SERGEI YESENIN: ‘THE LAST POET OF THE VILLAGE’

THE LAST POET OF THE VILLAGE

Sergei Yesenin, tr Anton Yakovlev, bilingual

Sensitive Skin Press 2019

 

In America today, there are a number of Russian poets of the early to mid-20th century who are famous enough to name drop comfortably in a literary gathering without drawing a blank stare.

And there are a couple of others whose names will be known enough that a person might feign familiarity.

 

And then there is Sergei Yesenin.

 

A man who declared 'if I hadn't been a poet I would have been a thief or a conman' -- but who, behind his prototypical revolutionary era belligerent street-tough image, offered a yearning heart-strong Russian populace with a romantic/nostalgic pipeline back to the lyrical wealth of 'old country' peasant Russia.

 

Sergei Yesenin -- part Mayakovsky, part peasant Pushkin. A poet whose words are on the lips and in the hearts of countless ordinary Russians -- for today’s discerning American readers, it's arguably not enough to feign knowledge of the man. You gotta know why his poetry’s so beloved.

 

The opportunity to find out why has just been presented to American reader anew, with the publication of Anton Yakovlev's fine book of translations 'The Last Poet of the Village’ (Sensitive Skin, 2019).

 

It worked for me. Cruising through this collection of shorter works by Yesenin, it became quickly apparent why the man was a giant figure on the literary landscape in his own country 'back in the day', and why his reputation has outlived him by going on 100 years in his own country.

 

Sergei Yesenin. Golden haired, blue eyed boy from the countryside. Part romantic part brawling counterculturalist. In life fawned over like a pop star. In death raised up to the pinnacle of fame, one of the most quoted modern poets among Russians today. And 'sadly neglected in the English-speaking world," says the translator.

 

With this book, Yakovlev declares his goal clearly -- a new 'first introduction' to the work of a beloved, necessary poet in the Russian canon.

 

If Yesenin's reputation has thus far failed to 'stick' in the poetry firmament for readers in America, but it is arguably to ourselves -- not him -- that we should ask why.

 

While the originating charisma and music in the man and his words may be unavailable to English speakers a century on, it is certain that Sergei's personal story is a colorful one. Raised by peasant grandparents in the holy Russian countryside (where he was made to chase game like a hound dog as a child) he began publishing romantic pastoral poetry at the precocious age of 15.

 

By his early 20s, he had rocketed to fame as an au courant, swaggering iconoclast... with a heart of peasant gold. By the age of 18 he had emerged in the turbulent streets of pre-Revolutionary Russia as one of the street-wise poetry toughs -- with a penchant for hooligan poetry and brash wise guy street talk -- but mixing in plenty of references to lime trees blossoming and nightingales singing.

 

And in the precious last few years of his life, he enjoyed a fast life as a pop idol, playing up to adoring female fans, marrying and divorcing with abandon (including a brief marriage to Isadora Duncan) -- dancing around the long tentacles of the increasingly intolerant Soviet state until his death at age 30 at the end of a rope, an apparent suicide, but quite possibly state assassination.

 

In this handsomely produced collection, Anton Yakovlev makes as good a case for us to fall in love in our own limited vashion with the poetry of this 'near-forgotten' man.

 

There's little doubt that Yesenin was good, early. 'Your harnessed horse drank from your palms/Reflections of birches broke in the pond.../I wanted, in the shimmering foaming streams, to rip a raw kiss from your scarlet lips' he wrote at the tender age of 15. Nothing maudlin or tawdry in lines like these.

 

But as early as 1916, and his attention turned to the turbulent streets of Moscow and St Petersburg, Yesenin's poetry began to grow in complexity.

 

I'm tired of living in my native land

Yearning for the vast fields of buckwheat

I'll leave my shack

To be a vagrant and a thief.

 

That's precisely what he did, mixing with the literary ruffians of the day, experiencing the highs and lows of street life -- living a raucous, sometimes miserable existence with untrustworthy comrades and women who turned him out of their houses.

