Sergey Yesenin. The life and creative fate of the poet Sergei Yesenin Sergei Yesenin the fate of the poet

A lot of grief and suffering always falls to the lot of a true poet, even if he is the darling of fate. After all, in this world nothing is given just like that and you have to pay for everything. For talent bestowed from above - a special payment.

The fate of the great Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, entangled in omissions and rumors, is evidence and confirmation of this. Throughout his short, reckless, romantic life, he aroused stormy, contradictory passions in those around him, and he himself was torn apart by passions just as stormy and contradictory.

With the posthumous fate of Yesenin, a strange metamorphosis occurred. He has been dead for more than seventy years, but everything connected with him lives on. Not only his poems live, but in general everything “Yesenin”. Everything that worried him, pleased, tormented him. Everything that came into contact with him in any way.

Yesenin is a kind of cult figure in our literature. Popular love even led to the emergence of the genre of “folk Yesenin studies”: the poet’s smile, blue eyes, golden curls are discussed, how gracefully the suit sat on Yesenin, and so on. (By the way, according to Varlaam Shalamov, Yesenin became the only poet accepted by the criminal world. In the camp language, “Yesenin” is called any home-grown poet from prisoners.) So the exclusivity of Yesenin's posthumous fate is obvious.

In one, Yesenin was unlucky. His biography is still far from a true, objective picture.

Academic "Yesenin studies" as a result of the activities of a number of Yesenin scholars is in stagnation. These scientists, having created the "official concept", calmed down on that. They formed a kind of closed team, where they do not want to let outsiders in. They hush up or even manipulate some facts of the poet's biography that do not fit into a pre-prepared scheme. This is the opinion of the candidate of historical sciences, the author of more than 80 publications on the history of literature, Sergei Viktorovich Shumikhin, and one cannot but agree with his opinion.

Indeed, in research last period nevertheless, there are some fluctuations in the interpretation of the poet's appearance, which in a strange way coincide with the fluctuations in the socio-political situation in the country. This spread is quite large: from the recent endless repetition of Yesenin's lines about Lenin, the exclamation "My mother is the motherland, I am a Bolshevik!" to the creation of the image of a fearless exposer of "Jewish-Bolshevik atrocities", hiding from the GPU and finally caught by this GPU in the Angleterre Hotel.

For some reason, "independent" researchers who could create an objective view of the life and work of the poet are not interested in him; they are engaged in Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam. There is, however, one, the most liberated, researcher studying Yesenin, the Englishman Gordon McVey from Bristol. He published the monographs "The Life of Yesenin" and "Isadora and Yesenin". True, his ideas, which have nothing in common with the "official concept", are not taken into account by Yesenin scholars. Well, McVeigh made an interesting point. He believes that Yesenin could become a very popular figure among the youth of the West, because he resembles famous rock stars who died early, like Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Cobain, because he is just as headstrong and anarchic. It is likely that the Englishman is right. And yet, no matter how objective McVeigh's research may be, for him, as well as for other Western scientists, Yesenin exists outside of the fate of Russia, outside of Soviet history.

There are also numerous memoir sources written not only by the powerful of this world - politicians, poets, actors, artists, but also by ordinary inhabitants, or even just envious and spiteful critics. However, all memoirs of this kind are very contradictory and inaccurate, since memoirs in general are never protocol accurate due to the author's personal view of things.

From everything that was said above, it becomes clear that it is extremely difficult to write about the life of Sergei Yesenin, especially within the framework of the usual school essay, because for this one would have to study a huge memoir and research material, and having studied it, make a lot of efforts in order to separate the legendary from the actual. Not everyone can do this, and I do not pretend to be the person who could master this.

And yet, since I took up this topic, I will try to briefly, almost in a dotted line, state the main facts of the poet's biography. I emphasize: what I have written does not pretend to be a revelation. Although I really hope that this will happen sooner or later.

“I am the son of a peasant. He was born on September 21, 1895, - Yesenin wrote in his autobiography, - From the age of two, due to the poverty of his father and the large number of his family, he was given up for education by a rather prosperous maternal grandfather ... ”His grandfather was a miller. Grandparents loved their grandson and cared about his future: grandfather taught him to fight, and his grandmother spoiled him and forced him to go to church. The family wanted Sergei to become a village teacher, and therefore he was sent to a closed church teaching school. But, having graduated from it in 1911, he announced his intention to become a poet,

The following year, Yesenin left for Moscow, where he began attending evening courses at the university.

And he joined a literary revolutionary society, earning a living in various places. While working as a proofreader at Sytin's publishing house, he fell in love with Anna Izryadnova, a work colleague who at the end of 1914 gave birth to his son, Yuri Izryadnov. Two months after that, their connection ceased, and Yesenin left for St. Petersburg in search of literary happiness. True, he came to Moscow for a short time in 1915 and 1916 to visit Anna and his son.

“At the age of eighteen, I was surprised, having sent my poems to magazines, that they were not being published, and unexpectedly raided St. Petersburg. I was received very warmly there. The first one I saw was Blok, the second - Gorodetsky. When I looked at Blok, sweat dripped from me, because for the first time I saw a living poet.

He "rushed" to St. Petersburg as a rustic, timid guy, with little luggage, with a notebook of poems and with the ambitious dream of many young provincials - to win fame for himself.

