Стихотворения и поэмы на английском языке с параллельными русскими текстами. Poems English parallel Russian texts. Россия - СССР. Russia - USSR
Great poem the Russia and The Man in Black
...as Esenin's poetic testament and even as an expression of the "spirit" of the times. Esenin's "admirers" of the petty-bourgeois bent argued that Esenin's collapse was inevitable, that the poet had squandered all his poetic potential and that his lyrical talent was in conflict with the age. So Mayakovsky wrote the poem "To Sergei Esenin" in which he sought to wrest Esenin from those who wished to make the poet's death serve their own ends.
Unfortunately very many of those who have written about Esenin, especially just after his death, saw in him primarily just the bard of vanishing patriarchal peasant Russia.
All this was in the most direct way bound up with the very sharp battle of ideas that was being waged in literary circles during the
formative period of the young Soviet state between, on the one hand, authors who were creating the new Soviet literature, openly siding with the revolution and furthering the splendid traditions of the Russian classics—traditions of realism, popular spirit and civic responsibility, and, on the other hand, the members of various literary groups and trends who, as a rule, adopted the standpoint of petty-bourgeois formalist art.
To detach Esenin from the major events of his age, to oppose his work to the times in which he lived, to present him as standing apart from the social storms and revolutionary upheavals which he witnessed is to destroy the poet, to destroy the social and national significance of his poetry.
The titles Esenin gave to his new books were On Russia and the Revolution, Soviet Russia and The Soviet Land. They contain the voice of the new Russia, its dreams, hopes and fears, they contain the soul of the people, the soul of the poet, they contain life itself in the eternal conflict of good and evil. We feel how difficult it was for the poet to bid a final farewell to the past and we see how hard it was for him sometimes to tread the unexplored paths of the new life.
But which of the poets — Esenin's contemporaries — found it easy? Blok? Mayakovsky? "All poetry is a journey into the unknown."
Blok, Esenin and Mayakovsky are sometimes contrasted. And sometimes one of them is "raised up" at the expense of the others. Or, which is worse, the work of one of them becomes a kind of yardstick, and other works which do not measure up to it and demand their own analysis, are placed outside socialist realism. All this results in a onesided, impoverished idea of the poetry of the age of the October Revolution.
For all their ideological and artistic differences Blok, Mayakovsky and Esenin were united on the main point—their genuine concern for the fate of insurgent Russia. Each of them was totally on the side of the October Revolution, each said his own inspired word about those unforgettable days.
Esenin's poetry is highly dramatic and true. It is full of sharp social conflicts and tragic collisions, profound and sometimes, it would seem, insuperable contradictions. "Prayers for the Dead", "Anna Snegina", "Pugachev", "Stanzas", "Moscow of the Taverns", "Persian Themes"— at first it is hard to imagine that all these poems were written by the same man, and, what is more, over a very short period of time.
It is essential to have a clear idea of the objective character of the contradictions in Esenin's poetry and not to ignore the main tendency, the main line of development in his work, which brought the poet from "Prayers for the Dead" to "Soviet Russia" and "Anna Snegina", works which make Esenin a classic of Soviet poetry.
Leonid Leonov was right when he wrote in January 1926: "Esenin's melodious talent was marked by a powerful creative charge. I am deeply convinced that Sergei Esenin could have done a great deal more. His creative juices had not yet dried up, a little longer and they would have gushed out of the Esenin recesses again, as the bright and sweet sap appears in a notch on a birch-tree in spring.
Maxim Gorky, Alexei Tolstoy, Boris Lavrenev, Dmitri Furmanov and other prominent men of letters paid tribute at that same time to the unfading strength of his verse, and hailed him as a great national poet.
The figure of Esenin, the poet and man, a striking and unique personality, is emerging ever clearer in our day.
"He was a big, handsome man," recalled the sculptor and artist Sergei Konenkov. "Even then, in his lifetime, his external appearance and his poetry seemed to me to be a phenomenon on a par with Chaliapin."
Esenin could not stand falsity, hypocrisy or affectation, he "was always himself". Truthfulness was the main trait of his talent. He had every justification to say of himself and his poetry: "I never lie at heart."
Open-hearted and ready to give people everything he had, Esenin was by no means as simple as he appeared to some of his contemporaries. The writer Nikolai Nikitin noted: "He was a man both complex and simple in his own way. And to a certain extent reserved, however strange this may sound about a person who lived his life in tumult."
The poet Boris Pasternak observed: "Since the days of Koltsov the soil of Russia has produced nothing more indigenous, spontaneous, fitting and native than Sergei Esenin... At the same time Esenin was a live and throbbing instance of that artistry which, following Pushkin, we call the supreme Mozartian principle, the Mozartian element."
A contemporary of his, the poet Nikolai Tikhonov has said: "The man of the future will also read Esenin as people read him today... His poems cannot grow old. In their veins flows the everlastingly young blood of everlastingly throbbing poetry."
While much in Esenin's poetry is uniquely national, appealing above all to Russian hearts, and much has dated, the main elements of his poetry which will ever continue to entrance people of all nations remain unaffected by time or place: the supremely dramatic quality of his thoughts and feelings in an era of unprecedented social transformations, and his ardent love for his native land and nature. This last aspect of his poetry makes him even dearer to present-day readers who are confronted not only with the boons of scientific and technological progress but also with its negative consequences, with a threat to the environment, with everything Esenin's sensitive heart foresaw and which he warned us about with such insight, such feeling for the earth and such a sense of responsibility for its future.
... Yet am I happy.
From the host of storms
Impressions that are quite unique I bring.
The whirlwind has my destiny adorned
With golden-textured flowering.
Such was the poet's true destiny — a generous, daring, splendid and anxious one, full of dramatic deliberations, doubts, joys and light...
YURI PROKUSHEV.