Main ailment

Friends and acquaintances of the poet agree that Yesenin's alcoholism became the primary reason for his premature departure "to that country where peace and grace." The poet himself, answering questions on December 5, 1925 when filling out an outpatient card, in the column "Alcohol" answered: "A lot, from the age of 24." In the same place, the hand of the attending physician ruthlessly deduced: "Delirium tremens, (hallucinations)." At the beginning of his bohemian life, the young healthy body of a Ryazan guy coped with the obligatory party libations. Yesenin even managed to organize "unloading" days. In 1921, he notes with pleasure in a letter to his friend Anatoly Mariengof: “... I won’t drink like that anymore, and today, for example, I even completely refused to look at the drunk Grishka. My God, what a disgusting thing it is, and I have probably been even worse. But for a long time the poet was not enough. IN Last year of his life, Yesenin became, in the words of the same Mariengof, “a man no more than one hour a day. From the first, morning, glass, consciousness was already darkening.

In 1922, Sergei Alexandrovich complained in a letter to his poetic "mentor" Klyuev: "I am very tired, and my last drunken illness made me completely shattered." While in America with his wife Isadora Duncan, Yesenin drank himself to epileptic seizures. In fairness, it must be said that not only on the amount of whiskey drunk, but also on its quality. At that time, America was shaken by the "dry law", so in the morning you had to take moonshine surrogates on your chest. A. Duncan wrote in the Herald Tribune newspaper, trying to somehow shield her husband and explain drunken covens with breaking mirrors in hotels: “The attacks of mental disorder that Yesenin suffers from do not only come from alcohol ... but also blood poisoning from drinking“ forbidden" American whiskey, in which I have the certificate of a famous New York doctor who treated Yesenin with similar seizures in New York ... ".

About relationships with authorities

Adherents of the version of the violent death of the poet are pressing with might and main on Yesenin's fatal conflicts with the authorities. There were conflicts, but only on the basis of the poet's tavern rampage. Yesenin was taken to the police station 10 times. But not in order to torture, but for "sobering up". I quote his fellow writer V. Khodasevich, who knew Yesenin closely: “Regarding Yesenin, an order was given in 1924 to the police - to deliver him to the station for sobering up and let him go, without giving further progress to the case.” The authorities were quite touching about the singer “Soviet Russia” ". The only poem that, with a huge stretch, can be classified as critical in relation to the authorities is “The Country of Scoundrels”. There, Yesenin has a hero named Leibman with the pseudonym Chekistov. If anyone does not know, the name of one of the leaders of the revolution Trotsky-Bronstein is Leib. Could this coincidence have mortally offended Leib Davidovich? There are other “terrible” words that Makhno utters (in the poem, the bandit Nomakh): “A herd! Herd! …Your equality is a deceit and a lie. For fools - a good bait. Scoundrels - a decent catch. But a bandit must say horror stories, that's why he is a bandit. That's all dissidence. But how many heartfelt lines Yesenin poured out on paper in favor of Bolshevik affairs! And the poet responded to the death of Lenin in the way that only a great lyric poet can respond: “And now he died ... The one who saved us is no more. And those whom he left, the country in a raging flood must be shackled in concrete.

Yesenin's hostility to the Bolsheviks is a myth. Of course, Sergei Alexandrovich began to play tricks on a drunken shop and used to utter all sorts of obscenities, but the authorities were indulgent towards his tavern frondism. If he was a danger to the authorities, he would easily be accused of some kind of conspiracy and would be slapped, like, for example, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov. Yesenin was on a short footing with many Chekists. In particular, he liked to drag the famous Chekist-mokrushnik Yakov Blyumkin along with him to parties, who decided in the summer of 1918 the German ambassador himself. Yesenin, according to Khodasevich, for courage could offer an honest company to go and see the execution of the "contra". “I’ll arrange it for you through Blumkin in one minute,” the inflamed lyric poet quite seriously declared.

How the Bolsheviks raised Yesenin

It is known that Lenin and Trotsky did not have much reverence for the poetry of Demyan Bedny. “Rough. He follows the reader, but you have to be ahead, ”the leader once said. Trotsky, too, although he sang his praises in the article "Literature and Revolution", did it not from a pure heart, but out of necessity.

Many people came to the revolution “from the plow”. Learned how to wield a saber. They also tried to take poetry by storm, as they recently took Perekop. So they wrote: "Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny / Rode on a frisky mare." Or: “I’ll torn my shirt like a sailor - / And I’ll shout: “Long live Trotsky!”

The young people were full of revolutionary enthusiasm, but is this really poetry? And until when could the farce Demyan be considered the first proletarian poet?

“The face, I must say frankly, does not inspire sympathy, and the atmosphere around him is not fragrant ... He will be a lackey, but there are nameless older and younger ones for this.”

(Trotsky)

And whom, pray tell, will you order to caress and uplift? Blok with his "Twelve" - ​​"the first poem about the revolution"? So this very revolution came out with something not very attractive, with some pogrom slogans:

Lock up the floors.

Today there will be robberies!

We are on the mountain to all bourgeois

Let's fan the world fire

World fire in the blood -

God! Bless!

Trotsky was smart enough to silently pass Blok's poem, in which many (M. Gorky, K. Chukovsky and others) saw "satire and evil satire."

Yesenin also does not inspire confidence, you have to work and work with him. “Revolution, you see, destroys a person”, “My revolution has not yet come!” Just look, he will run away to the West, although he declares himself “to the left of the Bolsheviks”:

Now in the Soviet side

I am the most furious fellow traveler.

“How come, fellow traveler! To what station? - Trotsky clarified sarcastically.

No, Sergei Alexandrovich, we still have to make you a Bolshevik, but if we don’t, then we’ll break you! There is only Mayakovsky now, but who is not tired of the rumbling of a barrel on a cobbled pavement? After the roar of war and devastation, people want silence and sincerity, but he “yells, invents crooked words,” Lenin grumbles with displeasure. But one has to be content with such poetry!