Gorodetsky introduced him to the peasant poet Nikolai Klyuev, who became Yesenin's friend and literary patron.

Many Petersburg acquaintances of the poet noted his pleasant boyish appearance and blue, "cornflower blue" eyes. And no one could remain indifferent to his youth, external attractiveness and, most importantly, to his great talent.

During the three years of his life in St. Petersburg, Yesenin became famous poet. He was surrounded by fans and friends. Gradually, he grew bolder, became bold, self-confident and boastful. But, strange to say, his naivete and gullibility remained. There was something special about this contradiction. Yesenin was loved, spoiled and even forgiven what they would not forgive another.

The poet was twenty-one years old when his first collection of poems, Radunitsa, appeared. From that moment on, the spiral of his life began to rapidly unwind.

In the same year, 1916, he was called up for military service, and there Empress Alexandra Feodorovna drew attention to him, for whom he happened to read his poems. Despite this honor, he hated army life and deserted as soon as the opportunity presented itself, but was soon caught and sent to a penal battalion.

During the 1917 revolution, Yesenin deserted again and joined the revolutionaries. No, he did not become a member of the CPSU (b), but he ended up in close proximity to the "Soviet leaders".

October touched social strings in Yesenin, and the first revolutionary motifs appeared in his poetry. By mid-1918 he began to take shape as one of the most important and original young poets. The youth raised him to the shield. When his collection Dove came out, the book was sold out in a few days.

And shortly before that, in the fall of 1917, Yesenin married Zinaida Reich, who served as a secretary in the Socialist-Revolutionary newspaper Delo Naroda. She bore him two children - a daughter, Tatiana, and a son, Konstantin. However, this marriage turned out to be fragile - in the summer of 1918 Yesenin left his wife (they officially divorced in 1921).

At the end of 1918, a new poetic school arose in Moscow. Its initiators called themselves Imagists. It included Anatoly Mariengof, Vadim Shershenevich, Alexander Kusikov and other young poets. The school needed a central figure, a bright, strong poetic name. Yesenin was brought in. And this was the main and only trump card of the Imagists. Without Yesenin, the school would be empty space. And Yesenin himself did not need imagism at all.

In 1919, writers' bookshops began to open one after another in Moscow. Writers themselves traded books and their writers' autographs. Poets read their poems in cafes and clubs, receiving a fee for their performance. Imagist poets also opened their bookstore. Managing somehow to publish their poems (and the time was difficult and there was not enough paper), they sold them in their bookshop. Their books, and especially Yesenin's poems, sold out quickly.

How did Yesenin live during these years?

He wrote a lot and easily and was published more and more often than others. He often performed with his poems in various cafes, including the Imagist Stable of Pegasus. Yes, and earn more than others. But it made his life no easier than the rest. Not easy or fun at all.

The life of the most translated Russian poet in the world, Sergei Yesenin, ended at the age of 30. Broke off or cut off - it is unlikely that humanity will ever know the reasons, circumstances and the real truth.

In search of the reasons for the so-called "suicide", one involuntarily asks the question: could Sergei Yesenin, the father of four children, voluntarily die, dooming their fates and lives to a miserable existence? And the question itself, which defines and emphasizes the degree of responsibility of a father to his children, makes one think. One can only guess what really happened. But the fact that Yesenin was a responsible person and was sick with all his heart for his loved ones and relatives is beyond doubt. Until his death, he was a caring son and brother. If we consider "suicide" from this point of view, then the answer is more than obvious ...

The official biography says that the poet left behind four children - Yuri, Konstantin, Tatyana and Alexander. Unofficially, it was believed that Yesenin had another son - Vasily, who at one time made a splash, gathering crowds of spectators at his readings of his father's poems. Along with Vasily's talent, his outward resemblance to his "father" was also noted. But as it turned out later, he turned out to be an “imposter”, and, carried away by his game of “father and son,” he even wrote a letter to I. Stalin in 1945, in which he turned to the leader of the peoples with a request to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the birth of the poet Yesenin , "whose work is permeated with endless love for the Motherland." This was the fatal mistake of the "unlucky impostor" - he is exposed and sent to the northern regions. Nothing more is known about the fate of Vasily. Like sinking into the water...

So, the fate of the children of Sergei Yesenin:

Yuri

Yesenin's first son was born on December 21, 1914. He was christened George, but everyone called the boy Yura. The poet met Yura's mother, Anna Romanovna Izryadnova, in March 1913, at the printing house where they both worked. They got together very quickly and glowed with happiness.

The first days after the birth of her son were probably the happiest in Izryadnova's life:

“When I returned home from the hospital, he had an exemplary order: everything was washed, the stoves were heated, and even dinner was ready and a cake was bought: he was waiting. He looked at the child with curiosity, kept repeating: "Here I am and the father." Then he soon got used to it, fell in love with him, shook him, lulled him, sang songs over him. He made me, rocking, sing: "You sing more songs to him." Looking ahead, let's say that Yuri was the only one of Yesenin's four children whom his father - albeit not for long - rocked and lulled and whose birth he responded with a verse (not intended for printing):

Be Yuri, Muscovite.

Live, in the forest, aukay.

And you will see your dream in reality.

Long ago your namesake Yuri Dolgoruky

I founded Moscow as a gift to you.

