The Poetry of Esenin by Sergei Esenin
"The Poetry of Esenin" explores the works of Sergei Esenin, a prominent Russian poet known for his deep connection to the themes of rural life, spirituality, and the struggles of the peasantry. Emerging during a transformative period in Russian literature, Esenin is often associated with the "peasant poets," who sought to capture the essence of traditional Russian culture amidst the upheaval of the early 20th century. His poetry reflects a nostalgic yearning for the simplicity of village life and a lament for the loss of old religious traditions, as seen in his early works like "Radunitsa."
Esenin's engagement with the Russian Revolution was complex; he initially welcomed it as a potential spiritual rebirth but later grew disillusioned by its impact on the countryside and the peasantry. His subsequent involvement with the Imaginism movement showcased his tumultuous personal life and artistic experimentation, though it also led to widespread criticism. Despite the challenges he faced, including the tragic end to his marriage with American dancer Isadora Duncan, Esenin's final works display a poignant beauty and introspection.
His poetry, characterized by lyrical simplicity and emotional depth, resonated with a diverse audience, capturing the conflict between Russia's agrarian past and its industrial future. Ultimately, Esenin's life and work serve as a powerful reflection of a nation in flux, marking him as one of the most significant figures in 20th-century Russian literature. His tragic end, in 1925, further solidified his legacy as a voice for the disillusioned and a symbol of an era marked by profound change.
The Poetry of Esenin by Sergei Esenin
First published:Radunitsa, 1916; “Ionia,” 1919; Moscow of the Taverns, 1922
Critical Evaluation:
After 1910 a general reaction occurred in Russian literature against the vagueness and obscurity of Symbolism. Acmeism, led by Gumilyov, and Futurism, under Mayakovsky, represented two of the directions taken by this reaction. A third direction was that followed by the so-called “peasant poets.” These writers, led by Nikolai Klyuyev, expounded a mystical faith in the Russian peasantry and worked folklore and religious liturgy into their poems. The greatest of the peasant poets was Sergei Esenin. Beginning as a student of Klyuyev, he soon surpassed his master in the form and content of his poetry.
The term “peasant poet” is extremely apt in Esenin’s case, for he always lamented the passing of traditional Russian life, the village, and the unsophisticated religion of the peasants. In one of his prose works, MARY’S KEYS, published in 1920, Esenin wrote about the origins of Russian art and culture and about the disintegration of Russian religiosity. He felt that without religious traditions the very source of folk art would disappear; whereas the earlier peasant had been able to orient himself in his environment, Esenin now felt that the peasants were uprooted and spiritually lost in an increasingly industrialized world. One critic of Esenin, V. Zavalishin, has said that Esenin knew and understood the meaning of folk art and the peasantry not as a learned scholar but as a man who had lived with them since childhood.
In 1916, Esenin published his first collection of poems, RADUNITSA, a quasi-pagan spring ritual for the dead. These early poems resemble Klyuyev’s work and often glorify the tranquil beauty of nature. In the following year Esenin welcomed the Revolution, but he saw it as a religious and not a political event. He felt that Bolshevism would wear itself out in time and would be superseded by a religious paradise. He saw only one obstacle to this earthly paradise: peasant fear and servility. The poem “Ionia,” written in 1918, urged the peasants toward courage and daring and predicted the advent of a proletarian Eden. Esenin’s religion was that of the Old Believers, a group which had split from the Orthodox Church, ostensibly over the question of whether the sign of the cross should be made with two fingers or three. The Old Believers had since dedicated themselves to dogma and fanatical faith, but Esenin reduced this faith to an earthly scale in such poems as “Returning Home” and “The Comrade.” Before long, however, Esenin realized the Revolution was not strengthening religion but substituting other ideas for it. In the poem “Mare’s Ships,” Esenin finally, though impressionistically, condemned the Revolution for the suffering and death it had caused.
Esenin feared the industrialization brought about by the Revolution. As an outward sign of increasing disillusionment, he founded, along with other younger writers, the Imaginism movement which flourished in Moscow from 1918 to 1920. The Imaginists, asserting that the distinctive nature of poetry lay in its imagery, tended to make their poems collections of word pictures, often far-fetched and exotic when they set coarse and crude images next to pathetic and sublime ones in their search for effects. But far more striking than their theory of literature was the kind of life they led. These writers took up a bohemian life of orgies and scandals, and it is said that Esenin outdid them all in license and violence.