 

Taking it all in and spitting it back out, with the bravado only a boisterous 20-something year old in the middle of the heady days of a revolution could muster ('This is nothing, he says, standing before the unfriendly, laughing rabble with a busted bloody nose...it'll heal by tomorrow').

 

I'm not a villain. I haven't robbed anyone in the forest.

I haven't shot wretches in dungeons.

I'm merely a street rake

Smiling at passing faces.

 

Dogs are recurring motif for him -- as they were for Mayakovsky, the best known of the poet cum werewolf of the era. Mayakovsky pushes the envelope hard, going so far as to declare that he has BECOME a dog and ending a poem about that with growls and barks.

 

For all his snarling, in the case of Yesenin there is less metamorphosis going on, and more return to his pastoral origins. ('I'm a good friend to animals/Healing them with my verses').

 

In particular, we find this in his early poem A Song About A Dog, a farm dog which has had seven pups, and must abjectly follow her master and watch as he drowns them in an icy river ('when she walked back, just barely/Licking the seat off her sides/She imagined the moon over the hut/to be one of her puppies').

 

This kindness to animals, with all its underlying boyish charm, takes on an appealing level of emotional complexity on a visit to the home of a famous poet, when he goes out back to make friends with the family dog (Give me your paw, Jim, for good luck/I've never seen such a paw/Let's bark together while the moon is out/At the quiet, noiseless weather'), and ask it to lick the hand of a woman inside the house.

 

She'll come, I give you my word

And in my absence, staring into her eyes

Please gently lick her hand on my behalf

For everything I was and wasn't guilty of

 

Sergei Yesenin -- a naughty reckless Moscow loner...known to every rundown hopeless jade in town, who would give his tie to a shaggy dog,;or take off his top hat, fill it up with gold oats, and feed the horses.

 

This is more than identification with animals in order to outrage the comfortable elite -- it is the wistful tenderness behind the mask of the tough guy poet, who cherishes the memory of his rural upbringing, and never really shake it off: 'how nice it is in the morning mist

 

To trace lines of grass with a scythe in a field

so that a horse and a sheep can read them.

 

That's memorable stuff, full of brilliance, audacity and charm -- and it is easy to see why a people big-hearted about the land which nurtures them, would commit it to memory.

 

Because all the while, the redemptive spirit of village and country life in Mother Russia -- where a revolution-weary citizen could celebrate 'a tender girl in white (singing) a tender song... the sweet happiness, the fresh blush of cheeks.'' Without pushing the analogy to far, Yesenin is a kind of tragi-romantic figure who tells us out loud 'There's no place like home' while falling further and further into the clutches of tragic demise. 

 

Yesenin says it, out loud. He can return home, he says, but it will be a poignant thing, tinged with something way past sadness, a homecoming in which he will find his former townspeople happy, but himself in misery, and he will hang himself and be buried plainly while the village dogs bark.

 

The moon will float up in the sky

Dropping the oars into the water

As ever, Russia will get by

And dance and weep in every quarter.

 

SF poet Jack Hirschman was on the money when he pegged Sergei Yesenin as 'Not really a peasant poet nor a Soviet revolutionary (but) a brilliant modern image maker, very Russian in a national sense." In poem after poem, Yakovlev presents a man who, rather than a competitor to the arch-decadent bad-boy Mayakovsky, is a persona in his own right, his maudit bravura palpable even though we never really lose sight of the wide-eyed peasant boy, golden haired and adorable, behind the pose.

 

Today in America there are a number of 20th century Russian poets whose reputation have eclipsed Yesenin. Mayakovsky. Anna Akhmatova. The three 60s dissident Russian writers who were popularized by City Lights in Anselm Hollo's pocket series book Red Cats (Yevtushenko/ Kirsanov/ Voznesensky). And there are a number of Russian poets whose names and works should be more familiar to American writers -- I could mention Burliuk, Kamensky and Khlebnikov.

 

But if Anton Yakovlev is right, there’s only one Sergei Yesenin.

 

With The Last Poet of the Village, he presents a new and compelling case for us to place the poetry of this tragic, beautiful Russian poet, at the very least, side by side with his peers.