But the idyll lasted only a month. Already at the end of January or at the very beginning of February, Yesenin lived in another place - alone, and in March he left for Petrograd. Anna raised her son alone. Sergey, being in Moscow, visited, occasionally helped with money. In amateur photographs, Yura is poorly dressed, his face is a smart boy beyond his years. He began to write poetry early, but showed them to few people.

After school, Yuri graduated from an aviation technical school, worked for some time at the Zhukovsky Academy. By that time, the father was no longer alive and the mother had to prove Yesenin's paternity in the Khamovniki court.

Yuri adored his father, knew by heart every line of his. He certainly knew N. Bukharin's "Evil Notes" ("Pravda", 1927, January 12), an article after which Yesenin almost ceased to be printed. All this, probably, together with other facts of Soviet reality, did not contribute to love for the authorities and "personally for Comrade Stalin."

Once, in 1934, in the company of golden youth, where Yuri Yesenin was also, under the influence of wine vapors, they started talking about the fact that it would be good to throw a bomb on the Kremlin. The next day, of course, this conversation was safely forgotten. In 1935, Yuri Yesenin was drafted into the army. He served in Khabarovsk, a year later he was arrested. After Yuri's arrest, Anna Romanovna Izryadnova's apartment was searched and the things described were seized, but her son would never know about it.

When the young man was being taken from Khabarovsk to Moscow, he thought that he must have committed some kind of military crime - he could not have imagined anything else. After all, he did not know that one of those who chatted in a drunken shop about a terrorist act was arrested a year later on some other case and, for some reason, decided to tell about this episode during the investigation.

Yura was charged with counter-revolutionary crimes, terror, participation in a criminal group. The verdict under this article has always been the same - "the highest measure." But the investigators cheated: they told Yuri that if he confirmed his “guilt”, then he, as the son of a famous poet, would not be shot, but only sent to a camp for a short time. In the camp, the son of Sergei Yesenin would have lived well - even criminals knew the price of the great Russian poet, and Yuri understood this. Therefore, during the investigation, he repeated the nonsense that was prompted to him, and signed that he not only conceived the crime, but also prepared it. Thus, he facilitated the work of the executioners. But this did not affect his own fate in any way - he would have been shot anyway, only he would have been tortured beforehand.

G. Yesenin's cellmate I. Berger in his book "The Collapse of the Generation" recalls that Yuri in prison said: "they" hounded his father to death. And here is how E. Khlystalov retells these memoirs: “Yuri Yesenin was convinced that his father had no reason to commit suicide, that he died as a result of some attacks, and we should talk about his murder.”

On August 13, 1937, Yuri Yesenin was shot. Anna Romanovna knew nothing about the fate of her son. Relatives of those sentenced to the highest measure, as a rule, were told: ten years without the right to correspond. She did not live ten years. She died after the war in 1946, she was 55. In 1956, at the request of Yesenin's youngest son Alexander Yesenin-Volpin, Georgy Yesenin was rehabilitated "due to the lack of corpus delicti." His case was recognized as completely fabricated. The falsifiers were allegedly even declared "enemies of the people" and shot, but in this case, it is appropriate to call a spade a spade - the "performers", and not the organizers of mass falsifications, were shot.

An interesting fact: in the house where Yura Yesenin was born today is a museum. It was organized by the actor Sergey Nikonenko. As it turned out, he was born in the same house.

Once I was flipping through the house books and found out that since 1921, the first wife of Sergei Alexandrovich, Anna Romanovna Izryadnova, lived here with their son Yuri and the poet's mother, Tatyana Fedorovna.

I took the information as a sign. Decided that this apartment should be a museum. At that time, her last mistress died and the apartment turned into a rooming house for the homeless. They smashed the windows, broke the batteries - they probably sold them for scrap. They even lit a fire. I don’t know how the house didn’t burn down, because in it wooden floors. In 1994, my epic began with going to the officials and collecting documents to create a museum. This went on for a year and a half. In the prefecture they warned me: "Sergei Petrovich, spend your health, money, and nothing will come of you." “You tell me where to go next, and then I will decide for myself,” I answered them. Went to the authorities. I was kicked from one institution to another. I decided that I would not give up anyway. Among the officials met such names as Benkendorf, Pushkin.

I told them: “Sergey Alexandrovich Yesenin loved Pushkin very much. Maybe now Pushkin will help our common cause a little? I even wrote it in statements. In the end it worked. I still live in this house, only one floor below.

Tatiana

If Yesenin met his first wife in a printing house, where they both worked for a penny, then Yesenin met his second wife already at the editorial office of the Socialist-Revolutionary newspaper Delo Naroda, where he was printed and his earnings were more or less decent. 23-year-old Zinaida Nikolaevna Reich worked there as a secretary-typist.

Anna Izryadnova:“In March 1915 Serezha went to Petrograd to seek his fortune. In May of the same year he came to Moscow, already different. I spent a little time in Moscow, went to the countryside, wrote good letters. In the autumn I stopped by: "I'm going to Petrograd." He called with him ... He immediately said: "I will return soon, I will not live there for a long time."

