About Yesenin without lies: who killed the poet

In Soviet school they didn’t say a word about Yesenin. Pushkin was there, but in pieces: “The days of late autumn are usually scolded …” or “Winter! It’s too early! We diligently crammed and read something in literature lessons, but it was very bad. We had a wise teacher – L.A. Nesterova. In violation of the rules, she stopped asking us questions and read “Eugene Onegin” aloud to us for three lessons. The class listened as if spellbound. I don’t know about others, but then, at the age of 15, I discovered the greatness of Russian culture – the language.

Later, during my half-starved graduate years, I saved myself by reading Pushkin’s poems out loud to myself instead of eating. I inherited the pre-revolutionary edition from my wife’s grandfather, a second-hand book dealer. From what the communists did not nationalize, there were also several books left in the “Reader-Reciter” format. There, for the first time, I came across the poems of early Yesenin from the collection “Radunitsa”: “The white birch tree under my window was covered with snow, as if with silver…” The impression was this: a continuation of Pushkin, but not an imitation of him, and this is again the great and powerful Russian language.

I am sure that this is not the fantasy of our older generation. My youngest son Ivan Sergeevich (14 years old) easily and with pleasure remembers the poems of Pushkin and Yesenin. Something boring, from untalented people, is difficult for him (he reads it before class, but gets angry). The eldest granddaughter Elena (9 years old) completely rebelled at school. The whole literature class was asked to learn the poems of Yu. Moritz. Elena studied them, but refused to read them in class because she didn’t like the poems. Instead, she offered the teacher a choice: A.S. Pushkin – “Autumn” or S.A. Yesenin – “Letter to Mother”. The teacher waved her hands: they say, Pushkin is not in the curriculum for the third grade, and Yesenin… is not at all. It ended with the teacher leaving Elena after the lesson, and she read both Pushkin and Yesenin to her. I got an “A” officially, but from underground. At a brief family council, I supported my granddaughter.

In the Soviet school I couldn’t stand Mayakovsky with his “sickle-and-hammer Soviet passport” and other things about Lenin and the party. Yesenin involuntarily communicated with Mayakovsky, but he once said to his insidious friend Mariengof: “I am a poet for some reason, and Mayakovsky is for something”; “They will forget me, and they will erect a monument to him on Tverskaya.” And yet it stands, and the monument to Yesenin is modestly nestled on the boulevard. But at least they didn’t forget to erect a monument to the poet, who, unlike Mayakovsky, did not call for the destruction of monasteries (Strostnoy – on the site of the monument to Pushkin) and sang of Moscow, which he loved with all his soul: “I love this elm city, even if it is flabby and even if it is decrepit, golden drowsy Asia rested on the domes…”

In 1992, the then Minister of National Affairs (there was such a thing) N.D. Egorov called me. As a rule, we talked with him about the revival of the Cossack troops, and then he surprised me with the question: “Do you like Yesenin’s poems?” I answer: “Not only do I love it, but I also know a lot by heart.” He told me: “Well, then tomorrow he will come to you.” – “Who-who?” – “Well, People’s Artist Sergei Petrovich Nikonenko. This concerns Yesenin, help him… I don’t want to call your boss Luzhkov.”

Nikonenko came – modest and charming. The problem was that he found one of the apartments where Yesenin, his mother and sister lived for more than a year. The artist renovated the apartment at his own expense, found pieces of furniture and a number of Yesenin’s personal belongings. He wants to make a museum-apartment there, but lower-level officials of the city hall are against it, and in general all the apartments at the address: Moscow, st. Sivtsev Vrazhek, house 44, is subject to privatization. With the help of Luzhkov, I managed to exclude apartment No. 14 from privatization and turn it into a private museum with the owner Nikonenko. This museum is still registered with him, and all expenses are on him. The apartment is not luxurious: three small rooms and a kitchen. Small toilet with washbasin. S.P. Nikonenko many times proposed to the Department of Culture of the Moscow City Hall to make the mentioned apartment a city museum or to join it to the A.S. Pushkin House Museum on Arbat, where the poet spent several happy months after his wedding with N.N. Goncharova. Moreover, it is very close – fifteen minutes walk. But no: there are more than enough excuses.

