67

p The very name Sergei Yesenin evokes an image of sheer beauty and humaneness. True, a feeling of anxiety is also associated with it, for his poetry expresses pain and confusion caused by the spectacle of the great revolutionary upheaval. At times his emotions were at odds with his reason which clearly saw the road stretching away into the future. But the main impression his poetry leaves you with is a feeling of lightness in your heart, the joy of contact 68 with something beautiful. And this is why Yesenin’s lyric poetry, like all real art, like music, has that peculiar healing power. Contact with the beautiful ennobles us, gives us new faith in life and fresh strength.

p Lyric poetry, we know, has its own means whereby a poet can tell a story of life or lay bare the secrets of his soul with a revealing power that could not be achieved by any other expressive media. I think that the greatness of Yesenin as a lyric poet lies in the amazing frankness with which he expresses emotions and reveals the wealth of the human soul in images and in the very music of his words. No wonder Gorky had said that “Yesenin was more of an organ of feeling created by Nature exclusively for poetry, than a man of flesh and blood".

p Sergei Yesenin was born on October 3, 1895, into a peasant family in the village of Konstantinovo on the Oka. In those days, Ryazan region was one of the poorest and most backward in Russia. People were compelled to leave their home villages and seek seasonal work elsewhere or jobs in the towns. Yesenin’s father, Alexander Nikitich, worked as a shop assistant at a butcher’s in Moscow. As a child Sergei lived with his grandfather and went to the parish school. The poet awakened in him at an early age and for all the wretchedness of village life he saw the beauty of it and lost his heart to it forever. He developed his feeling for poetry by reading Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Koltsov, and The Lay oj Igor’s Host whose poetic images he adored. It is no exaggeration to say that his native country was to him a spring of magic water which gave him a vision of all that is beautiful in the world.

p Yesenin’s poetry conjures up for us a picture of rural Russia with her roads bathed in moonlight in winter and brooding thirstily in summer. This Russia with her colours and smells is a big, inhabited world, the home of man, the poet’s Motherland, and he loved everything in it. All his comparisons, images, metaphors and expressive verbal means he drew from the peasant life that was his and which he understood.

p Yesenin likens the sun to the plough and the new moon to a lamb or a shepherd’s horn. Such metaphors and comparisons fill almost every poem.

p The Russian landscape and life in the countryside are the subject matter of Yesenin’s early poetry in which his enchantment with this natural world blends with his passionate feeling for Russia. The landscape, his home village and Russia are combined in his poetry in a single profound feeling of beauty. His patriotism was one of the mightiest sources feeding his poetry.

p Yesenin has described the charmingly modest landscape of Central Russia with a love so tender and profound as if it were a 69 living creature. And because he felt it thus, he showed it in movement and not contemplatively. The night “leans over the stream, and in the white water bathes its blue feet”; the grass “collects the copper pieces from the wind-blown willows”; the twilight “dances”; the pine “has put on a white head scarf" or again it has “bent in two like an old woman”; the warm evening “thievishly nibbles the tree stumps in the meadow”; the crescent moon “polishes its horns”; the marsh “blows clouds of smoke”; the willows “click their rosaries”, and so on. The sky, rivers, sunsets, dawns, shrubs, marshes, the new moon, fields and grasses—everything in Yesenin’s poetry is in motion and thereby comes into poetic relation with man, with life itself. His very soul has no existence apart from his native land, and he says:

p Land beloved! In my heart-dreams
I see suns in meadow streams.
Oh, to lose myself forever
In your glory-ringing greens!

p Yesenin brought into literature images of his native countryside, its speech and songs. His close, direct contact with folk songs and, consequently, the tradition of Koltsov whom Yesenin recognised as one of his teachers is everywhere in evidence.

p As a whole, Yesenin’s poetry is wistful in mood, but there is in it an infinite healing power, an inexpressible kindness that puts your soul at peace. This is one of the secrets of Yesenin’s appeal.

p Sometimes his imagery is so unexpected and his feelings so inexplicable that his poetry becomes rather involved. But in essence it is very simple. He brings his readers, whose mind has grown sophisticated with the abstractions of modern mathematical logic, cybernetics and all the intricacies of modern culture, back to those primordial affections and sufferings with which man emerges from his cradle and whose origins are lost to sight in the dim remoteness of history. Loving your mother, and loving your homeland. Sleeping out in the open and hearing a song through the mist. Simple joys and simple pain.

