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SerCjei Esenin
SOVIET RUSSIA1
That hurricane swept past. But few of us survived.
Renewing friendship's ties, we found many missing.
Again I turned my steps toward my orphaned birthplace,
Where I had set no foot for some eight years.
Whom shall I call? Share now with whom
The grievous joy of being still alive?
Here even the windmill-a bird of wooden beams
With just one wing-still stands, cross-eyed.
To everyone here I am a stranger,
And those who knew me once have now forgotten.
A heap of ashes layered with roadside dust
Lies where my father's house once stood.
1.
A peasant's son and former shepherd, Esenin was at first an enthusiast
of the Bolshevik Revolution. He saw in it the coming of the bucolic,
democratic utopia of which he dreamed in his early lyrics. But the ter–
rible reality of the Civil War and industrialization in Soviet Russia soon
bewildered the "peasant poet." Profo\llIldly self-destructive in tempera–
ment, Esenin yielded to an almost continuous orgy of drugs, liquor and
high living. His love affairs, his broken marriages-to Isadora Duncan,
among others-and his extravagant escapades made headlines in Berlin,
Paris and New York. In 1924, he made a final attempt to accommodate
himself to the Soviet world; he returned from abroad to his native vil–
lage. The experience was hardly a success, as "s'QViet Russia," the poem
he wrote after his trip, suggests. A year later, the thirty-year-old Esenin
cut his wrists and hanged himself.
Although Esenin's verse was scarcely published during the Stalin
era, he remains, together with Mayakovsky, the most popular contem–
porary poet among Russians of all ages.
