The theme of revolution in the work of S. Yesenin
On March 26, in the small hall of the Petrovsky Book Club, a conversation took place on the topic “Yesenin and the Revolution”. Tatyana Igorevna Fomicheva, senior researcher at the NUK “People’s Museum of S.A. Yesenin".
The event was held as part of the Cultural Voronezh Volunteer Project and the School of Historical Literacy program. Voronezh residents learned about the peculiarities of the great poet's work, and were also able to watch a sand animation made on the theme of poems related to the “revolutionary period”.
Sergei began writing poetry very early. At the age of 8, he realized his work as the work of a real poet. Yesenin received an excellent education - Zemsky four-year school, Moscow People's University, where he studied at the literary and philosophical department.
In Moscow, the young poet worked in a printing house, published his first poems.
The moment when Yesenin went to St. Petersburg to Alexander Blok and showed his work was a turning point for him: his poems began to be published in the capital's publications, his name became recognizable.
At the same time, Yesenin met members of the Scythians magazine, who expressed the Slavophile ideology. The "Scythians" dissuaded Yesenin from close friendship with the Royal Family. Subsequently, under their influence, the ideological and artistic images of Yesenin's works were formed, namely: the perception of the revolution as a special way for Russia, the vision of a change in the world in it, the ascension and transformation of the Russian spirit. During this period, each of his poems was filled with Christian and ancient Vedic images.
The first powerful response about the revolution was expressed in the poem "Comrade". This poem opens the revolutionary cycle. Lyricism here gives way to religious symbolism.
Here he does not glorify, does not justify the revolution, but writes about what he sees nearby, what he foresees in the future. In this poem, Yesenin buries Christianity along with the past world. In return, he offers his peasant, peasant Russia, which he loves and sees in the future. This Russia is set forth in the theses of Russian cosmism: it is Russia without the rich and masters, without poor farm laborers. Yesenin depicts these ideas with elusive strokes in his works.
The poet feels the new time, and expresses it in verse - "Wake me up early in the morning."
The collection of poems Transfiguration comes out after the revolutionary events. Judging by the name, this world should be clean, beautiful, renewed, without cross and torment. This is narrated in a poem by Inonia - a utopian peasant paradise. In reality, the country is tormented by civil wars, famine and devastation. In the urban world, the poet finds himself with difficulty. Yesenin is having a hard time with the city's attack on his native village. In one of his poems, the village is compared to a foal on thin legs, which a locomotive is trying to catch up with.
His work expresses sadness for the past dear to his heart, anxiety for the future of the peasants - the breadwinners of Russia.
Text: Julia Komolova
The writing
S. Yesenin is a great, original, truly Russian poet. The theme of the Motherland has always been the main one in his work, imbued with a deep love for rural, "hut" Russia, for the simple beauty of Russian nature. A simple peasant life, the same simple, open people, water meadows and blue lakes surrounded the poet from childhood and nurtured his extraordinary poetic talent.
Beloved edge! Dreaming of the heart
Stacks of the sun in the waters of the womb.
I would like to get lost
In the greens of your bells.
S. Yesenin accepted the October Revolution with joy, connected with it great hopes for the renewal of the village, whose inhabitants had to earn a living by hard work, they often lived in poverty. The poet believed that October would put an end to the poverty of the peasants and mark the beginning of a peasant's paradise. Therefore, Yesenin's poems dedicated to the revolution are full of undisguised joy and delight.
Stars are shedding leaves
In the rivers in our fields
Long live the revolution
On earth and in heaven!
In his autobiography “About Me,” Yesenin wrote: “During the years of the revolution, he was entirely on the side of October, but he accepted everything in his own way, with a peasant bias.” This probably meant the poet's dreams of building a "new world" in the village, closely associated with patriarchal traditions, since the city was always alien to Yesenin as a source of all artificial, iron, smoke and roar.
But the hopes of the poet were not destined to come true. The revolution required many bloody sacrifices, and the countryside brought new troubles and devastation. With longing and confusion, Yesenin looks around, experiencing a deep spiritual crisis caused by a misunderstanding of revolutionary reality. As a result, motifs of fatigue, loneliness, and tragic hopelessness appear in his poetry.