p The sadness of my bestial verse
I fed on mint and mignonette.. . .

p But Yesenin does not come to us in sadness, bringing solace in moments of grief. Yesenin also sang his hosannahs to life.

p Fine is the title Mayakovsky gave to his poem dedicated to the tenth anniversary of the Russian Socialist Revolution. His “fine!" is an exclamation of joy, a glad affirmation of all that the 70 Revolution has given the working people. It expresses the jubilance of emancipated labour.

p Yesenin puts a different meaning into the word. How fine it is to be alive! How fine life is!

p His amazingly fresh and keen perception of life as a thing of beauty finds expression in his frequent use of such exclamatory openings as:

p T’would be wonderful smilingly munching hay
with the snout of a crescent moon!
It’s good in the autumn freshness
Your apple-tree soul to shake down. . .
It’s fine getting out of your system
The nail of your blood-heating verse. . .
It’s fine through the grass to go wading
Alone, on a moonlit night. ...

p Yesenin had the gift of sincerity, the gift of laying bare his soul. He was a poet of the heart, and that is why his voice, overcoming all language barriers, the voice of humanity itself, a voice tense with the drama of our epoch’s revolutionary battles and cataclysms, reaches people everywhere. Poetry, he believed, should “caress the souls of strangers with the warmth of blood”. With all the passion of his tender nature he responded instantly and wholeheartedly to pain in men, animals and even plants. Mayakovsky used to say that he was everywhere where there was pain. But I think Yesenin might have said that about himself with more emotional right and a greater force of conviction. He shared the pain of the bitch whose pups had been taken away from her. He suffered for the cow led to slaughter. It hurt him when flowers were crushed underfoot, when fruit and grain were gathered for food.

p There are different kinds of humanity and love. Love can be a creative power. Love can mean pride in what one holds dear. Love can be compassion. And although Yesenin wrote that he envied those who “spent their life in battle, defending a great idea”, his was not a fighting nature. Even though he said, rejoicing, that:

The whirlwind has dressed up my life
In a flowering cloak of spun gold....

he was always thinking of other people, of people who were “even unhappier, even more downtrodden”. He had seen their eyes which were “sadder than a cow’s”, and he cried:

p Who’ll cast a stone into this pool?
Don’t touch it. Let it be.

71

p In one and the same year (1924) Yesenin extolled the heroism of revolutionaries (“Ballad of the Twenty-Six”, and his wonderful “Song of the Great March”) and worried about people whose “blood had turned rancid and mouldy, like water in a stagnant pool”. What could be done for these people? Surely man cannot be treated as refuse? Yesenin’s heart could not reconcile itself to this. To be sure, there is a great weakness in this love-compassion which has its roots in the “sentimentality of the patriarchal village world”. It is not the same kind of humanism as that praised by Gorky and Mayakovsky. For instance, Mayakovsky said of Lenin:

With friends
          he’d be the very soul of kindness.
With enemies
          as hard as hardest steel.

Here you have humanism not born but “hammered into shape" in the course of proletarian struggle. Yesenin’s humanism was inborn, he loved his neighbour as a Christian should, and was “the very soul of kindness" with friend and enemy alike. And this was the weak spot in his world outlook, reared on patriarchal soil. In his poetry even Lenin was transformed from a leader of the proletariat’s steel armies into just a “good old soul" who went sleigh-riding with the “snotty kids" in winter.

p Yesenin’s ideological position and his concepts of humanism are indefensible against historical criticism. But what can you do if Yesenin, like old Brotteaux in Anatole France’s Les dieux ont soif, had a “perverted instinct”, as Anatole France ironically calls it: he could not stand the sight of blood and no philosophical theories, however correct, could defeat this “unnatural trait" in his character. But then, such is the power of art that even the profession of erroneous ideas cannot prevent us from succumbing to the charm of defencelcssness if it is embodied in the image of a big, suffering heart. And we have to admit that we do succumb to this feeling of love-charity which Sergei Yesenin, like Romain Holland and our kind-hearted Korolenko, communicates to us so compellingly.

p Yesenin began to write poetry at the age of sixteen or seventeen and died when he was only thirty years old. He gained artistic maturity and ideological stability during the revolutionary years, and it was then, in the latter period of his creative life, that he produced his most important works.

p His commitment to the people was manifest in the political stand he took, siding with the revolution from the start. He has written some beautiful poetry about Lenin, the “Ballad of the Twenty 72 Six" in which he sang a hymn to the heroism of the Baku commissars, the wonderful “Song About the Great March”, and Anna Snegina-a. poem which can be ranked with the best in Soviet poetry. Gorky was very fond of his dramatic poem Pugachev about the peasant revolt against the autocracy in 18th-century Russia.

p But alongside these epic poems, alongside his lyric poems about nature and love, Yesenin’s lyric poetry speaks of something else, stemming from the old to which he was bound. He meant every word of it when he said:

I’m not a new man. Can I hide it?
I’m stuck with one foot firmly in the -past,
While with the other I keep falling, sliding,
To catch up with the steel-clad force that moves too fast.

