Sergei Esenin and Isadora Duncan

II

1917, October —Revolution. Country divided. Poets are divided, as all society is divided. The best, Aleksandr Blok, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Esenin, are on the side of the people—Revolution and Bolsheviks. Esenin believes that the Revolution brings the peasantry freedom and land, which the Bolsheviks call Socialism. The most famous and spiteful Merezhkovsky, his wife Zinaida Guippus, and others are running to Paris or Berlin. Links to the poetical ring are scattered around Europe.

1918. Only two years ago, Esenin dined with the Empress, and now, in Moscow, he submits an application to join the Communist Party and screams: Long live Revolution on the Earth and Heaven! But was not accepted by the Communists.

In search of political self-determination, he rushes about many parties of that time: S.R. with peasant’s deviation, Religious Socialism, Scythians, Narodnik (populism) movement, and so on… At last, he accepted Religious Socialism under the influence of Andrei Bely, Moscow poet-symbolist and Blok’s friend. Esenin’s symbol in the hungry country becomes a cow: I decided to show Russia through the cow; without a cow, there is no Russia:

                              I am telling you—you all perish,

                             The moss of your faith will suffocate you.

                            But over our pasture

                           Swelled up invisible cow’s horn.

1919. A group of poets, including Esenin, Mariengof, Shershenevich, and Ivnev, organized a new literary group of Imaginists (from French through English Imagists) and published a Declaration: We laugh when hearing about the content of art… Theme and content are a caecum of the art. All the content in the art is silly and senseless, as if it sticks to the art pictures. Image and only image.

They settled in the café Pegasus Stall. Café combined the bohemian restaurant with a stage for poets but mainly for the Rumanian band, a place for dancing and discussions about poetry altogether. Wine and vodka poured as a river:

                                       Noise and din in this terrifying den

                                       But the whole night through

                                      I read my verses to prostitutes

                                     And burn myself in alcohol with bandits.

                                               …             …          … 

                                     I, like you, a hopeless case,

                                    I can’t return.

 Their wildlife started to ruin Esenin.

 He couldn’t get rid of this strange and guffawed riff-raff; he was too weak to break his relations with this bohemia and his friends. And they needed him. Without his poetic genius, they couldn’t exist as a poetical group, and Cafe earned them money in the cold and hungry Moscow. It was a time of NEP- New Economic Politic, the temporary break brought by Communists to the hungry country. Nobody of the former petty bourgeoisie who stayed in the country and happily opened restaurants, cafes, and stores had understood that it was only one step to feed the country, and the second would be concentration camps, which Lenin had already created on 11 April 1919.

1920. Imaginists continue to publish their political articles against Socialism, which wants to control a human personality, but they are for anarchist art. Vadim Shershenevich publishes 4x4= 5, where he expounds their rhetoric about the image: Poem is not an organism; it’s the crowd of images ... We throw out from the poetry the sonorousness (music), description (painting), the beautiful and exact thoughts (logic), the soul feelings (psychology) and so on… Esenin signs under this credo but later refuses it because his poetry has been much more than an image for itself only.

His vagrancy continues; he has no home, not even one room in a communal apartment or a desk to keep his papers. He spends his nights in different homes with friends and acquaintances; he writes in those accidental places, at accidental desks, or just squatting somewhere. He suffered from his own disorganization to his last day:

                                         … you lost your children

                                         In the world,

                                         Your wife you

                                         Easily gave to another,

                                        And without family, friends,

                                       Without moorings

                                      You plunged into

                                       The pigsty whirl.

1921-1923. Isadora Duncan comes to Soviet Russia with the noble and idealistic idea of opening a Dance School for 1000 Russian children. Tired of depending on rich people’s donations, she wants the Communist Government to organize and take care of the school and for her to create the dances, teach them, and demonstrate her school to the new world of Communism:

On my way to Russia, I felt that my soul after death goes to the other world… I believed that the ideal state of Plato, Marx, and Lenin happened on this Earth by miracle. With all the ardor of the despairing to create my artistic dreams in Europe, I prepared to step into the ideal state of Communism. (Duncan. My Confession. Riga, 1928)

Didn’t she know that Russia was completely destroyed by the two wars, WWI and the Civil War, and the Revolution between them, and what was left of the country was in utter disorder? She was a 44-year-old woman. What “ideal state of Communism” was she thinking about?