Don't feel sorry for the departed
Leaving every hour -
There on the lilies of the valley blooming
Better than in our fields.
The collapse of hopes for a better life makes Yesenin seek oblivion in revelry and drunkenness, he is not written. And yet the poet strives to overcome these decadent moods, to accept a new life.
It's time to start
For my business
So that a mischievous soul
Already in a mature way she sang.
And let another life of the village
Will fill me
New strength.
Having been in the village, Yesenin listens to the peasants' discussions about the revolution, trying to find answers to the questions that torment him. He sees that the old, patriarchal, dear to his heart village is threatened with death, as the iron rumbling city is advancing on the “mysterious world”, that “the stone hands of the highway” have already squeezed the “village by the neck”.
Soon freeze with lime will whiten
That village and these meadows.
There is nowhere for you to hide from death,
There is no escape from the enemy.
Here he is, here he is with an iron belly
Pulls five to the throats of the plains...
In 1922, returning from a trip abroad, Yesenin was able to look at the post-revolutionary reality in a new way. In isolation from the Motherland, the poet was able to appreciate the power of technological progress, which is impossible without cities and cars. Yesenin understands the need not only for the revival, but also for the renewal of the village by leading it through "stone and steel."
Field Russia! Enough
Drag along the fields!
It hurts to see your poverty
And birches and poplars.
Yesenin creates a kind of trilogy: “Return to the Motherland”, “Soviet Russia” and “Homeless Russia”, in which he reflects on the Motherland, about life in the village. The poet no longer mourns the departing Russia, because he sees that life here is not going the way it used to, but not the way he imagined. New songs, new words make Yesenin feel almost like a stranger, a foreigner in his native land, among the people that the poet used to know as himself.
After all, for almost everyone here I am a gloomy pilgrim
God knows how far away.
But life in the village goes on as usual, and Yesenin understands that the Motherland has become younger, renewed. The poet blesses this new life: “Flower, young ones! And healthy body! You have a different life, you have a different tune ... ”Faith in the victory of the revolution is also reborn, but Yesenin is not sure that there will be a place for him in this young and active world. And yet: “I accept everything. I accept everything as it is ... I will give my whole soul to October and May ... "
The poet, who endlessly loves his homeland, managed to overcome doubts and not lose his great feeling of affection even in cruel life conflicts, because he believed that justice, kindness and, most importantly, beauty should eventually triumph.
But even then,
When all over the planet
The tribal feud will pass,
Lies and sadness will disappear, -
I will chant
With the whole being in the poet
sixth of the earth
With a short name "Rus".
Sergei Yesenin was born in the village of Konstantinovo, Ryazan region (on the border with Moscow). His father, Alexander Yesenin, was a butcher in Moscow, and his mother, Tatyana Titova, worked in Ryazan. Sergei spent most of his childhood in Konstantinovo, at the home of his grandparents. In 1904-1909 he studied at an elementary school, and in 1909 he was sent to the parochial school of the village of Spas-Klepiki. His first known poems date from this period. Yesenin wrote them at the age of 14.
Sergey Yesenin. Photo 1922
Having completed his studies in the summer of 1912, Sergei went to his father in Moscow, where he worked for a month in the same store with him, and then got a job at a publishing house. Already realizing that he had a poetic gift, he contacted Moscow artistic circles. In the spring of 1913, Yesenin became a proofreader in one of the largest printing houses in Moscow (Sytin) and made the first contacts with revolutionaries from the Social Democratic Labor Party, as a result of which he came under police surveillance.
In September 1913, Yesenin entered the Shanyavsky People's University in the historical and philosophical department, and in January 1914 he met one of his colleagues, proofreader Anna Izryadnova. His poems began to appear in magazines and in the pages of Golos Pravda, the predecessor newspaper of the Bolshevik Pravda.
The beginning of the war with Germany (1914) found Sergei Yesenin in the Crimea. In the first days of August, he returned to Moscow and resumed work at Chernyshev's printing house, but soon left to devote himself to writing. Sergey also left his girlfriend Izryadnova, who had just given birth to his first child.
