Sergey Yesenin
To Sister Shura
You sing me that song from before
The old mother sang to us,
Without regretting the lost hope,
I can sing along with you.
I know, and I am familiar,
That's why you worry and worry,
It's like I'm from home
I hear a gentle tremor in the voice.
You sing to me, well, I’m with this one,
With the same song as you,
I'll just close my eyes a little,
I see dear features again.
Sing to me, because my joy is
That I have never loved alone
And the gate of the autumn garden,
And fallen leaves from rowan trees.
Sing to me, and I’ll remember
And I won’t frown forgetfully:
So nice and so easy for me
Seeing the mother and the yearning chickens.
I am forever for fog and dew
I fell in love with the birch tree,
And her golden braids,
And her canvas sundress.
That’s why it’s not hard on the heart,
I need a song and some wine
You seemed like that birch tree
What is under the birth window.
(read by V. Yakhontov)
Yesenin Sergei Alexandrovich (1895-1925)
Yesenin! Golden name. Murdered youth. Genius of the Russian land! None of the Poets who came into this world had such spiritual strength, enchanting, omnipotent, soul-grabbing childish openness, moral purity, deep pain-love for the Fatherland! So many tears were shed over his poems, so many human souls sympathized and empathized with every Yesenin line, that if it were counted, Yesenin’s poetry would outweigh any and much more! But this method of assessment is not available to earthlings. Although from Parnassus one could see that the people have never loved anyone so much! With Yesenin’s poems they went into battle in the Patriotic War, for his poems they went to Solovki, his poetry excited souls like no other... Only the Lord knows about this holy love of the people for their son. Yesenin’s portrait is squeezed into wall family photo frames, placed on the shrine along with icons...
And not a single Poet in Russia has ever been exterminated or banned with such frenzy and tenacity as Yesenin! And they banned, and kept silent, and belittled, and threw mud at them - and they are still doing this. It is impossible to understand why?
Time has shown: the higher Poetry is in its secret lordship, the more embittered the envious losers are, and the more imitators there are.
Another great gift of God from Yesenin - he read his poems as uniquely as he created them. They sounded like that in his soul! All that remained was to say it. Everyone was shocked by his reading. Please note, great Poets have always been able to read their poems uniquely and by heart - Pushkin and Lermontov... Blok and Gumilyov... Yesenin and Klyuev... Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam... So, young gentlemen, a poet mumbling his lines on a piece of paper from the stage is not a Poet, but an amateur... A poet may not be able to do many things in his life, but not this!
The last poem, “Goodbye, my friend, goodbye...” is another secret of the Poet. In the same year, 1925, there are other lines: “You don’t know that life in the world is worth living!”
Yes, in the deserted city alleys, not only stray dogs, “lesser brothers,” but also big enemies listened to Yesenin’s light gait.
We must know the real truth and not forget how childishly his golden head was thrown back... And again his last wheeze is heard:
“My dears, good ones...”
“...I only love my children. I love. My daughter is good - blonde. She stamps her foot and shouts: I am Yesenina!.. This is such a daughter... I would like to go to Russia with my children... but here I am running around.” S. Yesenin
The life of the most translated Russian poet in the world, Sergei Yesenin, was cut short at the age of 30. Broken or torn off - it is unlikely that humanity will ever know the reasons, circumstances and the real truth.
In search of the reasons for the so-called “suicide,” you involuntarily ask the question: could Sergei Yesenin, the father of four children, voluntarily die, dooming their destinies and lives to a miserable existence? And the question itself, which defines and emphasizes the degree of responsibility of a father to his children, makes one think. One can only guess what really happened. But there is no doubt that Yesenin was a responsible person and cared for his loved ones with all his soul. Until his death, he was a caring son and brother. If we consider “suicide” from this point of view, then the answer is more than obvious...
The official biography says that the poet left behind four children - Yuri, Konstantin, Tatyana and Alexander. It was unofficially believed that Yesenin had another son, Vasily, who at one time made a splash, drawing crowds of spectators at his readings of his father’s poems. Along with Vasily’s talent, they also noted his external resemblance to his “father.” But as it turned out later, he turned out to be an “impostor,” and, carried away by his game of “father and son,” he even wrote a letter to I. Stalin in 1945, in which he addressed the leader of the peoples with a request to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the birth of the poet Yesenin , “whose creativity is permeated with endless love for the Motherland.” This was the fatal mistake of the “unlucky impostor” - he was exposed and sent to the northern regions. Nothing more is known about Vasily’s fate. How he sank into the water...
So, the fate of Sergei Yesenin’s children:
Yuri
Yesenin's first son was born on December 21, 1914. He was christened Georgy, but everyone called the boy Yura. The poet met Yura’s mother, Anna Romanovna Izryadnova, in March 1913, at the printing house where they both worked. They got along very quickly and were glowing with happiness.
The first days after the birth of her son were probably the happiest in Izryadnova’s life:
“When I returned home from the maternity hospital, he had exemplary order: everything was washed, the stoves were heated, and even dinner was ready and cake was bought: he was waiting. He looked at the child with curiosity, and kept repeating: “Here I am the father.” Then he soon got used to it, fell in love with him, rocked him, lulled him to sleep, sang songs over him. He made me rock me to sleep and sing: “Sing him more songs.” Looking ahead, we will say that Yuri was the only one of Yesenin’s four children whom his father, albeit for a short time, rocked and lulled to sleep and to whose birth he responded with a verse (not intended for publication):
Sergei Yesenin with employees of I.D. Sytin’s printing house. Below is the poet's common-law wife Anna Izryadnova
Be Yuri, Muscovite.
Live in the forest aukai.
And you will see your dream in reality.
Once upon a time, your namesake Yuri Dolgoruky
I founded Moscow as a gift for you.
But the idyll lasted only a month. Already at the end of January or at the very beginning of February, Yesenin lived in another place - alone, and in March he left for Petrograd. Anna raised her son alone. Sergei, when in Moscow, visited and occasionally helped with money. In amateur photographs, Yura is poorly dressed, his face is that of a smart boy beyond his years. He began writing poetry early, but showed it to few people.
After school, Yuri graduated from an aviation technical school and worked for some time at the Zhukovsky Academy. By that time, the father was no longer alive and the mother had to prove Yesenin’s paternity in the Khamovnichesky court.
Yuri adored his father and knew every line of his by heart. He undoubtedly knew “Evil Notes” by N. Bukharin (Pravda, 1927, January 12), an article after which Yesenin was almost no longer published. All this, probably together with other facts of Soviet reality, did not contribute to love for the authorities and “personally for Comrade Stalin.”
One day, in 1934, in a company of golden youth, where Yuri Yesenin was also, under the influence of wine fumes, they started talking about how it would be nice to throw a bomb on the Kremlin. The next day, of course, this conversation was safely forgotten. In 1935, Yuri Yesenin was drafted into the army. He served in Khabarovsk, and a year later he was arrested. After Yuri’s arrest, a search was carried out at Anna Romanovna Izryadnova’s apartment and the described items were seized, but the son will never know about this.
When the young man was taken from Khabarovsk to Moscow, he thought that he had probably committed some kind of military crime - he could not imagine anything else. He didn’t know that one of those chatting in a drunken shop about the terrorist act was arrested a year later on some other matter and during the investigation for some reason decided to talk about this episode.
Yuri Yesenin Yura was charged with counter-revolutionary crimes, terrorism, participation in a criminal group. The verdict under this article was always the same - “capital punishment”. But the investigators cheated: they told Yuri that if he confirmed his “guilt,” then, as the son of a famous poet, he would not be shot, but only sent to a camp for a short period. Sergei Yesenin’s son would have had a good life in the camp - even the criminals knew the value of the great Russian poet, and Yuri understood this. That’s why he repeated during the investigation the nonsense that was suggested to him, and signed that he not only conceived the crime, but also prepared it. Thus, he made the work of the executioners easier. But this had no effect on his own fate - he would have been shot anyway, only he would have been tortured first.
G. Yesenin’s cellmate I. Berger in his book “The Collapse of a Generation” recalls that Yuri said in prison: “they” hounded his father to death.” And here is how E. Khlystalov retells these memories: “Yuri Yesenin was convinced that his father had no reason to commit suicide, that he died as a result of some kind of attack, and we should talk about his murder.”
On August 13, 1937, Yuri Yesenin was shot. Anna Romanovna knew nothing about the fate of her son. Relatives of those sentenced to death were usually told: ten years without the right to correspondence. She did not live ten years. She died after the war in 1946, she was 55. In 1956, at the request of Yesenin’s youngest son Alexander Yesenin-Volpin, Georgy Yesenin was rehabilitated “for lack of evidence of a crime.” His case was found to be completely fabricated. The falsifiers were allegedly even declared “enemies of the people” and shot, but in this case, it is appropriate to call a spade a spade - the “performers” were shot, not the organizers of mass falsifications.
An interesting fact: in the house where Yura Yesenin was born today there is a museum. It was organized by actor Sergei Nikonenko. As it turned out, he was born in the same house.
Once I was leafing through the house books and found out that since 1921, Sergei Alexandrovich’s first wife Anna Romanovna Izryadnova lived here with their son Yuri and the poet’s mother, Tatyana Fedorovna.