Of course, on duty, it is more convenient for Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky to deal with the education and re-education of poets, but it was the right time to re-educate him. Bukharin was also unsuited for this purpose, although he was considered the main ideologist of Bolshevism. Trotsky, as the most educated Bolshevik leader, closely watched, directed and commanded in literature. And what came of it? All the poets and writers of the "Silver Age" left Bolshevik Russia, leaving "unreliable", "unstable", "politically limited fellow travelers". Involuntarily, one had to sing praises to proletarian poets and publish green youth.

Trotsky did not stand on ceremony with poets:

“Those who join will not remove the North Star from the sky, nor will they invent soundless gunpowder. But they are useful, necessary - they will go like manure under new culture. And this is not so little at all ... We are very well aware of the political narrow-mindedness, instability, and unreliability of fellow travelers. But if we throw out Pilnyak with his Naked Year, the serapions with Vsevolod Ivanov, Tikhonov and Polonskaya, Mayakovsky, Yesenin, then what, in fact, will remain, besides still unpaid bills for future proletarian literature?

The field of art is not one where the party can command.

The words are correct, but one should not take them at face value - they were said when the party had already pronounced a verdict on all those who were "on their own." The “frantic communist” (as St. Kunyaev calls him), journalist and party leader Georgy Ustinov, published this decision in his 1923 article. In it, the peasant poets Yesenin, Klyuev, Klychkov and Oreshin were first called "psycho bandits", and the chapter of the article was called "Condemned to death."

“Do poets sense their doom? Certainly. Grandfather's Russia is gone, and with it, with a melancholic song, its poets depart. “For me, Proletkult will not cry, / And Smolny will not cook kutya,” Nikolai Klyuev sighs melancholy. And Yesenin - the brightest, most gifted poet of the transitional era and the most incorrigible psycho-bandit, echoes his brother: "I am the last poet of the village."

Why was Yesenin not along the way with the Bolsheviks?

“Vardin is very good to me and very attentive. He is a wonderful, simple and warm person. Everything he does in literary politics he does as an honest communist. The only trouble is that he loves communism more than literature.”

Yesenin wrote this to his sister, but he knew that all his letters would become the property of well-known authorities. Galina Benislavskaya quotes these lines, and adds on her own behalf: “Vardin, despite the narrowness of his views, had a beneficial effect on Sergei Alexandrovich in the sense of determining his “political orientation” (...) “He had a good attitude towards Vardin forever. Even in a letter from the Caucasus to Katya, mentioning that he did not go along with Vardin, he spoke of Vardin as a wonderful person.

All the Bolsheviks who closely surrounded Yesenin - and Vardin, and Voronsky, and Berzin, and others - were undoubtedly good people but they loved communism more than literature.

Yesenin said definitely:“I will give my whole soul to October and May, but I won’t give up only the sweet lyre.” Albert Rhys tells Williams:“I met Yesenin shortly after his breakup with the dancer Isadora Duncan. Yesenin was looking for a spacious and comfortable apartment. But in overpopulated Moscow it was difficult to find such an apartment, and someone advised the poet to turn to Kalinin.

It doesn't matter, - Yesenin declared with all the self-confidence of youth, - he will be glad to see Pushkin of today's Russia, - and immediately added, - or any of his friends.

I must say that Yesenin did not have an apartment. No. For all the years of his stay in his beloved Moscow, he never had his own corner. Everyone has been writing about Yesenin's homelessness over the past two years. Here is a literally anecdotal episode: “The friend with whom Yesenin came asks him:“ Where are you going to spend the night? - “I don’t know,” the poet answers, “let’s go at least to you.” A. Nazarova told about the same: “Yesenin was terribly tormented, having no permanent shelter. On Bogoslovsky - Mariengof and Kolobov needed a room, on Nikitskaya - Galya and I lived in the same room. He either spent the night with us, then at Bogoslovsky, then somewhere else, like a stray dog, wandering around and being unable to either work in peace or live in peace ... His sister also huddled somewhere in Zamoskvorechye. Another sister was supposed to come from the village.”

The poet took the advice of his friends and went to Kalinin. What the conversation was between them, we probably will never know, but, apparently, Mikhail Ivanovich was not simple and advised Yesenin to leave for his village and live there for two years. In other words, he advised me to get out of Moscow and sit in the wilderness. Kalinin must have had reasons for such advice. Yesenin did not listen to Mikhil Ivanovich. And what immediately followed this disobedience? All hardships fell upon Yesenin: collections were not published, poems were not printed.

In one of his poems he wrote:

I am the rightful owner of the Russian country,

Like a stray dog ​​roamed the earth.

The bookstore, from which he had some income, passed into other hands. The Pegasus Stall Cafe, where he was the owner on shares with others and received dividends, went bankrupt, it was also closed soon after.

Isadora sent a reassuring telegram:

“My work is brilliant. Trotsky was. He treated me amazingly. Thanks to his help, they now give me large funds for the publishing house.

But what is it really? Yesenin has always been difficult, but he has never had such a difficult time. Read the lines from the diary of Galina Benislavskaya, which have never been published:

“Understand,” the poet complained, “I am not the master in my house, I have to knock on my house, and they don’t open it for me.”

“Sometimes it seemed to him, and in fact it was, that he was rejected and rejected. After all, after all, the entire peasantry of the USSR is ideologically alien to the communist worldview, but we are drawing it into new construction.

We involve because it is a force, a large value. It was very hard for Sergei Alexandrovich that he was ignored in this regard as a person and as a social figure. The situation was created like this: either come to us with a ready-made worldview, or we don’t need you, you are a poisonous flower that can only poison the psyche of young people.

