SERGEI ECENIN and ISADORA DUNCAN
I
Do not look at her wrists,
And from shoulders flowing silk
I sought happiness in this woman,
But unexpectedly found ruin.
In these four lines of his poem, our young and already famous poet not only gave the image of a beautiful woman, unusually elegantly dressed in silk (who could dress in silk in the hungry and cold Moscow after the Revolutionary years?) but expressed his longing for the earnestness of their love affair and its “ruin.” Sergei Esenin and Isadora Duncan met at the party of well-known artist S. Yakulov in Moscow:
[She] approached, and her screwed-up eye drove the hooligan mad.
That madness continued for two years, from the autumn of 1921 to the winter of 1923. Sergei Esenin, in his 25 years of life, was a beautiful young boy rather than a man. In his dandy suit, top hat, kidskin gloves, and expressive walking stick (it was his “dandy–hooligan” period), he made an impression on the sensational Isadora in the cold, hungry, and poor Moscow of 1921. Immediately, they became the most extravagant couple in Moscow, not knowing each other's language.
We are all informed about the sensational life of the exceptional dancer Isadora Duncan. But who was Sergei Esenin?
In the words of the most acknowledged writer Maxim Gorky, Esenin was
not so much a human being but an organ created by nature exclusively for poetry.
Two years later, Esenin introduced Isadora to Gorky in Berlin at a dinner in a restaurant. At the age of 46, she was already heavy and often drunk. During their dinner, she drank too much and made an unfavorable impression on the famous writer when she danced for him after dinner: She was everything that Esenin didn’t need.
Esenin was, as he wrote about himself: I am a village poet, and that was true. But Russia never knew another village genius, such as this boy, never before him and not yet after him.
He was born on 21 September 1895, in the village of Konstantinovo (Russian villages usually carried the names of their owners from the times of Serfdom), Riazan’ province, into a poor peasant family with two more children. His father regularly went to Moscow to earn some money because there was no job in the village.
His parents sent their clever boy to the village school, and then they paid some small payment for his education to get a teacher certificate in the Church-Teacher School for two years, after which he could teach in the elementary schools of the district. Children lived in the school’s dormitory without any adult care. But they had to start every morning and finish the evening on their knees, preying. On church holidays, they spent a lot of time in the church, as remembers one of the students, V.V. Znyshev. From 5 to 8 pm, we independently prepared our homework for the next day. After that, we read Pushkin, Lermontov, and other poets, and then Esenin read his own poems. They differed from the other students’ poems by their lightness. In such conditions, studied and developed his talent slender, curly-headed, with expressive blue eyes, merry, with unbalanced nature, always active, blond boy, Seriozha Esenin.
The school was so poor that it didn’t have a library. They had to walk two km. to the closest library in a nearby town. But Esenin was lucky; the teacher of Russian language and literature, E. M. Khitrov, was the best, and Esenin loved his class. His pupil’s poems stroke the teacher:
There, where cabbage’s beds
The sunrise waters in red,
A baby maple is sucking
His mother’s the green udder.
They still amaze me, and I hope everybody who loves poetry. Esenin was only 15 years old when he wrote that poem. It is striking how this boy could see, looking at the young branch of maple, growing from a tree as a baby and a tree as his nursing mother. His imagery is so rich: he always saw everything around him in these surprising images. When he joins the literary group of Imagists, he will be the best one and only one who stays in the history of Russian and World Literature.
1912, the autumn. He comes to Moscow, where his father works as a shop assistant in a meat shop. He lives with him in the dormitory and works in the same shop. The sequence of sullen days follows. One day, he neglects to stand up at the entrance of the shop's mistress, and he is sacked. Returns to his village:
The scarlet color of dawn weaved at the lake.…
There is a merry melancholy in the scarlet of dawn.
His sketches of nature always represent images full of mood or spirit, and they are always alive:
Slipping young birches smile,
Their braids are disheveled,
Their green earrings rustle,
And silver dews burn.
Or: Oh, thin little birch,
What is the wind whispering to you?
And: In the yarn of the sunny days
Time weaved its thread.
1913. Village boy wants to go to Moscow, and his second voyage has been more successful. He finds work as a corrector’s assistant at the famous Sytin’s Publishing House. His corrector, A.R. Izriadnova, becomes his common wife. Thus, he begins many love affairs in his short life. Son was born Yury Sergeevich Izriadnov (1914-1937), absolutely unnecessary to his father. He leaves his job, his wife, and his son. He wants to get an education and become a student of People’s University, named after its founder, A. L. Shaniavsky, which is open to poor young people, free of charge. After two years of studying at the Faculty of Philology, he quits the University because of a lack of money. Moscow literary magazines don’t accept his poems, and he goes to Petersburg, where he successfully begins his literary career.