I took the information as a sign. I decided that this apartment should be a museum. At that time, its last owner died and the apartment turned into a shelter for homeless people. They knocked out the windows, broke the batteries - they probably sold them for scrap. They even lit a fire. I don’t know how the house didn’t burn down, because it has wooden floors. In 1994, my epic began, visiting officials and collecting documents to create a museum. This went on for a year and a half. At the prefecture they warned me: “Sergei Petrovich, waste your health, your money, and nothing will come of it.” “You tell me where to go next, and then I’ll decide for myself,” I answered them. I went to the authorities. I was kicked from one institution to another. Still, I decided that I would not give up. Among the officials I met such names as Benkendorf and Pushkin.
Photo: Sergey Ivanov I told them: “Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin loved Pushkin very much. Maybe now Pushkin will help our common cause a little?” He even wrote this in his statements. It worked in the end. I still live in this house, only on the floor below.
Tatiana
If Yesenin met his first wife in a printing house, where they both worked for pennies, then Yesenin met his second wife in the editorial office of the Socialist Revolutionary newspaper Delo Naroda, where he was published and his earnings were more or less decent. 23-year-old Zinaida Nikolaevna Reich worked there as a secretary-typist.
Anna Izryadnova:“In March 1915, Seryozha went to Petrograd to seek his fortune. In May of the same year I came to Moscow, a different person. I spent a little time in Moscow, went to the village, wrote good letters. In the fall I stopped by: “I’m going to Petrograd.” He called me with him... He immediately said: “I’ll be back soon, I won’t live there for long.”
Zinaida Reich and daughter Tatyana But Yesenin did not return to Anna. He was received enthusiastically in the capital. Soon the first book of poems was published. There was a severe world war going on. The poet was drafted into the army. He served on an ambulance train, delivering wounded from the front. Then the February Revolution occurred. The poet deserted from Kerensky's army. In the summer of 1917, with his friend, the poet Alexei Ganin, he decided to leave for the provinces. An acquaintance, Zinaida Reich, the future mother of Tatyana and Konstantin Yesenin, got in touch with them. In Vologda, unexpectedly for everyone, including himself, he married her in a church.
In her memoirs, Tatyana wrote: “I was born in Orel, but soon my mother went with me to Moscow, and until I was a year old I lived with both parents. Then there was a break between them, and Zinaida Nikolaevna again went with me to her family... After some time, Zinaida Nikolaevna, leaving me in Orel, returned to her father again, but soon they separated again.”
Soon Tatyana’s mother met the famous theater director V. E. Meyerhold. This acquaintance changed the future life of Z. N. Reich. She became his wife and with her children, Tatyana and Konstantin, settled in Meyerhold’s apartment.
Sergei Yesenin loved children in his own way, visiting them, meeting Zinaida Nikolaevna, V. E. Meyerhold. Writer Roman Gul in Berlin heard Sergei Yesenin share with friends:
“...I only love my children. I love. My daughter is good - blonde. She stamps her foot and shouts: I am Yesenina!.. This is such a daughter... I would like to go to Russia with my children... but here I am running around.”
Before leaving for Leningrad at the end of December 1925, S. Yesenin came to say goodbye to the children. A few days later, Moscow said goodbye to the poet. The children were brought on December 31, 1925 to the Press House on Nikitsky Boulevard, where a civil memorial service was held. Z. N. Reich often brought Tanya and Kostya to the coffin in which their father lay. “My father was unrecognizable to me,” T. S. Yesenina wrote in 1986, “I couldn’t believe it was him. I remember what happened next well. A stop at the Pushkin monument, reading poetry at the open grave. When they began to lower the coffin into the grave, the mother screamed so much that Kostya and I grabbed her from both sides and also screamed. Then I have a memory loss..."
Yesenin's wife, actress - Zinaida Nikolaevna Reich (1894 - 1939) and children from Yesenin - Tatyana and Konstantin. Yesenin's children fell in love with their stepfather V. E. Meyerhold, who acted as a “second dad”, in whose house they were surrounded by care and attention. Tatyana went to the ballet school at the Bolshoi Theater for several years. She graduated from high school in 1936. The biggest event after graduation was a trip with V. E. Meyerhold and Z. N. Reich to France. In September 1937, she entered the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow University. A month later, she married Kutuzov V.I., a student at the Mechanical Engineering Institute named after. Bauman. Soon, the husband's father, I. I. Kutuzov, a prominent party and public figure, one of the leaders of the “workers' opposition,” was repressed and declared an “enemy of the people.” In June 1939, V. E. Meyerhold was arrested on unfounded charges, and on July 14, Z. N. Reich was brutally murdered in her apartment by unknown people.
In fact, the arrest of Konstantin and Tatiana’s stepfather has a backstory. In 1934, Stalin watched the play “The Lady with Camellias”, in which Zinaida Reich played the main role, and did not like the performance. Criticism attacked Meyerhold with accusations of aestheticism. Zinaida Reich wrote a letter to Stalin saying that he did not understand art.
On January 8, 1938, the theater was closed. Order of the Committee for Arts under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR “On the liquidation of the Theater named after. Sun. Meyerhold" was published in the newspaper "Pravda" on January 8, 1938. The script for the future life of the outstanding director had already been written - in 1939 he was arrested. After three weeks of interrogations, accompanied by torture, Meyerhold signed the testimony required by the investigation: he was accused under Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (counter-revolutionary actions). In January 1940, Meyerhold wrote to V. M. Molotov:
...They beat me here - a sick sixty-six-year-old man, they put me on the floor face down, they beat me on my heels and back with a rubber band, when I was sitting on a chair, they beat me on my legs with the same rubber […] the pain was such that it seemed to be on sore sensitive places poured boiling water on my feet...
Tatiana Yesenina After the death of Reich and Meyerhold before the Great Patriotic War, Tatyana Sergeevna was left with her younger brother Konstantin and little son Vladimir in her arms. Having been evicted from her parents' apartment in Bryusov Lane, Yesenina saved Meyerhold's archive by hiding it at the dacha in Balashikha, and at the beginning of the war she handed it over to S. M. Eisenstein for safekeeping.
During the Great Patriotic War, Tatyana Yesenina was evacuated with her husband and son to Uzbekistan, where, at the request of Alexei Tolstoy, she and her family received a small room in a barracks house. She lived in Tashkent for half a century, working as a correspondent for the newspaper Pravda Vostoka and as a scientific editor in publishing houses in Uzbekistan.
She initiated the process of rehabilitation of Vsevolod Meyerhold. Letters from Tatyana Yesenina to Meyerhold researcher K.L. Rudnitsky are an important source for studying the work of the repressed director.
She wrote books and stories “Zhenya - the miracle of the 20th century”, “Lamp of Moonlight”, memoirs about S. Yesenin, Z. Reich and V. Meyerhold.
She died on May 5, 1992 in Tashkent. She was buried after the funeral service in the ancient city Botkin cemetery.
Konstantin
Konstantin was born on February 3, 1920. In Kostya’s “Birth Statement,” compiled, apparently, from the words of his mother, it is written that he was born on March 20, 1920, and his father in the same document is named by his occupation as a Red Army soldier. In the court "Case on Inheritance Rights" the time of birth is also recorded incorrectly - February 20, 1920.
Konstantin's godfather was the writer Andrei Bely. Sergei Yesenin was absent at the birth of his son. Zinaida Nikolaevna informed him about the birth of her son over the phone and asked: “What to name?” “Yesenin thought for a long time, choosing a non-literary name, and said: “Konstantin.” After baptism I realized: “Damn it, Balmont’s name is Konstantin.” I didn’t go to see my son.”
The birth of Konstantin coincided with a time of sharp cooling in relations between S. A. Yesenin and Z. N. Reich. Sergei Yesenin's suspicion was fueled by gossip among his close friends. “A Novel Without Lies” by Anatoly Mariengof describes the scene of a chance meeting between Sergei Yesenin and Zinaida Reich on the platform of the Rostov station in 1920, when the poet, upon examining his son, said: “Ugh... Black... Yesenins are not black...”.
Kostya and Tatyana Yesenin Kostya's childhood memory retained scant memories of his father. This is what he wrote in the 70s: “The very first thing that memory has preserved is the arrival of my father in the spring of 192... but I don’t know which one exactly. It’s a sunny day, my sister Tanya and I are running selflessly around the green yard of our house. (...) Suddenly, an elegant man and woman dressed “in a foreign style” appeared in the yard. The man is fair-haired, wearing a gray suit. It was Yesenin. With whom? Don't know. My sister and I were taken upstairs to the apartment. Of course: First date with my father after a long break! But for us it was, however, an unfamiliar “uncle”. Konstantin remembered that his father talked more with Tanya, that he did not bring gifts, but he was angry when he found out that the children did not read his poems.
Sergei Yesenin loved children in his own way and carried their photographs with him. V.F. Nasedkin recalled that at the meeting the poet did not forget to introduce: “But here are my children ... - he shows me a photographic card. The photo shows a girl and a boy. He looks at them himself and seems surprised by something. He is twenty-nine years old, he himself still looks like a young man.”
There were occasional meetings between Konstantin and his father. The stormy scene of explanation between father and mother, which the son witnessed, remains in my memory. Sergei Yesenin did not show paternal feelings for his son, since he loved his daughter Tatyana more. “As a child, I was very similar to my mother,” K. Yesenin explained this inattention, “in facial features, hair color. Tatyana is a blonde, and Yesenin saw more of himself in her than in me.”