Sergei Alexandrovich suffered greatly from his inactivity.“They will not be forgiven for this, they will be avenged for this. Let me be a victim, I must be a victim for everyone who is "not allowed." They don't let me, they don't want to, well, we'll see. Everyone gets mad at me. This is not a pound of raisins for you. How else get angry. And we are all evil. You do not know how angry we are if we are offended. Don't touch it or it will be bad. I will scream, I will, I will be everywhere. Planted - let planted - it will be even worse. We always wait and endure for a long time. But don't touch! No need!"

“For how many years our authorities hid these ingenuous lines of a person close to the poet. And all in order to hide the truth about the persecution of Yesenin by the leaders of the Bolsheviks for political reasons. - said Eduard Khlystalov.

Evdokimov's memoirs also testify to how the Bolsheviks "educated" Yesenin (chapter "On a wooden sofa").

“In August, the Literary and Art Department was transferred along the same corridor to the very end. In two small rooms, cluttered with cupboards and tables with bad archaic heating, with overcrowding of the rooms with service personnel and the visiting public, it was heavy and stuffy. And brought: do not smoke in the rooms.

In the corridor at the door they put a small, for three, wooden sofa. On this sofa, perhaps, a rare contemporary writers did not spend a few minutes of his life.

And almost every visit to Yesenin also began with this sofa. He came, lit a cigarette - and went out into the corridor.

Throughout the autumn he visited quite often. And somehow it happened that most often I met him on the couch, noticing from a distance in the corridor a familiar figure ...

Usually monthly payments a thousand rubles each had to be given out by proxy Yesenin to his wife, then to his cousin Ilya Yesenin. Before the poet's marriage to SL. Tolstoy received money from his sister, EL. Yesenin.

In order to: save money, when the poet came for them in a state of intoxication, we considered it our duty not to give him money.

Under a plausible pretext, I quickly went to the lower floor, to the financial sector, warned our workmates not to give money to Yesenin at the cash desk, or took an already issued order from the cash desk. In cases of the poet's persistence, the issuance was delayed until 3 o'clock in the afternoon, then they gave him a check to the bank, when operations were already stopped there that day. In the latter case, there was hope that the poet would sober up in the morning and the money would not go to waste.

It must be said that not only Yesenin was brought up by the Bolshevik government in this way. They remember, for example, how Vladimir Mayakovsky tap-danced in the office of the chief accountant with a promise that he would not leave until all the money was on the table. From all the offices, employees and employees came to watch and admire this spectacle. Mayakovsky knew how to get his way.

Yesenin did not have such a stranglehold. He was delicate, and if he left empty-handed, he did not look into his eyes. He was ashamed of the people. And Evdokimov remembered all his life this guilt before Yesenin.

Suppose that Yesenin, "educating", was deprived of money for the purpose of "prevention", but in the same way, Benislavskaya or sister Katya had to travel many times, "and often there was not even a tram." Did this also contribute to a “sober existence” or, on the contrary, pushed you to the taverns with a desire to drown out the insult?

Even on the last day, leaving Moscow for good, he failed to receive money, despite the fact that he came from the hospital three days before departure, warning about this.

The warrant has been issued, - said Evdokimov, - but you came too early.

Yesenin did not receive either in the morning, or after two, or after four. And he left for Leningrad without money.

After leaving Isadora, as you know, Yesenin lived with G. Benislavskaya. She recalls:

“The three of us had to live (I am Katya and Sergey Alexandrovich) in one small room, and in the autumn of 1924 a fourth was added - Shurka. And spending the night in our apartment is generally something indescribable. In my room - I, Sergey Alexandrovich, Klyuev, Ganin and someone else, and in the next small, cold room, on a broken camp bed - one of Sergey Alexandrovich's companions or Katya. Later, in 1925, the picture changed somewhat: in one room - Sergei Alexandrovich, Sakharov, Muran, Boldovkin, nearby in the same little room in which her mistress lived by that time - the owner of the room herself was on the bed, and on the floor, at the window - her sister, all the space between the wall and the bed was given to us - me, Shura and Katya, and the last of us slept half under the bed.

Well, how difficult it was for Sergei Alexandrovich with money - this cannot be described in words. "Projector", "Krasnaya Niva" and "Spark" paid carefully. But only new poems were handed over to the magazines, and this money could not be enough.

"Krasnaya nov" paid a nightmare. Almost every other day I had to go there (and often there was no tram) in order to finally catch the moment when the cashier had money. In addition, more than once they gave out in parts, at 30 rubles, and in the meantime debts accumulated, the money was needed in the village, often Sergei Alexandrovich asked to be sent. The situation was such that sometimes my salary personally saved us, and I received a little, 70 rubles. There were four permanent “dependents” in total (mother, father and two sisters), and they lived in different places, parents in the village, sisters in Moscow, and Sergei Alexandrovich himself throughout the USSR.

(...) Never in my life before and after that I did not know the value of money and did not appreciate all the charm of receiving a certain salary, when, in essence, you depend only on the calendar.

5. Bolsheviks The plant has been working for more than a year, and people kept coming and coming to Pechatkino. No one knew or counted how many people had gathered here; some said - five, others - eight thousand. In a short time, four drinking houses lined up in one row near the entrance of the plant

CHAPTER XX STALIN, MEN, AND BOLSHEVIKS The father of nations first appeared in Prishvin's Diary in 1924: “Stalin published a pamphlet against Trotsky, 'Trotskyism or Leninism' - it is impossible to pronounce it, but Kamenev called his pamphlet 'Leninism or Trotskyism' - it is pronounceable.

CHAPTER 15 STALIN, BOLSHEVIKS AND MEN The father of the peoples first appeared in Prishvin's Diary in 1924: “Stalin published a pamphlet against Trotsky “Trotskyism or Leninism” - it is impossible to pronounce, and Kamenev called his pamphlet “Leninism or Trotskyism” - it is pronounceable.