Yesenin spent most of 1915 in Petrograd, which was then the heart of Russian cultural life. The great poet Alexander Blok introduced him to literary circles. Yesenin became friends with the poet Nikolai Klyuev, met with Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Nikolai Gumilyov, Marina Tsvetaeva, who highly appreciated his works. For Yesenin, a long series of public performances and concerts began, which then lasted until his death.
In the spring of 1916, his first collection, Radunitsa, was published. In the same year, Yesenin was mobilized to the ambulance train No. 143. He received such a preferential form of military conscription thanks to the patronage of friends. I listened to his concerts Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. Gravitating more to poetry than to war, Yesenin was subjected to a 20-day arrest in August for appearing too late from one leave.
Sergei Yesenin and the revolution
Secrets of the Century - Sergei Yesenin. Night in Angleterre
The version of the murder has a lot of indirect evidence. The examination of the corpse and the medical conclusion of suicide were made with excessive and incomprehensible haste. The related documents are unusually short. The time of Yesenin's death in some medical documents is indicated on December 27, in others - on the morning of the 28th. Bruises are visible on Sergey's face. At the Angleterre that same night there were prominent agents of the government. The persons who witnessed the poet's suicide soon disappeared. His ex-wife, Zinaida Reich, was killed in 1939 after declaring that she was going to tell Stalin everything about Yesenin's death. The famous poems written in blood were not found at the place of the poet's death, but for some reason were given to them on December 27 by Wolf Erlich.
Sergei Yesenin on his deathbed
The mystery of the death of Sergei Yesenin has not yet been solved, but everyone knows that in those troubled years, poets, artists and artists who were hostile to the regime were either shot, or thrown into camps, or committed suicide too easily. In the books of the 1990s, other information appeared that undermined the version of suicide. It turned out that the pipe on which Yesenin was hanging was not located horizontally, but vertically, and traces of the rope connecting them were visible on his hands.
In 1989, under the auspices of the Gorky Institute of World Literature, the Yesenin Commission was established under the chairmanship of the Soviet and Russian Yesenin scholar Yu. After investigating the then widespread hypotheses about the murder of Yesenin, this commission stated that:
The now published "versions" about the poet's murder followed by a staged hanging, despite some discrepancies ..., are a vulgar, incompetent interpretation of special information, sometimes falsifying the results of the examination.
However, it soon became clear that the "expertise" of the Prokushev Commission was reduced to correspondence with various expert institutions and individual experts who even earlier they expressed in the press their negative attitude towards the version of the murder of Yesenin. V.N. Solovyov, a forensic prosecutor of the General Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation, who participated in the work of the commission, later gave the following ambiguous description of its “specialists” and the conditions of their “investigation”:
“These people worked within the strict limits of the law and were used to realizing that any biased conclusion can easily transfer them from their office chair to prison bunk beds, that before crowing, you need to think hard”
SERGEY YESENIN, 1918
REVOLUTION IN SERGEY ESENIN'S WORK http://esenin-poetry.ru/ref/351-2.html
About S. Yesenin, Blok wrote: "Sergey Yesenin appeared in Russian literature suddenly, as comets appear in the sky." Indeed, this finest lyricist, the singer of Russian nature, quickly and easily took a special place in literature, many of his works were set to music and became songs.
The Russian land appears before the poet as a sad "calm corner", "the meek homeland", "the side of the feather grass forest". The whole world for him is painted in bright, iridescent colors. The Russian plowman, the Russian peasant, until quite recently so earthly and peaceful, turns into a brave, proud in spirit hero - the giant Otcharya, who holds on his shoulders the "unkissed world." Yesenin's peasant - Otchar is endowed with the "strength of Anika", his "mighty shoulders are like a granite mountain", he is "indescribable and wise", in his speeches "blue and song". There is something in this image from the legendary heroic figures of the Russian epic epic. Otchar makes us remember, first of all, the epic image of the hero-plowman Mikula Selyaninovich, who was subject to the great "draught of the earth", who effortlessly plowed the "clean field" with his miracle plow. "Father" is one of Yesenin's first poetic responses to the events of the February Revolution of 1917. This poem was written by Yesenin in the summer of 1917 during his stay in his native village. In September, "Otchar" is published by one of the Petrograd newspapers. In this poem, as well as in the "Singing Call" and "Okto-ikha" written a little earlier in Petrograd, the theme of the revolutionary renewal of the country is revealed in images that are most often cosmic, planetary in nature. Hence the prophetic meaning of these poems, their oratory-polemical rhythmic structure.