Kostya did not feel his own father in Sergei Yesenin, since his stepfather V. E. Meyerhold was involved in his upbringing. Natalya Yesenina (the Poet’s niece, daughter of Catherine’s sister) cites the following episode: “There was a case (according to my mother) when Sergei Alexandrovich came to visit his children, Kostya ran up to the door and, seeing his father, shouted: “Tanya, come to you.” Yesenin has come! A child is a child. He called V. E. Meyerhold “dad”…”
Konstantin, when he was 20 years old, tried to write down detailed memories of S. Yesenin and asked his mother. His father’s last wife, Sofya Andreevna Tolstaya, told him about his father, who treated Kostya warmly, and during meetings asked him to read the poems that he occasionally wrote.
Misfortunes did not bypass Yesenin’s children. After the murder of his mother and the shooting of his stepfather, Kostya, as a student, was moved from his large parents’ apartment to a room on Bolshaya Pionerskaya Street. Konstantin studied at the Moscow Civil Engineering Institute. Very soon there were not enough funds for normal living. Occasionally, his relatives helped him in any way they could, who themselves lived meagerly. Anna Romanovna Izryadnova, the mother of Yura, the poet’s first son, took a great part in his fate. “The woman was of amazing purity,” K. Yesenin recalled with gratitude. - Amazing modesty. After I was left alone, Anna Romanovna took a great part in my fate. In pre-war 1940 and 1941, she helped me in every possible way - she fed me during difficult student times. And later, when I was at the front, she repeatedly sent parcels with cigarettes, tobacco, and warm clothes.”
In November 1941, when the German army reached the borders with Moscow, a 4th year student at the Moscow Civil Engineering Institute, Konstantin Yesenin, volunteered to go to the front. Before leaving for the army, Konstantin took a suitcase filled with papers and rare publications of his father for the safekeeping of Yesenin’s last wife, Sofya Andreevna Tolstoy, who saved and returned everything to him after the war. But many of his father’s things, which Konstantin inherited, remained ownerless at his Moscow dacha in Balashikha. “A lot of letters, notes, and business papers from my father were lost during the war,” recalled Konstantin Sergeevich. - They were kept at my dacha. I was at the front, my sister was evacuated to Tashkent, and settled there. All our relatives on our mother’s side died during the war. The dacha remained empty. Twice it was occupied without permission. The entire archive was dumped in a barn. There he lay for several years and winters, in frost and heat.”
Konstantin at the dacha, 1980 Konstantin witnessed great interest in his father's poetry. He recalled how, after the blockade of Leningrad, in a second-hand bookstore, where he entered by chance, one customer asked, “Tell me, do you have a volume of Yesenin’s poems?” A woman seller with a tired face that bore traces of hunger and difficult experiences was surprised: “What are you talking about! Of course not! Nowadays Yesenin’s books are rare.” Konstantin was proud that his father’s poetry was in demand.
At the front, Kostya was wounded three times. In the summer of 1944, during one of the battles, the commander of the first company of the assault battalion and his deputy for political affairs were killed. Junior Lieutenant Konstantin Yesenin took command of the company and led the soldiers into the attack. The explosive bullet pierced his lungs. Soon, Konstantin Yesenin’s relatives received notice of his death. On December 9, 1944, the newspaper “Red Baltic Fleet” published an essay by Yu. Sarkisov and M. Kurganov “At the Blue Sea,” which talked about the death of Komsomol organizer Konstantin Yesenin. The news of the death of K. S. Yesenin turned out to be erroneous. He, seriously wounded, was taken to the hospital in an unconscious state by a nurse from another unit. He survived. But the headquarters did not know about this. The Third Order of the Red Star found him many years after the end of the war.
After demobilization, K. S. Yesenin continued his studies at the Moscow Institute of Civil Engineering. It was difficult to live on the scholarship, so I was forced to sell two notebooks of my father’s thoroughly copied poems to the Main Archive Directorate of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. After graduating from university, he began working on post-war construction sites as a foreman and construction site manager. He erected the largest construction complex in Luzhniki, built residential buildings, schools and cinemas in the capital. The surname Yesenin did little to help Konstantin’s production career. “It must be said that bearing the surname Yesenin is quite troublesome,” wrote K. S. Yesenin in 1967. “Sometimes some workers from among my construction fraternity were frightened by the close proximity to the surname Yesenin, and some even suggested that I change my surname. But this is all, of course, due to poverty of thought.” Subsequently, K. Yesenin went to work as a reviewer in the USSR Cabinet of Ministers on construction issues, and as the chief specialist of the State Construction Committee of the RSFSR.
In pre-war times, Konstantin Sergeevich was fond of football. In 1936 he played in the finals of the Moscow youth championship and was noted for his excellent sporting success. After the war, he played football in competitions of national teams of production teams, and closely followed football battles in the country. I began to keep statistics about teams, players, and various sporting events. K. Yesenin’s statistics opened up many new facets in football and became valuable material for sports specialists and numerous fans. Very soon, Konstantin Sergeevich became a prominent football columnist in sports journalism, which became his second “profession” in the last years of his life. Konstantin Sergeevich is accepted into the Union of Journalists.
Konstantin Yesenin on the left For 40 years, Konstantin Sergeevich has collected a huge card index about football and football players. It was a kind of football encyclopedia. Based on these materials, K. Yesenin wrote and published the book “Football: Records, Paradoxes, Tragedies, Sensations” (1968), which quickly became a bibliographic rarity. There is a phrase in the book: “Human passions always surprise dispassionate people, incapable of hobbies, who have become rigid in their perception of the world only through a glass of practicality.” This was the position of Konstantin Yesenin. Subsequently, he published the book “Moscow Football and Spartak” (1974), which was highly appreciated by numerous football fans. Until the end of his life he worked on the book “The Chronicle of Soviet Football.” In recent years, K. S. Yesenin was deputy chairman of the All-Union Football Federation.
One day at the airport Tatyana Sergeevna Yesenina stood in line for tickets with two heavy suitcases. A young officer helped her carry her suitcases. When Tatyana Sergeevna took out her passport to present to the cashier, the officer read the name and asked in surprise, worrying:
“Are you Yesenina? Tell me, aren’t you a relative of football extras Konstantin Yesenin?” When Tatyana Sergeevna met her brother, she told him about this episode, adding: “You have become more famous than your father.” And then they laughed for a long time.
Konstantin Sergeevich did a lot to restore the name of his father. He often spoke with stories about his father, mother, and other contemporaries, and visited places associated with the name of S. Yesenin. In 1967, in the collection “Yesenin and Russian Poetry” he published his memoirs “About Father”, which in 1986, after minor editing, were reprinted in the two-volume book “S. A. Yesenin in the memoirs of his contemporaries.”
Died on April 26, 1986 in Moscow. He was buried in the 17th section of the Vagankovsky cemetery in Moscow in the same grave with his mother, not far from his father’s grave.
Alexander
Of Sergei Yesenin’s four children, his last son Alexander lived the longest.
Alexander with his mother The son of the poet Sergei Yesenin died on March 16, 2016 in the USA at the age of 92. Alexander Sergeevich Yesenin-Volpin - mathematician, philosopher and poet, participant in the dissident and human rights movement in the USSR. In December 1965, he became one of the organizers of the Glasnost Rally. The social activist spent about six years in prisons, exile and psychiatric clinics, where he was sent for anti-Soviet activities.
Yesenin-Volpin wrote several fundamental works on logic and theory of law in the USSR. It was Yesenin-Volpin who introduced the word “glasnost” as a public demand for the authorities to comply with the law and make legal procedures transparent.
His father, the poet Sergei Yesenin, passed away when Yesenin-Volpin was one and a half years old. His mother was the poetess and translator Nadezhda Volpin. The parents were literary friends, but were not married. Soon Nadezhda became pregnant.
Yesenin was shocked to learn that Nadezhda wanted to keep the child. “What are you doing to me! I already have three children!” - he exclaimed. Nadezhda, offended by his reaction, left for Leningrad without leaving him an address: “Okay. This will be my child. Only mine…".
Yesenin tried to find Nadezhda, but the neighbors in the communal apartment, at her request, did not tell him the address. There was even a ditty going around Moscow: “Nadya left Sergei without a child in her arms.” They said that when she was pregnant, she wore a dress with a picture of the sun on it and said that she would give birth to Christ. On May 12, 1924, a son was born, exactly like his father.
Nadezhda Volpin writes that Yesenin asked an acquaintance who visited her whether he was black or white. To which he replied: “And I’m not just white to him, but simply - this is the kind of boy you were, this is what you are. No cards needed."
Sergei Yesenin saw his son twice. Once on the street: his mother then handed him over to the nanny, saying, “Take him away so he won’t see.” The poet was offended. And the second time he came to Nadezhda’s house - specifically to see his son...
A. S. Yesenin-Volpin after the meeting of the IX Yesenin Readings. Leningrad, March 24, 1989 In 1933, at the age of 9, together with his mother-translator Nadezhda Volpin, he moved from Leningrad to Moscow, where in 1946 he graduated with honors from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University; in 1949, after graduating from graduate school at the Research Institute of Mathematics at Moscow State University and defending his Ph.D. thesis on mathematical logic, he went to work in Chernivtsi.
In 1949, for “anti-Soviet poetry” he was placed for compulsory treatment in the Leningrad Special Psychiatric Hospital, and in September 1950, as a “socially dangerous element”, he was deported to the Karaganda region for a period of five years. Amnestied after Stalin's death in 1953, he soon became known as a mathematician specializing in the field of intuitionism. In 1959, he was again placed in a special psychiatric hospital, where he spent about two years.
Yesenin-Volpin’s “disease,” for which he was “treated” in psychiatric hospitals, is called “pathological truthfulness.”
