Esenin, Sergei Aleksandrovich

ESENIN, SERGEI ALEKSANDROVICH. - Russian lyric poet, b. in the village of Kozminsk on 21 Feb. 1895. He is without doubt the best known - outside Russia - and, in many respects, also the greatest of the poets of the first period of the Soviet regime. His lyric poetry draws on the tradition of peasant poetry and, at the same time, on bold avant-garde formulas.

As a very young man, he frequented the circle around Alexander Blok and the other Symbolist poets. Not without profound ideological uncertainties, he adhered to the Bolshevik Revolution, which nevertheless always remained alien to the innermost part of his nature and to the most spontaneous aspects of his art. His wanderings and his extravagances were tolerated by the regime, which had not yet imposed on writers, as it later did, the formula of so-called socialist realism and the strictest political discipline. His marriage to Isadora Duncan produced a great scandal. Increasingly tormented by inner contradictions, he abandoned himself to orgies and scandals, as if seeking a momentary escape from his anguish: barely thirty years old, he died by suicide on 28 Dec. 1925. The best part of his poetic output is far superior to the unexamined aesthetic formulas of the "Imagist" school, of which he was the greatest exponent. The blasphemous expressions that recur at times in his poetry cannot conceal a desperate, even if fleeting, restless need to believe, to return to religion, to his native village and to the charm of tradition.