Sergei Yesenin, early lyrics: famous poems and their features. Yesenin and the October Revolution

Esenin's childhood and adolescence. Sources of impressions and their significance in lyric creativity poet. The role of the church teaching school in the formation of Yesenin's worldview. First appearances in print. Analysis early poems Yesenin (1910-1914). Yesenin's letters to school friend Grisha Panfilov. The poet's connections with the workers of the printing house "T-va ID Sytin", poets-surikovtsy, professors and students of the People's University. A. L. Shanyavsky. Democratic tendencies in Yesenin's early poetry.

1

The poetry of early Yesenin is heterogeneous and unequal. In it, sometimes completely opposite poetic traditions collide and the poet's unequal social aspirations are clearly noticeable. Frequent in the past and not overcome in our time, attempts to pull this contradictory creativity to any one series of poems, to single out one, albeit very sonorous motive, one, even often repeated mood, more than once led researchers to unacceptable extremes.

Taken as a whole, in all its screaming dissimilarity, Yesenin's poetry with a captivating emotional force, in a multitude of large and small shades, surprisingly truthfully reveals that socio-psychological world, the product of which she could only be.

In a solid fusion of ringing, cheerful, melodies close to the Russian heart and dazzlingly bright colors with the insipid, immovable and asceticism of religion not alien to the peasant, Yesenin's poetry was born, and its roots deeply rooted in the native and familiar element from childhood.

Like many during his apprenticeship, Yesenin did not escape the sometimes close to him, and sometimes accidental, foreign influences. And yet, the motives of his lyrics invariably flourished on the same soil: now unrestrained daring and serene joy, now meek humility, or even despondency and hopeless sadness.

Yesenin's poetry captured a kind of syncretism of peasant psychology in its complex inconsistency: in childhood and decrepitude, in infantile impulses into a foggy distance and in dead immobility, in constant glances at the age-old traditions of patriarchal antiquity.

This "ancient, mysterious world", of course, was not closed in itself, the trends of the revolutionary epoch freely and violently burst into it and, colliding with grandfather's notions, struck sparks of future "fires and rebellions".

Did the aspiring poet manage to grasp the trends of modern times? Did he discern the flashes of a glowing glow, heard the thunderclaps or drowned them out with harsh religious chants and the thick ringing of bells of "patriarchal Russia, who was praying to sweat?"

In Yesenin's early poems, there are many juicy, vivid pictures of the native nature close to him from the cradle. Do they obscure the stormy social life of the Russian countryside, or are the moods of the pre-revolutionary peasantry discernible in the multicolored poetry of Yesenin's lyrics?

The range of these complex questions has attracted the attention of researchers for more than a decade, and nevertheless, no complete and exhaustive answers have yet been given to them.

During his early youth, Yesenin did not have to experience the beneficial influence of people who clearly distinguished the paths of social development. Therefore, the ideas of popular struggle, which inspired and inspired Russian literature, were not the source of his early lyrics, from which, for many reasons, dropped some of the motives characteristic of Russian literature of those years. But as a poet, Yesenin had the gift of surprisingly subtle feeling and truthfully reproducing the world around him. All in the sounds of his native land, Yesenin caught and in beautiful poems conveyed their temporal tone. His poetry "smells of life", and these smells intoxicate with the aroma of native fields.

Fidelity to reality and closeness to the traditions of national oral poetry more than once helped the poet to overcome the vagueness and vagueness of his own ideals. But, weakened by the absence of a revolutionary orientation, Yesenin's lyrics were inferior in this to the loud voices of the poets of "Zvezda" and "Pravda" and especially the poetry of D. Bedny. But even then, when the poet experienced the alien influences of decadent literature that flourished in the salons of the northern capital, his poetry often resisted its disembodied, deadening pathos. Yesenin was not swallowed up by Klyuev's condovity, the hypocritical monastic asceticism, to which the Olonets guslar inclined him.

Yesenin came to literature with great talent and no definite social aspirations. What touches did the poetry of early Yesenin leave in the motley and complex picture of Russian literature of the pre-revolutionary era?

The earliest poems of Yesenin were created from childhood impressions and are designated as 1910. In subsequent years, the poet experienced various influences. In his poetry, however, the melodies of his native land sounded steadily, acquiring a more or less definite form of poetic expression. Therefore, it will be legitimate to single out the pre-revolutionary work of the poet in a special period with the designation early, marked by the publication of the first collection of poems "Radunitsa", the lyric suite "Rus", the poem "Martha Posadnitsa", as well as the story "Yar" and stories "At White Water" , "Bobyl and Druzhok". In the same years the poet created "The Legend of Evpatiy Kolovrat, Khan Batya, the color of three hands, the black idol and our Savior Jesus Christ" and the book of poems "Dove", published in 1918 *.

* (See S. Yesenin. Radunitsa. Pg., 1916; its the same. Russia. "Northern Notes". Pg., 1915, No. 7, 8; its the same. Martha Posadnitsa. The People's Cause, April 9, 1917; its the same. Yar. Northern Notes, February - May 1916; its the same. By the white water. "Stock Exchange", mornings. release on August 21, 1916; its the same. Bobyl and Druzhok. Good Morning, 1917, No. 1; its the same. The Legend of Evpatiy Kolovrat. "The Voice of the Working Peasantry", June 23, 1918)

Yesenin is one of those few Russian poets whose childhood was deprived of the beneficial influence of high culture, did not breathe the thunderous air of liberation ideas, did not know heroic examples of revolutionary resistance. The early years of the future poet passed away from the active social struggle, in the depths of which a new Russia was born.

Growing up in the wilderness of Meshchera forests to the monotonous noise of pines and birches, to the quiet rustle of grasses and splashes of "bosom waters", Yesenin was not familiar with the music of the revolution, and in his first poems one does not hear the battle melodies, to the accompaniment of which the twentieth century entered life and revolutionary literature declared itself.

The poet spent his childhood in a family far from the trends of modern times. He was born on September 21 (October 3), 1895, and for the first 14 years he lived in his native village of Konstantinovo, which, even in the era of 1905, was not distinguished by the activity of revolutionary sentiments.

The son of a peasant, Yesenin did not experience the heavy burden of village life, which the Russian farmer carried for centuries to the sad songs of fathers and grandfathers that accompanied him from cradle to grave. Unlike many of his peers, the poet knew neither the exhaustingness of peasant labor, nor his calloused poetry, and need and deprivation did not darken his childhood.

That is why Yesenin was not so close to the plowman's labor song, which sounded loudly in A. Koltsov's poetry and illuminated her with that infrequent joy that fell to the lot of the peasant when mother earth, soaked in tears and sweat, rewarded him for hard labor.

Yesenin did not accidentally exclude the work of N. Nekrasov from his genealogy, which he led from A. Koltsov *. Yesenin's early poetry does not contain a high and clearly expressed Nekrasov ideology, depth of depiction of folk life, civic consciousness. She was inferior in this also to the poetry of A. Koltsov, I. Nikitin, and sometimes the poetry of I. Surikov, who had a great influence on the poet.

* (See the poem by S. Yesenin. "Oh Russia, flap your wings ...".)

Yesenin has a lot in common with these poets, but in the early lyrics he failed to develop the strongest motives of their work. The share of the poor that worried A. Koltsov fell out of the poetry of S. Yesenin, who were not close to the long-standing traditions of the laboring Russian song. And nevertheless, the attractiveness of Yesenin's poetry is in the blood connection with the national life, everyday life, psychology and the spiritual world of the Russian person.

And although the poet was excluded from the labor activity of his fellow villagers, he knew their life and psychology well and took from them a deep, inexhaustible love for his Motherland, for the unfading beauty of its nature, the legends of "deep antiquity." These childhood impressions and affections, however, were invariably accompanied by other, no less vivid, but not so poetic and attractive impressions. In the early years of his life, the poet more than once witnessed senseless drunken carnages, fanned for some reason by the romance of heroism and special village prowess, heard harsh abuse, observed unjustified cruelty, and he himself often came to his home "with a broken nose."

Yesenin had a great store of childhood impressions, but they are extremely contradictory. Into the poet's immature ideological consciousness, fancifully intertwined and "another world", arising from the frequent and skillful stories of pious pilgrims, as well as from church books, the meaning of which was persistently explained to his grandson by his grandfather. These unequal impressions of childhood, which formed the basis of the poet's first poetic experiments, were the source of the contradictory heterogeneity of his early poetry, in which the sounds and colors of a full-blooded life are alternately shimmering loudly and dazzlingly, or the nasal monastic voices are heard.

Later, recalling his childhood, Yesenin invariably emphasizes the dissimilarity of his first impressions. "My first recollections date back to the time when I was three or four years old. I remember a forest, a big ditch road. My grandmother goes to the Radovets Monastery, which is 40 miles away from us. Grasping her stick, I can hardly drag my legs from fatigue, and the grandmother kept saying: “Go, go, berry, God will give you happiness.” Often the blind people wandering through the villages gathered at our homes, sang spiritual verses about a beautiful paradise, about Lazar, about Mikola and about the groom, the bright guest from the unknown city. .. My grandfather sang to me songs old, viscous, mournful. On Saturdays and Sundays he told me the Bible and the sacred story "*.

* (Sergey Yesenin. Autobiography, 1924. Collected. Op. in five volumes, v. 5, pp. 15-16. See in the same place the autobiography "Sergei Yesenin", 1922; Autobiography, 1923; "About Me", 1925.)

A dense religious flavor of the life surrounding the boy was also created by the church, which raised its cross over the expanses of the Oka waters and grew into the loam of the right bank steepness of the river right in front of the windows of the house where the poet was born. And nearby monasteries - Poschupovsky, Solotchinsky, the cathedral in Ryazan, and in the surrounding villages there are many churches and churches with their patronal divine services, monks and nuns, "saints". Along the vast floodplain of the Oka, the glitter of upward-looking Christian symbols - crosses - spread far, and for centuries it hummed from the harsh bass of bells calling into the divine bosom.

And next to this ghostly life, intrusively poisoning the boy's consciousness, wonderful pictures of his native nature opened before his eyes. The village of Konstantinovo is spread out on a steep steep bank of the spacious Russian river, which, freeing itself from winter constraint, pours its hollow waters here for many kilometers. In summer, a fragrant carpet of endless meadows, dissected by many streams and rivulets, oxbows and lakes, blooms in the floodplain. On the left side of the Oka there is a mighty Meshchera forest, on the right - an endless steppe - Russia "without end and without edge", about which songs and tales were composed.

And the poet heard a lot of songs and fairy tales as a child. "The nanny is an old woman who took care of me, told me fairy tales, all those fairy tales that all peasant children listen to and know" *. In his autobiographies, the poet sharply opposes the religious influence of his grandfather and grandmother, the influence, as he calls it, "street". “My street life was but similar to my home life. My peers were mischievous guys. **.