Rejoice!
The earth appeared
New font!
Burned out
blue blizzards,
And the earth lost
The sting.
In the men's manger
A flame was born
To the peace of the whole world!
This is how Yesenin begins his "Singing Call". In "Oktoikh" this junction of the "earthly" with the cosmic gets its further development:
We shake the sky with our shoulders,
We shake the darkness with our hands
And in a skinny ear of bread
We inhale star grass.
Oh Russia, oh steppe and winds,
And you, my father's house!
In "Oktoikh", just as in "The Singing Call" and "Father", mythological images and biblical legends are filled with new, revolutionary-rebellious content. They are reinterpreted by the poet in a very peculiar way and are transformed in verses into pictures of a "peasant's paradise" on earth. The civic pathos of these poems finds its figurative expression in the poet's romantic dream of the harmony of the world, renewed by a revolutionary storm: "We did not come to destroy the world, but to love and believe!". The desire for equality, the brotherhood of people is the main thing for the poet. And one more thing: already the February events give rise to a completely different social mood in Yesenin's lyrical poems. He joyfully welcomes the coming of a new day of freedom. He expresses this state of mind with great poetic power in the beautiful poem "Wake me up early tomorrow ...". S. Tolstaya-Yesenina says that "according to Yesenin, this poem was his first response to the February Revolution." With the revolutionary renewal of Russia, Yesenin now connects his further poetic fate.
Wake me up early tomorrow
Shine a light in our upper room.
They say that I will soon be
Famous Russian poet.
The feeling that now he, too, the son of peasant Russia, is called upon to become a spokesman for the thoughts, aspirations and aspirations of the insurgent people, Yesenin conveys with great pathos in the poem "O Russia, flap your wings ...". In his poetic manifesto, Yesenin puts forward a noble, democratic idea: to show revolutionary Russia in all its beauty and strength. The poet seeks to expand the artistic horizon, to deepen the social problems of his works. Special mention should be made of Yesenin's "little poem" "Comrade", written by him in the hot pursuit of the February events in Petrograd.
Yesenin was one of those Russian writers who, from the first days of October, openly sided with the rebellious people. “During the years of the revolution,” Yesenin wrote, “he was entirely on the side of October, but he accepted everything in his own way, with a peasant bias.” Everything that happened in Russia during the years of October was unusual, unique, and incomparable to anything. "Today the foundation of the world is being revised," Vladimir Mayakovsky said. "Revolutionary, keep stepping!" Alexander Blok called on the sons of insurgent Russia. Sergei Yesenin also foresaw great changes in the life of Russia:
Come down, appear to us, red horse!
Harness yourself to the lands of the shafts.
We are a rainbow to you - an arc,
The Arctic Circle - on the harness.
Oh, take out our globe
On a different track.
More and more Yesenin captures the "vortex" beginning, the universal, cosmic scope of events. The poet Pyotr Oreshin, recalling meetings with Yesenin during the years of the revolution, emphasized: “Yesenin accepted October with indescribable delight, and accepted it, of course, only because he was already internally prepared for it, that all his inhuman temperament was in harmony with October ...". However, to comprehend deeply, consciously all the significance of historical and social changes in the life of the people, especially the Russian village, associated with the struggle for the triumph of the ideas of the Great October Revolution, he, of course, could not immediately.
