contributing to the figurative illumination of his philosophical and aesthetic concept of life.

The colors blue and cyan are especially common in Yesenin’s poetry. This is not just the poet’s individual attachment to such colors. Blue and light blue are the colors of the earth's atmosphere and water; they predominate in nature, regardless of the time of year. “Warm blue heights”, “blue groves”, “plain blue” - these are frequent signs of nature in Yesenin’s poems. But the poet is not limited to simply reproducing the colors of nature.

These colors turn into meaningful metaphors under his pen. Blue color for him is the color of peace and silence. That is why it is so often found when the poet depicts morning and evening: “blue evening”, “blue dusk”, “blue evening light”.

The blue color in Yesenin’s poetics serves to designate space, latitude: “blue arable land”, “blue space”, “blue Rus'”. Blue and dark blue in their combination serve to create a romantic mood in the reader. “My blue May! June is blue! - the poet exclaims, and we feel that here the months are not just named, here are thoughts about youth.

Scarlet, pink and red colors are quite common in Yesenin’s designs. The first two symbolize youth, purity, innocence, youthful impulses and hopes: “you yearn for the pink sky”, “I burn with pink fire”, “As if I were in the echoing early spring, // I rode on a pink horse”, “With the scarlet juice of the berries on my skin //Tender, beautiful”, etc.

The red color, akin to scarlet and pink, has a special semantic connotation in Yesenin’s poetics. This is an alarming, restless color, as if one feels the expectation of the unknown. If the scarlet color is associated with the dawn, symbolizing the morning of life, then the red hints at its imminent sunset: “the road is thinking about the red evening,” “the red wings of sunset are fading.”

When Yesenin was in a heavy and gloomy mood, the color black invaded his works: “The Black Man” is the name of his most tragic work.

Yesenin’s rich and capacious color painting, in addition to being picturesque and deepening the philosophical nature of his lyrics, greatly helps to enhance the musicality of the verse. S. Yesenin is one of the great Russian poets who developed the wonderful and unique tradition of Russian verse - melodiousness. His lyrics are permeated with the element of song. “I was sucked into song captivity,” the poet admitted.

The melodiousness of Yesenin's lyrics

It is no coincidence that many of his poems were set to music and became romances. He makes extensive use of sound in his works. Yesenin's sound writing, generous and rich, reflects a complex, polyphonic picture of the surrounding world.

Most of the sounds in the poet's poems are named as words. These are: the squeal of a blizzard and the hubbub of birds, the sound of hooves and the call of ducks, the sound of cart wheels and the vociferous noise of peasants. In his works we clearly hear how “a blizzard with a mad roar // Knocks on the hanging shutters” and “a tit shading between the forest curls.”

Yesenin often uses metonymy, that is, he names not a sound, but an object for which it is characteristic: “Behind the window there is a harmonic and the radiance of the month.” It is clear that here we are not talking about the harmonica as an instrument, but about its melody. Metonymy is often complicated by a metaphor that conveys the nature of the movement and sound of an object. For example, in the poem “Shine, my star, don’t fall,” the fall of autumn leaves is conveyed by the word “crying”:

And golden autumn

The sap in the birch trees decreases,

For everyone I loved and abandoned,

Leaves are crying on the sand.

The nature of sounds in Yesenin’s poetry correlates with the seasons. In spring and summer, the sounds are loud, jubilant, joyful: “In the wind’s tidings there is an intoxicating spring,” “And with the choir of birds’ prayer // The bells sing the hymn to them.” In autumn, the sounds fade sadly: “The owl owls like autumn, the leaves whisper like autumn,” “the forest froze without sadness or noise.”

Yesenin's verse is rich in instrumentation. The poet willingly uses assonance and alliteration, which not only give his works musicality, but also more clearly emphasize their meaning.

Yesenin's sound images help convey the psychological state of the lyrical hero. The poet associates with the sounds of spring youth, a young perception of life, a “flood of feelings”: “Spring sings in the soul.”

The bitterness of loss, mental fatigue and disappointment are emphasized by the sad sounds of autumn and bad weather. Yesenin’s sounds often merge with color, forming complex metaphorical images: “the ringing marble of white stairs,” “the ringing of a blue star,” “the blue clang of horseshoes,” etc. And as a result of such sound and color associations, it appears again and again in his in creativity, the image of the Motherland and the associated hope for the triumph of the bright beginnings of life: “Ring, ring, golden Rus'.”

The smoothness and melody of Yesenin’s verse is greatly facilitated by rhythm. The poet began his creative path by trying out all the syllabic-tonic meters and opted for trochee.

Russian classical poetry of the 19th century was predominantly iambic: iambics are used in 60-80% of the works of Russian poets. Yesenin chooses a trochee, and the trochee is pentameter, elegiac, imparting thoughtfulness, smoothness, and philosophical depth to the verse.

