To most Anglophone readers Sergey Esenin (1895-1925) and Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) probably number among the less familiar Russian poets. And yet within Russia they were the most celebrated poets of the twentieth century. Mayakovsky, beside being admired as a great modernist by the likes of Pasternak, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, was also the unofficial poet laureate of Bolshevism following the revolution and thus occupied a privileged place in Soviet culture. Esenin was less favoured by the political and literary élites; and yet the peculiar combination, expressed in his poetry, of nostalgia for the vanishing traditions of rural life together with a riotous bohemianism, held a special fascination for ordinary Russian readers, so much so that any literate household in the late Soviet period would always feature at least two volumes of poetry: the selected works of Aleksandr Pushkin, and of Sergey Esenin.

To most Anglophone readers Sergey Esenin (1895-1925) and Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) probably number among the less familiar Russian poets. And yet within Russia they were the most celebrated poets of the twentieth century. Mayakovsky, beside being admired as a great modernist by the likes of Pasternak, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, was also the unofficial poet laureate of Bolshevism following the revolution and thus occupied a privileged place in Soviet culture. Esenin was less favoured by the political and literary élites; and yet the peculiar combination, expressed in his poetry, of nostalgia for the vanishing traditions of rural life together with a riotous bohemianism, held a special fascination for ordinary Russian readers, so much so that any literate household in the late Soviet period would always feature at least two volumes of poetry: the selected works of Aleksandr Pushkin, and of Sergey Esenin.

The two twentieth century poets regarded each other from a wary distance. Esenin had little appreciation for what he regarded as the urbanistic modernism and political engagement of Mayakovsky’s work. Mayakovsky, while admiring Esenin’s talent, could only disapprove of his bohemianism and lack of commitment, and consequently seized every opportunity to attack what he considered the backwardness and decadence of ‘Eseninism’.

 

The last years of Esenin’s life were increasingly chaotic and unhappy, as he succumbed to depression and alcoholism. During this time he became increasingly alienated from official Soviet culture, while in his personal life a series of turbulent relationships included his brief marriage to the American dancer Isadora Duncan in 1922. Something of the atmosphere of these years is reflected in the poem Letter to my Mother.

In the early hours of 27 December 1925, while staying at the Hotel Angleterre in Leningrad, Esenin cut his wrist and wrote his last poem in his own blood. The last two lines of this poem are alluded to in the corresponding lines from Mayakovsky’s To Sergey Esenin, excerpts from which are translated here. The following night Esenin hanged himself in his hotel room.

 

In the aftermath of Esenin’s suicide, leading Russian poets were invited to commemorate his death. Mayakovsky, ever the committed poet, and concerned to combat the romantic pessimism which he took to be expressed in Esenin’s suicide, undertook to write a poem which, he wrote, would make ‘Esenin’s death uninteresting’. And yet, as Mayakovsky’s biographer Edward J. Brown has suggested, To Sergey Esenin is an ambivalent work in which Mayakovsky was unable to suppress his feeling of identification with the suicide.

 

A few years later, on 14 April 1930, Mayakovsky shot himself through the heart.

Sergey Esenin

Letter to my Mother

Greetings, old woman! How are you?
Are you well? As for me – I’m alright;
And I hope our old house is still bathed in
The same magical evening light.

But I hear that you fret for my safety,
Though you try to conceal your distress;
That you’re often seen wandering the highway
In your old-fashioned country dress.

And they say that you see a recurring
Dream as the dusk starts to fall –
Of some lout who’s just thrust a dagger
Through my heart in a bar room brawl.

Cheer up, old woman! Don’t worry:
It’s all a preposterous lie;
For, although I’m a scandalous drunkard,
Still, I’ll see you before I die.

I’m the same loving son as always
And my only ambition’s to come
Back alive from this chaos and madness
To visit once more my old home.

I’ll return in the Spring when the blossom
Has covered our garden in white;
But promise you’ll no longer make me
Get up with the first morning light.

Don’t fret over what never happened,
Don’t revive the old dreams – let them go;
From my earliest days deprivation
Is all I’ve been fated to know.

And don’t teach me to pray – it’s not worth it.
The old days will never come back;
You alone are my one consolation,
You alone are the light which I lack.

So forget your imaginary worries
And learn how to curb your distress;
And stop wandering about on the highway
In your old-fashioned country dress.

Vladimir Mayakovsky

To Sergey Esenin

You’ve gone, as they say, to another life;
No more vodka or notoriety
As you slice through the milky way like a sharpened knife:
Merely sobriety.

No, Esenin, I never meant to mock you.
This catch in my throat isn’t laughter – it’s pain.
It’s as though I can see you now – but I’m powerless to stop you
As you string yourself up after slashing your veins.

Stop! Leave off! Have you lost your mind,
Allowing death’s pallor to wash your cheeks?
For you could come up with words of a kind
Which no one else in this in this world can speak.

But why did you do it? Perplexity overwhelms me.
‘The most important reason was that he had no link
With the toiling masses’, the critics tell me,
‘And this resulted in too much drink.

He should have quit bohemia for the working class:
Schooled in its wisdom he’d have given up fighting’.
But since when did the workers quench their thirst with kvass?
Surely they’ve also been known to delight in

A drink now and then? ‘We should have charged Doronin
To improve the political content of his song’.
Then you could have written fifty lines every morning
Just like he did – tedious and long.

But supposing you’d heeded their advice, then I think
You’d have gone and topped yourself long before.
For surely it’s better to die from drink
Than to be a bore?

Nor is the cause of our loss laid bare
By the noose or the penknife. If you’d managed to obtain
A bottle of ink at the Hotel Angleterre,
Would you still have needed to slash your veins?

Yet your admirers rejoiced and shouted: ‘Encore!’
In imitation of you a host of them are dead.
But why augment the statistics by one death more
When you can augment the production of ink instead?

And now your voice will no longer be heard.
To propagate myths is a grave mistake.
The people, the creator of Russian words,
Have lost an eloquent apprentice rake…

This age is a difficult time for the muse.
But tell me, you sons of the exploited class,
Was there ever a great man who consented to choose
The road down which it was easiest to pass?

The word is the commander of human daring.
Forward march! Let history accelerate through the years,
Let nothing but the flutter of our tangled hair in
The wind remind the past we were ever here.

On this planet of ours joy is in short supply.
We must snatch it from the future while we can.
In this life it’s not so difficult to die.
But it’s hard to build a world that’s fit for man.