* (Sergey Yesenin. Autobiography, 1924, vol. 5, pp. 15-16.)

** (Sergey Yesenin. Autobiography, 1924, vol. 5, p. 16.)

Religious ideas about heavenly paradise, divine gardens, asceticism of saints collided in the mind of the future poet with the tangible beauty of reality.

The poet inherited the duality of perception of the world from childhood from fellow villagers and relatives, in the spiritual atmosphere of which his first ideas about life were formed. The peculiarities of this naive attitude, dating back centuries, but close to the Russian patriarchal peasant, Yesenin fully disclosed later in his poetic treatise "The Keys of Mary", as well as in a letter to R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik: "A poet should always push his vision over After all, if we write in Russian, then we should know that before our images of double vision ... there were images of double feeling: “Mary light the snow” and “play the ravines”, “Avdotya wet the threshold.” These are images of the calendar style that our Great Russian created from that double life when he experienced his days in two ways, churchly and everyday life.

Mary is the church day of St. Mary, and "light the snow" and "play the ravines" is an everyday day, the day of the snow melting, when streams murmur in the ravine "*.

* (Unsent letter to R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik, 1921; V - 148, 149.)

Of course, such an understanding of the worldview and traditions of the poetry of the peasantry arose in the poet at the time of his maturity, when he had not only rich experience in versification, but also acquired certain theoretical knowledge that allowed him to distinguish between the principles of creating images of "double vision" and "double feeling." And yet Yesenin expressed here what was close to him from childhood and found embodiment already in the first book of poems, the poetics of which is also heterogeneous and reflects the influence of various poetic elements. These influences are often fleeting, externally. In such poems, the transient unstable mood of the poet is guessed, and they fall out of the poetic structure inherent in him already in the early period, which is based on folk imagery.

The poet's deep connection with folklore is not interrupted throughout his life, and it is not shaken by numerous literary influences. The forms of this connection are not the same and undergo a complex evolution.

The closeness to the poetic traditions of peasant folklore is the most stable feature of the poetics of early Yesenin, which is organically related to the range of topics that attracted the poet and the peculiarities of his attitude. " Literary lessons“grandfather and the Spas-Klepikovskaya school, which the poet graduated from in 1912, did not make any changes in the spiritual world that developed in the rural community. strong knowledge of the Church Slavonic language. This is all I have endured "(V - 16).

Of course, the closed church-teaching school expanded the circle of the poet's knowledge, including literary. She, however, protected her pupils from the non-ecclesiastical pathos of the ideas of the twentieth, revolutionary century. Her task was to educate students in the spirit of patriarchal and religious antiquity. Twice a day, the pupils listened to prayers and sermons, and they trained teachers who were close in spirit to the Orthodox Church.

And, of course, it was no coincidence that this school was located in a secluded place, far from the big roads, in the very depths of the Meshchera forests, in a village surrounded by swamps and swamps that even daredevil hunters did not dare to overcome. And when the future poet was allowed to see his parents, he made his way home in a roundabout way, on which he was met and escorted by the gloomy and silent, or the piously ringing towers of monasteries and churches. And on this way, the bass of copper burst into the noise of the forests, the rustle of grasses and the mysterious chorus of bird voices.

The poet, however, was more attracted by songs, fairy tales, ditties that had long existed in his homeland, and, overcoming religious influences, he began his work by imitating folklore. "I started composing poetry early. My grandmother gave jerks. She told fairy tales. I didn’t like some fairy tales with bad ends, and I rewrote them in my own way. He began to write poetry, imitating ditties. I didn’t believe in God much. I didn’t like to go to church,” - Yesenin writes in his autobiography (V - 11), contrasting the origins of his work with religious influences.

And although these words belong to a mature poet, who was scolded by critics for adherence to religion, in them he told the truth. And later, repeatedly returning to the origins of his poetry, trying to understand the true and deep influences, Yesenin will repeat these words many times: "Village ditties had an influence on my work at the very beginning" (V - 16). "The songs that I heard around me were arranged to the verses, and my father even composed them" (V - 23).

Folk psychology, the life of the Russian countryside, the traditions of her poetic creativity had such a great influence on the future poet that they allowed him to resist persistent attempts to introduce him to religion. Many of the poems written by him after graduating from the church teacher school (before 1915) contain not only polemics with the church, but also an hostile ironic attitude towards it, and this is the best evidence of the poet's deep disagreements with the hopes that his grandfather and Ryazan bishop.

In the poems of these years, a purely earthly, everyday perception of the world and there are no serious attempts to imitate the sacred commandments. Religious symbolism and biblical imagery, familiar to the poet from childhood, are absent in his poetry of 1910-1912, and by 1915 he created poems that affirm the beauty of earthly life, the charm of his native nature.

Perky and vociferous, these poems are opposed to monastic humility and meekness, they depict a multicolored and joyful world. Everything in him lives, breathes, develops, and this polyphonic movement alone is in contradiction with the calmness characteristic of the religious worldview. The poet notices the dew on the nettles, and hears the song of the nightingale, and beyond the river - the beater of the sleepy watchman. Yesenin winter sings and echoes over the thicket shaggy forest, a blizzard is spreading like a silk carpet, a blizzard with a furious roar knocks on the shutters and gets angry more and more, and the chilled and hungry sparrows dream of the beauty of spring under the snowy whirlwinds. Yesenin's dawn weaves a scarlet cloth on the lake, bird cherry pours snow, lightning has tied a belt in foamy streams *.

* (See the poems: "It's already evening. Dew ...", "Winter sings - hunts ...", "The scarlet light of dawn is woven on the lake ...", "The bird cherry pours snow ...", "The night is dark, can't sleep ... "," The flood smoke has licked the silt ... ".

Note: the poem "Where there are cabbage beds ...", dated by the poet in 1910, is not considered here. This date should not be considered reliable: the quatrain was written no earlier than 1919. In the original version, it was included in the poem "Hooligan".

Then you see how the maple leaves without looking back to the glass of the swamps. And the little maple womb The wooden udder sucks.

In Yesenin's youthful poems, one can already hear the independent voice of the future great poet, who passionately loves and acutely feels his native nature in many, often barely perceptible shades. The poetic image in them is simple, transparent, devoid of pretentiousness. The metaphor has not yet gained strength, but its peculiarities are already noticeable. The lyrical feeling, however, is shallow, devoid of great experiences, arises as a response to the sounds and overflows of nature.

From the means of expression, the most often used is an epithet, simple comparisons, rarely a metaphor. In each stanza, a small picture is usually drawn, arising from direct observations and the desire to convey the sensations and experiences they caused.

It's already evening. Dew Glitters on the nettles. I stand by the road, Leaning against the willow. Great light from the moon Straight to our roof. Somewhere the song of a nightingale I hear in the distance. Good and warm, Like the stove in winter. And the birches stand Like big candles. (I - 55)

A quiet moonlit evening, familiar, sounds and colors of nature caused the poet to feel joyful, and the rays of the moon, falling on the tops of birches, lit them "like big candles", and they felt warm, like in a home near the stove. By the way, the "big candles" in this poem are one of the typical cases of the poet's frequent and most secular use of religious words.

Another poem is based on direct observation:

You watered the horse from handfuls on the bit, Reflecting, birches broke in the pond. I looked out of the window at the blue handkerchief, The breeze fluttered black curls like a snake. I wanted to break a kiss with pain in the flickering of foamy streams From your scarlet lips. But with a sly smile, splashing at me, You ran away at a gallop, ringing the bits. In the yarn of sunny days, time has woven a thread ... They carried you past the windows to bury you. And under the cry of the requiem, under the censer canon, I still fancied a quiet, uninhibited ringing. (I - 59)

From direct observation arises in these poems and the epithet (watchman sleepy, Forest shaggy, sparrows playful, ringing quiet uninhibited, the light of dawn scarlet, yearning cheerful, Pine resinous, run unsteady, jets frothy, Forest green, dawn poppy, fur crimson). And even if some of these epithets are not original - they are taken from everyday life, just like the first Yesenin metaphors: " winter calls out", "in the yarn of sunny days, time has woven the thread", "weaved on the lake the scarlet light of dawn", "the month dropped the yellow reins" and etc.

It is important to note that in the poetic means of this series of poems there is no orientation towards biblical imagery. They are deprived of it, as well as religious motives and church ideas. Yesenin's metaphors come from the deep traditions of folk poetry and are based on the likeness of nature to ordinary everyday, everyday phenomena (time weaves a thread, the month drops the reins-rays, and he himself, like a leisurely rider, moves across the night sky).

The concreteness and distinctness of the poetic vision is expressed in the most everyday everyday vocabulary, the dictionary is simple, it rarely uses bookish and even more abstract words and expressions. This language was used by fellow villagers and fellow countrymen. Sometimes there are religious words that the poet uses to express his purely secular ideas.

In the poem "A flood of smoke ..." haystacks are compared with churches, and the mournful singing of a capercaillie with a call to the all-night vigil.

And nevertheless, one cannot see the poet's religiosity in this. He is far from her and paints a picture of his native land, forgotten and abandoned, flooded with floods, cut off from big world left alone with a dull yellow moon, the dim light of which illuminates the haystacks, and they, like churches, surround the village by the haystacks. But unlike churches, the haystacks are silent, and for them the capercaillie with mournful and gloomy singing calls for all-night vigil in the silence of the swamps.

The grove is also visible, which "covers the wood with a blue gloom." That is the whole low-key, joyless picture created by the poet, everything that he saw in his native land, flooded and covered with blue darkness, devoid of people's joy.

And this motive of regret about poverty and deprivation of the native land will pass through the early work of the poet, and the ways of expressing this deeply social motive in pictures of nature, seemingly neutral to the social aspects of life, will be more and more improved.

In the poem "Kaliki" Yesenin in a sharp, ironic form expressed his attitude to religion. Wandering saints, "worshiping the most pure Savior" and singing verses "about the sweetest Jesus", he calls buffoons, putting a negative meaning in this word. Their song about Christ is listened to by the nags and echoed by loud geese. And the wretched saints hobble past the cows and tell them their "suffering speeches", over which the shepherds laugh.

No, this is not mischief, as one well-known critic put it, referring to the poem "Kaliki", but a clear dislike for the clergy and the denial of those commandments that the Savior-Klepik churchmen vigorously hammered into their disciples.

In the poems "Imitation of a song", "Under a wreath of forest chamomile ...", "Tanyusha was good ...", "Play, play a tagline ...", "Mother walked in a bathing suit through the forest ..." poet to the form and motives of oral folk art. Therefore, they contain a lot of traditional folklore expressions such as: " frantic separation", how " insidious mother-in-law", "I will admire if I will drop in", v " terem dark", braid -" snake gas chamber", "blue-eyed guy".