The melodiousness of Yesenin's trochee is created by the abundance of pyrrhic elements and various melodization techniques - anaphors, repetitions, enumerations. He also actively uses the principle of the ring composition of poems, that is, the roll call and coincidence of beginnings and endings. The ring composition, characteristic of the romance genre, was widely used by Fet, Polonsky, Blok, and Yesenin continues this tradition.

Until the end of his life, Yesenin continued to be concerned with the question of “what happened, what happened in the country.”

Back in August 1920, the poet wrote to his correspondent Evgenia Lifshits: “...The socialism that is going on is completely different from what I thought... It’s cramped for the living in it.”

Over time, this belief grew stronger. Yesenin figuratively spoke about what happened in Russia after October 1917 in his 1925 poem “Unspeakable, blue, tender...”:

Like a threesome of horses running wild

Traveled all over the country.

Many of Yesenin’s poems from the last years of his life are evidence of his painful thoughts about the results of the revolution, the desire to understand “where the fate of events is taking us.” Either he is skeptical of Soviet power, or “for the banner of freedom and bright labor // Ready to go even to the English Channel.” Either for him “Lenin is not an icon,” or he calls him “Captain of the Earth.” Either he claims that he “stayed in the past... with one foot,” or he is not averse to “pulling up his pants // Run after the Komsomol.”

“Return to the Motherland”, “Soviet Rus'”, “Homeless Rus'” and “Leaving Rus'”

In summer and autumn, Yesenin creates his “little tetralogy” - the poems “Return to the Motherland”, “Soviet Rus'”, “Homeless Rus'” and “Leaving Rus'”.

In them, with his characteristic merciless sincerity, he shows mournful pictures of a devastated village, the collapse of the fundamental foundations of the Russian way of life.

In “Return to the Homeland” it is “a bell tower without a cross” (“the commissioner removed the cross”); rotten cemetery crosses, which “as if the dead were in hand-to-hand combat, / / ​​Frozen with outstretched arms”; discarded icons; "Capital" on the table instead of the Bible.

The poem is a poetic parallel to Pushkin’s “I Visited Again”: both here and there - a return to the homeland. But how different this return appears. Pushkin depicts the connection of times, the continuity of ancestral and historical memory (“my grandson will remember me”). Yesenin has a tragic gap in the relationship between generations: his grandson does not recognize his own grandfather.

The same motive can be heard in the poem “Soviet Rus'”. “In his native village, in an orphaned land,” the lyrical hero feels lonely, forgotten, unnecessary: ​​“My poetry is no longer needed here, // And, perhaps, I myself am not needed here either.”

“In my own country, I’m like a foreigner,” - this is how Yesenin perceived his place in post-revolutionary Russia. The testimony of the emigrant writer Roman Gul is interesting in this regard.

Recalling one of his meetings with Yesenin in Berlin, Gul writes: “The three of us left the house of the German pilots. It was five o’clock in the morning... Yesenin suddenly muttered: “I won’t go to Moscow. I won’t go there as long as Russia is ruled by Leiba Bronstein”, i.e. L. Trotsky.

The poet recreated the ominous appearance of Leon Trotsky in 1923 in a poetic drama under the characteristic title “Land of Scoundrels.” Trotsky is depicted here under the name of a red counterintelligence officer, Chekistov, who hatefully declares: “There is no more mediocre and hypocritical // Than your Russian lowland peasant... I swear and will stubbornly // Curse you for at least a thousand years.”

The brilliant singer of Russia, the defender and custodian of its national way of life and spirit, Yesenin, with his creativity, entered into a tragic collision with the policy of de-peasantization, and in fact, the destruction of the country. He himself understood this perfectly well.

In February 1923, on his way from America, he wrote to the poet A. Kusikov in Paris: “I, a legitimate Russian son, feel sick of being a stepson in my own state. I can’t, by God I can’t! At least shout guard. Now that all that’s left of the revolution is nothing but a pipe, it has become clear that you and I were and will be the kind of bastard on whom we can hang all the dogs.”12

Yesenin was in the way, he had to be removed. He was persecuted, threatened with prison and even murder.

The poet’s mood in the last months of his life was reflected in the poem “The Black Man” (1925), inspired by Pushkin’s drama “Mozart and Salieri.” The poem tells how a black man, who lived in the country of the most disgusting thugs and charlatans, began to appear to the poet at night. He laughs at the poet, mocks his poems. Fear and melancholy take possession of the hero; he is unable to resist the black man.

Death of Yesenin

Life in Moscow is becoming more and more dangerous for Yesenin. On December 23, 1925, trying to break away from his pursuers, the poet secretly left for Leningrad. Here, late in the evening of December 27, at the Angleterre Hotel, he was killed under mysterious circumstances. His corpse, in order to simulate suicide, was hung high from the ceiling on a suitcase strap.

The poet's murder did not hinder the popularity of his works among readers. And then the ideologists of the new government made an attempt to distort and then ban his work.

The unsightly image of the poet began to intensify into the mass consciousness: a drunkard, a libertine, a brawler, a mediocre poet, etc. The “favorite of the party” N. Bukharin was especially zealous.