Alexander Volpin was an ardent anti-Soviet. They asked him: “Sasha, what do you have against the Soviet regime?” - "I? I have nothing against the Soviet gang that illegally seized power in 1717.”
He said “a lot of unnecessary things.” He was periodically put in a psychiatric hospital. He had a saying: “Well, I’ve already been treated for this!” Alexander’s relatives asked not to visit them; after his arrival, the apartment was put under control, phones were tapped... “We have children,” they told him.
In 1961, Yesenin-Volpin’s book “Spring Leaf” was published in New York, which, in addition to poetry, included his “Free Philosophical Treatise.” For this, Khrushchev, at a meeting with the intelligentsia on the Lenin Hills, called him a “rotten poisonous mushroom.” The treatise contained a phrase that infuriated the authorities: “There is no freedom of speech in Russia, but who can say that there is no freedom of thought there.”
At the end of 1962, Khrushchev uttered one of his catchphrases: “They say he is mentally ill, but we will treat him.” And for the next four months, Yesenin-Volpin again found himself in a hospital bed. Less than two years later, Khrushchev was removed. The thaw is over - Brezhnev’s tightening of the screws has begun...
They took him to Lubyanka and let him go: there was nothing to grab onto. He reminded the authorities that dissent is not at odds with the law, and therefore should not be punished. Volpin’s wife Victoria recalled: once, during a three-hour conversation with investigators, Alexander Sergeevich exhausted them so much that they gave up, called her and said: “Take it!”
Yesenin-Volpin formulated and began to defend the idea that Soviet laws in themselves are quite acceptable, and the problem lies in the refusal of the state to follow these laws. He convinced his associates that if the state respected its own laws, citizens would not be in a position of powerlessness and that the situation with respect to human rights would change if citizens actively sought the state to comply with the laws.
In May 1972, at the urgent suggestion of the Soviet authorities, he emigrated to the United States. He was simply left with no choice. The phrase “If you don’t go to the Middle East, we’ll send you to the Far East,” which later circulated as a joke, initially did not contain any irony. Coming from the lips of a KGB officer, it sounded even ominous. Alexander Sergeevich decided not to tempt fate anymore. By that time, he had already spent enough time in prison, and in exile, and in psychiatric hospitals.
Ekaterina Aleksandrovna Yesenina (1905 - 1977) is the eldest of the two sisters of the poet Sergei Yesenin. Readers mainly knew about her as her brother’s personal secretary, the keeper of part of his archive. And very little was written about her as the wife of Vasily Nasedkin, a close friend of Yesenin, a poet who was repressed in 1937 and executed by the NKVD in the fabricated “case of writers.”
Sister! Sister!
There are so few friends in life!
Like everyone else,
I have a stamp on me...
If your heart is tender
Wearily,
Make him forget and shut up.
From S. Yesenin’s poem “Letter to my sister,” dedicated to E. Yesenina.1925.
Sister Ekaterina was 10 years younger than Sergei Yesenin. In 1911, when Sergei was already 15, his younger sister Alexandra was born. A year later, Sergei moved from his native village of Konstantinov, Ryazan province, to his father in Moscow and began to see his sisters rarely. However, he was interested in their lives and asked about them in letters to his mother. When Catherine in 1917-18 studied in Moscow, visited her often. Finally, in 1922, Catherine finally moved to Moscow and since then her fate has been inextricably linked with the fate of her brother.
Sergei Yesenin with his sisters Katya and Shura. 1912
Ekaterina became Sergei’s assistant in his literary and publishing affairs. Their relationship was not easy: Sergei monitored the “moral character” of his sister and her hobbies, and she, a smart, lively and beautiful girl, could be frivolous, and even believed that her brother should support her. However, Catherine, who was not even twenty, really took care of her brother: she pulled him out of drunken companies, talked to editors, and “extorted” fees. In 1925, she married Sergei’s close friend, the poet Vasily Nasedkin. After the death of her brother, she began preserving his legacy.
Ekaterina Yesenina. OK. 1922
In 1930, Nasedkin was summoned to the OGPU in the Lubyanka. They questioned why he left the Bolshevik Party in 1921. Vasily Nasedkin did not hide the fact that he “disagrees with the politics in the countryside and in literature.” “Despite the party’s decision to put an end to excesses in the collectivization of agriculture, these excesses exist. It needs to be done more carefully. I approve of the liquidation of the kulaks as a class, but without the mistakes of dispossessing the middle peasants. I do not agree with the party’s policy in the field of literature: it pushes a number of fellow travelers towards hackwork and opportunism. This is caused by the party’s excessive ideological pressure on the writer - to write only on topical topics. In my speeches, including in Herzen’s house, when speaking about ideology, I pronounced “idiotology”* (*Archival criminal case of V.F. Nasedkin R-1. No. 9650. URAF FSB of Russia). No punitive sanctions were imposed against him then. But the regime was getting tougher, and having such a fact in your biography was risky. This automatically placed Nasedkin in the ranks of a politically suspicious element...
Ekaterina and Sergei Yesenin. 1925
Ekaterina Yesenina's husband was arrested on October 26, 1937. The NKVD falsified the so-called “case of the writers” - “a terrorist group of writers associated with the counter-revolutionary organization of the right.” They were charged, among other things, with preparing an assassination attempt on Stalin.
Ekaterina Yesenina with her husband Vasily Nasedkin and children Natalia and Andrey. 1937
A long list of “underground workers”, famous and not so well-known, headed by the writer Valerian Pravdukhin, fell under the rink of repression: Alexey Novikov-Priboi (Novikov), Ivan Pribludny (Yakov Ovcharenko), Sergei Klychkov, Yuri Olesha, Yesenin’s very young son Yuri, and many other. Their whole fault was that, gathering at different times and in different companies in coffee shops and apartments, poets and writers talked, including on seditious topics. They gossiped about what was happening in the country, of course, they allowed themselves to disagree with something and criticize the order.
On March 15, 1938, the military collegium of the Supreme Court (VKVS) sentenced Ekaterina Yesenina’s husband to death. On the same day he was shot. The Yesenin family learned about this only many years later - then, in 1938, the NKVD presented them with false information about the sentence “to 10 years without the right of correspondence.”
***
Before his arrest, he worked as a literary editor in the magazine “Kolkhoznik”, Vasily Nasedkin provided for his family, as Ekaterina kept house and raised children - Andrei and Natalia. Now, after her husband’s arrest, Ekaterina had to get a job as a receptionist at a clinic, then as a Mosconvert envelope counter in order to somehow feed her children.
Soon the security officers came to Ekaterina Yesenina with an arrest warrant and a search warrant for her apartment on Arbat, signed by Beria himself. The operative who was in charge of Yesenina-Nasedkina’s case kept asking more and more about the anti-Soviet activities of her husband (who had already been executed).
From the interrogation report:
<...>“Answer: Vasily Fedorovich Nasedkin was my husband from December 1925 to October 27, 1937. I know nothing about his anti-Soviet activities.
Question: You are not telling the truth. You have hidden and continue to hide the facts known to you. We encourage you to give candid testimony.
Answer: I declare once again that I know nothing...”
The investigation was completed in less than a month. There was no trial at all. From the Resolution of the Special Meeting (OSO) under the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR dated November 1, 1938: “E. A. Yesenin, as a socially dangerous element, shall be deprived of the right to reside in 15 points for a period of 5 years...” (Archival criminal case E. A. Yesenina No. 18098. URAF FSB of Russia).
Ekaterina Alexandrovna spent two months in Butyrka prison. A group of cellmates - the wives of ambassadors and military leaders, the wife of Yezhov, under whom her husband was executed. The children were first sent to the Danilovsky reception center, and then sent to different orphanages in Penza, in accordance with the then-current special order to separate brothers and sisters - children of “enemies of the people.”
***
Due to a serious illness - severe asthma attacks, Ekaterina Yesenina was allowed to settle in the Ryazan region and take her children from orphanages. 11-year-old Andrei and 5-year-old Natalia were brought to Konstantinovo.
Ekaterina Aleksandrovna Yesenina herself wrote about this time: “In 1939, I was exiled from Moscow to Ryazan along with other wives of “enemies of the people.” There were a lot of us. I remember when our train arrived in Ryazan, we walked from the station through the city streets in a continuous stream to the large NKVD building. We were registered there, then everyone [those expelled] somehow settled in Ryazan.”
Ekaterina Yesenina’s daughter, Natalia Vasilievna, recalled: “Mom was ordered to report to the NKVD in Ryazan on the 15th of every month. There she was told to urgently get a job. She joined the Konstantinovsky collective farm “Krasnaya Niva” (she worked at the playground at the collective farm - approx.).
Then she found a job in the city, took her son Andrei and left for Ryazan, where they lived on the outskirts of the city [on the 2nd line of the Lennoselka Ryazan] in the Zerechensky family, and on Sundays they came to us [in the village. Konstantinovo]. Mom worked as an accountant at the Ryazselmash [plant] until the war began..."
***
“Mom became a donor - she donated blood for wounded soldiers. During this three years I received a work card instead of an employee and a good lunch on the day of donating blood, until I discovered that I was losing my eyesight. Then donation was banned for her, but for the four of us (my grandmother, Tatyana Fedorovna, came to visit them from Konstantinovo - approx.) it was a source of livelihood. They also gave me vodka for my work card, which my mother exchanged for milk and other products.”