What was the “old” the traces of which we find in Yesenin’s poetry? In the first place, an abundance of religious images and themes, especially in his early poetry. Yesenin himself wrote: “The most controversial stage was my religiousness which left a very distinct imprint on my early poems. I do not regard this period as creatively mine. It was conditioned by my upbringing and my environment when I first embarked on my literary career. ... I would ask my readers to treat all my Christs, Virgin Marys and St. Nicholases as the fairy-tale element in poetry. All these proper names must be taken in the same way as we take such names, which now belong to mythology, as Osiris, Cannes, Zeus, Aphrodite, Athene, and so on. In my poems the reader should turn his attention mainly to the lyrical feeling and the imagery which has shown the way to many, many young poets and prose writers.”

p All these themes and the verbal pattern of many poems with their predilection for archaisms reflected Yesenin’s idealisation of the patriarchal village. And as a result, naturally enough, his protest against capitalism did not have a consistently revolutionary character. He glorified democratic freedom as in “Marfa-Posadnitsa” or gave vent to his feeling of protest in devil-may-care rowdiness.

p There is one other weak spot in Yesenin’s literary heritage. I mean his verses, few as they are, of the “Moscow Tavern Life" kind. In this and other such cycles Yesenin glamourises free-living and casual love-making (“Your blue eyes, soaked in drink”, or “Sing then, sing, play your cursed guitar" and so on) which are alien in spirit to a Soviet person. These morbidly Bohemian themes are the direct result of the pernicious influence which life in a bourgeois city and in a set of decadent poets had on Yesenin.

p I can well understand the desire to idealise one’s favourite poet. But, frankly, I would not care for Yesenin more if he were a 73 marble Adonis with not a thought wrinkling his brow and not a line of suffering on his face. I hold more precious the poet who fearlessly laid bare his restless soul, who had known both the glory of success and the tragedy of failure, who had known the dazzling happiness of communion with beauty, and also the bitterness of denied understanding, the pain of suffering. The Yesenin who was prepared to “caress the souls of strangers" with the warmth of his blood is dearer to me. Maybe he was not as handsome as Adonis, but he was more human.

p When we meet one of Yesenin’s heroes out in the open, in the countryside, more often than not we find him to be a good Russian lad with a touch of bold recklessness and also much tenderness in his soul. But when Yesenin paints the same character against the background of a big city, we see this same lad trudging along the moonlit street to some dive, and whining to some hoodlums or tarts about his finished life. In the Soviet reader, a character such as this can evoke nothing but condescending pity.

p Yesenin committed suicide in the Hotel Angleterre in Leningrad on December 28, 1925. In the last two years of his life his wonderful poetic talent blossomed in all its splendour. He had freed his poetry of the affectation and intricacy that was alien to it, and it now clearly revealed its kinship with the Pushkin tradition. Yesenin himself used to say at that time that Pushkin’s poetry had the strongest appeal for him.

p Carlo Levi, the well-known Italian author, wrote in one of his articles that, in his opinion, the works of Russian literature which had the greatest influence on Italian writers, especially young writers, came from the pen of Lev Tolstoi, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Yesenin, “affecting to a large extent the whole of later Italian literature".

p When I was in Rome in 1958, I asked Carlo Levi if Yesenin’s influence could not perhaps be explained by the fact that in Italy the importance of the peasantry is as great as it had once been in Russia.

p “Does it surprise you that Yesenin is so popular with us?" he asked.

p “Of course. After all, there’s only Russia in his heart.”

p “Yes, but your Russia is the human heart. Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky too, they belong to those whose hearts shine for all mankind. And there can be no poetry if there is no heart.”

It was well put. Humanity is a part of the Russian tradition, of the tradition of Russian literature. And we remember with tremendous affection the good name of Sergei Yesenin because humanity is our motto, because in a country which is building communism the most honorary title is Man.