Folklore methods of constructing a poetic image are also used. "The cuckoos are not sad - Tanya's relatives are crying" (type of image, good famous poet from Russian folk song and "The Lay of Igor's Host").

But the poet uses not only the folklore form and creates his images on its basis, he makes folklore the subject of his poetry, the source of the themes of many poems, preserving the social meaning of folk art. "Tanya was good ..." is a song about a difficult girl's fate, about wild manners in a pre-revolutionary village, about life ruined in the prime of life ("Tanya has a wound on her temple from a dashing brush").

The poem "Tanyusha was good ..." can serve as an example of the skilful treatment of an aspiring poet with oral folk art. The poem contains a lot of folklore words, expressions, images and it is built on the basis of a folk song, but the hand of the future master is felt in it. Here, the poet makes good use of psychological parallelism, which is often used in folk art to express grief, misfortune, and sadness. In the spirit of the song tradition, Yesenin combined it with a vigorous chastushche chant. His Tanyusha, having learned about the betrayal of her beloved, although "turned pale like a shroud, grew cold like dew, her scythe developed like a snake-like snake," nevertheless finds the strength to adequately answer him: "Oh, you blue-eyed guy, no offense I'll tell you, I came to tell you: I'm marrying someone else "(I - 68).

The above-mentioned poems of Yesenin are devoid of fruitless influences and they clearly express a craving for topics close and dear to the Russian reader.

2

Feeling himself "a grandson of the Kupala night, who was born with songs in a grass blanket," grown to maturity, the poet created many paintings of Russian nature, but landscapes are not the only virtue of his even the earliest poetry.

From the very beginning, social motives and themes penetrated into it, which, we repeat, were in conflict with the aspirations of the poet's official educators. And this is the great power of influence on him by the oppressed, illiterate, laboring and impoverished Ryazan village, which more than once rose with stakes, pitchforks and scythes against its oppressors.

For too long, our criticism diligently searched for sources of the mature Yesenin's contradictions in the religiosity, humility, meekness, and devotion of the village, in the pre-revolutionary conditions of which he grew up, the figure of the praying grandfather also stood out immensely. Meanwhile, even in the early poems of the poet there is neither meekness, nor meekness, nor piousness. They loudly sound "intoxicated joy", darkened by the consciousness of abandonment and isolation from the big world.

Of course, in these years (1910-1914) the poet experienced various literary influences, and they will be discussed, but the poems created from vivid impressions of childhood do not give the right to identify Yesenin of these years with Yesenin of St. Petersburg.

This was not taken into account by the critics. Even Voronsky, who perfectly knew the poet's work and life, could not dismember Radunitsa, and in his negative assessment he singled out the poems created after the poet breathed the air of the capital's reactionary philosophy. "Russia of Yesenin in the first books of his poems is humble, drowsy, dense, stagnant, meek, - Russia of praying moths, bell-ringing, monasteries, iconic, canonical, whale ... By the strength of what was said, his poetic works of the period under consideration are artistic and reactionary." Voronsky explains this development of Yesenin by the influence of "decomposing" and "softening grandfather's vaccination." "And" Radunitsa ", and" Dove ", and" Trinity ", and many other poems of the poet are colored and saturated with the church, religious spirit" *.

* (A. Voronsky. Sergey Yesenin. Literary portrait. In the book: A. Voronsky. Literary critical articles. M., "Soviet Writer", 1963, pp. 244, 245, 247, 248.)

In a later article "On the Departed," Voronsky softened and somewhat revised his assessments of Yesenin's work, but he still assessed the early cycle of poems incorrectly: "The first cycle of his poems was rustic-idyllic, tinged with churchliness."

* (A. Voronsky. About the departed. In the book: Sergei Yesenin. Sobr. poems, vol. I. M.-L., GIZ, 1926, p. XVIII.)

In the pre-revolutionary Ryazan village there were not only idylls. The flame of the liberation struggle flared up in it, and the peasant movement seriously alarmed the eminent secular and spiritual nobility.

The Ryazan Territory in tsarist Russia was really abandoned, the poorest among the beggars. It was a peasant land. Peasants made up 94% of the total population of the province *.

* (All digital data were taken by us from the work of V. I. Popov "Peasant movement in the Ryazan province in the revolution of 1905-1907." "Historical Notes", 1954, No. 49, pp. 136-164. Further numerical data are given without reference to this work.)

But in this peasant land, the peasants accounted for only half of the best lands of the province, the other half was in private ownership, the peasant allotment per capita in Ryazan province was lower than in neighboring provinces *, and was equal to an average of one tithe, and in in a number of villages it was even lower. The price of land lease was skyrocketing, as were taxes. In 1904, redemption payments alone accounted for 50% of all taxes on the population of the province.

* (Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Kaluga, Orel.)

Literacy was extremely low, and medical care was almost nonexistent. * It is not by chance, therefore, that the indices of the impoverishment of the peasants of the province grew steadily and were higher than the all-Russian ones. Poor people - 63.6 against 59.5%, middle peasants - 17.7 against 22%. The peasants of the Ryazan province lacked in 1905 two million poods of grain for sowing the fields. From hunger and poverty, they went to work in cities and moved to other regions of the country or fell into the bondage of kulaks and landowners.

* (9 doctors and 11 paramedics per 100,000 population.)

Such was the Yesenin region on the eve of the first Russian revolution, which unfolded in it with special force. In 1905-1907, 515 peasant uprisings were registered in the Ryazan province. And although they were scattered and isolated, suppressed by the power of power and weapons, they were not distinguished by meekness and humility. The peasants burned down the landowners' estates, took away livestock, grain, and cut down forests. There was open resistance to the authorities, there were executions of the rebels, and all this created an atmosphere in the Ryazan province that was far from condolence and monasticism.

It is impossible not to take into account the revolutionary sentiments of the peasants, as other critics do. After all, they played a significant role in awakening the consciousness of many peasant writers.

But the revolutionary wave only casually captured the northern districts of the province, in one of which the poet was born and lived, and in them there were fewer landowners, and the allotments of the peasants were higher, and the class contradictions were not so sharp. That is why out of 515 actions of the peasants of the Ryazan province, only 8.8% falls on the northern districts.

The severity of the revolutionary struggle was weakened in the consciousness of the future poet by the fact that his work began during the years of Stolypinism and the general decline of revolutionary activity, ideological confusion in the ranks of the creative intelligentsia, Vekhovism and God-seeking, in the years when decadent fashions flourished. "The reaction manifested itself in all spheres of social life, in science, philosophy, art. Tsarism carried on a frenzied chauvinistic agitation. Militant clergy was active. Among the intelligentsia, counter-revolutionary sentiments, renegade ideas, fascination with mysticism and religion died down ... For a while, the bitter struggle subsided. in the village" * .

* ("History of the CPSU". M., Gospolitizdat, 1960, p. 126.)

The conditions were quite suitable for the implementation of the ideas of the owners of the Spas-Klepikovskaya church-teacher's school, which, by the way, is idealized by some of our critics, regardless of the opinion of a mature poet about it. She did everything to eradicate the memory of the revolution in the minds of her students. It is no coincidence that neither Yesenin, nor his teachers and classmates, in their memoirs and letters relating to the years of schooling, said nothing about the impressions of the long and hard struggle of the Ryazan peasantry in the era of 1905-1907.

And these memories were vivid both among the churchmen and among the intelligentsia. The poet mentions the victims of the 1905 revolution only in 1913 in a letter to Grisha Panfilov, in which he gives another fair description of the Spas-Klepikov spiritual atmosphere: “I don’t know that you settled there in Klepiki, it’s time to break free. Are you not oppressed by that suffocating atmosphere? At least here you can talk to someone and listen to something "(V - 106). And these are not memories, but vivid impressions of a poet who has just graduated from school.

In a friendly school circle, Grisha Panfilova was very fond of not only early Gorky, but also Nadson and Tolstoyism. Yesenin also had a great interest in Tolstoy's philosophy. The validity of these words is confirmed by letters, poems, autobiographies of the poet himself. The poems of the Klepikov period are not distinguished by life-affirming pathos *. Deprived of deep feelings and experiences, both artistically and ideologically, they are still very weak. They, however, characterize the literary mood of the students of the Spas-Klepikovo school, who listened to them with enthusiasm, and the imitative and weak poem "Stars" was even praised by the teacher of literature EM Khitrov **.

* (See poems: "Stars", "Remembrance", "My Life", "What Has Passed - Can't Return", "Night", "Sunrise", "To the Dead", "Drops", "Poet".)

** (See the note to this poem (I - 335).)

In most of the poems of 1910-1912, pessimistic motives not alien to the poet at that time sound, borrowed, in particular, from Nadson along with an arsenal of poetic means:

As if my life is doomed to suffering; Grief along with longing barred my way; As if with joy life is forever parted, From melancholy and from wounds the chest languished. (I - 74)

People are unhappy, killed by life, With pain in your soul, you live out your life. Sweet past, you have not forgotten, Often you call him back. (I - 83)

In the arsenal of these means there are such cliches, devoid of Yesenin's concreteness and imagery: "life is a lot of suffering," "an unenviable lot," "a soul languishing with longing and grief," "foggy distance," "sighs and tears," "magical, sweet dreams "," life is a deception ". Even nature becomes pale, its colors fade, shades disappear: "Suddenly a thunderstorm will come, a strong thunder will thunder and destroy magic, sweet dreams"; "Pearl drops, beautiful drops, how beautiful you are in the rays of gold"; "The stars are clear, the stars are high." Neither "pearl drops", nor "red dawn", nor "dark blue sky" can be compared with the images of nature created by the poet later:

Dawns are blazing, fogs are smoking, A crimson curtain is above the carved window. (I - 85)

Lightning girdled In foamy streams a belt. (I - 67)

Pours bird cherry snow, Greenery in bloom and dew. In the field, leaning towards the shoots, Rooks walk in the strip. (I - 62)

In 1910-1912, Yesenin failed to create any significant works. In his work of these years, there is a lot of resignation to fate, Tolstoyan non-resistance, lamentations about the "villainous fate." It is student-like imitative.

These influences might not have been if there were a sensitive and understanding poetry teacher next to the young poet. But this was not the case. Nobody noticed the deep springs of Yesenin's talent. For too long, the poet developed alone, groping his way into poetry, until he met Blok, who appreciated Yesenin's talent and helped him as a poet. But that was already in 1915.

As for the Spas-Klepikovskaya school, it came as a surprise to her when, two or three years after her graduation, Yesenin's name became the property of all-Russian literature. Arriving at school with the talent and living soul of a poet, Yesenin left it with a "strong knowledge of the Church Slavonic language" and with no less firmly entrenched in his mind Tolstoy's ideas, which he later had to overcome.