One day, Yesenina’s friend, writer Lydia Seifullina, wife of the repressed Valerian Pravdukhin, sent her some money to Ryazan, which was very helpful. “Mom didn’t have a penny left, she was in despair. At this time there was a knock on the door - the postman brought a transfer, and we were saved,” recalls Ekaterina Yesenina’s daughter.
***
The Yesenins’ then neighbor, Ryazan resident Vasily Pervushkin, who studied at Ryazan School No. 17 together with Ekaterina Alexandrovna’s son Andrey, recalled: “... Ekaterina Alexandrovna was cheerful in public, always cheerful, loved to joke. Who would have thought what she had to endure? She dressed simply - in a sweatshirt, felt boots, and smoked goats' legs.<...>
Andrei, by the way, was very similar to his uncle. And several times, when he and I were alone, he recited Yesenin’s poems to me by heart. He sincerely admired his uncle and once told me: “Now they have forgotten about him, but you will see, the time will come and the whole world will read him!”
Ekaterina Alexandrovna's term of exile ended in 1943. In 1944 she was getting ready to leave<...>: “I’ll go restore my brother’s name and ours, we suffered innocently.”
***
In 1945, Ekaterina Aleksandrovna Yesenina and her children, at the request of her and Yesenin’s friend, party worker Pyotr Chagin, were allowed by Beria to return, but not to Moscow, to the Moscow region, to Skhodnya.
Yesenina acquired part of the hut with difficulty. Chagin helped her find a job. But soon her health completely weakened: prison and exile, poverty, humiliation, and the shocks she experienced took their toll. At forty-two, Ekaterina Alexandrovna became a disabled person of the 2nd group.
She waited fifteen years for her repressed husband Vasily Nasedkin. She refused the offer of the writer Sergei Gorodetsky, a close friend of Yesenin, to marry him and thereby improve her situation. Only in the mid-1950s did Ekaterina Alexandrovna learn about the execution of her husband.
In August 1956, at the request of Ekaterina Yesenina and the petition of the Deputy Secretary of the Board of the Union of Writers of the USSR K. Voronkov, writer Yu.N. Libedinsky and Leo Tolstoy’s granddaughter, Yesenin’s last wife Sofia Tolstoy, managed to achieve the complete posthumous rehabilitation of Vasily Nasedkin. Ekaterina Aleksandrovna Yesenina herself was rehabilitated in September 1956.
Ekaterina, Konstantin and Alexandra Yesenin
In all subsequent years, Ekaterina Alexandrovna restored her husband’s creative heritage, including his previously banned work “One Year with Yesenin,” and she herself wrote memoirs about her brother Sergei Yesenin. She was one of the initiators of the creation of the Literary and Memorial Museum of S. A. Yesenin in the village of Konstantinovo, Rybnovsky district, Ryazan region. In the 1960-1970s, Ekaterina Aleksandrovna Yesenina took part in the preparation of collected works and many collections of her brother’s poems. She died of a myocardial infarction in 1977 in Moscow.
From: Esenin.ru
“The sex idol of Russia for all time, he languished from the melancholy of indifference... his women loved him, but he didn’t love them...” Who do you think this is written about? No, this is not about an actor or a stripper. These words, published a year ago, are about Sergei Yesenin. They belong to the editor of one of the literary almanacs - and there is nothing to add here... The poet, both during his life and after his death, was lucky to have this kind of respondents. In their home-grown heads, different reviews were born about him, about his lyre-soul, which in some incomprehensible way blossomed in constant drunkenness, riotous lifestyle and in psychiatric hospitals. How insignificant the crowd is in its understanding of the Genius. What good ground she prepared for the crime of the century to become suicide.
Konstantinovo - the origins of the polyphonic, bright, original Yesenin world. A bright, green, free village on Ryazan land. Church on a hill, chapel, spring. A manor's house with a huge, beautiful garden and rows of neat peasant houses, among them two houses of the poet's grandfathers - Nikita Osipovich Yesenin (on his father's side) and Fyodor Andreevich Titov (on his mother's side), respected and sober people. The latter, as Katya, Yesenin’s sister, recalled, was known by the whole district: “smart in conversation, cheerful in a feast and angry in anger, our grandfather knew how to please people... At the beginning of spring, grandfather left for St. Petersburg and sailed on barges until late autumn... In gratitude to God For a successful voyage, grandfather erected a chapel in front of his house. The icon of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker always had a lamp burning in the chapel during the holidays. After settling accounts with God, grandfather was supposed to have fun. Barrels of mash and wine were placed near the house.“Drink! Eat! Rejoice, Orthodox Christians! There is no point in saving money, if we die, everything will remain...” In the house of this grandfather, Fyodor Andreevich, Yesenin’s parents, Tatyana Fedorovna and Alexander Nikitich, had a wedding. Sergei lived in the same house as a child when his father and mother had a big disagreement, and before leaving for the city, she brought her two-year-old, restless and very weak son to the parental home. Here they came out and fell in love with him, especially his grandmother Natalya Evtikhievna, who was a “jack of all trades”: she wove canvases, baked pies with lingonberries, kept the house clean and beautiful. And how many fairy tales she knew - she couldn’t listen to them again. “Grandmother loved me with all her might, and her tenderness knew no bounds. On Saturdays they washed me, cut my nails and crimped my head with hot oil, because not a single comb could take curly hair...” - Yesenin recalled about his wonderful five years of life lived in love and affection - from three to eight, so important in life everyone. How much warmth and beauty came with that time to Sergei: “...At night, in calm weather, the moon stands upright in the water. When the horses drank, it seemed to me that they were about to drink the moon..." And how many images of Constantine's nature the poet will bring in his pure verses... ("Hey you, slaves, slaves! // You stuck to the ground with your belly. // Today the moon is with water // The horses drank." "Heavenly Drummer", 1918).
In the zemstvo four-year school, the village priest Ivan Yakovlevich Popov shared good guardianship over Sergei with his grandfather. A widower who raised a daughter and several other adopted children, he discouraged him, already grown up and playful, from the street and was the first to notice the unusualness of the student. In the house of Ivan’s father in 1907-1908, the “quiet youth, feeling meekly” read his first poems to the successful metropolitan student Nikolai Sardanovsky, a relative of the village priest. The poems, Nikolai recalled, were about rural nature...
Yesenin graduated from his four-year school in 1909 with honors and, at the request of his father Ivan, was sent to a church-teacher school in Spas-Klepiki, where he began almost adult life, far from home, unfriendly, with a common dormitory for forty beds, with fights among classmates. And here, when Sergei did not know where to lay his head, a kindred spirit appears next to him again - Grisha Panfilov, who also studied at this school, but lived at home, with his parents, in Spas-Klepiki. They got along quickly and communicated as if they had known each other for a long time: about poetry, about literature, about Leo Tolstoy, about the fact that they should go to Yasnaya Polyana and honor his memory, about all their experiences and first hobbies. Sergei often visited Grisha at home and became attached to him with all his soul. When a friend died of consumption in 1914, the land left from under Sergei. Grisha, Grisha... How he supported his precious classmate who had left for Moscow. I sent so many kind letters so that he wouldn’t feel lonely. It was to him, Grisha Panfilov, that Sergei wrote: “Moscow is a soulless city, and everyone who strives for the sun and light mostly runs away from it...”But gradually seventeen-year-old Yesenin began to get used to the capital. A forwarder in the bookselling partnership "Culture", a Surikovite (participant of the Surikov literary and musical circle, in which talents were "discovered"), a subreader, then a proofreader, in Sytin's printing house, a student of the historical and philosophical course at Shanyavsky University and, finally, a young father. In December 1914, his son Yura was born.
Yesenin’s first common-law wife, Anna Izryadnova, worked with the poet in Sytin’s printing house and lived with him for quite a while. But this did not stop her from maintaining a relationship with Yesenin. The doors of her house were always open for him. Anna Romanovna left an interesting verbal portrait of a very young poet: “He had just (in 1913 - editor's note) arrived from the village, but in appearance he did not look like a village guy. He was wearing a brown suit, a high starched collar and a green tie. With golden curls, he was doll-like beautiful...” It must be said that almost all the companions of his life left memories of Sergei Alexandrovich. (Only the diaries of Zinaida Reich, his first official wife, disappeared.) And they were all extremely charming, smart, talented, who played their roles in his personal and creative destiny. So to say that women loved Yesenin, but he didn’t, is somehow unnatural and strange. Perhaps his love story does not have such a sizzling feeling as, for example, Alexander Blok, and he practically did not make dedications to his chosen ones, except perhaps Augusta Miklashevskaya. But the soulful reader does not need to look for feelings in his poems; there are no poems without feelings.
The fact that Yesenin did not love anyone is one of the many stereotypes created about him by his contemporaries. There are famous sayings that the poet had three loves: for Russia, poetry and fame. Yes, and this is understandable, because great feelings arise “when you love your soul to the bottom”...The great subjectivity of contemporaries in their assessments of Yesenin is evidenced by the Yesenin portraits they compiled. Zinaida Gippius saw him like this: “He is 18 years old. Strong, medium height. He sits over a glass of tea a little like a peasant, stooping; the face is ordinary, rather pleasant; low-browed, with a file-shaped nose, and Mongolian eyes slightly squinting...” The literary leader of the proletariat, M. Gorky, saw something else in Yesenin: “Yesenin gave me a dim impression of a modest and somewhat confused boy, who himself feels that there is no place for him in the huge St. Petersburg. Such clean boys are residents of quiet cities, Kaluga, Orel, Ryazan, Simbirsk, Tambov. There you see them as clerks in shopping arcades, apprentice carpenters, dancers and singers in tavern choirs..."