But Yesenin did not return to Anna. He was enthusiastically received in the capital. Soon the first book of poems was published. There was a severe world war. The poet was drafted into the army. He served on an ambulance train, delivering the wounded from the front. Then came the February Revolution. The poet deserted from Kerensky's army. In the summer of 1917, with his friend, the poet Alexei Ganin, he decided to leave for the provinces. An acquaintance Zinaida Reich, the future mother of Tatyana and Konstantin Yesenin, got in touch with them. In Vologda, unexpectedly for everyone, including himself, he married her in the church.

In her memoirs, Tatyana wrote: “I was born in Orel, but soon my mother left with me for Moscow, and for up to a year I lived with both parents. Then there was a gap between them, and Zinaida Nikolaevna again left with me to her relatives ... After some time, Zinaida Nikolaevna, leaving me in Orel, returned to her father again, but soon they parted again.

Soon, Tatyana's mother met the famous theater director, V. E. Meyerhold. This acquaintance changed the future life of ZN Reich. She became his wife and with her children, Tatyana and Konstantin, settled in Meyerhold's apartment.

Sergei Yesenin loved children in his own way, visiting them, met with Zinaida Nikolaevna, V. E. Meyerhold. Writer Roman Gul in Berlin heard Sergei Yesenin share with friends:

“... I only love my children. I love. My daughter is a good blonde. He stamps his foot and shouts: I am Yesenina! .. Here is such a daughter ... I would like to visit children in Russia ... but I’m wandering around.

Before leaving for Leningrad at the end of December 1925, S. Yesenin came to say goodbye to the children. A few days later, Moscow said goodbye to the poet. On December 31, 1925, the children were brought to the Press House on Nikitsky Boulevard, where a civil memorial service was held. Z. N. Reich often brought Tanya and Kostya to the coffin in which their father lay. “My father was unrecognizable to me,” T. S. Yesenina wrote in 1986, “I couldn’t believe that it was him. I remember the next one well. Stop at the monument to Pushkin, reading poetry at the open grave. When the coffin was lowered into the grave, the mother screamed so much that Kostya and I grabbed her from both sides and also screamed. Then I have a memory loss ... "

Yesenin's children fell in love with their stepfather V. E. Meyerhold, who acted as a "second dad", in whose house they were surrounded by care and attention. Tatyana went to the ballet school at the Bolshoi Theater for several years. In 1936 she graduated high school. The biggest event after leaving school was a trip with V. E. Meyerhold and Z. N. Reich to France. In September 1937, she entered the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow University. A month later, she married V. I. Kutuzov, a student at the Mechanical Engineering Institute. Bauman. Soon, her husband's father, I. I. Kutuzov, a prominent party and public figure, one of the leaders of the "workers' opposition", was repressed and declared an "enemy of the people." In June 1939, V. E. Meyerhold was arrested on unfounded charges, and on July 14, Z. N. Reich was brutally murdered in his apartment by unknown persons.

In fact, the arrest of Konstantin and Tatyana's stepfather has a backstory. In 1934, Stalin watched the play The Lady of the Camellias, in which Zinaida Reich played the main role, and he did not like the play. Criticism fell upon Meyerhold with accusations of aestheticism. Zinaida Reich wrote a letter to Stalin saying that he did not understand art.

On January 8, 1938, the theater was closed. Order of the Committee for Arts under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR "On the liquidation of the Theater. Sun. Meyerhold" was published in the newspaper "Pravda" on January 8, 1938. The script for the future life of the outstanding director had already been written - in 1939 he was arrested. After three weeks of interrogation, accompanied by torture, Meyerhold signed the testimony necessary for the investigation: he was accused under Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (counter-revolutionary actions). In January 1940, Meyerhold wrote to V. M. Molotov:

... They beat me here - a sick sixty-six-year-old man, they laid me on the floor face down, they beat me with a rubber tourniquet on my heels and on my back, when I sat on a chair, they beat me with the same rubber on my legs […] the pain was such that it seemed to hurt sensitive places legs poured boiling water ...

After the death of Reich and Meyerhold before the Great Patriotic War, Tatyana Sergeevna was left with her younger brother Konstantin and her little son Vladimir in her arms. Being evicted from her parents' apartment in Bryusov Lane, Yesenina saved Meyerhold's archive by hiding it in a dacha in Balashikha, and at the beginning of the war she handed it over to S. M. Eisenstein for safekeeping.

During the years of the Great Patriotic War Tatyana Yesenina was evacuated with her husband and son to Uzbekistan, where, at the request of Alexei Tolstoy, she received a small room with her family in a barrack house. She lived in Tashkent for half a century, working as a correspondent for the Pravda Vostoka newspaper, and as a science editor at publishing houses in Uzbekistan.

She was the initiator of the process of rehabilitation of Vsevolod Meyerhold. Tatyana Yesenina's letters to the researcher of Meyerhold's work K. L. Rudnitsky are an important source for studying the work of the repressed director.

She wrote books-tales "Zhenya - a miracle of the twentieth century", "Lamp of moonlight", memoirs about S. Yesenin, Z. Reich and V. Meyerhold.

She died on May 5, 1992 in Tashkent. She was buried after the funeral at the old city Botkinsky cemetery.

Konstantin

Konstantin was born on February 3, 1920. In Kostya's Birth Statement, obviously compiled from his mother's words, it is written that he was born on March 20, 1920, and his father in the same document is named a Red Army soldier by occupation. In the court "Case on the rights of inheritance" the time of birth is also recorded incorrectly - February 20, 1920.