THE BOLSHEVIKS The changes that took place in the country changed the face of the once prim capital of the empire. The daughter of the British ambassador, Miri-el Buchanan, saw revolutionary Petrograd like this: “Dirty red flags now fluttered over the Winter Palace, the fortress and government offices.

Chapter thirty-six. BOLSHEVIK AGAINST BOLSHEVIK The Cheka was almost abolished a year after its creation! Of course, it would not have come to this, but at one time it seemed so. Far from everyone in the Bolshevik

Chapter sixteen. Bolsheviks in power I was returning to the front. The trains were terribly crowded, but, fortunately, I managed to get a seat in a first-class carriage. In Molodechno, I reported on the arrival to the commander of the 10th Army, General Valuev, and dined at his headquarters, along with

Chapter 3 Esenin's Posthumous Sin I have an irony... If you want to know, Heine is my teacher. (Yesenin about himself. From the memoirs of Erlich) In the memoirs of P. Chagin, Yesenin mentions the name of Heinrich Heine next to the name of Karl Marx. Meanwhile, Yesenin assured that "under no weather"

19 Evening at the Polytechnic Museum. Yesenin's student Augusta Miklashevskaya. What happened after Yesenin's death Re-registration of the "Association" Some critics and literary critics were convinced that Yesenin's article "Life and Art" began a break with the Imagists. The same

20 Yesenin's quarrel with Mariengof. "Masculine" act. An incident in a pub. Trial of 4 poets. Yesenin's suspicious environment In the same October 1923, Sergei met Kozhebatkin, went with him to some cafe. Alexander Melentievich told Yesenin why they didn’t pay

24 Yesenin's triumph in the Union of Poets. Prototypes of Yesenin's heroines. Who is the northerner in "Persian Motifs"? End of the Freethinker. Explanations of Vsevolod Ivanov The beginning of Yesenin's evening in the club of poets was scheduled at nine o'clock, but even earlier the club was crowded with members of the Union

25 Yesenin and Mariengof in the Mouse Hole. Yesenin's marriage to S. A. Tolstoy. Esenin's speech at the Press House We called our new cafe on the corner of Kuznetsky Most "Mouse Hole". On the wall near the buffet counter, Borya Erdman mounted a spectacular showcase on a wooden shield

Chapter 8. Yesenin's son comes from America to his father's grave "... it's not worth living more days anyway ..." When Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam came to Leningrad, they stayed at the house of Nadezhda Volpin. Once the mistress's little son was asked, pointing to Osip Emilievich:

CHAPTER FIVE The Second Congress of the R.S.D.R.P. Abroad and the Split in the Party. - Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. - Bronstein-Trotsky, Plekhanov and Lenin In November 1902, having finished my term of exile, I returned to Nikolaev. There, I soon had to plunge headlong into the affairs of the local Social Democratic

Chapter 5 The Bolsheviks are in power The Bolsheviks are in power, but the vast majority of the noble-bourgeois St. Petersburg treats this fact extremely superficially: "Is it conceivable? A coming phenomenon! Somehow it will end, and, obviously, very soon ..." But how and why "is obvious ", none

How children were raised in the families of Pushkin and Solzhenitsyn ... It is impossible to raise children well if you yourself are bad. Leo Tolstoy Natalya Pushkina-Lanskaya Thoughts on marriage From the letters of N. N. Pushkina-Lanskaya to P. P. Lansky. "Our Heritage", No. 3, 1990 ... And now I return to your

Chapter eight. Bolsheviks 1. The persecution of religion, which began immediately after the Bolshevik coup, surprised the naive VA Platonova: she could not understand why the government, which declared itself to be the people, acts against the traditional folk beliefs. Alexey

Sergei Yesenin: "I did not shoot the unfortunate in dungeons ...". - part 3.

In 1915, young, perky, full of vitality, Sergei Yesenin wrote the lines that became prophetic:

By that sand
And I'm on a wind sway,
Love sadness.
They'll lead you with a rope around your neck...

Only seven years will pass, and the prophecy about the death of Sergei Alexandrovich will sound again, said by his close friend, the poet Nikolai Klyuev: “You, doomed to be slaughtered ... rejoice in your slaughtering ... ”- he wrote in a letter to Yesenin. The poet himself foresaw a tragic death. “I will be a victim...,” he told his literary secretary G. Benislavskaya, and a few days before his death he directly confessed to V. Erlich: “They want to kill me! I, like a beast, feel it! ”The life of Sergei Alexandrovich, according to the latest research, was cut short on December 27, 1925. at the Angleterre Hotel. What happened then in this hotel, how exactly the earthly existence of the great poet ended - will be shown (hopefully) in the near future. However, even today it can be said with a high degree of certainty that Yesenin, contrary to the official version, was killed and then hung up. And here the question immediately arises: “And for what, in fact, Yesenin could have been killed?”

I am not a villain and I did not rob the forest,

I'm just a street rake
He did not shoot the unfortunate in dungeons,

Smiling at oncoming faces -

Sergei Yesenin wrote about himself. He wrote simply and sincerely, as, indeed, about everything that he had to write about. “I never lie with my heart,” he says in one of his poems. Paradoxically, it was precisely this position that did not suit the Bolshevik authorities, who believed that if a person lives in a revolutionary time, he must obey the laws of this time. This worldview was clearly defined by the proletarian poet E. Bagritsky, speaking about his century, he wrote:
"Lie" - lie,
But if he (the century) says:
"Kill" - kill ...
Sergei Yesenin, brought up from childhood on Christian, Orthodox values, preached otherwise. In one of his youthful letters, he wrote to his soulmate G. Panfilov: “Grisha, I am currently reading the Gospel and find a lot of new things in it ... Christ is perfection for me,” and in another letter: “Yes, Grisha, love and pity people - and criminals, and scoundrels, and liars, and sufferers, and the righteous: you could and can be any of them. Love the oppressors too, and do not stigmatize, but reveal with caress the vital illnesses of people.