In this disorder, she meets an exceedingly disordered young man of 25, looking like her tragically lost young son, with his blue eyes, luxurious blond wavy hair, and gracefully built, undersized Sergei. Been young, disoriented by all these political calamities in his beloved Russia, he wrote a lot about death as an exit from his disordered life:

                       You didn’t know,

                In the continuous smoke,

                In the devastating stormy life

                     From which I suffer

                     And can’t understand,

                     Where the fate of events carry us.

Or:               And I, having ruined my youth, / have even no memory of it.

Premonition of death chasted him also:

                                 Well, kiss me! So, I want.

                                The rot sang me his song.

                               Evidently, my death was felt by

                              Who hovers in the high.

The famous Dancer, with her two best students, agreed to follow her to Russia, and her brother, who helped her organize the school, occupied the huge, old mansion given to her by the government. Instead of a thousand, the government let her choose about 100 gifted children, and the school was opened. Children were fully provided for by the state.

As a talented dancer, she created several dances in the ancient Greek style for her school, like the Red Flag and International. First, the children had to learn the movements and study them mostly with her helpers. She organized several paid concerts to help her school with money. She was magnificent in her Dance of Grief with a small coffin on her stretched-up hands on Chopin’s music and in the International in a red dress. Even Lenin found the time to see and applaud her performance.

There is a lot of information about the relationship between Duncan and Esenin.

On the huge, old mirror, Duncan writes in its dust with mistakes in Russian: I love you, Seriozha. They drink a lot of Champagne, which her friends send through the French embassy. Both already were drunkards, she is in her 44, he- in his 25.

She fell in love with a beautiful golden boy with blue eyes, reminding her son. Maybe he fell in love with her too, but mostly, he fell in love with her worldwide fame, as his closest friend Mariengof asserted. Introducing her to his friends or acquaintances, he cynically calls her “old woman.” As a son of uneducated, narrow-minded poor peasants, he behaves accordingly and can’t forgive her age and many men before him:

                                             I didn’t know that love is infection,

                                             I didn’t know that love is a plague.

                                            She approached and by her screwed-up eye

                                            She drove me, hooligan, mad.

                                             Our life is a sheet and a bed.

                                             Our life is a kiss and into a whirlpool.

………….

                                            Sing, but sing! In the fated sweep

                                            Of these arms- fated misfortune.

                                            But you know, send them …

In another poem:           I am sad to look at you,

                                        What a pain, what a pity!

Or:                                     Lips of strangers destroyed

                                           Your body’s warmth, your trembling.

                                            And like rain is drizzling

                                            From my numb soul.

His cycle of Hooligan’s Verses about their relationship is the only one in his poetry where he is vulgar and cynical regarding a woman. It’s even embarrassing to read these poems. Their drinking bouts, their fights, his rages, his obscenity with her- all of that in his poems:

                                Pour forth, harmonica,

                                What a bore… what a bore…

                               Drink with me, rotten bitch,

                               Drink with me.

But at the end of the poem, he comes to his senses and asks for forgiveness:

                              Darling, I am crying, / forgive, forgive…

Why had she been so patient with all his rages, his hate, his insults and beatings? She explained his beating her by the Russian country custom: if a man loves a woman - he beats the woman; if he doesn’t beat her- he respects her. But it is a Russian folk joke, not a country custom.

1922, Spring. Duncan decided to go to Europe and America for concerts to make some money for her school and invited Esenin to join. The Soviet government could let him go only as her husband. Neither of them wanted to be married. A long time ago, Duncan gave a vow never to marry. Esenin didn’t care about marriage after his divorce from Raikh, but the Soviet government insisted.

2 May 1922, their marriage was registered.  On May 10, they took off to Berlin, Germany.