Konstantin's godfather was the writer Andrei Bely. Sergei Yesenin was absent at the birth of his son. Zinaida Nikolaevna informed him about the birth of her son by phone and asked: “What should I call it?”. “Yesenin thought for a long time, choosing a non-literary name, and said: “Konstantin.” After the baptism, he realized: "Damn it, but Balmont's name is Konstantin." I didn’t go to see my son.”

The birth of Konstantin coincided with the time of a sharp cooling of relations between S. A. Yesenin and Z. N. Reich. Suspicion of Sergei Yesenin was fueled by gossip in the circle of his close friends. In "A Novel Without Lies" by Anatoly Mariengof, the scene of a chance meeting between Sergei Yesenin and Zinaida Reich on the platform of the Rostov railway station in 1920 is described, when the poet, when examining his son, said: "Fu ... Black ... Yesenins are not black ...".

Kostya's childhood memory retained meager memories of his father. Here is what he wrote in the 70s: “The very first thing that my memory retained was the arrival of my father in the spring of 192 ... but I don’t know which one exactly. Sunny day, my sister Tanya and I are selflessly running around the green courtyard of our house. (...) Suddenly, smart, "foreign" dressed man and woman appeared in the yard. The man is blond in a gray suit. It was Yesenin. With whom? Don't know. My sister and I were taken upstairs to the apartment. Still: The first, after a long break, a date with his father! But for us it was, however, an unfamiliar "uncle." Konstantin remembered that his father talked more with Tanya, that he did not bring gifts, but he became angry when he found out that the children did not read his poems.

Sergei Yesenin loved children in his own way, carried their photographs with him. VF Nasedkin recalled that at the meeting the poet did not forget to introduce: “But my children ... - he shows me a photographic card. The photo shows a girl and a boy. He himself looks at them and seems to be surprised at something. He is twenty-nine years old, he himself still looks like a young man.

There were episodic meetings between Konstantin and his father. The stormy scene of the explanation between father and mother, which the son was a witness, remained in my memory. Sergei Yesenin did not show paternal feelings for his son, since he loved his daughter Tatyana more. “As a child, I was very similar to my mother,” K. Yesenin explained this inattention, “with facial features, hair color. Tatyana is a blonde, and Yesenin saw more of his own in her than in me.

Kostya did not feel his own father in Sergei Yesenin, since his stepfather V. E. Meyerhold was engaged in his upbringing. Natalya Yesenina (Poet's niece, daughter of Ekaterina's sister) cites the following episode: “There was a case (according to my mother) when Sergei Alexandrovich came to visit his children, Kostya ran up to the door and, seeing his father, shouted: “Tanya, come to you Yesenin came! A child is a child. He called V. E. Meyerhold “Daddy…”

Konstantin, when he was 20 years old, tried to write down detailed memories of S. Yesenin, asked his mother. The last wife of his father, Sofya Andreevna Tolstaya, told him about his father, who warmly treated Kostya, and at meetings she asked him to read the poems that he occasionally wrote.

Misfortune did not bypass Yesenin's children. After the murder of his mother and the execution of his stepfather, Kostya, as a student, was moved from a large parental apartment to a room on Bolshaya Pionerskaya Street. Konstantin studied at the Moscow Civil Engineering Institute. Very soon, funds for a normal living were not enough. Occasionally, he was assisted by relatives as much as they could, who themselves lived poorly. Anna Romanovna Izryadnova, the mother of Yura, the poet's first son, took a great part in his fate. “A woman was of amazing purity,” K. Yesenin recalled with gratitude. - Amazing modesty. After I was left alone, Anna Romanovna took a great part in my fate. In pre-war 1940 and in 1941 she helped me in every possible way - she fed me in difficult student times. And later, when I was at the front, I repeatedly sent parcels with cigarettes, tobacco, and warm clothes.

In November 1941, when the German army reached the borders with Moscow, Konstantin Yesenin, a 4th year student at the Moscow Civil Engineering Institute, volunteered for the front. Before leaving for the army, Konstantin took a suitcase full of papers and rare publications of his father to the custody of Yesenin's last wife Sofya Andreevna Tolstaya, who saved and returned everything to him after the war. But many of his father's things, which Konstantin inherited, remained ownerless at the Moscow dacha in Balashikha. “A lot of letters, notes, business papers of my father died during the war,” recalled Konstantin Sergeevich. - They were kept at my dacha. I was at the front, my sister was evacuated to Tashkent, and so she settled there. All of our relatives on my mother's side died during the war. The dacha was left empty. Twice it was arbitrarily settled. The entire archive was dumped in a barn. There he lay for several years and winters, in frost and heat.

Konstantin witnessed a great interest in his father's poetry. He recalled how, after the blockade of Leningrad, in a second-hand bookstore, where he went by chance, one customer asked, “Tell me, do you have a volume of Yesenin’s poems?” The saleswoman with a tired face, bearing traces of hunger and hard feelings, was surprised: “What are you! Of course not! Now Yesenin's books are a rarity. Konstantin was proud that his father's poetry was in demand.