Esenin recorded his psychological experiences during these years in “A Hooligan’s Confession,” published in 1921, and in a collection called MOSCOW OF THE TAVERNS, appearing a year later. Soviet critics have condemned these poems as full of filth and vice with nothing to elevate them. But at the same time these verses are something of a personal confession. It is as though Esenin realized that his depression could not be dissolved in vodka, and only too well he also realized he was out of step with the times. In one of his poems, full of despair, he considers himself the last poet of the peasants. And in another poem he feels that his poetry has fallen from grace, and, probably, so has he. In 1921, Esenin wrote a play in verse entitled PUGACHEY. It is a collection of lyrical fragments which, although not historically true, does possess an element of social veracity colored by Esenin’s passionate sympathy for the enslaved peasants.
With many poets Imaginism was simply a literary pose, a desire to shock the bourgeoisie as the Futurists had done before them. But for Esenin this life was more tragic. He felt the full force of its pessimism. His disillusionment with the Revolution which had led him into the Imaginist circle continued unabated, forcing him to say in one poem that he has been deceived. By 1920 the anti-peasant aspect of the Revolution had become even more pronounced, and Esenin culminated this period of drunkenness and scandal with his marriage to Isadora Duncan, the American dancer, in 1922. Without a common language between them, they found a bond in high living. A year later, after an unsuccessful and shabby world tour, their marriage ended.
These events seem to have sobered Esenin, and on his return to Russia he tried to adjust to the new order and to regain and reconsider his ideas and feelings about the rural Russia he had given up for Moscow. Although he returned to his native village, he could not recapture his past, and the lyrics he wrote in this period are sad and reflective, foreshadowing his death. In one poem he said that he was destined to die in the back alleys of Moscow, not in the village of thatched houses where he had been born. In another poem Esenin calls himself the last of the village poets. He celebrates the beauty of nature and complains about the coming of machinery to destroy the beautiful fields. The loss of his youth and joy in the village, the changes created by his urbanization, cause him to grieve, and his poem reflects his later death by his own hand. Most of his tavern poems contain a tragic reflection.
Eventually Esenin turned from Imaginism and chose Pushkin for his new model; and in “Persian Themes” Esenin’s verse does resemble the lucid, simple verse of his new model. During the last year of his life Esenin wrote the long, autobiographical poem, “Anna Snegina,” which portrays a Russian village during the Revolution, and “The Black Man,” a narrative poem in which a man confesses his many sins. In several of his shorter lyrics of this period Esenin prophesied his own death, and on December 27, 1925, he hanged himself in a Leningrad hotel room after writing a farewell poem with his own blood. The verses ended with the now famous lines in which he declared that death is not new, but life is no newer.
Esenin’s last poems are simple and melodious, sometimes sentimental and sometimes nostalgic. During the 1920’s he was extremely popular for these verses. His lyrical, melancholic poems of the rural landscape, village life, and animals appealed both to Communist youth and to older Russians who still remembered pre-revolutionary days. Esenin seemed to have a special feeling for animals, calling them “younger brothers” and dedicating several of his poems to them, as in “The Cow” and “Song About a Dog.”
Because Esenin rejected the Revolution and because he led a life of riot, Eseninism was officially condemned by the Communist Party. Officialdom described him as a kulak (rich peasant) poet and did not allow his work to be reprinted. Censorship did not dim Esenin’s popularity; in fact, one critic has called him the most widely read twentieth century Russian poet, both at home and abroad.
In a sense Esenin’s personal fate was symbolic of a Russia in transition. During his lifetime his country changed from an agrarian society to a complex industrial state. The conflict between what had been and what was emerging, and the failure of many of the hopes people had for the Revolution, were expressed personally in the poems of Esenin. Perhaps this is the secret of his great appeal. Esenin, unlike Mayakovsky, refused to compromise himself for the Revolution. He remained openly critical of the government, never diminishing the vigor of his own poems as Mayakovsky had done. And when he could take no more, when both his personal and public life offered him nothing more, he chose death.