At first, the poet perceives the period of war communism one-sidedly; it is still difficult for him to understand that the contradictions of this time will be quickly overcome by the development of the new reality itself. It was during this difficult period of class battles, which required an especially clear and precise ideological position from the artist, that Yesenin's "peasant bias" manifested itself most tangibly. One should not think that this "deviation" is a consequence of only the subjective aspects of the poet's worldview and creativity. In fact, there was no "peasant deviation". Yesenin's works primarily reflect those specific, objective contradictions that were characteristic of Russian society during the period of the proletarian revolution, which actually did not please the ideologists of the "iron discipline", this was the main conflict between the poet and the "revolution".
Russia!
Dear heart!
The soul shrinks from pain.
“I am very sad now,” Yesenin writes in 1920, “that history is going through a difficult era of killing the individual as a living thing, because there is absolutely not the socialism that I thought about ...” The poet’s utopian dreams of socialism as "peasant's paradise" on earth, until recently so inspiredly sung by him in "Inonia".
Especially hard, at times tragically, in 1919-1921, the poet experiences a revolutionary breakdown of the old, patriarchal foundations of the Russian village. The story about how a locomotive overtook a thin-legged colt has a deep inner meaning in Sorokoust. It is in this scene that the poem reaches its climax:
Let us recall one of the most heartfelt and humane lyrical poems - "I do not regret, I do not call, I do not cry ...", written by him in 1921. How philosophically wise Yesenin's reflections on the days of a fleeting life are in him, with some artistic power expressed in him love for people, for all life on earth!
Wandering spirit, you're less and less
You stir the flame of your mouth.
Oh my lost freshness
A riot of eyes and a flood of feelings.
When you read the late Esenin, you are amazed at the fact that, it turns out, almost everything that we have just now started talking aloud after seventy years of silence, almost all of this has already been said and foreseen by the poet of genius. With amazing force, Yesenin captured that “new” that was forcibly introduced by visiting emissaries into the life of the village, blew it up from the inside and now led to a well-known state.
"I was in the village. Everything is collapsing ... You have to be there yourself to understand ... The end of everything" - these were Yesenin's impressions of those years. They are supplemented by the memoirs of the poet's sister Alexandra Yesenina: "I remember the famine that came. Terrible time. Bread was baked with chaff, husks, sorrel, nettles, swan-doy. There was no salt, matches, soap, and I didn’t even have to think about the rest ... Along with honest people, "laboutis" with long arms crawled into power. These people lived quite well ... "
June 1, 1924 Yesenin writes "Return to the Motherland". The image of desolation, but not Chekhov's and Bunin's, in which there was poetry, but some kind of hysterical, hopeless, foreshadowing "the end of everything", meets us at the very beginning of this little poem. "The bell tower without a cross", the crosses of the cemetery, the crosses that are the image of the civil war! - "as if in hand-to-hand dead men, froze with outstretched arms." The miserable life of a village devastated by years of internecine strife, "calendar Lenin" instead of icons thrown out by the sisters of the Komsomol members, "Capital" instead of the Bible ... A grandson who did not recognize his grandfather, another image of a symbol - an epoch, another terrible insight into the future . How does this contrast with Pushkin's: "The grandson ... will remember me"! ..
The poet sums up the tragic result of all this in the poem of the same days "Soviet Russia":
That's the country!
What the hell am I
Shouted in verse that I am friendly with the people?
My poetry is no longer needed here
And, perhaps, I myself am not needed here either.
I accept everything
I accept everything as is.
Ready to follow the beaten tracks.
I'll give my whole soul to October and May,
But I won't give you my sweet lyre.
Yesenin predicted much of what happened in the country. in his lyrics in the summer of 1924 and in the poem "Anna Snegina", conceived at the same time. The poem is closely connected with Yesenin's entire lyrics, it absorbed many of its motifs and images. If we talk about traditions, then in the year the work on the poem was completed - 1925 - Yesenin wrote: "In the sense of formal development, now I am drawn to everything more to Pushkin. And the Pushkin tradition, of course, is present in the poem. It seems to be more fruitful to talk about Pushkin's beginning in a broad sense, which, by the way, Yesenin himself referred to in the above statement. First of all, it is the people. Yesenin, having gone through the temptation of an exquisite metaphor, came to such an understanding of art, which is determined by the artist's loyalty to "simplicity, goodness, truth." These guidelines were expressed in the language of the poem, more precisely, in all the richness of colloquial folk speech, which is striking from the first lines. In Yesenin's poem, the characters "self-reproduce" through speech and therefore immediately acquire plastically visible features of a living face. Everyone's speech is so individual that we well remember the driver, and the miller, and the old woman, and Anna, and even her mother, who utters only one phrase, but is defined in it, and Pron, and Labutya, and, of course, the main hero himself.