At the front, Kostya was wounded three times. In the summer of 1944, during one of the battles, the commander of the first company of the assault battalion and his deputy for political affairs were killed. Junior Lieutenant Konstantin Yesenin took command of the company and led the fighters behind him into the attack. An explosive bullet pierced his lungs. Soon, the relatives of Konstantin Yesenin received a notice of his death. On December 9, 1944, the newspaper "Red Baltic Fleet" published an essay by Yu. Sarkisov and M. Kurganov "At the very blue sea", which told about the death of Komsomol organizer Konstantin Yesenin. The news of the death of K. S. Yesenin turned out to be erroneous. He, seriously wounded, in an unconscious state, was taken to the hospital by a nurse from another part. He survived. But the headquarters did not know about this. The Third Order of the Red Star found him long after the end of the war.

After demobilization, K.S. Yesenin continued his studies at the Moscow Engineering and Construction Institute. It was difficult to live on a scholarship, so he was forced to sell two notebooks of his father's verses that had been white-copied to the Main Archive Department of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. After graduation, he began to work at post-war construction sites as a foreman, head of the construction site. He erected the largest building complex in Luzhniki, built residential buildings, schools and cinemas in the capital. The surname Yesenin did little to help Konstantin's production career. “I must say that wearing the name Yesenin is quite troublesome,” wrote K.S. Yesenin in 1967. “Sometimes some workers from among my construction fraternity were afraid of the close proximity to the name Yesenin, and some even suggested that I change my last name. But this is all, of course, from the paucity of thought. In the future, K. Yesenin moved to work as a referent in the Cabinet of Ministers of the USSR on construction issues, the chief specialist of the Gosstroy of the RSFSR.

Before the war, Konstantin Sergeevich was fond of football. In 1936 he played in the finals of the youth championship of Moscow and was noted for his excellent sporting achievements. After the war, he played football at the competitions of the national teams of production teams, closely followed the football battles in the country. He began to keep statistics on teams, players, various sports meetings. The statistics of K. Yesenin opened up many new facets in football, became a valuable material for sports specialists and numerous fans. Very soon, Konstantin Sergeevich became a prominent football columnist in sports journalism, which became last years his life as a second "profession". Konstantin Sergeevich is accepted into the Union of Journalists.

For 40 years, Konstantin Sergeevich has collected a huge card file about football and football players. It was a kind of football encyclopedia. Based on these materials, K. Yesenin wrote and published the book Football: Records, Paradoxes, Tragedies, Sensations (1968), which quickly became a bibliographic rarity. There is a phrase in the book: “Human passions always surprise people who are impassive, incapable of passion, who have hardened in their perception of the world only through a glass of practicality.” This was the position of Konstantin Yesenin. Later he published the book "Moscow Football and Spartak" (1974), which was highly appreciated by numerous football fans. Until the end of his life, he worked on the book Chronicle of Soviet Football. In recent years, K. S. Yesenin was the deputy chairman of the All-Union Football Federation.

Once upon a time at the airport Tatyana Sergeevna Yesenina with two heavy suitcases stood in line for tickets. A young officer helped her carry the suitcases. When Tatyana Sergeevna took out her passport to present to the cashier, the officer read the surname and asked in surprise, worried:

"Are you Yesenina? Tell me, are you not a relative of the football extra Konstantin Yesenin? When Tatyana Sergeevna met her brother, she told him about this episode, adding: "You have become more famous than your father." And then they laughed for a long time.

Konstantin Sergeevich did a lot to restore the name of his father. He often spoke with stories about his father, mother, other contemporaries, visited places associated with the name of S. Yesenin. In 1967, in the collection “Yesenin and Russian Poetry”, he published his memoirs “On the Father”, which in 1986, after a slight author's revision, were reprinted in the two-volume book “S. A. Yesenin in the memoirs of contemporaries.

He died on April 26, 1986 in Moscow. He was buried at the 17th section of the Vagankovsky cemetery in Moscow in the same grave with his mother, not far from the grave of his father.

Alexander

Of the four children of Sergei Yesenin, his last son Alexander lived the longest.

The son of the poet Sergei Yesenin died on March 16, 2016 in the USA at the age of 92. Alexander Sergeevich Yesenin-Volpin - mathematician, philosopher and poet, member of the dissident and human rights movement in the USSR. In December 1965, he became one of the organizers of the Glasnost Rally. The social activist spent about six years in prisons, exile and psychiatric clinics, where he was sent for anti-Soviet activities.

Yesenin-Volpin wrote several fundamental works on the logic and theory of law in the USSR. It was Yesenin-Volpin who introduced the word "glasnost" as a public requirement for the authorities to comply with the law and make legal procedures transparent.

His father, the poet Sergei Yesenin, passed away when Yesenin-Volpin was one and a half years old. His mother was the poetess and translator Nadezhda Volpin. Parents were friends in the literary workshop, but were not married. Soon Nadezhda became pregnant.

Yesenin was shocked to learn that Nadezhda wanted to keep the child. “What are you doing to me! I already have three children!” he exclaimed. Nadezhda, offended by his reaction, left for Leningrad without leaving him an address: “Good. This will be my child. Only mine…".

Yesenin tried to find Nadezhda, but the neighbors in the communal apartment, at her request, did not tell him the address. A ditty even went around Moscow: “Nadya left Sergey without a child in her arms.” It was said that when she was pregnant, she wore a dress on which the sun was depicted, and said that she would give birth to Christ. On May 12, 1924, a son was born, like two drops of water similar to his father.