These lines were written even before the revolution of 1917, directed against the so-called "oppressors". It would seem that after the revolution, Yesenin changed his views. After all, he welcomed it (“Long live the revolution, both on earth and in heaven!”) And even wrote himself down as its creator:

The sky is like a bell

My mother is the Motherland,
The month is language

I am a Bolshevik

And as a Bolshevik, he must think and write accordingly. And, in fact, having fallen into spiritual obscuration (however, like the majority of the Russian people), Sergei Yesenin wrote blasphemous verses corresponding to the revolutionary, atheistic time. So one of them says:
The same honey flows the flesh
For thousands of years the same stars are famous,
You taught me, Lord.
Do not pray to you, but bark
For pennies from golden aspens
For your curly gray hairs,
Recalcitrant, robber son.
I'm screaming at you: "To hell with the old!"
It would seem that he renounced the "old" one, in which life was built on Christian mercy and love for one's neighbor, it seemed that he should become a preacher of a new, revolutionary testament: if necessary, lie, if necessary, kill ...

However, already in 1919, in a short poem "Mares' Ships", the poet, referring to the animals, which, in his opinion, became better people, He speaks:

I won't go anywhere with people.

Than from your beloved to raise the earth
It's better to die together with you,

Into the crazy passing stone.

The same poem contains the following lines:
You are rowing into the land of the future.
With oars of severed hands
Yesenin began to understand that the revolution is built on blood, began to see clearly from "freedom that blinded everyone." But with his sensitive, poetic heart, he felt that this insight could become fatal for him. And again the prophetic words sounded in his work:

Only a heart under shabby clothes

"My friend, my friend, clear eyelids
Whispers to me, who visited the firmament:

Only death closes.

In 1923, in a letter to A. Kusikov, Sergei Alexandrovich wrote: “I cease to understand to which revolution I belonged. I see only one thing, that neither for February, nor for October ... "Why so - he explained in the poem" Country of Scoundrels ":
Some conversations
empty fun,
Well, what did we take in return?
Well then
Same thieves
The same crooks came
All were taken prisoner.
And the law of the revolution
Following the ideological insight, spiritual insight also came to Yesenin.

I'm ashamed that I believed in God

I'm sorry that I don't believe it now.

These lines, ambiguous in meaning, are known to all admirers of Sergei Alexandrovich's work. He spoke with great certainty to Isadora Duncan in 1922:

- The Bolsheviks banned the use of the word "God" in the press, you know?

But the Bolsheviks are right. There is no God. Old. Silly.

- Oh, Isadora! After all, everything is from God. Poetry and even your dances, - answered Sergey Alexandrovich, the translator Duncan Lola Kinel recalled.

However, Yesenin's return to God was excruciatingly difficult. Even in 1924, in his poems, he still did not separate himself from the bravado characteristic of the intelligentsia of that time. So in the work “Letter to Mother”, Sergei Yesenin writes:
There is no return to the old.
And don't teach me to pray, don't.
But a year later, confessional-repentant lines sounded in his work:

Forgive me for

I pray to him at night.
I don't believe in God
And you need to pray...
So I need.
When, in April-May 1925, one of the most anti-Christian opuses of Demyan Bedny, the poem “The New Testament without Defect Evangelist Demyan”, was published in ten issues of the Pravda newspaper, Yesenin openly stood up for Orthodoxy, writing the poetic “Message to the Evangelist” Demyan." And although in it Sergei Alexandrovich again expresses his personal ambivalent attitude towards religion (which, most likely, was a screen for Bolshevik censorship), however, in general, he directly says that no one should trample on the Orthodox faith of the Russian people.

In his letter, the poet writes:

... When I read in Pravda

I felt ashamed as if I had
The untruth about Christ of the lecherous Demyan.
No, you, Demyan, did not offend Christ,
Into the vomit vomited drunk...
There was a thief, Judas was.
You didn't hit him with your pen a lot.
You are blood clots at the cross
You were just missing.
You only grunted at Christ,
He dug his nostril like a fat boar.

Efim Lakeevich Pridvorov.

(The real name of Demyan Bedny was Efim Alekseevich Pridvorov.)

In May 1925, Yesenin handed over the "Message" for publication to the newspaper "Bakinskiy Rabochiy", which was edited by his close friend P. Chagin. However, he did not dare to publish this work. And then it went through the people in the lists. They were read to them, copied by hand and passed to each other. Copies were widely distributed throughout Russia. For that time, Yesenin's "Message" played a big role in strengthening the national spirit. For a long time, Yesenin scholars denied the authenticity of this "Message", referring to the words of Ekaterina Yesenina, published in 1926 in the same Pravda. "This poem does not belong to my brother." However, at the end of the 20th century, the original of the poem was found and graphologists confirmed that it was written by Sergei Yesenin. In addition, there are the memoirs of P. Chagin, who personally remembered this work from Yesenin.

In 1925, it became completely clear to the Bolsheviks that they failed to “tame” Yesenin. He did not become a troubadour of the revolution. "God's pipe" - this is how Sergei Yesenin spoke about himself. The Bolsheviks saw in him an ideological and spiritual danger.. He was put under surveillance, criminal cases were opened against him, threatening to turn into political ones at any time (only thanks to world fame they did not dare to send the poet to the dungeons of the Cheka). Yesenin foresaw a tragic denouement, and this premonition tormented him. According to the memoirs of Ekaterina Yesenina, praying before the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, he said: “Lord, you see how I suffer, how hard it is for me ...”

On December 27, Sergei Alexandrovich died tragically. The true reasons for his death were hidden, but many witnesses still did not believe that the poet committed suicide. The husband of Ekaterina Yesenina, the poet Vasily Nasedkin, was one of the first to see the corpse in Angleterre and immediately told her: “It doesn’t look like suicide ... Brains leaked onto my forehead ...”