The fact that Anna Snegina ended up far from Soviet Russia is, of course, a sad pattern, a tragedy for many Russian people of that time. Separation from Anna Snegina in the lyrical context of the poem is the poet's separation from youth, separation from the purest and most holy that a person has at the dawn of life. But - and this is the main thing in the poem - everything humanly beautiful, bright and holy lives in the hero, remains with him forever - like a memory, like a "living life", like the light of a distant star that points the way in the night:
Far away, they were cute!…
That image in me has not faded away
We all loved during these years,
But that means
They loved us too.
This epilogue was very important for Yesenin - a poet and a man: after all, all this helped him to live, fight in himself with his "black man", and also withstand an inhuman struggle with haters of Russia and the Russian poet. The theme of the motherland and the theme of time are closely connected in the poem. In a narrow chronological sense, the epic basis of the poem is as follows: the main part is the Ryazan land of 1917 in the fifth chapter - a sketch of the fate of one of the corners of the great rural Russia of the period of terrible upheavals, witnessed by the poet and hero of "Anna Snegina" (action in poem ends in 1923). Of course, behind the fate of one of the corners of the Russian land, the fate of the country and the people is guessed, but all this, I repeat, is given in sketches, although with rather characteristic poetic pictures. After the lines about the time of the revolution, when "the grimy rabble! Played the yards on the pianos! The Tambov fox-mouth for cows," follow verses of a different tone:
Years went by
Sweeping, fiery...
The grain grower's lot is gone.
Yesenin, as it were, foresaw the time when the fate of the grain grower would result in the tragedy of 1929-1933. The words sound sarcastically in the poem, which representatives of different intellectual strata called the peasant:
Fefela! Breadwinner! Iris!
Owner of land and livestock
For a couple of dirty "katek"
He will let himself be whipped.
Yesenin himself does not idealize the Russian peasantry; he sees heterogeneity with it, sees in him both the miller with his old woman, and the driver from the beginning of the poem, and Pron, and Labutya, and the peasant squeezing his hands from profit ... At the same time, one must not forget that the positive principles, the peculiar basis of life the poet sees in the working peasantry, whose fate is the epic basis of the poem. This fate is sad, as it is clear from the words of the old miller's woman:
We are now restless here.
Everything blossomed with sweat.
Continuous peasant wars -
They fight village against village.
These peasant wars are symbolic; they are the prototype of a great fratricidal war, a genuine tragedy, from which, indeed, according to the miller’s wife, Rasey almost “disappeared” ... A echo with this also occurs at the end of the poem in the miller’s letter:
Russia...
She's a dumbass.
Believe it or not, don't believe your ears -
Once Denikin's detachment
Ran into the Kriushans.
This is where the fun started...
With such fun - around -
With a screech and a laugh
The Cossack whip roared...
Such "fun" is not good for anyone, except perhaps for Labuta, who demands a "red order" for himself ... The condemnation of the war - imperialist and fratricidal - is one of the main topics. The war is condemned by the entire course of the poem, by its various characters and situations: the miller and his old woman, the driver, the two main tragedies of Anna Snegina's life. Moreover, sometimes the voice of the character merges with the voice of the author, as, for example, in the words of a letter from a miller, the poet once says directly from himself:
And how many unfortunates with the war
Freaks now and cripples!
And how many are buried in the pits!
And how many more will be buried!
And I feel in the cheekbones stubborn
Violent spasm of cheeks...
The soul-shattering humanity of Russian classical literature, its "humanity that cherishes the soul" lives in Yesenin's poem.