Nadezhda Volpin writes that Yesenin asked a friend who visited her whether he was black or white. To which he replied: “And I told him - not only white, but simply - that's how you were a little boy, that's how you are. You don't need cards."

Sergei Yesenin saw his son twice. Once on the street: the mother then handed him over to the nanny, they say, "take it away so that they don't see it." The poet was offended. And the second time he himself came to Nadezhda's house - especially to see his son ...

In 1933, at the age of 13, together with his mother-translator Nadezhda Volpin, he moved from Leningrad to Moscow, where in 1946 he graduated with honors from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University; in 1949, after graduating from the graduate school of the Research Institute of Mathematics at Moscow State University and defending his Ph.D. thesis in mathematical logic, he left to work in Chernivtsi.

In 1949, for "anti-Soviet poetry" he was placed for compulsory treatment in the Leningrad Special Psychiatric Hospital, in September 1950, as a "socially dangerous element", he was exiled to the Karaganda region for a period of five years. He was amnestied after Stalin's death in 1953, soon after which he became known as a mathematician specializing in the field of intuitionism. In 1959 he was again placed in a special psychiatric hospital, where he spent about two years.

The "disease" of Yesenin-Volpin, from which he was "treated" in psychiatric hospitals, is called "pathological truthfulness."

Alexander Volpin was an ardent anti-Soviet. They asked him: “Sasha, what do you have against the Soviet regime?” - "I? I have nothing against the Soviet gang that illegally seized power in 1917.”

He said "too much". He was periodically put in a psychiatric hospital. He had a saying: “Well, I have already been treated for this!” Alexander's relatives asked not to go to them - after his arrival, the apartment was put under control, phones were tapped ... "We have children," they told him.

In 1961, Yesenin-Volpin's book Spring Leaf was published in New York, which, in addition to poetry, included his Free Philosophical Treatise. For this, Khrushchev, at a meeting with the intelligentsia on the Lenin Hills, called him "a rotten poisonous mushroom." The treatise contained a phrase that infuriated the authorities: "There is no freedom of speech in Russia, but who can say that there is no freedom of thought."

At the end of 1962, Khrushchev uttered one of his catchphrases: "They say he is mentally ill, but we will treat him." And for the next four months, Yesenin-Volpin again ended up in a hospital bed. Less than two years later, Khrushchev was removed. The thaw is over - the Brezhnev tightening of the screws has begun ...

They took him to the Lubyanka - and let him go: there was nothing to grab onto. He reminded the authorities that dissent is not at odds with the law, and therefore should not be punished. Volpin's wife Victoria recalled: once, during a three-hour conversation with investigators, Alexander Sergeevich exhausted them so much that they gave up, called her and said: "Take it!".

Yesenin-Volpin formulated and began to defend the idea that Soviet laws in themselves are quite acceptable, and the problem lies in the refusal of the state to follow these laws. He urged his associates that if the state obeyed its own laws, citizens would not be left in a position of disenfranchisement and that the human rights situation would change if citizens actively pressed the state to comply with the laws.

In May 1972, at the urgent suggestion of the Soviet authorities, he emigrated to the United States. He was simply left with no choice. The phrase “If you don’t go to the Middle East, we’ll send you to the Far East,” which later went around as a joke, initially did not contain any irony. From the lips of a KGB officer, it sounded even ominous. Alexander Sergeevich decided not to tempt fate anymore. By that time, he had already sat out in prison, and in exile, and in psychiatric hospitals.

In the USA he worked at the University of Buffalo, then at Boston University. The author of the theorem in the field of dyadic spaces, which received his name.

A lot of grief and suffering always falls to the lot of the poet, even if he is the darling of fate. After all, in this world nothing is given just like that and you have to pay for everything. There is a special price for talent. The fate of the great Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, entangled in omissions and gossip, is evidence and confirmation of this. Throughout his short, romantic life, he aroused stormy, contradictory passions in those around him, and he himself was torn by passions just as stormy and contradictory. With the posthumous fate of Yesenin, a strange metamorphosis occurred. He has been dead for more than seventy years, but everything connected with him lives on. Not only his poems live, but in general everything "Yesenin". Everything that worried him, pleased, tormented him. Everything that in any way collided with him. Yesenin in our literature is a kind of cult figure. Popular love even led to the emergence of the genre of “folk Yesenin studies”: the poet’s smile, blue eyes, golden curls are discussed, how gracefully the suit sat on Yesenin, and more. By the way, according to Varlaam Shalamov, Yesenin became the only poet accepted by the thieves' world (In the camp language, "Yesenin" is called any home-grown poet from prisoners.) So the exclusivity of Yesenin's posthumous fate is obvious. In one, Yesenin was not lucky.