In the Orthodox Church, there were also initially priests who did not believe in suicide. According to the researcher of the life and death of Yesenin N. Sidorina, memorial services for him were performed in three churches: in Moscow, in Leningrad and on Ryazan land. In the Kazan church of the village of Konstantinovo, Sergei Alexandrovich was buried in absentia by his spiritual mentor, Archpriest John Smirnov. At that time, for the funeral of suicides and memorial services for them, they were immediately deprived of the priestly dignity. This means that the testimonies of relatives were quite convincing that Yesenin did not commit suicide, but was killed.

But for almost eighty years, the version of suicide stubbornly insinuated itself into the consciousness of the Soviet people. And only in 1997 in the newspaper "Izvestia" the director of the Special Archive A.S. Prokopenko said: “Researchers of the causes of the death of Sergei Yesenin have long come to the conclusion that the OGPU was directly involved in the death of the poet. And there are documents about this in the archives of the KGB, but for seven decades they have not been allowed to read them. For the sake of just one removal of the sin of suicide from the soul of a great poet, the wicked who cut off his life should be named.

Yesenin was killed by the Bolshevik internationalists for national identity, for preaching Orthodox values ​​​​in his work - love for one's neighbor and mercy, love for the Motherland and the Russian people, for the fact that with his poems great poet opposed the lack of spirituality implanted by the Soviet government, and thereby supported the people's belief that Orthodox Russia has not sunk into nowhere, which means that the time will come for its revival. For this, Sergei Yesenin was doomed to the slaughter.

Big research work in the investigation of the death of Sergei Yesenin - identifying the causes that led to the murder, customers and specific perpetrators of the crime - was done by an associate professor of the Department of Literature of the St. Petersburg Academy of Culture, a member of the Union of Writers Russian Federation Viktor Kuznetsov. In his work “The Secret of Yesenin’s Death,” the author wrote: “In the story with Yesenin, the sadists acted ahead. Paradoxically, but true: there is not a single convincing evidence that the poet committed suicide. But there is a lot of evidence of the murder.”

Here is how Kuznetsov describes the incident: “The director of the“ staging ”of the suicide of Sergei Yesenin in the 5th room of the Angleterre Hotel was the film director of Sevzapkino Pavel Petrovich Petrov (Makarevich), who, trusting the thugs who dragged the body of the murdered Yesenin through the basement labyrinth from the building of the GPU investigative prison, located at 8/23 Mayorova Avenue, did not check the 5th hotel room prepared for open viewing.” how Yesenin, bleeding, was able to build such a complex pyramid on the table with cut palms and other wounds and climb up to the ceiling; what a terrible depressed mark above the bridge of the nose (the official version is a burn); finally, the jacket of the deceased disappeared somewhere. By the way, I. Oksenov, a well-known radiologist at that time, a member of the Leningrad literary group "Commonwealth" (1925-1929), who saw him, wrote in his "Diary": heating, on which he hit his head), his mouth is half open, his hair has developed a terrible halo around his head. And further: “In the coffin, he was no longer so terrible. The burn was smeared over, eyebrows and lips were brought up. ”Further, Kuznetsov cites the testimony of a novice scammer then, a young poet Pavel Luknitsky: “Yesenin did not look much like himself. During the autopsy, his face was corrected as best they could, but still there was a large red spot on his forehead, a nodule in the upper corner of the right eye, an abrasion on the bridge of the nose, and a flat left eye: it leaked out ”(“ Meetings with Anna Akhmatova. T 1. 1924-1925, Paris: Ymca-Press, 1991).

Photographic materials - evidence of the version of the murder of Sergei Yesenin: All photographs - the originals are stored in the museum of S.A. Yesenin. There are also photographs of the poet's death masks, which are kept both in museums and in private collections.

Photographic materials indicate not only that Sergei Yesenin did not hang himself, but also that before his death he put up strong resistance to the executioners who inflicted mortal wounds on him.

All photographs are accompanied by questions, due to the discrepancy between the images of the official version, which claims the poet's suicide.

What does it mean for Russia to recognize the official version of the death of Sergei Yesenin

Emigrant, historian and writer Mikhail Koryakov in 1950 categorically stated: “Spitting on Yesenin means spitting on Russia and the Russian people.” Why were the people of Russia deceived, why were they forced to believe in the suicide of Sergei Yesenin? Why was his poetry banned? What was the Soviet government and the emerging communist system so afraid of?

Allowing people to read Yesenin's poems - for the communist system meant allowing people to believe in God, why lose faith in the Communist Party, and, in the end, for the Communist Party it meant losing their power over the people. Therefore, the young genius Sergei Yesenin was slandered and presented to the people as a rowdy, brawler, drunkard and womanizer, moreover, a mentally ill person.

But even this was not enough for the ruling communist regime, it was necessary to make the great Russian poet still a sinner - therefore, this monstrous crime was committed not only in relation to the physical destruction of the poet, but also the destruction of the conscience of the Russian people. People who believed in this lie became accomplices in this crime. At its core, the murder of Sergei Yesenin is a crime against humanity.

Later, Yesenin's poetry was banned, people were attracted for reading the poet's poems under Article 58 (an article in the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, which entered into force on February 25, 1927 to counter counter-revolutionary activities). The campaign against "Yeseninism" lasted for several decades.

The return of the pure, worthy and proud name of the great Russian poet Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin is the return of the conscience of the people of Russia.

From the very beginning of its history of murder, the communist system has always used the same gangster tactics: it started by creating negative rumors in society about who it was going to persecute. If a person was broken spiritually, he no longer posed a threat to the communist system, but if a person remained faithful to some ideals, he had to be destroyed, as they did with Sergei Yesenin, whom the Soviet government put "outside the law."

“Whoever the person placed outside the law is, he is immediately crossed out, no matter what his merits were in the past. So, there is no need to talk about any doubts about his guilt: this person turns not just into an outcast, but into a living corpse, whose death was only a matter of time…”, said Lieutenant General of Justice A.F. Katusev.