3

The best poems of Yesenin of 1910-1914 attract with the freshness and juiciness of pictures of nature, drawn boldly, sweepingly. The reader is captivated by the nakedness and sincere sincerity of the feelings expressed by the poet.

During these years, however, Yesenin has a vague idea of ​​the true purpose of poetry. His work is chamber, not inspired by the lofty ideas of the century, lyrical feeling is unstable, limited to a circle of intimate themes and experiences, the aesthetic ideal is not clear-cut, his thoughts are contradictory. The poems of these years are unequal. They are then full of energy and optimism ("It's already evening. Dew ...", "Winter sings - sounds ...", "Weaved on the lake ...", "Pours bird cherry with snow ...", "Dark night, can't sleep ... "), then woeful and sad, inspired by thoughts of the transience of life (" Imitation of a song "," Under a wreath of forest chamomile ... "," Tanya was good ... "," Remembrance "," To the deceased ").

The ambiguity of social positions is clearly expressed in Yesenin's poems about the poet. In the first of them "He is pale. He thinks a terrible way ..." (1910-1911), the theme of the social role of art is completely absent, and Yesenin's fate appears to be bleak, lonely, tragic.

He is pale. Thinks a terrible way. Visions live in his soul. The blow of life hammered in the chest, And the cheeks drank doubt. Hair is knocked down in clumps, A tall forehead in wrinkles, But its beauty of clear dreams Burns in thoughtful pictures. He sits in a cramped attic, The stub of a candle cuts his eyes, And a pencil in his hand Conducts secret conversations with him. He writes a song of sad thoughts, He catches the shadow of the past with his heart. And this noise, mental noise ... He will take it for a ruble tomorrow. (I - 70)

In another poem "That poet, who destroys enemies" (1912) Yesenin understands the social purpose of the artist as follows:

That poet, who destroys enemies, Whose true mother, Who loves people like brothers And is ready to suffer for them. (I - 82)

In comparison with the first poem, the theme of art is taken deeper here, but the abstractness of judgments has not been overcome, the criteria are very general and vague, and this characterizes Yesenin's mentality of those years. To the question that tormented him about the role of art in the life of the people during these years, he could not find a clear and concrete answer.

In a letter to Grisha Panfilov from Moscow, he asks a friend to help him in this: "I want to write" The Prophet "in which I will stigmatize the blind crowd, stuck in vices. as for the necessary material. Indicate which way to go, so as not to blacken yourself in this sinful host. From now on I give you an oath, I will follow my “Poet.” Let humiliation, contempt and exile await me. I will be firm, as will my prophet, drinking a glass full of poison for the holy truth with the consciousness of a noble deed "(V - 92).

“To stigmatize a blind crowd stuck in vices” is more of a romance than a clear awareness of purpose. And although Yesenin asks "to bless him for noble work" and does not want to "blacken himself in this sinful host", he is ready to endure "humiliation, contempt and exile", his ideas about the poet and poetry are still vague and far from the ideas firmly established in advanced Russian literature.

Of course, we are talking about a young man who had just left school, living conditions and school isolated from the progressive movement of his time, groping his way into literature, alone, deprived of ideological support. Education in the Klepikov school in the spirit of Christian morality contributed little to the correct solution of such complex and acute problems. In discussing the appointment of the poet Yesenin surpassed his teachers. But there is no reason to overestimate his youthful ideas, as is sometimes done in critical literature.

The instability and uncertainty of Yesenin's worldview are also visible from other letters to his school friend: “I have changed in views, but the beliefs are the same and have sunk even deeper in my heart. I don’t use chocolate, cocoa, coffee, and I don’t smoke tobacco ... I began to look at people differently too. A genius for me is a man of word and deed, like Christ. abyss of debauchery "(V - 92, 1913).

In this mixture of religions, a kinship with the ideal of the poet, "ready to suffer for people" and "love them like brothers" is noticeable.

A raid of Tolstoyism, Christianity, Buddhism coexists in the letter with a message about agitation among the workers: "Recently I organized agitation among the workers with letters. I distributed among them the monthly magazine Ogni with a democratic direction" (V - 93). It is hardly worth giving great importance social activities and agitation of the poet during this period. Moreover, his literary sympathies are extremely dubious: "Of course, I also have sympathy for such (after Christ and Buddha. - P. Yu.) People, such as Belinsky, Nadson, Garshin and Zlatovratsky, etc. But how Pushkin, Lermontov, Koltsov, Nekrasov - I don’t admit. You, of course, know the cynicism of A. Pushkin, the rudeness and ignorance of M. Lermontov, the lies and cunning of Koltsov, hypocrisy and gambling and oppression of the courtyards N. Nekrasov, Gogol is a real the apostle of ignorance, as Belinsky called him in his famous letter, and you can even judge about Nekrasov by Nikitin's poem "To the Poet of the Investigator" (V - 92, 93).

Later, Yesenin would dramatically change his opinion about the great Russian writers, call Gogol "beloved" (V - 9), appreciate Lermontov, Koltsov, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy. In the early years, however, his ideas about them were unstable, and his philosophical and worldview views were eclectic, vague, devoid of active citizenship.

Yesenin's passion for religion dates back to 1913: "... at the present time I read the gospel and find a lot new for me ... Christ is perfection for me. But I do not believe in him as much as others. Those believe out of fear that will be after death? And I am pure and holy, as in a person gifted with a bright mind and a noble soul, as an example in the pursuit of love for one's neighbor. Life ... I cannot understand its purpose, and after all, Christ did not reveal the purpose of life either. " (V - 95). The poet believes not only in "the bright mind and noble soul of Christ," but also in the afterlife. Turning to Grisha, he remarks: "You yourself once said:" Still, I think that after death there is another life. "Yes, - Yesenin admits, - I also think, but why is she life?" (V - 95). The words of a friend cited by Yesenin also characterize the worldview of Grisha Panfilov, who is also often overestimated in critical literature, which unconditionally affirms the democratic mood of young friends.

Undoubtedly, in Panfilov's school circle, ideas of service to society were discussed, and they were close to Yesenin, but these are rather ideas of Christian service, revived with renewed vigor in the poet's mind in the first year of his stay in Moscow. “Yes, Grisha,” he inspires Panfilov, “love and pity people, and criminals, and scoundrels, and liars, and sufferers, and righteous people. You could and can be any of them. Love the oppressors and do not stigmatize, but reveal I caress the vital diseases of people "(V - 100).

Instead of the denunciation of the "mob stuck in vices," declared in the "Prophet's" concept, it proclaims the treatment of social illnesses by affection, quite in the spirit of Tolstoy's non-resistance to evil by violence. These are the results of the upbringing of the Spas-Klepikovskaya church-teacher's school. So Yesenin arrived in Moscow in the summer of 1912.

The poet was led to the city by the desire to find ways to great literature and try his hand at poetry. He had no connections in literary circles, his name was not known in the press. Torn away from his native village element, Yesenin found himself in the first months of his life in a city alien to him in an atmosphere of spiritual isolation. Feuds began with my father, and a break followed them, I had to leave my job in the office of the merchant Krylov. Life was difficult and not at all the way the young man wanted. Having lost the support of his father, the poet found himself in an even more difficult position. Instead of literary studies, I had to think about a piece of bread every day.

The poet's own impressions of his stay in Moscow also do not coincide with their assessment in some critical works *, and therefore they need to be sorted out. "... You look at life and think: do you live or not? It is very monotonous, and that new day, the situation becomes unbearable, because everything old becomes disgusting, you long for a new, better, clean, and this is old something is too vulgar "(V - 89, 1912); "The devil knows what it is. Life in the office becomes unbearable. What to do? I am writing a letter, and my hands are trembling with excitement. I have never experienced such depressing torments" (V - 94, 1913); "Dark clouds thickened over my head, all around lies and deceit. Sweet dreams are broken, and the whirlwind whirlwind carried everything away in its nightmarish cycle. Finally, I have to say that life is really" an empty and stupid joke "(I - 104, 1913) ; "... We have to make a scandal with the means. I don't know how I will hold on, but there is so little strength "(V - 106, 1913);" All formed hopes collapsed, darkness enveloped both the past and the present "(V - 106, 1913).

* (See Yu. Prokushev. Yesenin's youth.)

To a number of the poet's unhappy moods, expressed in letters to a friend, one should add unflattering assessments of the people with whom he had to meet in the city. "Moscow is a soulless city, and everyone who strives for the sun and light for the most part runs away from it ..."; "People here are mostly wolves out of self-interest. They are happy to sell their brother for a penny" (V - 108, 1913); "Exhausted, I sit down for a letter. Lately I also fell off my feet. My nose was bleeding a lot" (V - 109, 1914); "Something is sad, Grisha. It's hard. I am alone, alone around, alone and there is no one for me to open my soul to, and people are so small and wild" (V - 110, 1914).

These are Yesenin's own impressions of his stay in Moscow. Mental disorder and dissatisfaction find expression in a number of poems of these difficult days for the poet. In them there is neither exuberant cheerfulness, nor colorful pictures of native nature, and the world seems to Yesenin gloomy and boring, devoid of bright colors:

It's sad ... Mental anguish The heart is tormented and torn. Boring sounds do not give me time to breathe. You lie down, and the bitter thought Doesn't go crazy, Your head is spinning from the noise ... How can I be? And My very soul languishes. There is no consolation in anyone. You can barely breathe. Gloomy and wild all around. Share, why are you given? Nowhere to bow your head. Life is both bitter and poor. It's hard to live without happiness. (I - 86)

"Time boring sounds" are heard in other poems sent to Grisha Panfilov. These poems, weak artistically and not intended for printing, clearly express the inner world of the poet, who has not yet found like-minded people in the city and willingly turns to the sad motives of Nadson's poetry, about the purchase of whose works he informs a friend *.

* (See letters from Konstantinov, February - March 1913 (V - 98).)

It would be wrong to explain Yesenin's depressed mood by deep reflections on the fate of the Motherland, which worried at that time the Russian intelligentsia, who painfully survived the defeat of the 1905-1907 revolution and entered a period of a new upsurge of the liberation movement. Such an explanation would be incorrect, even if one takes into account Yesenin's connections with the revolutionary-minded workers of the printing house of the "ID Sytin Association", where the poet worked for some time in a proofreader.

S. Yesenin among the workers of the printing house "Association of I. D. Sytin"

Spiritually Yesenin was not prepared for active revolutionary work, and the letters we examined to Panfilov eloquently speak of this. In some of them, the poet reports on the arrest of workers, on his participation in the labor movement, on the surveillance of him by the police and on the search carried out by the police in his apartment. And although these facts of Yesenin's biography correspond (to a certain extent) to reality, it would be risky to exaggerate them. In one of his letters (1913) he writes: "Firstly, I am registered among all the professionalists, and secondly, I had a search, but everything ended well so far" (V - 108).

