ESENIN, SERGEJ ALEKSANDROVIĆ. – Russian lyric poet, born in the village of Kozminsk on 21 February 1895. He is undoubtedly 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 upon the tradition of peasant poetry and, at the same time, upon bold avant-garde formulas.
At a very young age, he frequented the circle around Alessandro Blok and the other Symbolist poets. Not without profound ideological uncertainties, he adhered to the Bolshevik Revolution, which, however, always remained alien to the innermost core of his nature and to the most spontaneous aspects of his art. His wanderings and eccentricities were tolerated by the regime, which had not yet imposed upon writers—as it did later—the formula of so-called socialist realism and the strictest political discipline. His marriage to Isadora Ducan caused a great scandal. Increasingly tormented by inner contradictions, he abandoned himself to orgies and scandals, as though seeking a momentary escape from his anguish: barely thirty years old, he died by suicide on 28 December 1925. The finest part of his poetic production is far superior to the insufficiently developed aesthetic formulas of the “Imaginist” school, of which he was the foremost exponent. The blasphemous expressions that occasionally recur in his poetry cannot conceal a desperate, though fleeting and restless, need to believe, to return to religion, to his native village, and to the fascination of tradition.