It is the spring of 1915. Esenin is 20 years old. Coming out from Petersburg’s Railroad Station, he asks for Blok’s address in a first bookstore and visits the most famous poet- symbolist Aleksandr Blok, who reads his poems and likes them but gives him advice not to hurry. Blok presented him with his book of poems. Esenin notes in his autobiography: When I was looking at Blok, sweat dripped from me; it was the first time I saw the alive poet. Blok also gave Esenin a note for the literary magazine: In my opinion, your poems had to be published. And come to me if you need something.
So, I stayed in Petrograd and didn’t regret it. And all from light Blok’s hand. (Zvezda, 1946)
For the “light Blok’s hand,” Esenin quickly, from his first steps, becomes a celebrity as a peasant young poet, and the best literary salons, like Merezhkovsky and Sinaida Guippius, open for this village boy. With his peasant’s sharpness, Esenin understands the rules of the game. Vladimir Mayakovsky, another famous young poet, meets Esenin dressed in bast shoes and a shirt with some embroidery on the small crosses. I couldn’t believe him. He seemed to me such an operatic dummy. But soon after acquiring the fame, he changed his costume. Gorky in the letter to Roman Rolland describes Esenin: Short, gracefully built, with blond curls, blue eyed and clean. Town met him with such a delight as a glutton sees strawberries in January. He was 18 years old. But at 20 he already had a bowler on his curls and looked like a shop assistant from confectioner’s.
1916, time of WWI, Petersburg became Petrograd and Esenin, among others was called up in the army. He was enrolled as a medical orderly in the medical train #143 at the Tsar Village, very close to Tsar Palace, where, one day, he was invited to read his poems to the Empress and her children. He decided to continue playing a peasant boy and dressed up in the folk peasant costume; he impressed all of them. As Esenin remembered, Tsarina said: Poems are beautiful but very sad, and his answer: So, all of Russia. Tsarina presented poet with golden watch.
His whole life is in his poetry. His poetry carries the elements of the Russian spirit, the strength of Russian suffering, and Russian enjoyment. His ability to abandon himself into sorrow or lightness or find some violent and bold ecstasy in despair was not understood by foreigners, as I found out reading Peter Kurt Isadora Duncan or Joan Acocella, who called our best poet a “thug” in her preface to Isadora Duncan’s Autobiography, not knowing his poetry at all.
His constant anxiety, the absence of attachment to a definite place, to a certain person, or to friends, and the constant change of conceptions become the themes of his poems.
The motifs of vagrancy and hooliganism:
Spit out, wind, the armful of leaves, / I am, like you, hooligan.
[I] Will leave my hut and wander like a tramp and thief. Or: I squander my youth since when and so far, timelessly. And: You went with your head over heels/ into a pub’s whirl.
1916. Esenin is 20 years old, and his first book is out, Radunitsa- Rainbow. The main themes of the book are Nature in the different, always alive images and love for Russia:
Unhealthy, sickly, hollow,
Watery, gray smoothness.
That is all close and dear to me,
What we call Homeland.
The language of many poems, starting from the book's title, is archaic, taken from Holy Scriptures that the Russian Peasantry was habitual to:
If holy troop screeches/ cast the Rus’, live in paradise! /I would say: no paradise! /Give me my motherland!
1917, August. Esenin married Zinaida Raikh (1894- 1939), a secretary at the newspaper People’s Affair. Their affair, as always with Esenin and women, was short. She never stopped loving him. They had two children, a girl and a boy. For the first time in his life, he had a family and a home; he was a master and told everybody with pride that he had a wife. His friends didn’t like it, and they made everything for him to desert his family. Especially Mariengof, his closest friend, did his utmost. After Esenin’s death, he published his Novel Without Nonsense.
What a lovely piece of history. I love reading Russian literature, (although I'm not that proficient, for the drama, the imagery, the love of country. But I'd never heard of this poet. So grateful you're part of this community! I hope you'll offer more.
I hope it's Part 1 and more is to come!
PS strangely, when we studied Esenin in school and had to pick a verse to memorize and read before the class-while I loved many of his poems, I picked one about the city, and its street kids. "Cigarette Vendors". I don't know why, besides that I obviously loved it too...maybe I felt that most won't pick it, and I didn't want it to get lost, or something.