Recently, researchers have especially often referred to this place in the letter in order to emphasize the poet's involvement in the revolutionary movement. And indeed, when he was a proofreader of the printing house, Yesenin participated in workers' meetings, distributed the magazine Ogni, which had a democratic orientation. It is impossible to regard this as a conscious revolutionary activity proceeding from internal motives. And this is best said about this in the letter itself, which is usually quoted in its first part, but meanwhile its end is eloquent, and we have to write it out again: "Have you read Ropshin's novel" That which was not "from the era of 5 years A very wonderful thing. This is where the unbridled boyishness of the revolutionaries is in reality 5. Yes, Grisha, after all, they pushed freedom 20 years back. 109).

We will not dwell on all the shades of Yesenin's statement, we only emphasize that the slanderous novel by B. Savinkov (Ropshin) pleased him, who considered himself a "registered professional", to his liking, and he called the revolutionary feat of the 1905-1907 fighters "unbridled boyhood". It is impossible to combine this with conscious revolutionary activity.

Since 1962, a new document has been included in the literature about Yesenin - "Letter to Fifty" *, and reports of detectives who were spying on Yesenin in November 1913 were also discovered. These materials are presented with sufficient completeness in the book of Yu. Prokushev **, and there is no need to cite them again. Let us only note that the letter from "five groups of class-conscious workers of the Zamoskvoretsky District" sharply condemned the splitting activities of the liquidators and the anti-Leninist position of the Luch newspaper.

* (See L. Shalginova's message "Letter of Fifty and Yesenin". "New World", 1962, No. 6, pp. 278-279.)

** (See Yu. Prokushev. Yesenin's youth, pp. 137, 138, 143-156.)

Among the fifty signatures under the letter is Yesenin's signature, which gave rise to the police, in whose hands the document fell, to establish careful surveillance of him. In the reports of the police, there is nothing, however, that would confirm the conscious and active participation of the poet in revolutionary movement, no such materials were found during the search. Obviously, Yesenin's signature on the document also cannot be considered a manifestation of conscious revolutionary activity. All his thoughts in Moscow were aimed at finding ways to literature. And in this main endeavor, he did not receive the expected support and soon left his job in the printing house. So, faced for the first time with the workers of the city, Yesenin did not become either a singer of the revolutionary struggle, or a conscious revolutionary. These connections did not leave deep traces in his early poetry. The poems "At the Grave" and "The Blacksmith", which reminded (and even then dully) of this connection, the poet did not include in his first collection "Radunitsa", he never recalled them and did not include them in subsequent editions of his works *. We also note that in none of his autobiographies did the poet recollect his participation in the revolutionary movement.

* (The poem "Blacksmith" was first published in the newspaper "Put 'Pravdy" on May 15, 1914.)

This does not mean at all that short-term work in the collective of Sytinsky, who were waging an organized struggle for their rights, did not have any influence on the poet and was not useful to him. Breathing in the air of the printing house, Yesenin begins to think more and more about life, seeks to comprehend its meaning, somehow self-determine in it, to realize its complexity and disorder. In the work of Yesenin of these years, democratic tendencies intensified and new themes emerged that expanded the range of his poetry. The poem "Martha the Posadnitsa" condemns the despotism of Tsar Ivan III and glorifies the Novgorod freemen. In the poems "Patterns", "Mother's Prayer", "Heroic Whistle" Yesenin writes about the imperialist war.

Under the influence and with the help of the Sytins, he entered the People's University. A. L. Shanyavsky, establishes contacts with Surikovites and becomes a member of this circle. All this helps him to expand and deepen his knowledge of his native literature, to get to know more closely the new life of the city for him. But all this does not open before him, who considered himself an established poet, a broad road to print. And although in the circle of Surikovites the poet finds a literary environment close to him and personally meets a number of poets, his publishing plans do not advance, and he decides to leave Moscow and try his luck in the capital.

At the end of 1913 Yesenin wrote to Panfilov: “I think at all costs to escape to St. Petersburg ... Moscow is not an engine of literary development, but it uses everything that is ready-made from St. Petersburg. There is not a single magazine here. Positively not a single one. There is, but which are only suitable for the trash, like "Around the World", "Ogonyok" (V - 108).

AR Izryadnova, who knew Yesenin closely in those years, notes in her memoirs: "He was in a depressed mood, he is a poet, and no one wants to understand this, the editorial offices are not accepted for publication."

* (Yu. Prokushev. Yesenin's youth, p. 115.)

Only in the last year of his stay in Moscow Yesenin was able to publish several of his poems in the magazines "Mirok", "Protalinka" and in the newspaper "Nov" *. Of course, children's magazines published poems taking into account the age and interests of their readers, the selection of works for them was limited. Unable to print everything that had been created by that time, Yesenin submitted his first sketches of pictures of Russian nature and the fairy tale "The Orphan" to the magazine "Mirok". By them it was impossible to judge the content of the poet who entered the literature, but already in them the reader could notice the freshness of his sensations of nature, the subtlety of observations, the fullness of feelings, the simplicity and brightness of their poetic expression. The concreteness and transparency of images is especially evident in such, for example, a poem:

* (Mirok is a monthly illustrated magazine for families and elementary schools. In 1914, S. Yesenin's poems "Birch", "Porosha", "Selo", "Easter Annunciation", "Good Morning", "Little Orphan", "Winter Sings - Auket" were published in it. "Protalinka" is a magazine for middle-aged children. In 1914, in No. 10, S. Yesenin published the poem "Mother's Prayer" in it. In the newspaper "Nov" on November 23, 1914, the poem "Bogatyrsky whistle" was published. In an interesting post by S. Strievskaya "Isn't it Yesenin?" ("Literary Russia" of 14 / X 1966, p. 11) it is suggested that Yesenin's poems "This Night" and "Would Leave" were published in 1913 in No. 5 of the Moscow legal Bolshevik newspaper "Our Way" ... S. Strievskaya, however, doubts Yesenin's authorship, which has not yet been proven.)

The golden stars dozed, The mirror of the backwater trembled, The light dawns on the river backwaters And blush the grid of the sky. Sleepy birches smiled, Disheveled silk braids. Green earrings rustle, And silver dew burns. At the wattle fence, overgrown nettles Dressed in bright mother-of-pearl And, swaying, playfully whispers: "Good morning!" (I - 99)

In this small sketch, not only the subtlety of observation conquers, but also the great poetic skill of the artist, who knows both sound writing and vowel harmony. Even in Russian poetry, rich in landscapes, there are few such pearls, and this is a vivid evidence of Yesenin's stubborn improvement literary technique during his stay in Moscow.

The absence of deep social motives is another feature of the poems published in 1914, which cannot be explained solely by the content and direction of the magazines in which the poet was published then.

In the poems "Mother's Prayer" and "Bogatyrsky Whistle" Yesenin touched upon an acute topic at that time - the attitude to the imperialist war, which brought innumerable troubles to the Russian people. The ideological and artistic solution of the topic is not distinguished either by political maturity or by the firmness of the author's social positions. The poet thus reveals the feelings of a mother, whose son "saves his homeland in a distant land":

An old woman prays, wipes away her tears, And dreams bloom in the eyes of the tired. She sees the field, the field before the battle, Where the murdered son lies by her hero. On the chest wide sprinkles blood like a flame, And in the hands of the frozen enemy banner. And from happiness with grief, she froze, She bowed her gray head in her arms. And they covered their eyebrows with rare gray hairs, And tears are falling from the eyes like beads. (I - 103)

There are many tears in these lines, and the first reading of the poem gives the impression of the inconsolable grief of the mother who lost her son in a senseless war. The author's idea, however, is different. He forces the old woman to draw in her imagination a battlefield "where the murdered son lies by her hero" with an enemy banner in her hands. And when such dreams bloom in her tired eyes, she freezes from happiness with grief. As a mother, she feels sorry for her lost son, but she is happy that he died the death of a hero for his homeland. "Mother's Prayer" reveals the ambiguity of the poet's attitude to the imperialist war, the poem is devoid of any condemnation of it. The same applies to the poem "The Heroic Whistle", in which the poet, in an epic style, paints the face of a Russian peasant who, without regret or grief, sets out for the enemy and saves Russia:

A man got up, washes from the bucket, Gently talks with poultry, After washing, he dresses up in sandals And takes out the openers with a mace. The man thinks on the way to the smithy: "I'll teach you a lesson filthy mug." And on the go, out of anger, he pushes, Throws off a ragged sermyag from his shoulders. The blacksmith made the peasant's lance sharp, And the peasant sat down on a kicking nag. He rides a motley road, Whistles a mighty song. The peasant chooses a path more noticeable, Rides, whistles, grins, The Germans see - the century-old oak trees trembled, Leaves fall from the whistle on the oak trees. The Germans threw away their copper caps, They were frightened by the whistle of the heroic ... Victory holidays rule Russia, The earth hums from the monastic ringing. (I - 104, 105)

Such an image of the imperialist war is not only far from realism, but also close to false, Slavophil patriotism and was the result of the author's unclear and unstable social positions on this sensitive issue.

Yesenin's poems were published in Moscow and in other publications. In 1915 they were published by the magazines Milky Way, Friend of the People, Parus, Good Morning *. In the poems "Patterns", "Belgium" the poet again turns to the theme of the imperialist war, but its artistic solution remains the same. In "Patterns" Yesenin repeated "Mother's Prayer", and in "Belgium" he heard the call to fight to the bitter end.

* ("Milky Way", 1915, No. 2, February - "Reeds rustled over the backwater"; No. 3, March - "The scarlet color of dawn was woven on the lake." "Friend of the People", 1915, No. 1, January - "Patterns", "Sail"; № 2 - "O child, I cried for a long time over your fate." "Good Morning", 1915, No. 5, 6, October - "Grandma's Tales". In addition, the magazine "Mirok" published poems: "What is this?", "Belgium", "Bird cherry".)

And the lot of righteousness will be accomplished: Your enemy will fall at your feet And he will pray with sorrow to Your broken altars. (I - 113)

Turning to Belgium and appreciating her "mighty, free spirit and courage", the poet calls on her to punish the enemy. Later, Yesenin will reconsider his attitude to the war, but his first responses about it do not give reason to see him as an enemy of the carnage started by the ruling elite.