In January 1925, while in the Caucasus, Yesenin completed his last and main poem. The breadth of the historical space of the poem, acquired by the hero at the end of her openness to life impressions, the best movements of the soul, directly correspond to folk ideals, the spokesman of which was and remains in his best works the great Russian poet S.A. Yesenin - "the poetic heart of Russia". And while the earth lives, Yesenin the poet is destined to live with us and "sing with his whole being in the poet the sixth part of the earth with the short name" Rus ".
What changes took place in the poet's attitude to the revolution and social ideas, the policy of the Bolsheviks? How did this affect your work?
In the first post-revolutionary months, the poet was full of enthusiasm, hoping that now the peasant's age-old dream of free, joyful patriarchal work on his land would come true. In the spirit of the time, god-fighting and god-building motifs briefly enter his poems of 1918. The real development of the revolution resulted in the destruction of all the foundations of national life. All this led to changes in Yesenin's political position. The moods of his poems become different in 1920-1921.
In the small poems "Sorokoust", "Confessions of a hooligan", poems of these years, the image of the "iron guest" appears, symbolizing the ruthless destruction of the "sweet, dear", living world.
In the poem "The mysterious world, my ancient world ..." Yesenin reflects on the fate of the peasantry. The enemy is victorious, the peasant world is doomed:
The beast fell down ... and from the cloudy bowels
Someone pull the trigger now...
Suddenly a jump ... and a two-legged enemy
Fangs are torn apart.
People's, peasant Russia resisted the forces of destruction to the end. In this poem, the poet speaks of his vital, mortal unity with this world, unity in love and hatred.
Oh, hello, my beloved animal!
You don't give yourself to the knife for nothing.
Like you - I, persecuted from everywhere,
I pass among the iron enemies.
Like you, I'm always ready
And though I hear the victorious horn,
But he will taste the blood of the enemy My last, deadly jump.
Yesenin was a man of whole spiritual experience. And the state of his soul was determined primarily by the perception of what was happening in his native land. Lyrical and philosophical miniatures, poems of a different genre and style acquire a sad and elegiac sound:
Now I have become more stingy in desires,
My life, or did you dream of me?
As if I am a spring resonant early Ride on a pink horse.
("I do not regret, do not call, do not cry…")
An important image of this poem is consonant with the central one in "Sorokoust": "pink horse" - "red-maned colt". The fate of the motherland and the state of the poet's soul are inseparable. He sang, “when My land was sick”, he could express unhealthy moods himself. But he did not lose his moral compass. And this allowed us to hope for understanding and forgiveness.
I want at the last minute to ask those who will be with me -
So that for everything for my grave sins,
For disbelief in grace They put me in a Russian shirt Under the icons to die.
(“I have one fun left ...”)
After returning from abroad, there was a short period in the poet's life of reviving hopes for the end of the social storm. Peace, peace, not only the lyrical hero of Yesenin's poems, but the whole people wanted.
Attempts to peer into the life of the new Russia, to comprehend one's own place in it are reflected in the poems "Return to the Motherland", "Letter to a Woman", "Soviet Russia". Very conflicting feelings fill the lyrical poems of Yesenin in 1924-1925.
He is happy to capture the signs of a resurgent life: “Unspeakable, blue, tender ... / My land is quiet after storms, after thunderstorms ...” But the sad confidence grows stronger that there is no place for him in a new life.
One of the best in terms of the depth of feeling and the perfection of his poetic embodiment was the poem "The golden grove dissuaded ...". It is written in the traditional manner for Yesenin. The life of the soul of a lyrical hero
merged with the natural world. The rustle of fading leaves, the noise of the autumn wind, the cries of flying birds speak better than words about the state and feelings of the hero. He sees no consolation in his own past and present:
I'm full of thoughts about a cheerful youth,
But I don't regret anything in the past.
And only the nature of the native land still gives calm to the tormented spirit, calls for understanding, forgiveness, farewell:
Like a tree sheds its leaves,
So I drop sad words.
And if time, sweeping with the wind,
Rake them all into one unnecessary lump... Say so... that the golden grove Dissuaded me with a sweet tongue.
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