His biography is still far from a true, objective picture. Academic "Yesenin studies" as a result of the activities of a number of Yesenin scholars is in stagnation. These scientists, having created an "official concept", calmed down on this. They formed a kind of closed team, where they do not want to let outsiders in. They hush up or even manipulate some facts of the poet's biography that do not fit into a pre-prepared scheme. This is the opinion of the candidate of historical sciences, the author of more than 80 publications on the history of literature, Sergei Viktorovich Shumikhin, and one cannot but agree with his opinion. True, in the studies of the last period, there are still some fluctuations in the interpretation of the poet's type, surprisingly coinciding with fluctuations in the socio-political situation in the country. This spread is quite large: from the recent endless repetition of Yesenin's lines about Lenin, the exclamation "My mother is the motherland, I am a Bolshevik" to the creation of the image of a fearless exposer of "Jewish-Bolshevik atrocities", hiding from the GPU and finally captured by this GPU in the Angleterre hotel. For some reason, "independent" researchers who could create an objective view of the life and work of the poet are not interested in it, they are engaged in Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam. There is, however, one researcher studying Yesenin - the Englishman Gordon McVey from Bristol. He published the monographs "The Life of Yesenin" and "Isadora and Yesenin". True, his ideas, which have nothing in common with the "official concept", are not taken into account by Yesenin scholars. So, McVeigh made an interesting point. He believes that Yesenin could become a very popular figure among the youth of the West, because he resembles famous rock stars who died early, like Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Cobain, because he is just as headstrong and anarchic. It is likely that the Englishman is right. And yet, no matter what McVeigh's objective studies are, for him, as well as for other Western scientists, Yesenin exists outside of the fate of Russia, outside of Soviet history. There are also numerous memoir sources written not only by the powerful of this world - politicians, poets, actors, artists, but also by ordinary inhabitants, or even just envious and spiteful critics.

However, all memoirs of this kind are very contradictory and inaccurate, since memoirs in general are never protocol accurate due to the author's personal view of things. From everything that was said above, it becomes clear that writing about the life of Sergei Yesenin is extremely difficult, especially within the framework of an ordinary school essay, because for this one would have to study a huge memoir and research material, and having studied it, make a lot of efforts to to separate the legendary from the actual. Not everyone can do this, and I do not pretend to be the person who can master this. And yet, since I took up this topic, I will try briefly, almost in a dotted line, to state the main facts of the poet's biography. I emphasize: what I have written does not pretend to be a revelation. Although I really hope that this will happen sooner or later. “I am the son of a peasant. He was born in 1895 on September 21, - Yesenin wrote in his autobiography, - From the age of two, due to the poverty of his father and the large number of his family, he was given up for education to a rather prosperous maternal grandfather ... ". His grandfather was a miller. Grandparents loved their grandson and cared about his future: grandfather taught him to fight, and his grandmother spoiled him and forced him to go to church. The family wanted Sergei to become a village teacher, and therefore he was sent to a closed church school. But, having finished it in 1911, he announced his intention to become a poet. The following year, Yesenin left for Moscow, where he began attending evening courses at the university and joined a literary revolutionary society, while working in different places to earn a living. While working as a proofreader at Sytin's publishing house, he fell in love with Anna Izryadnova, a work colleague who at the end of 1914 gave birth to his son, Yuri Izryadnov. Two months after that, their connection ceased, and Yesenin left for St. Petersburg in search of literary happiness.

True, he came to Moscow for a short time in 1915 and 1916 to visit Anna and his son. “At the age of eighteen, I was surprised, having sent my poems to magazines, that they were not being published, and unexpectedly ran into St. Petersburg. I was received quite warmly there. The first one I saw was Blok, the second - Gorodetsky. When I looked at Blok, sweat dripped from me, because for the first time I saw a living poet. He "rushed" to St. Petersburg as a timid guy, with little luggage, with a notebook of poems and with the ambitious dream of many young provincials - to win fame for himself. Gorodetsky introduced him to the peasant poet Nikolai Klyuev, who became Yesenin's friend and literary patron. Many Petersburg acquaintances of the poet noted his pleasant boyish appearance and blue, "literary" eyes. And no one could remain indifferent to his youth, external attractiveness and, most importantly, to his great talent. During the three years of his life in St. Petersburg, Yesenin became a famous poet. He was surrounded by fans and friends. Gradually, he grew bolder, became bold, self-confident and boastful. But, strange to say, his naivete and gullibility remained. There was something special about this contradiction. Yesenin was loved, spoiled and even forgiven what they would never forgive another. The poet was 21 years old when his first collection of poems, Radunitsa, appeared. From that moment on, the spiral of his life began to rapidly unwind. In the same year, 1916, he was called up for military service, and there Empress Alexandra Feodorovna drew attention to him, for whom he happened to read his poems. Despite this honor, he hated army life and deserted as soon as the opportunity presented itself, but was soon caught and sent to a penal battalion.

During the 1917 revolution, Yesenin deserted again and joined the revolutionaries. No, he did not become a member of the CPSU (b), but he ended up in close proximity to the “Soviet leaders”. October hooked social strings in Yesenin, and the first revolutionary motifs appeared in his poetry. By the middle of 1918 he had become one of the most significant and original young poets. The youth raised him to the shield. When his collection Pigeons came out, the book was sold out in a few days. And shortly before that, in the fall of 1917, Yesenin married Zinaida Reich, who served as a secretary in the Socialist-Revolutionary newspaper Delo Naroda. She bore him two children - a daughter, Tatiana, and a son, Konstantin. However, this marriage turned out to be fragile - in the summer of 1918 Yesenin left his wife (they officially dissolved the marriage in 1921). At the end of 1918, a new poetic school arose in Moscow.