And here is G. Ivanov’s recollection: “... Yesenin comes out onto the stage in a pink silk blouse, with a comb dangling from a gold belt. Cheeks are flushed. In hands is a bouquet of paper cornflowers. He comes out with his arms akimbo, swaying somehow “like a fellow.” A cheeky smile, but embarrassed.” All these reviews refer to approximately the same period - the appearance of Sergei Alexandrovich in St. Petersburg in the spring of 1915, where he went to seek a meeting with Blok, which he had long dreamed of. He hoped that the great poet would somehow help him and tell him what to do next. After all, Yesenin is already published by all the thin Moscow magazines, only the thick ones are not yet welcome, and “Radunitsa” - the first collection of poems - is almost ready.
“During the day I have a guy from Ryazan with poetry. Peasant of the Ryazan province. 19 years. The poems are fresh, clean, verbose. Language. He came to me on March 9, 1915,” Blok noted in his diary, who, having politely met him, sent him to S. Gorodetsky and M. Murashev. The latter worked in the most popular newspaper at that time, Birzhevye Vedomosti.
 Sergey Yesenin. Petrograd, 1916 |
“He read a lot of things... He would finish reading until dawn and, without sleeping, go to study again. He had such a greed for learning, and he wanted to know everything...” - Tatyana Fedorovna, the poet’s mother, recalled about his first universities. “I read all my free time, spent my salary on books, magazines...” wrote Anna Izryadnova. “It was hard to imagine when this “scandalist” worked, but he worked hard at that time,” said N. Poletaev, referring to 1921.
Let's return to the first St. Petersburg period of the poet, which is so rich in events, and not only literary ones. In the spring of 1916, Yesenin was called up for military service - with the Highest permission he was appointed as an orderly on the Tsarskoe Selo military hospital train No. 143, lived in Tsarskoe Selo, not far from Ivanov-Razumnik, was presented to the court, where his poems were listened to, “with bated breath, fearing skip a word." The Empress really liked the poems, she even expressed her deign to dedicate the next collection to her. Of course, this immensely flattered the young poet. But when “free-thinking” colleagues in the shop learned that a dedication to the Empress would appear on the collection “Dove”, Yesenin was pinned against the wall for a “vile act.” He barely managed to remove “I reverently dedicate...” from the set, although several proofs did leak into the hands of bibliophiles.
Here, in Tsarskoye Selo, Sergei Alexandrovich met Rasputin, spent time in the hospital where his appendicitis was removed, and here he experienced another mobilization - already in Soviet times - to fight the whites. Out of fright, as A. Mariengof wrote, the poet ran to the circus commissar - N. Rukavishnikova, since the circus performers were exempted from the honor of defending the republic. She invited him to ride into the arena on horseback and read some poems that corresponded to the spirit of the times, accompanying the pantomime. But during one of the performances, the previously calm horse suddenly shook its head so much that Yesenin, out of surprise, “flew out of the saddle and, having described a dizzying somersault in the air, stretched out on the ground,” later saying that he would rather lay down his head in a fair fight.
Anatoly Mariengof is another milestone in Yesenin’s life. At first glance, they were friends inseparable. But how things turned out not so simply, and much later, “A Novel Without Lies,” written by Mariengof, became another portion in the brew of “memories of the poet.”
 Zinaida Reich with children Kostya and Tanya |
Then, when Galina Benislavskaya wrote these words in her diary, no one from the poet’s entourage could have imagined how the “not seeing the revolution” would echo in his fate, which would divide his life (like the lives of many, but in this case we are talking about Yesenin ) into “before” and “after”. And what happened “after” will gradually begin to bring him closer to the tragedy of 1925.
Immediately after the October revolution, Yesenin found himself not in the party, G. Ivanov recalled, but in close proximity to the “Soviet top”, because it was “psychologically impossible” to imagine him with Denikin, Kolchak or in exile. “From his origin to his mental make-up, everything disposed him to turn away from “Kerensky Russia” and not out of fear, but out of conscience, to support the “worker-peasant” one. Sergei Alexandrovich himself wrote in his 1922 autobiography that he was never a member of the RCP, because he felt much “to the left.” And, finally, the well-known assessment of L. Trotsky: “No, the poet was not alien to the revolution - he was not related to it. Yesenin is intimate, gentle, lyrical - the revolution is public, epic, catastrophic. That is why the poet’s short life ended in disaster.”
Direct proximity to the “Soviet elite” - what this really meant is not easy to understand from reviews. The essence of the poet's relationship with the new world and the new government can only be found in his own confessions and, of course, in poetry. But search carefully, without waving lines taken out of the context of “The Jordanian Dove”: “The sky is like a bell, // The month is a language, // My mother is the homeland, // I am a Bolshevik.” After all, there are other thoughts: “Evil October showers rings // from the brown hands of birches.” Is it possible to judge by one word from an entire phrase? And can all eyewitness testimony be taken on faith or, on the contrary, interpreted as convenient? For example, this episode: in the spring of 1918, at Alexei Tolstoy’s name day, Sergei Alexandrovich, who had returned from St. Petersburg, was courting a certain poetess and suddenly innocently suggested to her: “Do you want to watch how they shoot? I’ll arrange this for you through Blumkin in a minute.” Blumkin was sitting at the same table. What was it? According to V. Khodasevich, Yesenin “showed off” in this way. Most likely so. But there are other points of view.
Or another story - about external panache - with top hats. Whoever pinched Yesenin for them, reproaching him for taking aim at Pushkin. But the cylinder came to the poet himself.
“...It was raining in St. Petersburg. My parting shone like the top of a piano,” Mariengof recalled. - Yesenin’s golden head turned brown, and his curls hung in pitiful clerk’s commas. He was upset to the last degree. They ran from store to store, begging them to sell us a hat without a warrant. In the tenth store, the red-cheeked German at the cash register said:
Without a warrant, I can only release you the cylinders.
We, incredibly delighted, gratefully shook the German’s plump hand. And five minutes later on Nevsky, ghostly St. Petersburg residents rolled their eyes at us, the toffees cackled after us, and the amazed policeman demanded: “Documents!”
Surprisingly, by 1919, the time of the total “reorganization of the world” and the monstrous Red Terror, the poet already had four books: “Radunitsa” (1916), “Dove” (1916), “Transfiguration” (1918) and “Rural Book of Hours” (1918). In this case, it is necessary to take into account the conditions under which he worked. N. Poletaev recalls how Yesenin lived (in 1918) in Proletkult, together with the poet Klychkov. They huddled in the bathroom of the Morozov merchants. One slept on the bed, and the other in the closet. And Yesenin’s friend L. Povitsky talked about how the poet often went hungry and how one day he and Klychkov came to visit him, and while Povitsky was trying to put it on the table, the guests swallowed a large piece of butter in one fell swoop. The owner was surprised: how could they eat it without bread? - “Nothing - delicious!” - the guests answered.Meanwhile, according to V. Mayakovsky, there was one “new trait in the narcissistic Yesenin: he treated with some envy all the poets who were organically united with the revolution, with the class and saw a great optimistic path ahead of them” - there were many such interpretations . And if we add to this: Yesenin’s scandals skillfully provoked by the audience in the “Stable of Pegasus”, his direct participation in the development and publicity of the program of the Imagists, who, according to A. Lunacharsky, maliciously abused modern Russia, the brave correspondence of Sergei Alexandrovich with Lunacharsky, collective requests the imagists let them out of Russia, Yesenin and Mariengof’s visits to “Zoyka’s apartment” - into the so-called “salon” of Zoya Shatova, the detention and bringing of Yesenin to the Lubyanka - then the portrait of the “hooligan” Yesenin begins to acquire distinct, convex features. And try to explain to the public that it is impossible to fit a poet into a general mold. As for imagism, the poet himself said the following to Ivan Rozanov: “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” - that’s where, perhaps, the beginning of my imagism came from.” And is it possible to “place” Yesenin in any artistic movement, literary school? His poetry is outside of schools.
Much of what was happening at that time in the Pegasus Stable can be explained by a shocking state of mind and a desire to “ignite” the audience. Something - mischief. How else to treat, for example, the episode when Yesenin went to ask the member of the presidium of the Moscow Council on duty for a paper for the Imagists, which was under the strictest records. For the visit, he put on a long-skirted undershirt, combed his hair in a peasant style and, standing in front of the responsible person without a hat, bowing, specially asking, “for the sake of Christ,” to do “divine mercy” and give him papers “for peasant poems.” Blond Lel, of course, was not refused.
But there was a lot of other things in this “imagist” period, not just for fun. “...Do you hear? Do you hear a loud knock? // This is the rake of dawn through the forests. // With the oars of severed hands // You are rowing into the land of the future,” the poet read from the cafe stage. (Later, as we know, the “land of the future” will appear - the unfinished play “The Land of Scoundrels.”) Further, from the same poem “Mare Ships”: “Oh, who, who should we sing // In this mad glow of corpses?”
Such lines became the necessary information for those who came to the cafe under the guise of poetry lovers, but the main events of Yesenin’s “anti-Soviet” life were still ahead.