Yesenin's poem "The Blacksmith" published in 1914 in the newspaper "Path of Truth" is not distinguished by the certainty of social ideals. Having painted a picture of a stuffy, gloomy smithy with a heavy and unbearable heat, where "there is a frenzy from screeching and noise in the head," the poet advises the blacksmith to "fly a playful dream into the sky-high distance":

There, in the distance, behind a black cloud, Beyond the threshold of gloomy days, A mighty shine of the sun hovers Above the plains of the fields. Pastures and fields are sinking In the blue glow of the day, And over the arable land, greens are ripening happily. (I - 98)

Happy arable land beyond the threshold of gloomy days, far behind a black cloud, in a sky-high distance - this is the whole point of the poem. What is the transcendental distance into which one must strive "from grief and adversity, shameful fear and hateful timidity"? The poet, unfortunately, does not give an answer to the question that arises. Its transcendental distance is uncertain. However, the image of blacksmiths "blowing up the forges and forging boldly while the iron is hot" was familiar to the readers of Pravda, and it could evoke certain associations when reading the poem "Blacksmith". This can explain the publication of it in the newspaper.

Despite the fact that Yesenin was close to the revolutionary-minded working collective, he did not assimilate revolutionary ideology in Moscow and did not develop a system of views different from those with which he arrived in Moscow, although the circle of his ideas about life expanded.

A poet by nature and way of perceiving the world, Yesenin turned out to be deaf to the impressions of city life, and she did not leave a single vivid image in his mind. In his soul lived pictures of rural life, sounds and colors of nature, swamps and swamps, the hubbub of mowers, powders, spills, flowering herbs.

With all this, he came to Petrograd to A. Blok in March 1915 *.

* (The date of the first meeting of Yesenin with Blok is determined by Blok's record: "A peasant of the Ryazan province, 19 years old, poems are fresh, clean, vociferous, wordy, came to me on March 9, 1915". A. Blok. Notebooks (1901-1920). M., " Fiction", 1965, p. 567.)

Yesenin wanted to hear an assessment of his work from the lips of a great poet, with whom he did not have to meet in Moscow. A. Blok not only highly appreciated Yesenin's poems, but also helped him establish strong literary ties.

With the assistance of A. Blok and S. Gorodetsky, Yesenin received ample opportunities to publish his poems in the then most famous metropolitan magazines. If during the three Moscow years Yesenin published several of his poems with great difficulty, then in the first months of his life in Petrograd they were accepted by "Monthly Journal", the newspaper "Birzhevye Vedomosti", the magazine "Russian Thought", "Voice of Life", "Ogonyok" , "New magazine for everyone", "Northern notes", "Niva" (supplement to the magazine), "All the world". The poet's name became generally known, his poetry took on an independent life.

Of course, if Yesenin had not had a bright talent, no recommendations would have helped him, and he would not have had such a stormy success in the literary circles of the capital. But the presence of indisputable talent is only one and, perhaps, not the main reason that can explain the attention given to the poet. The social basis of his poetry and the direction of his talent, devoid of political acuteness, quite suited those who enthusiastically took him into their arms and saw in him a representative of the lower classes, a singer of pious peasant Russia.

The poet acquired a literary name not in those social strata of the Russian intelligentsia that expressed the true interests of his beloved Russia. Therefore, his natural poetic gift, not supported by the certainty of social ideals, received a one-sided development, and for a long time his poetry wandered along winding paths, far from the pillar road of the century. And this main result of Yesenin's three-year life in Petrograd (1915-1917) is best confirmed by his works created by him in those years.

But before addressing them, it is necessary to at least briefly describe other important issues.

The main theme of Yesenin's lyrics has always been love for Russia. And not an abstract admiration for the beauties of nature, characteristic of city dwellers, but a warm, lively love for the countryside, for rural nature. His early lyrics are religious in nature, and biblical images in their own way play a huge role in them. Russia appears as a promised land, sanctified from above, using the direct patron of God: my land is golden! Autumn shining temple!

Christianity in Yesenin's early lyrics is of a folk character. Traditions come rather not from the Bible, and not from the book culture of Orthodoxy, but from the Orthodoxy of the people. Purely formally, motives and images are used that are characteristic of the semi-apocryphal genre of "spiritual poetry", and for folklore generally.

Folk Orthodoxy from the earliest times has been fancifully intertwined with paganism. Christ himself can live in every vagrant beggar, and he can be pitied like a brother:

And maybe I will pass by And I will not notice in the secret hour. That in the firs are the wings of a cherub, And under the hemp is the hungry Savior.

All nature, as is characteristic of pagan consciousness, appears animated, mystically transformed, anthropomorphic. The title of his first book "Radunitsa" also speaks about the paganism of early Yesenin. Radunitsa is religious holiday commemoration of the departed, dating back to the pre-Christian celebration in honor of Rod, the ancestor deity. The Mother of God merges with the image of the mother goddess, the earth, the creative forces of nature. The Savior also appears to be almost a pagan deity.

The lyrical hero of Yesenin's early lyrics is an outspoken pagan:

Happy is he who is miserable in joy. Living without friend and foe. Will pass a country road, Praying for heaps and haystacks.

And the nature, to which he prays, is animated, endowed with qualities inherent only to man, and the man himself dissolves in it and loses his personal qualities. Yesenin's poems are a spell of nature, they are overflowing with direct appeals:

Green hairstyle, Maiden breasts, Oh thin birch. What looked into the pond?

Yesenin's early lyrics are very harmonious. It contains a holistic, harmonious picture of the world, which makes it possible to say something about nature that has not yet been said in literature before.

The connection with folk art is very important for Yesenin's poetry. He uses song-ditties:

Play, play, talyano, crimson furs. Come out to meet at the outskirts, beauty, groom, and this gives his lyrics a special musicality. Yesenin's early lyric poetry expresses the worldview of a simple Russian peasant in artistic form, but is not limited to it. but it tells about common human values- love for native nature, native country, for loved ones.

Yesenin is one of the most widely read poets in our time, he always remains modern, because he is close to the people.

Yesenin's poems became dear to me as soon as I entered the magical world of poetry. Since then, the versatility and originality of his work never cease to amaze me. Deeper and deeper studying the life and work of the poet, I fell in love with him with all my soul.

Among the Russian poets special place is occupied by S. A. Yesenin. His early poems are full of sounds, smells, colors. Girlish laughter rings, the "white chime" of birches is heard, willows are calling, wood grouses are crying "with ringing", bells are poured.

It was the Ryazan nature that brought up the sensitive, sympathetic, kind, beautiful in its simplicity poet S. Yesenin. Pictures of his native land are captured in his unforgettable captivating poetry.

Sergey Yesenin. In the very sound of this name, one can hear the melodiousness, the music of native expanses, the beauty of the people who created such a poet.

Literary and artistic analysis of the poem by S. A. Yesenin "Dissuaded the golden grove."

Almost every poet writes poems about nature, touches upon the themes of friendship, love, poetry and the purpose of poetry, problems of relationship with the world. One way or another, they stop at the problem of life and death. And everyone solves it in their own way.

The work of Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin seems to me to be an amazingly pure source of folk poetry. You are amazed at the great and endless love that the poet had for his homeland, its boundless expanses and nature.

Whatever he writes about, the image of his native land is invisibly present in his poems.

The beautiful, bright, sonorous and multi-colored lyrics of Sergei Yesenin are filled with high patriotism. Whatever the poet writes about is all about Russia. She appears to the author as a tender girl-birch tree, then as "blue that fell into the river", then meek and serene.

Analysis of the poem "Uncomfortable liquid moon ...", written in the twenty-fifth year.

Yesenin's lyrical hero is merged with nature, in it he feels his roots, the roots of the human race. Nature, according to Yesenin, is full of mythological symbols, both pagan and Christian. Yesenin's mythological characters live in the real world.

The tender, bright and melodious lyrics of S. A. Yesenin cannot be imagined without the theme of love. In different periods of his life and work, the poet uniquely feels and experiences this wonderful, sublime and at the same time bitter feeling.

The poetry of Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin cannot be called monotonous, it is rather diverse. At various stages of his life, Yesenin chooses completely dissimilar themes for his poems.

Growing up in the wilderness of the Meshchera forests to the sound of pines and birches, to the quiet rustle of grasses and splashes of "bosom waters", Yesenin was not familiar with the music of the revolution, did not feel the heavy burden of village life, but knew the psychology of farmers well.

Sergei Yesenin is an outstanding Russian poet, whose unique talent is recognized by everyone. From a young age, Russia lived in Yesenin's heart, its sad and free songs, rural silence and girlish laughter, the grief of mothers who lost their sons in the war.

His poetry is, as it were, the scattering of the treasures of his soul with both handfuls. A. Tolstoy Yesenin's poems are a sincere confession of a romantic soul, attracting with spirituality and a desire to sing the best human feelings.

Why can you love your Motherland? Of course, this is a special topic: after all, everyone loves the Motherland with their unique love. Why did such an extremely Russian poet like Yesenin love his native land?

The main theme of Yesenin's lyrics has always been love for Russia. And not an abstract admiration for the beauties of nature, characteristic of city dwellers, but a warm, lively love for the countryside, for rural nature. His early lyrics are religious in nature, and biblical images in their own way play a huge role in them. Russia appears as a promised land, sanctified from above, using the direct patron of God:
My land is golden! Autumn shining temple!
Christianity in Yesenin's early lyrics is of a folk character. Traditions come rather not from

Bible, and not from the book culture of Orthodoxy, but from the Orthodoxy of the people. Purely formally, motives and images are used that are characteristic of the semi-apocryphal genre of “spiritual poetry,” and of folk folklore in general.
Folk Orthodoxy from the earliest times has been fancifully intertwined with paganism. Christ himself can live in every vagrant beggar, and he can be pitied like a brother:
And maybe I will pass by And I will not notice in the secret hour. That in the firs are the wings of a cherub, And under the hemp is the hungry Savior.
All nature, as is characteristic of pagan consciousness, appears animated, mystically transformed, anthropomorphic. The title of his first book "Radunitsa" also speaks about the paganism of early Yesenin. Radunitsa is a church holiday of remembrance of the departed, dating back to the pre-Christian celebration in honor of Rod, the ancestor deity. The Mother of God merges with the image of the mother goddess, the earth, the creative forces of nature. The Savior also appears to be almost a pagan deity.
The lyrical hero of Yesenin's early lyrics is an outspoken pagan:
Happy is he who is miserable in joy. Living without friend and foe. Will pass a country road, Praying for heaps and haystacks.
And the nature, to which he prays, is animated, endowed with qualities inherent only to man, and the man himself dissolves in it and loses his personal qualities. Yesenin's poems are a spell of nature, they are overflowing with direct appeals:
Green hairstyle, Maiden breasts, Oh thin birch. What looked into the pond?
Yesenin's early lyrics are very harmonious. It contains a holistic, harmonious picture of the world, which makes it possible to say something about nature that has not yet been said in literature before.
The connection with folk art is very important for Yesenin's poetry. He uses song-ditties:
Play, play, talyano, crimson furs. Come out to meet at the outskirts, beauty, groom, and this gives his lyrics a special musicality. Yesenin's early lyric poetry expresses the worldview of a simple Russian peasant in artistic form, but is not limited to it. but it tells about universal human values ​​- love for native nature, native country, for loved ones.
Yesenin is one of the most widely read poets in our time, he always remains modern, because he is close to the people.

