By Sergey Esenin
I was born on September 21st of 1895 in the province of Ryazan of the Ryazan district, Kuzminskaya parish, in the village of Konstantinovo.
At the age of two I was sent away to be raised by a relatively well-off grandfather on my mother’s side, who had three adult-age unmarried sons with whom I spent almost my entire childhood. My uncles were mischievous and wild. At three and a half they placed me on a horse without a saddle and immediately launched it into a gallop. I remember, I freaked out and was holding onto the mane very tightly. Afterward, they were teaching me how to swim. One of the uncles (uncle Sasha) would take me out in his boat, we'd drift away from the shore, he would take off my underwear and toss me, like a pup, into the water. I would splash around in a frightened and hapless manner and, right before I begin choking, he would start yelling: “Eh! You bitch! Now, just what are you good for?..” “Bitch” for him was an expression of tenderness. Thereafter, when I was eight or so, the other uncle would use me as a replacement for a hunting dog and I would swim across lakes to fetch shot-down ducks. I was very good at climbing trees. Among the boys I was always the ringleader and a big-time fighter and always walked around all scraped up.
Only my grandma scolded me for my mischievousness, while my grandpa would occasionally rile me up for fistfights himself and would often tell grandma: “Don’t you touch him, you fool! He’d get tougher that way!” My grandma loved me with all her might, and her tenderness had no borders. On Saturdays they would wash me, clip my nails and rub my head with heating oil because not a single ridge of a comb was able to handle my curly hair. But the oil wouldn’t help much either.
I would often start benevolently yelling out cuss words and even now feel some kind of an unpleasant reaction to Saturdays.
Thus flew by my childhood. When I grew up they really wanted to make a village teacher out of me and for that reason sent me to the school for priests and teachers, after finishing which I was supposed to enroll at the Moscow teachers’ institute. Luckily, none of this took place.
I began writing poetry early on, when I was about nine, but associate my first conscious creativity with being sixteen to seventeen. Some of the poems from those years were published in Radunitza (a collection of poems Esenin released in 1916. The title is an archaic variation of the Russian word for rainbow – Ed.).
When I was eighteen I was very surprised, after having sent out my poems to numerous journals, by the fact that they wouldn’t publish them. So I went off to Saint Petersburg.
I was welcomed with open arms there. The first person I saw was Blok, the second – Gorodetsky. Whenever I’d look at Blok, sweat would drip from me, because for the first time in my life I was looking at a living poet. Gorodetsky brought me together with Klyuev, of whom I haven’t yet heard at that time. In spite of our major internal differences, Klyuev and I started up an even greater friendship.
During those same years I enrolled in the Shanyavsky University where I only spent a year and a half and then, once again, went back home to the village. At the University I became acquainted with the poets Semenovsky, Nasedkin, Kolokolov, and Filipchenko.
From among the poets who were my contemporaries I liked Blok, Bely, and Klyuev the best. Bely gave me a lot in the formal sense, while Blok and Klyuev taught me lyricism.
In 1919 with a group of friends I published the manifesto of Imaginism. Imaginism was the formal school of poetry which we wanted to establish. But this school did not have a strong foundation and died on its own, in this manner proclaiming that authenticity resides within the organic image.
I would gladly renounce many of my religious poems and lyrics, but they have a great significance as the poet’s roadway towards the revolution.
Since I was eight years old my grandma would drag me to different monasteries and because of her we would constantly be sheltering various wandering men and women. One would hear spiritual poems chanted all day long. Grandpa was the opposite. Wouldn’t refuse a drink. From his side, he liked to arrange eternal wedding parties without anyone actually getting married. Later, when I left the village, it took me a long time to sort out just what my own disposition was.
During the revolutionary years I was wholly on the side of the October, but processed everything in my own way, with a certain peasant twist. In the sense of formal development I am, once again, drawn most of all to Pushkin. And as for further autobiographical factoids, – you can find them in my poems.
- October 1925