Winds, winds, oh snowy winds,
Notice my past life.
I want to be a child of light
Or a flower from the meadow border.

I want a shepherd's whistle
Die for yourself and for everyone.
Star bells in the ears
Pours evening snow.

Its foggy trill is good,
When he drowns the pain in a blizzard.
I would like to stand like a tree
On the road on one leg.

I would like under horse snores
Hug with a neighboring bush.
Raise, you moon paws,
My sadness in heaven with a bucket.
(p. Yesenin. 1919).

"Beat the communists, save Russia!" - Sergey Yesenin.
120 years ago on October 3, Sergey Yesenin, the most translated Russian poet in the world, was born. He left many mysteries. But one thing is certain: his main love was Russia.
“According to the official version, Yesenin's life was tragically cut short at the age of 30. But she did not break off - she was cut off, ”said the St. Petersburg poet Nikolai Brown, the son of the poet Nikolai Leopoldovich Brown, who, along with other writers, carried Yesenin’s body out of Angleterre on December 28, 1925.
“Father refused to sign the protocol, which said that Yesenin had committed suicide. The writer Boris Lavrenyov, who was also in Angleterre, did not believe in suicide, and the next day published an article in Krasnaya Gazeta about the death of the poet under the heading “Executed by degenerates”.
The father said that the poet had two deep wounds: a hole above the bridge of the nose, as if from a pistol grip, and another one under the eyebrow. There was no furrow characteristic of the gallows on the neck. “When Yesenin had to be carried out,” my father said, “I took him, already stiff, under my shoulders. The upturned head dropped. The vertebrae were broken." When I asked if Yesenin was shot, there was a short answer: "He was tortured." The father was sure that the dead Yesenin was brought to the hotel room from interrogation.
I also knew the writer Pavel Luknitsky, one of the organizers of Yesenin's funeral, and once asked him what he remembers about the death of the poet. Luknitsky confirmed: the poet "died during interrogation", after being tortured, saying: "But there was no left eye." - "How was it not?" - "Escaped."
For the funeral, Yesenin's appearance was so "restored" that when parting at the Moscow House of Press, according to the testimony of the writer Galina Serebryakova, a "baked doll" lay in the coffin.
The poet was killed for the same reasons for which a number of his friends and contemporaries from the writer's circle were executed: Ganin, Klyuev, Klychkov, Vasiliev, Nasedkin, Pribludny and others. And even earlier, in 1921, - Gumilyov. The power of the militant atheists-internationalists aimed to make the recalcitrant "former" Russians (such a term appeared in the Soviet press) an obedient herd. And if a person did not succumb, they killed him. In Leningrad, the party line was implemented by Grigory Zinoviev (head of the Comintern), in Moscow by Leon Trotsky.
By the time of his death, 13 criminal cases had been opened against Yesenin. The poet was the only one who could shout in a restaurant near Red Square: “Beat the communists, save Russia!” This was the moment when Yesenin learned that the communists used chemical weapons to suppress the Tambov rebellion. Then 70 thousand peasants led by Ataman Antonov rebelled against the power of the Soviets. The song of the rebels - "Antonovskaya" - became the poet's favorite song. Then he portrayed Trotsky as a "Jewish commissar" in the poem "Country of Scoundrels." And he wrote to a friend: “I feel sick, the legitimate son Russian Empire, to be a stepson in your own country.”
Yesenin was saved from reprisal by the fact that he went on a trip to Europe and America with Isadora Duncan.
Immediately after the poet's death, Soviet newspapers wrote: "Yeseninism, which smells bad, must end," "a talented loser gone crazy." “It smelled bad” for the Bolsheviks, for example, the fact that Yesenin “reverently dedicated” his first collection of poems in 1915 to Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, whom he was personally acquainted with, as well as with the Grand Duchesses, to whom he dedicated the poem “Princesses”. Yesenin did not violate the oath given to Tsar Nicholas II. During February Revolution the poet served in the army. Then many soldiers swore allegiance to the Provisional Government. But Yesenin is not. Shortly before his death, he wrote: “I cease to understand to which revolution I belonged. I see only one thing: that neither for February, nor for October.
The poet opposed the blasphemy against God, which was encouraged by the Bolsheviks. Six months before his death, in response to the blasphemous verses of Demyan Poor, Yesenin wrote:
When I read in Pravda
The untruth about Christ of the lecherous Demyan
I felt ashamed, as if I had
Into vomit, vomited drunk.
And when the Bolsheviks decided to remove the word “God” from all his writings, the poet had a fight with a typesetter in a printing house, but restored the previous version. And the new government, meanwhile, dismantled the bell tower in his native Konstantinov (on which young Yesenin rang for the holidays) in order to build a pigsty out of that brick. In Yesenin, a rural boy never died, who sang in the church on the kliros, was friends with Father John Smirnov, who was the first to discern the talent of a poet in him. This father baptized Yesenin with the name Sergei in honor of St. Sergius of Radonezh. This same priest also buried the poet.
Yesenin departed from God and returned again. Requested:
“So that for everything for my grave sins,
For disbelief in grace
They put me in a Russian shirt
Under the icons to die ... "
“Yesenin was buried in three places: in Moscow, his native village of Konstantinov and the neighboring village of Fedyakino. There was no doubt that he had been killed. Otherwise, no one would have buried him, ”Irina Mikhailovna Mamonova, the granddaughter of the poet’s cousin on her father’s side, told AiF. - My grandmother, Nadezhda Fedorovna, was seven years older than the poet, she lived for 97 years. Grandmother said that she was at the funeral service in Konstantinov. And in Moscow, at the funeral, Yesenin's mother, Tatyana Fedorovna. Grandmother saw Yesenin a month before his death. The poet was hiding in the hospital from the Chekists. Yesenin was loved and appreciated by the famous doctor Pyotr Gannushkin. In dangerous moments, he hid Sergei Alexandrovich. And Yesenin's enemies created a myth about his alleged mental problems and unrestrained drunkenness. However, Yesenin himself (this is in the memoirs, in particular, of I. Schneider) repeated: "I never write when drunk."
When did Yesenin drink, if over the last 5 years of his life he wrote about 100 poems and 5 poems, and over the last year of his life he prepared and published 4 collections of poems? And in Leningrad, where the tragedy occurred, he went to work on the publication of the complete collection of his works.
In Moscow, in the December frosts, thousands of people came to say goodbye to the poet. The queue was incredible, from five in the evening all night until the morning the flow of people did not end. Yesenin's execution continued even after his death. The poet's coffin disappeared from the grave at the Vagankovsky cemetery, says Nikolai Brown. - This was discovered in 1955 by Yesenin's sister Shura, when the grave was opened in order to bury his mother Tatyana Fedorovna next to the poet's remains. At the end of the 80s. an elderly witness was found, the driver of the OGPU Snegiryov, who on January 1, 1926 took part in the removal of the coffin from the grave. Where the coffin was taken, he did not know.
Yesenin had the opportunity not to return from abroad.
But he returned, although he understood that he was going to the slaughter. In his love for Russia, he was sincere:
“If the holy army shouts:
"Throw you Russia, live in paradise!"
I will say: “There is no need for paradise,
Give me my motherland."
P.S. The case of the death of the great Russian poet is still inaccessible to this day, it is still labeled “secret”.