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Other compositions:

1. Only he knew bliss, who didn’t live with passion, And who didn’t know love, he didn’t care that he didn’t live. V. Shakespeare The artistic strength of S. Yesenin's lyrics lies in the fact that behind it stands his human destiny, full of drama and contradictions. Read More ......
2. All poems by S. Yesenin, from melodious and tender poems about the country of "birch chintz" to disturbing reflections on the fate of Russia in the "severe and terrible years", every image, every line is warmed by a feeling of boundless love for the homeland: - But most of all - Love for Read More ......
3. Seryozha has his own beautiful voice. He loves Russia in his own way, like no other. And sings Her in his own way. Birches, a month, rye fields, lakes - This is his song. And he sings it with all his being. A. Andreev Behind the dark ridge of the forest sat Read More ......
4. Many believe that Mayakovsky had the “loud voice” of the tribune of the revolution, was a public poet par excellence, as he himself wrote: “He humbled himself, taking his own song by the throat.” All of this is both true and false. The voice was really loud, the height was high, the chin Read More ......
5. The gap between the poet and reality is the most important feature of V. Mayakovsky's early lyrics. The poet strives to give himself to people, feels that “I” is not enough for him, he speaks out new truths, but turns out to be unnecessary, lonely, since the world around him is inhuman, cruel and spiritually Read More ......
6. S. A. Yesenin and V. V. Mayakovsky are great Russian poets of the early 20th century. These are milestone poets, cult poets. Their work in many ways created the “face” of that difficult time, by their works we largely judge the people of those years. Yesenin's poems Read More ......
7. Lermontov considered himself the literary "son" of Pushkin, but, as we can see, he represented something completely new for Russian literature. Perhaps he remained one of a kind, because there is nothing even remotely reminiscent of his muse in Russian literature Read More ......
8. Yesenin's work, without a doubt, is a special milestone in the history of Russian literature at the beginning of the 20th century. The future poet was born in the village of Konstantinov, Ryazan province. Naturally, the theme of his native land, nature became the main ones in his work. However, Yesenin very often turned to Read More ...

Yesenin's early lyrics

Sergei Yesenin (unlike, for example, Blok) was not inclined to divide his creative path into any stages. Yesenin's poetry is distinguished by a high degree of integrity. Everything in it is about Russia. “My lyrics are alive with one great love, love for the homeland. The feeling of homeland is the main thing in my work, ”said the poet. Yesenin brought Russian nature to poetry with all its distances and colors - "amazing in their beauty." But his contribution to Russian literature is connected not so much with the novelty of the subject (landscape lyrics are the main theme of all poetry of the 19th century), as with the ability to see nature from the inside of the peasant world. In Yesenin's poems, everything turns into the gold of poetry: soot over the flap, and cackling chickens, and hairy puppies (poem "In the hut"). And the poet sees a low-key Central Russian landscape as follows:

Beloved land! The heart is dreaming

Skirts of the sun in the waters of the bosom,

I would like to get lost

In the greens of your hundred-bells.

Peasant Rus is the central image of Yesenin's first collections "Radunitsa" (1916) and "Dove" (1918). The very titles of both books are indicative. Radunitsa is the day of remembrance of the dead, usually the first Monday after Easter week. The word itself means "brilliant", "enlightened." So called in Russia and the first spring days. Blue, blue are the constant epithets of Yesenin Russia:

Again in front of me is a blue field.

The puddles of the sun are shaking a red face.

The blue in the eyes is chilling with unsteady water ...

The specific, "individual" use of color is a phenomenon characteristic of all poetry at the beginning of the 20th century. If Blok's "blue" is the color of separation, sadness, unattainability of happiness, then in Yesenin's poetry it is almost always substantively fixed, more concrete. Esenin's semantic associations of "blue" color definitions are youth, fullness of light feelings, tenderness.

"The charm and mystery of Yesenin Russia - in a quietly radiant absence" (L. Anninsky). The key images of early poetry are ringing and sleep (slumber, fog, haze). Yesenin Russia is the heavenly city of Kitezh. She quietly slumbers to the ringing of bells "on the misty shore":

Milky smoke shakes the village with the wind,

But there is no wind, there is only a slight ringing.

And Russia slumbers in its merry melancholy,

Clutching hands on the yellow steep slope.

("Dove").

And even though your fog drives away

A stream of winds blowing winged

But all of you are myrrh and Lebanon

Magi, mysteriously magical.

("Weave a wreath for you alone ...").

Of course, Yesenin's Russia, as well as the Russia of Tyutchev, Nekrasov, Blok, is only a poetic myth. For young Yesenin, she is the embodiment of paradise. However, this image is gradually becoming more complicated. Remarkable are the echoes of Yesenin's image of Russia with Blok Russia. For both poets, next to "Russia is a secret", "a bright wife" - another, "googly mother Russia", walking, beggar and homeless:

My side, side,

The band was grieving ...

Only the forest, yes the salting,

Yes, the spit across the river ...

Puddle glows with tin.

Sad song, you are Russian pain.

But, in spite of everything, the feelings of the lyrical hero are unchanged: "Weave a wreath for you alone, / I sprinkle a gray stitch with flowers" and "... not to love you, not to believe - / I cannot learn."

In the poem "Behind a dark strand of forest trees ..." the lyric hero directly identifies himself with his homeland:

And you, like me, are in a sad need,

Forgetting who is your friend and enemy,

You yearn for the pink sky

And dove clouds.

These are very revealing lines. Two Russia - "earthly" and "heavenly" - coexist in the soul of the poet, although his longing is about blue Russia, the heavenly city of Kitezh. Yesenin's lyrical hero is "an eternally wandering wanderer", "going into the azure". And the homeland is loved by mortal love because it is abandoned. The motive of the father's abandoned house is one of the leading ones in Yesenin's lyrics.

The following are usually distinguished as specific features of the lyric hero of Yesenin's poetry:

- the maximum approximation of the hero's biography to the author's biography (autobiographical motives are at the heart of most of Yesenin's poems);

- naturalness of tone, confessional openness of the lyric hero ("poetry is a letter from Yesenin", - Y. Tynyanov defined this feature);

- the hero's feeling of a blood, mortal connection with all living things in the world ("the verb is clear to me of the earth");

- the openness of the hero to the world, his grateful acceptance, but at the same time - the longing for "otherworldly fields" and "the one that does not exist in this world."

Post-October lyrics

"The last poet of the village." Despite the extraordinary integrity of Yesenin's artistic world, the style of his "verbal walk" changed throughout the poet's career. “During the years of the revolution, he was completely on the side of October, but he took everything in his own way, with a peasant bias,” the poet wrote in his autobiography (About Me, 1925). The "peasant deviation" was that Yesenin, like other poets who wrote about the peasantry (N. Klyuev, P. Oreshin, S. Klychkov), expected the liberation of the peasants from the revolution, the transformation of Russia into a great Peasant Republic - the blessed country of Bread and Milk. In 1917-1919. Yesenin, almost ceasing to write lyrics, creates a cycle of revolutionary poems: "The Jordanian Dove", "Heavenly Drummer", "Inonia" and others - "New Testament of a new peasant era". However, it soon became clear that Yesenin's expectations were not met. In the spring of 1920 in Konstantinov (trips to his homeland were usually "fruitful" for lyrics) Yesenin wrote a single poem - "I am the last poet of the village ...":

I am the last poet of the village

The boardwalk is modest in songs.

At the farewell I stand mass

Birch trees cindering in foliage.

If we didn’t know for sure that the poem was written in early spring, when a leaf on the trees is barely pecking, if it weren’t known for certain that it was written in Konstantinov, where there are no bridges, it could well be taken as a sketch from nature. But this is not a landscape, but the image of farewell created by means of landscape painting both with an endangered - wooden - village, and with its the last poet- still alive, but already feeling that his time had passed:

Not alive, someone else's palms,

These songs will not live with you!

Only there will be ears-horses

To grieve about the old master.

The wind will suck on their neigh,

Memorial dance.

Soon, soon wooden clock

Will wheeze my last hour!

Yesenin seems to be ordering a panikhida for the doomed world dear to his heart, he himself "celebrates" it alone, and he does it in the very Temple where the service can be performed at any hour and in any place - in the Temple of Nature. Through the traditional for his poetry "woody" figurative sign ("everything from a tree - this is the religion of our nation's thought," the poet believed) he expresses his deepest pain. This is the pain of the death of the way of life, where everything is connected with the "tree", and most importantly - from the extinction of the art born by this "religion". Therefore, the “modest” bridge that the “last poet of the village” builds in songs is a “boardwalk” made of wood, a harmonious bridge. Therefore, the rattle of the "wooden" clock of the moon becomes a sign of doom. Therefore, the servants of the temple are trees, "curing" with autumn foliage. And even a candle necessary in the ceremony of the memorial action, like everything that rallied in a doomed protest against the inanimate palms of the iron guest, is a living candle, made of bodily wax:

Will burn out with a golden flame

A candle made of body wax,

And the moon clock is wooden

Will wheeze my twelfth hour.

Yesenin became the "last poet" not only of the village, but of all the outgoing Russia, that Russia, the myth of which has existed for centuries. "I am very sad now, history is going through a difficult era of the mortification of the individual as a living thing" (from Yesenin's letter, August 1920).

Darling, darling, funny fool

Where is he, where is he chasing?

Doesn't he know that there are live horses

Steel cavalry won?

<…>Only for me, as a psalmist, to sing

Hallelujah over the home country.

("Sorokoust", 1920)

The year 1920 was a turning point in Yesenin's work. The motives of the abandoned house are complicated for him by the conflict "Sovetskaya Rus" - "Leaving Rus". The poet himself is in the “narrow gap” between them: “The language of fellow citizens has become like a stranger to me. In my country I am like a foreigner. "

Literary critic Alla Marchenko named the hero of Yesenin's lyrics recent years"Talking Yesenin". Poems 1924-1925 surprisingly many voices. The poet himself does not know the answer to the question "where is the fate of events taking us?"

I'm listening to. I look in my memory

What the peasants are talking about.

"WITH Soviet power to live by our gut ...

Now there would be chintz ... Yes, a little nails ... "

How little these bradas need,

Whose life is all potatoes and bread.

("Rus leaving").

Love lyrics. “A blue fire swept around, / We forgot our birthplaces. / For the first time I sang about love, / For the first time I renounce making trouble. These are the lines of the famous poem from the cycle "Hooligan's Love" (1923). Indeed, in Yesenin's early work (until the early 1920s), poems about love were rare. The poem of 1916 "Do not wander, do not wrinkle in the crimson bushes ..." is indicative of his poetic world. Here, the beloved is inseparable from the natural environment: she has a "sheaf of oat hair" and "grains of eyes": "With scarlet juice of berries on the skin, / Gentle, beautiful was / You look pink like a sunset / And, like snow, radiant and light." The departed beloved, who was "a song and a dream", did not disappear without a trace - she dissolved into the world around her:

The grains of your eyes have crumbled, wilted,

The subtle name melted away like a sound

But remained in the folds of a crumpled shawl

The smell of honey from innocent hands.