In the meantime - 1921. Meeting with Isadora Duncan. Their romance, starting from their acquaintance, is entirely a love story with all the appropriate comments. “At the end of the dance, he jumped up and on a huge mirror that spanned the entire wall, with the sharp stone of his ring, drew two clear words: “I love Duncan”... The world celebrity, spoiled by constant success, obviously encountered such an expression of delight for the first time in his life ", - recorded from the words of eyewitnesses Vs. Christmas. But here is another story - as if Duncan, who quickly noticed the blue-eyed guy, turned to the “decadent old man” S. Polyakov with a question: Who is this young man with such a vicious face? And they were immediately introduced.
The romance spun quickly. The public went through different versions of such a union: they wanted prosperity, they wanted more fame, a famous person in their biography, etc. Nadezhda Volpin, another common-law wife of the poet, who gave birth to his son Alexander, judged their relationship differently. She believed in Isadora's sincere passionate love and Yesenin's strong attraction. And of course, as befits a woman, she was not without emotions: “Yesenin, I think, imagined himself as Ivan the Fool, conquering the overseas queen.” And so be it. Isadora showed up on time. The poet was not in the best mood, he was tired of his former friends, of literary ups and downs, of the truth of life that came to him with every new day, he closed in on himself and openly admitted: “... I’m very tired, and my last Drunkenness made me completely nervous.” In the same 1921, Yesenin finished the dramatic poem “Pugachev”:
“...No, this is not August, when the oats fall off, // When the wind beats them across the fields with a rough club. // Dead, dead, look, there are dead people all around, // There they are laughing, spitting out rotten teeth”...
The overseas firebird picked up the poet and carried him over the seas and oceans. Berlin, Paris, New York and again - Europe. And on “the other shore” another truth came to him: “...why the hell do people need this soul, which in Russia is measured for pounds. This soul is a completely unnecessary thing, always in felt boots, with dirty hair... With sadness, with fear, but I am already beginning to learn to say to myself: button up your soul, Yesenin, it’s as unpleasant as unbuttoned trousers,” he wrote from New -York A. Mariengof.
|
Colonel of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Eduard Aleksandrovich Khlystalov, who worked for many years as an investigator at 38 Petrovka, dealt with the issue of the death of Sergei Yesenin. Here are just a few conclusions from his private investigation: “...In the conclusion on the causes of Yesenin’s death, forensic expert Gilyarevsky wrote: “Based on the autopsy data, it should be concluded that Yesenin’s death resulted from asphyxia caused by compression of the respiratory tract through hanging. The indentation on the forehead could have been caused by the pressure of hanging. The dark purple color of the lower extremities and pinpoint bruises on them indicate that the deceased was hanging for a long time. The wounds on the upper extremities could have been inflicted by the deceased himself and, being superficial, had no influence on death”... Doubt about the authenticity of the act is caused by the following. 1) The act is written on a simple sheet of paper without any details confirming that the document belongs to a medical institution. It does not have a registration number, corner stamp, official seal, signature of the head of the hospital department or examination bureau. It should be added that after 1925 the fate of A.G. Gilyarevsky is unknown; his wife was repressed and also disappeared. |
And in Moscow, after his departure, the poet’s friend, already mentioned above, Galina Benislavskaya, fell ill - with acute neurasthenia, she arrived for treatment at a sanatorium in Pokrovsky-Streshnevo. She wrote about herself: “It was excruciatingly painful all night... Like a toothache, the thought that E. loves this old woman, and that there is nothing to hope for here.” Galina was very attached to Yesenin, endured all the difficulties of his creative nature and really helped. Suffice it to say that after Yesenin’s quarrel with the Imagists, and most importantly with A. Mariengof, she sheltered him, and then both of the poet’s sisters, Ekaterina and Alexandra. Everyone lived in one room, Benislavskaya took care of the housework, and she herself often slept on the floor under the table - there weren’t enough meters. Her help was invaluable in another matter; it seems that it was she, being associated with the Cheka, who several times solved his problems with arrests. (By the way, it is an interesting fact that in 1924 she had a secret admirer - Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov, that after Yesenin’s death Galina drowned her grief in wine, that on the anniversary of the poet’s death she shot herself at his grave.)
Sergei Aleksandrovich returned to Moscow in August 1923 and plunged deeply, as V. Khodasevich writes, into the NEP swamp, “having felt all the shameful difference between Bolshevik slogans and Soviet reality even in the city, Yesenin fell into anger.” His tavern scandals and performances began, one of which ended in a comradely trial of four poets: S. Yesenin, P. Oreshin, S. Klychkov and A. Ganin. They were accused of insulting a stranger while talking in a pub about the publication of a magazine, calling him a “Jewish face.” Friends assured that the offended man had overheard them. As a result, the prosecutor L. Sosnovsky, a like-minded person of L. Trotsky and one of the organizers of the execution of the royal family, saw in the incident a manifestation of anti-Semitism. And in the newspaper “Working Moscow” dated December 12, 1923, workers’ correspondents wrote that the case of the four poets revealed an ulcer for us, “which needs to be cured or cut off once and for all.” The situation turned out to be more than serious, and L. Sosnovsky knew this, of course. According to the Decree “On the Fight against Anti-Semitism” adopted in 1918, the perpetrators had two options: a camp or execution. V. Polonsky, V. Lvov-Rogachevsky, A. Sobol stood up for the poets, assuring those listening that the accused were not anti-Semites, that an unfortunate misunderstanding had occurred. (After the funeral of S. Yesenin, A. Sobol will be found at the monument to Dostoevsky with a bullet through his head.) As a result, the four were publicly reprimanded. And yet it was the beginning of the end. After a series of events, Alexei Ganin, like Sergei Yesenin, would be dealt with in 1925. Ganin will be shot, and the theses he wrote, “Peace and Free Labor for Nations,” will be added to the case, in which he stated that Russia has been in a state of mortal agony for several years, that the clear spirit of the Russian people has been treacherously killed. Pyotr Oreshin and Sergei Klychkov will not long outlive their friends: the first will be shot in March 1937, the second in October of the same year...
At the end of the friendly trial, Sergei Alexandrovich, of course, realized that this performance was staged for a reason. And yet he responds to all participants in the action with an article entitled “Russians”: “There was no more disgusting and vile time in literary life than the time in which we live. The difficult state of the state over these years in the international struggle for its independence, by chance circumstances, brought into the arena of literature revolutionary sergeants who have merits for the proletariat, but not at all for art...” the poet wrote, further mentioning both Sosnovsky and Trotsky. The latter is also captured in poetic images, in the unfinished play “Country of Scoundrels”, where one of the heroes - the Chekistov commissar (aka Leibman) - arrived, according to the author’s plan, from Weimar to Russia “to tame fools and beasts” and “to rebuild the churches of God in latrines." The prototype of Chekistov is none other than Leiba Trotsky, who lived in exile in the city of Weimar.
Further events brought the poet ever closer to a tragic ending. Former friends and comrades also had a hand in this. The imagists, R. Ivnev, A. Mariengof, V. Shershenevich, not only did not come to the comrades’ courtroom in order to testify with their own presence to the falsity of the accusations against Yesenin, but moreover, they wrote a letter to the editor of the magazine “New Spectator”, in every possible way disowning poet. (Why did they need him now? In the Mariengof cafe, in the “Pegasus Stable”, where the public flocked to Yesenin and thereby made good money, he no longer appeared.)
The artist Svarog (V.S. Korochkin), who made a drawing of the deceased Yesenin in a hotel room, told his friend, journalist I.S. Heisin, the following: “It seems to me that this Erlich slipped him something at night, well... maybe not poison, but a strong sleeping pill. It was not for nothing that he “forgot” his briefcase in Yesenin’s room. And he didn’t go home to “sleep” - with Yesenin’s note in his pocket. It was not in vain that he was hanging around all the time nearby; probably, their entire company was sitting and biding their time in the neighboring rooms. The situation was nervous, there was a congress in Moscow, people in leather jackets were walking around in Angleterre all night. They were in a hurry to remove Yesenin, which is why everything was so clumsy, and many traces were left. The frightened janitor, who was carrying firewood and did not enter the room, heard what was happening and rushed to call Commandant Nazarov... And where is this janitor now? First there was a “noose” - Yesenin tried to loosen it with his right hand, and so his hand froze in a cramp. His head was on the armrest of the sofa when Yesenin was hit above the bridge of his nose with the handle of a revolver. Then they rolled him up in a carpet and wanted to lower him from the balcony; a car was waiting around the corner. It was easier to kidnap. But the balcony door did not open wide enough, so they left the corpse by the balcony, in the cold. They drank, smoked, all this dirt remained... Why do I think they rolled it into the carpet? When I was drawing, I noticed a lot of tiny specks on my trousers and a few in my hair... they tried to straighten their arm and slashed the tendons of their right arm with a Gillette razor, these cuts were visible... They took off their jacket, wrinkled and cut, put valuables in their pockets and then they took everything away... They were in a great hurry... They “hung” it in a hurry, already late at night, and it was not easy on a vertical riser. When they fled, Erlich remained to check something and prepare for the version of suicide... He also put this poem on the table, in a prominent place: “Goodbye, my friend, goodbye”... A very strange poem ..." (Published in the newspaper "Evening Leningrad", December 28, 1990).In that letter, colleagues in the workshop stated the following: “After a well-known incident that ended in court... the group developed an internal divergence with Yesenin... Yesenin, in our view, is hopelessly ill physically and mentally...” And the poet at this time, from December 17, 1923 to the end January 1924, stayed in the sanatorium department of the Shumsky psychiatric hospital. Benislavskaya put Yesenin there, fearing for his health and life: he increasingly began to talk about the enemies who were pursuing him. (Case No. 10055 was opened against S.A. Yesenin in the MCCHK for the fight against counter-revolution and crime, transferred to the Council of People's Court on January 27/1920.) After the hospital in January 1924, he was arrested together with Ganin in the Domino cafe. Sergei Alexandrovich was pulled out and put back in the hospital, after which he left for Leningrad, then on a trip to the Caucasus, from September 3, 1924 to March 1, 1925. Apparently, this trip saved him from the fact that he did not end up in the same bunch of charges as Ganin, who was charged with counter-revolutionary activities. Cases were also opened against Yesenin; he was accused under Articles 88, 57 and 176 of the Criminal Code - public insult to government officials, counter-revolutionary actions and hooliganism.