Rogova Anastasia 05/10/2019 at 23:40

He allowed himself to spit on recognized authorities, bathed in the adoration of secular beauties, burned his life recklessly and ... acutely yearned for a lovely village. It's all about Sergei Yesenin. There are still many mysteries and mysteries around the figure of the great poet. Including his terrible death in the Angleterre Hotel ...

October 3 (September 21, according to the old style) will mark the 124th anniversary of the birth of the "last poet of the village", as Sergei Yesenin called himself. He really was already born a poet, and the Ryazan village of Konstantinovo shaped his character, religious beliefs and views for the rest of his life. And in whatever cities, and at whatever high-society events Yesenin later shone (and he happened to read his poems in front of Empress Maria Feodorovna), the village in him remained the main beginning. Sergei's view of life is a stubborn and wary, slightly mocking, in some ways limited, in some ways infinitely broad look of the Russian peasant.

When young Yesenin, a talent already recognized in his homeland, arrived in St. Petersburg with publications and the blessing of teachers, he did not come from scratch (as he coquettishly later told and wrote), but clearly understanding how he needs to behave and what is expected of him literary circles.

Nikolai Klyuev, the founder of his own circle of "new peasant" poetry, immediately guessed in the talented golden-haired native of the province a talent suitable for his program of performances, and carefully took the young man under his wing. If Nikolai Klyuev lived today, he would have become an amazing PR man or producer.

At the beginning of the 20th century, interest among the creative intelligentsia in the countryside increased a hundredfold. And Klyuev, who himself has peasant roots, was well aware that he would impress the audience gathering for poetry evenings. He and Yesenin, in ideally styled peasant shirts, girded with sashes (and sometimes in bast shoes), with hair smoothed with lard, read poems from the stage about the village, about Russian melancholy - with obligatory birch trees, horses, open spaces and peasant huts.

Klyuev himself resembled a kind of Mikula Selyaninovich, and the young Yesenin with golden curls was the shepherdess Lelya. Both of them seemed to have stepped off the popular print, showing the St. Petersburg public exactly the kind of village that they wanted to see: picturesque, epic, fabulous. And Yesenin's appearance and poetry were the quintessence of this fictional village. The success was enormous. Everywhere they talked about "peasant" poets. The ladies wept with delight at the sight of Sergey's golden curls, and the venerable poets approvingly clapped the folk talent on the shoulder.

But Klyuev, in his spare time from performances, sat in his luxurious hotel apartments, reading foreign authors in the original, and Yesenin mastered the nightlife of the Northern capital. Nikolai always disapproved of the self-will of his young comrade-in-arms, who, instead of talking about the destiny of Russia, preferred to have fun recklessly. It is not surprising that the creative duet soon broke up, and Klyuev sharply condemned his former protégé.

With Anatoly Mariengof and Vadim Shershenevich, Yesenin created a new direction in poetry - Imagism, which was based on an understanding of the main goal of creativity, as the creation of an image. But Yesenin's poetry did not fit any literary framework. The poet grew up rapidly, and his poems changed just as rapidly. Only one thing remained unchanged - a bitter tenderness for the village. He missed her, his childhood, his hopes. Although, at that time, Sergei already had everything that any poet striving for success could dream of.

Glory, recognition, success with women, constant drinking - all this gradually turned Yesenin from a healthy peasant guy into a hysterical and capricious life-breaker. Exaggerated praise and admiration of the fans made them believe in their own genius. Yesenin considered himself not only "the last poet of the village", but also the first poet of Russia. He did not like Mayakovsky - he was afraid that he would beat off his listeners and recognition from him. He shouted when he saw newspaper articles about Mayakovsky: "I will die under a fence on which posters with an announcement of Mayakovsky's evening will be posted!" Friendship with Mariengof also ended in a complete break.

Oddly enough, only the well-aimed and caustic Zinaida Gippius, who did not love either Yesenin himself or his poems, guessed the poet's weak point - early glory. And she predicted that it was the "copper pipes" that would destroy this "cherub". Yesenin did not pay any attention to the warning "Gippiusikha". In general, he treated the representatives of symbolism, especially the elders, without the slightest respect. Sergei was sure that he himself knew perfectly well what creativity was, and how a real poet should live. Of the representatives of the older generation, Sergei Yesenin respected only Blok. Respected, but slightly condescendingly, condescendingly.