In a quiet hour, when dawn is on the roof.

Like a kitten, it washes its mouth with its paw,

I hear meek talk about you

Water honeycombs singing with the wind.

Not all of the poems of the "Hooligan's Love" cycle are among Yesenin's best creations. Rather - separate images, stanzas, lines:

May I love another

But also with her, with her beloved, on the other,

I'll tell you about you, dear,

That once I called dear.

I'll tell you how the past flowed

Our life, which was not the past ...

Are you my daring head,

What have you brought me to?

("Evening black eyebrows raised ...").

Love is the central theme of "Persian motives" and the so-called "winter cycle" (end of 1925). High emotional intensity, spiritual nakedness, reckless daring - distinctive features Yesenin love lyrics... In conveying the element of love, the poet is deeply individual:

Sweetheart, are you? is it?

These lips are not tired.

These lips, as in jets,

Life will be satisfied with kisses.

Sweetheart, are you, are you?

Did they whisper roses to me?

Yesenin's poems about love are emphatically musical. It seems that all the charm of the famous "Shagane you are mine, Shagane ..." from "Persian motives" is precisely in the successfully found repeating line - the musical theme of the entire poem.

In one of his early poems, Yesenin depicted parting with his beloved as parting with his own shadow:

Somewhere in a clear field, near the border,

Ripped off I am his shadow from the body.

She left naked

Taking my curved shoulders.

Somewhere she is now far away

And she hugged the other tenderly.

<…>But he lives by the sound of past years,

That, like an echo, wanders around the mountains ...

("The day is gone, the line has decreased ...")

Usually, they rarely pay attention to the fact that in Yesenin's poems, the beloved, like the image of Russia, is only an echo, an echo, a shadow, a dream:

The month is shining. Blue and sleepy.

The horse hooves well.

The light is so mysterious

As if for the only one –

The one in which the same light

And which is not in the world.

("I see a dream. The road is black ...")

A grateful acceptance - the main tone in the attitude of the lyrical hero to life - is also manifested in the attitude to a woman - a friend, beloved. He knows how to say goodbye and part with his beloved lightly, with gratitude, without hysterical strain:

Loved with another lover

Perhaps he will remember me

How about a unique flower ...

("Flowers tell me - goodbye ...")

Darling!

I tortured you

You had a longing

In the eyes of the tired ...

("Letter to a Woman")

Even in one of the most "tavern" poems saturated with vulgarisms ("They loved you, mocked you - / Unbearable. / Why do you look so blue splashes? / Or do you want in the face?"), It seems, everything is written for the sake of two final lines:

To your pack of dogs

It's time to get cold.

Darling I'm crying

Sorry Sorry…

("Rash, harmonica. Boredom ...")

Features of the poetic style. Literary critics usually note the following features of Yesenin's poetics:

1) Song and folklore beginning. Yesenin himself repeatedly pointed to the folklore sources of his poetry. This is, first of all, song melody. It is no coincidence that Yesenin still remains a poet who is sung more than anyone else. The rhythmic pattern of Yesenin's verse is similar to the rhythm of folk songs and ditties:

Eh, Russian birch!

Path-road is narrow.

This sweet as a dream

Only for the one in love with

Hold you with branches

Like well-aimed hands.

From the folk song in Yesenin's poetry - an abundance

repeats and ring bezels:

Evening light of the saffron edge,

Quietly the roses run through the fields.

Sing me a song my dear

The one that Khayyam sang.

Quietly roses run through the fields ...

- as well as constant epithets and a system of through lyrical images (maple, bird cherry, apple tree, garden, autumn), passing from poem to poem.

2) Specific imagery. "It was not I who invented this image, it is ... the basis of the Russian spirit and eyes." Each Yesenin image ("a fairy-tale werewolf", according to the poet) contains a definition of some, not always easy, straightforward poetic thought. In most cases, Yesenin's "figurativeness" is, as a rule, practically untranslatable into the language of concepts. In order to better understand the poet's thought, it is necessary to take into account the entire context of his work. So, the line “everything will pass like smoke from white apple trees” from the famous “I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry ...” will say much more if you know that Yesenin's apple tree is both a real tree and an image of the poet's soul:

Well under the autumn freshness

Shake off the soul-apple tree with the wind ...

<…>Not everyone can sing

Not everyone is given an apple

Fall at the feet of others.

Yesenin's verbal image reflects "the nodal ovary of nature and man." Hence - two beloved artistic reception poet - personification and metaphor, which are often combined in one image:

Hut - an old woman with a jaw of the threshold

Chews the fragrant crumb of silence.

("The road is thinking about the red evening ...")

I see a garden in blue nakraps,

Quietly August lay on the fence.

Keeping lindens in green paws

Bird hubbub and chirping.

("This street is familiar to me ...")

Yesenin's peculiar discovery is “the personification of the opposite,” when what is happening with the natural world is identified with the state of man. The poem "Dissuaded the golden grove ..." For Yesenin, poetry is a beautiful garden (grove), where words are leaves, and images are apples shaken from the soul when they are filled with juice. For a poet, man, poetry and nature are one indivisible whole. Yesenin's lyrical hero often endows himself with "portrait" signs of trees (most often - a maple), a flower, a leaf: "I seemed to myself the same maple, / Only not fallen, but green with might and main ..."; "I will my dear head / I will give it like a golden rose ..."

3) Features of color and light palette. The predominant colors in Yesenin's lyrics are blue, light blue, pink, gold, silver. Often the colors are muted, softened, and the landscape seems to be covered with a haze:

Ineffable, blue, tender,

Quiet is my land after storms, after thunderstorms,

And my soul is a boundless field –

Breathes with the scent of honey and roses.

Yesenin's landscape, as a rule, is not external, with precisely captured details, but internal - the landscape of the lyrical hero's soul. It is interesting that Ivan Bunin, a supporter of pictorial accuracy in poetry, scolded Yesenin for landscape "inaccuracies" and even reproached him for "ignorance of nature."

Yesenin's favorite epithets - "blue" and "blue" - are constant characteristics of the mother-homeland, Russia and the poet's youth: "Keeps the blue Russia / Old maple on one leg ..."; "May my blue, June blue!"

It is significant that in the poem "The Black Man" and the last - "winter" - cycle of poems, mainly two colors prevail - black and white:

Snowy plain, white moon

Our side is covered with a shroud.

And birches in white are crying through the forests.

Who died here? Died? Am I not myself?

Lednev A. V

Poem "Anna Snegina"

This poem, written in 1925, according to the poet, "is the best that I have written." The genre of the poem is defined as lyric-epic: the inner, lyrical plot of the work is inextricably linked with the story of what “happened, what happened in the country”. Yesenin's role model was the novel in verse "Eugene Onegin", the motives of which are heard in "Anna Snegina" (the noble theme, the first love of the heroes, the "difference" between the author and the hero of the poem, Sergei). At the heart of the plot - real events: Yesenin's two visits to his homeland in 1918 and 1924. (in the poem the action takes place in 1917 and in 1923); the prototype of the main character was Yesenin's acquaintance, the landowner L. I. Kashina.

In the center of the lyrical plot of the poem is the meeting of the "famous poet" with his first love in the summer of 1917:

Hello my dear!

A long time ago I am I haven't seen you.

Now from childish years

I became an important lady

And you are a famous poet.

What are you different now!

I even sighed furtively

Touching your hand to you ...

<…>We dreamed of glory together ...

And you hit the crosshair

He made me about it

Forgetting the young officer ... "

The defining lines in the development of the lyric plot of the poem are the lines: "And at least the former is not in my heart, / Strangely I was full / An influx of sixteen years ...". Sergei's meeting with Anna takes place on dramatic days: a revolution is brewing, Anna's husband dies at the front (and Sergei - "the first deserter in the country" - is still alive here):

I remember distinctly now

Those days, the fatal ring ...

But it was not at all easy for me

See her face.

The "polyphony" of Yesenin's later lyrics has already been noted above. This fully applies to the poem, where the events of 1917-1923. are given through the eyes of a variety of people: the miller, his wife, the Kriushin peasants. It is indicative that the poem begins with the driver's story about how the reins “rolled off the happiness” in Radov: the Kriushans killed the foreman of their village. Since then, "the Radovtsy are beaten by the Kriushans, now the Radovtsy are beaten by the Kriushans." The assassin of the foreman - Peter Ogloblin (surname "speaking") is the current leader of the Kriushans. It is he who calls Sergei into his "assistants" to go "to Snegina ... together ... To ask." What is happening is not directly assessed by the author, but through the characteristics of the characters (for example, the same Prona: "Ogloblin stands at the gate / And I'm drunk in the liver and in the soul / Kostit impoverished people") and through subject details. On that visit, nothing happened with the land: Sergei took Prona away from the house where they received the funeral. In the fall of the same year, Prong Labut's brother, a member of the Council and a war “hero”, went “the first to describe the manor’s house”, who is given such a murderous characterization: “A man - what is your fifth ace: / At every dangerous moment / Khvalbishka and a devilish coward”. (The fifth ace is an extra ace in a cheating deck).

Anna's explanation with Sergei is the culmination in the development of the lyrical plot:

I remember –

She said:

"… you

Insulted by accident ...

Cruelty was my judgment ...

There was a sad secret

What is called a criminal passion ... "

Many years later, Sergei learns the reason for the refusal of the "girl in a white cape":

“Of course, until this fall

I would have known a happy reality ...

Then you would leave me,

Like a drunk bottle ...

Therefore, it was not necessary ...

No meeting ... not even continuing ...

Especially with old views

Could I am to offend the mother. "

One of the reasons for the outbreak of the revolution, and then civil war- the gap between the "white" and "black" bone, Russia, noble and peasant. It turned out to be insurmountable for Sergei and Anna, despite the feeling that connected them: the "lyric" was prevented by the "epic". The fate of the heroes turns out to be inseparable from the fate of their home country.

The composition of the poem, like many of Yesenin's lyric poems, is built on a circular principle.

Distant, lovely were

That image in me has not faded away ...

We all loved these years

But they loved us a little, –

this is how the first chapter ends. In the final chapter, after Sergei received from Anna a "gratuitous letter" with a London seal, only one word was changed in these verses. In any, even the most "harsh and formidable years", the inner (peace of the soul, feelings) is the main thing for a person. It is indestructible, eternal. The final verses of the poem are about this:

We all loved these years

But that means they loved us too.