At the end of July 1925, the poet left again. This time, with Sofia Tolstoy, the granddaughter of Lev Nikolayevich, he ends up in Baku... And all these travels, the entire last year of his life, are running. From myself, from my environment, from S. Tolstoy, from the authorities, from illness. "God! I’m telling you for the hundredth time that they want to kill me! I feel it like an animal!” - he said to the Leningrad imagist poet V. Erlich.
Many people then noticed the poet’s alarming behavior. It did not change even after the clinic for nervous patients, from where Yesenin escaped, cherishing the plan to leave for Leningrad and start a new life. He telegraphed V. Erlich in advance to find 2-3 rooms - he wanted to move the sisters later. Before leaving, he dropped in to see Mariengof to make peace, and to see his children, Tanya and Kostya (their mother, Zinaida Reich, was not at home). They say that he was full of plans, he wanted to create his own magazine and work so that no one, not even friends, would interfere. But on December 27, 1925, he died; the poet was found hanged in his room at the Angleterre Hotel. According to the official version, he committed suicide.
According to the unofficial story, he was killed. And there is no reason not to believe this. Everything related to the investigation into the circumstances of his death is still a dark, shameful story with confused, contradictory testimony of “witnesses,” gross violations of the case management on the fact of death, and inadequate documentation. There are several memories of that terrible day in which the thought of murder is obvious. The husband of Yesenin’s sister, Ekaterina, V. Nasedkin (shot, like P. Oreshin, in March 1938), coming home from Angleterre, said that this did not look like suicide, “it seemed like his brains were popping out on his forehead.” Posthumous photographs of Yesenin (including negatives) taken by M. Nappelbaum have also been preserved; some of them clearly show a penetrating wound under the right eyebrow, which was not noted in the forensic medical examination report. Traces of the struggle are also visible in the photograph of the hotel room where Sergei Alexandrovich died: everything in the room is turned upside down, there are blood stains on the carpet and candelabra. The pose of the deceased also seemed unnatural to many: the stiff right arm was bent at the elbow, the “experts” concluded that the poet was grabbing the battery with his hand... But here you don’t need to be an expert to understand that the hanged man will not be able to bend his arms at the elbows, in the moment of strangulation from the noose the body sags like a bag.
Will the truth ever be told?
head oil
ESENIN SERGEY ALEKSANDROVICH 1895-1925
Born in the village of Konstantinov, Ryazan province.
In 1912 he moved to Moscow, where his father worked for a merchant.
“From his first collections (Radunitsa, 1916; Rural Book of Hours, 1918) he appeared as a subtle lyricist, a master of deeply psychologized landscapes, a singer of peasant Rus', an expert in the folk language and the folk soul.
In 1919-23 he was a member of the Imagist group. A tragic attitude and mental confusion are expressed in the cycles “Mare’s Ships” (1920), “Moscow Tavern” (1924), and the poem “The Black Man” (1925). In the poem “The Ballad of Twenty-Six” (1924), dedicated to the Baku commissars, the collection “Soviet Rus'” (1925), and the poem “Anna Snegina” (1925), Yesenin sought to comprehend “the commune-raised Rus',” although he continued to feel like a poet of “the passing Rus' ", "golden log hut". Dramatic poem "Pugachev" (1921).
In a state of depression, he committed suicide.” (I protest! they killed him (()
ESENIN ALEXANDER NIKITICH(1873-1931) - father of the poet S. A. Yesenin]
Sergei Yesenin's father Alexander Nikitich sang in church as a boy
on Shchipok Street, there was a butcher shop where Sergei Yesenin’s father Alexander Nikitich worked as a senior clerk and where he went to work in 1912 and where Sergei Yesenin also worked as a clerk when he moved from his village of Konstantinovo to Moscow. And he lived with his father not far from Shchipok Street in Bolshoi Strochenovsky Lane, in Krylov’s house, 24, in a hostel for “single clerks”... True, after a while he left the butcher shop (what kind of butcher is he?! and what kind of clerk?! ) and went back to Konstantinovo, but soon returned to Moscow again and for some time worked as a salesman in a bookstore in the Strastnaya Square area. And in 1913, he got a job as an assistant proofreader, a subreader, in the printing house "Partnership of I.D. Sytin" on Pyatnitskaya Street, 71... And then he left, as they say, for free bread.
TATIANA FYODOROVNA ESENINA(TITOVA; 1865-1955) - the poet’s mother, whose image ran through all of his work.
NATALIA EVTIKHIEVNA TITOVA(1847-1911) - grandmother of Yesenin (mother of Tatyana Fedorovna)
Titov Fedor Andreevich (1845-1927), Yesenin’s maternal grandfather
TITOV IVAN FEDOROVICH, Yesenin’s maternal uncle
EKATERINA ALEXANDROVNA ESENINA-elder sister (1905-1977).
ALEXANDRA ALEXANDROVNA ESENINA - younger sister (1911-1981).
Yesenin Ilya Ivanovich (1902-1942?), cousin of the poet
Yesenina Olga Alexandrovna (1898-1901
Nasedkin Vasily Fedorovich (1895-1938), poet, husband of E. A. Yesenina
FIRST WIFE ANNA IZRYADNOVA 1891-1946
ESENIN YURI (GEORGY) SERGEEVICH born December 21, 1914 in Moscow. Graduated from the Moscow Aviation Technical School.
Father - SERGEY ALEXANDROVICH ESENIN, poet (1895-1925),
mother - ANNA ROMANOVNA IZRYADNOVA(d. 1946).
(Sivtsev Vrazhek, 44, apt. 14 where Anna Izryadnova lived, her son Georgy Yesenin lived and temporarily, in 1938 - 1939, Yesenin’s mother, Tatyana Fedorovna, was registered)
On April 4, 1937, Yuri Yesenin was arrested in the Far East (where he served in the military) as “an active participant in a counter-revolutionary fascist-terrorist group,” by order of the deputy. People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Y. Agranov. On May 18, Yesenin was taken to Moscow to the Lubyanka. He was subjected to massive psychological treatment by NKVD officers and signed all the accusations against him. On August 13, 1937, Yu. Yesenin was shot.
In 1956, Yuri Yesenin was posthumously rehabilitated.
SECOND WIFE ZINAIDA REICH:
On August 12, 1917, Sergei Yesenin and Zinaida Reich (1894-1939) got married in the Kiriko-Ulitovskaya Church in the Vologda district.
Children: Tatyana and Konstantin
ESENINA TATYANA SERGEEVNA(May 29, 1918 - May 6, 1992 Botkin cemetery in Tashkent) Russian science fiction writer.
Father - poet Sergei Yesenin. Mother - actress Zinaida Reich. Lived in Tashkent. Member of the Writers' Union. Director of the Sergei Yesenin Museum.
ESENIN KONSTANTIN SERGEEVICH(02/03/1920, Moscow - 04/26/1986, Moscow, buried at the Vagankovskoye cemetery. He was a famous football statistician. Son of Zinaida Reich
On November 4, 1920, at the literary evening “The Trial of the Imagists,” Yesenin met Galina Benislavskaya
Benislavskaya Galina Arturovna (1897-1926)
THIRD WIFE: ISADORAH DUNCAN:
On May 2, 1922, Sergei Yesenin and Isadora Duncan ((1877-1927) decided to consolidate their marriage according to Soviet laws
On May 12, 1924, the illegitimate son of Sergei Yesenin and Nadezhda Davydovna Volpin was born in Leningrad - a prominent mathematician, famous human rights activist,
A. Yesenin-Volpin
Now lives in the USA.
FOURTH WIFE SOFIA TOLSTAY
Sofia Andreevna Tolstoy.
Tolstaya-Yesenina Sofya Andreevna (1900-1957) - Yesenin’s wife, museum worker, granddaughter of L. N. Tolstoy. Under Yesenin’s dictation she wrote down many of his works, rewrote his poems, and actively participated in the publication of Yesenin’s works. After the poet’s death, Tolstaya organized the Yesenin Museum in Moscow, collected, preserved and rewrote many of Yesenin’s manuscripts.
Sofya Andreevna Tolstaya, born on April 12, 1900 in Yasnaya Polyana, died on June 29, 1957 in Malakhovka near Moscow.
KASHINA (nee Kulakova) LIDIA IVANOVNA (1886-1937) - owner of the estate in the village. Konstantinovo, Yesenin’s friend.
Panfilov Grigory Andreevich (1893-1914) - friend of Yesenin’s adolescence
Sardanovskaya (married Olonovskaya) Anna Alekseevna (1896-1921), Yesenin’s youthful hobby, teacher, relative of the Konstantinovsky priest Fr. Ivan (Smirnova). Perhaps Yesenin’s acquaintance with Sardanovskaya dates back to 1906