Yesenin lived through the entire history of the All-Russian pogrom perpetrated by Leninists. And he suffered a half-starved existence and outright persecution of his poetry. There wasn’t even a permanent corner. And nearby, like a shadow, was Mariengof, clearly set up by the security officers to keep an eye on him. He diligently dragged Yesenin to taverns, and got him drunk, and got him drunk, later writing the book “A Novel Without Lies,” where he showed the poet in the most unsightly light. It is not clear when Yesenin had time to write his wonderful poems… Apparently, based on his book, father and son Bezrukov made a disgusting film about Yesenin – a drunkard and rowdy. Now, not just anywhere, but at the Moscow Art Theater there is a play “Yesenin’s Women” (author Z. Prilepin) – as if the genius is famous for hanging around women.

In encyclopedic dictionaries about Yesenin’s death, there is often a version that he “committed suicide in a state of depression.” The version is convenient so as not to try to find out the actual circumstances of his death on the night of December 25, 1925. There could be no depression. Yesenin came to St. Petersburg to take part in the publication of a collection of his poems. Finally! Mariengof was not nearby – and that means no one would drag him into the tavern. He chose a hotel for himself, but he was accommodated in Angleterre, where the security officers decided everything (it was on the balance sheet of the Cheka). Everyone who saw Yesenin recalled that he was in a great mood.

Yesenin’s room was chosen in a room that before the revolution had been adjoined by a pharmacy, and it was easy to get inside through a door closed by a closet. He asked the doorman not to let anyone in to see him except the poet N. Klyuev, but when he arrived, the doorman told him that Yesenin had gone into the city and would return very late, i.e. unwanted witnesses were deliberately eliminated.

Now about Yesenin’s number itself. During the Soviet era, it was very difficult to get there: it was closed and was listed for repairs. In the 70s of the last century, I served in the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, I had security clearance, and my girlfriend and I were allowed into this room. There were no renovations there. There was a table, chairs, a bed, a closet (the same one that closed the door to the pharmacy). According to the official authorities, Yesenin hanged himself on a hook from a chandelier near the ceiling. Ceiling height – 3 m 75 cm! I clarified this. Imagine how, without being a circus performer, it was possible to get there… And then, according to the protocol of the called policeman (drawn up very carelessly), Yesenin was lying near the heating radiator, and there was no choke noose on his neck: a rope with a knot was simply thrown over neck. There were cigarette butts in the ashtray, and if Yesenin smoked, it was only a pipe. In the post-mortem photo there are traces of beatings, and on the hands there are a lot of deep scars…

There are still many facts that speak against the version of suicide, which many still do not believe in. Z.N. Reich, who had children from Yesenin and in 1937 wrote a bold letter to Stalin demanding that the secret of the poet’s death be revealed, also did not believe. This letter, of course, did not reach Stalin, but a decision was quickly made at Lubyanka, and Zinaida Reich was killed (more than 40 stab wounds). Now, if we remember the poet’s women, then a monument to Zinaida Nikolaevna should be erected on the same boulevard where the monument to Yesenin is.

V. Meyerhold, then the wife of Z. Reich, was also hit. At the military board, we issued a certificate of rehabilitation for Meyerhold, who was convicted under one of the points of the notorious Art. 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR for espionage for Japan. This, of course, was the work of the security officers, since the “espionage” consisted in the fact that Meyerhold spoke with the Japanese ambassador at a reception at the Foreign Ministry. In supervisory proceedings on such trails there are two or three documents: a resolution of the state security investigator and a decision of the “troika” or the Special Meeting, but the director was involved in the case as Meyerhold-Reich. I asked my experienced boss: “Why also Reich?” Answer: it was more convincing, since Z. Reich was an anti-Soviet and the wife of the anti-Soviet Yesenin. It is unclear how Reich’s anti-Sovietism was manifested, and even more so Yesenin’s anti-Sovietism. After all, the poet came, as they say, from the people: “My father is a peasant, and I am a peasant’s son.” But at the same time, Yesenin felt that the Soviet authorities did not like him very much. After all, a criminal case was brought against him… for anti-Semitism. He was publicly perplexed: I supposedly have a Jewish wife (Reich), and her children are Jews. And, in order to at least correct something, he wrote: “I am now the most furious fellow traveler of the Soviet country.” Not enough! It was necessary to write some kind of poem about Lenin, but Yesenin could not lie to such an extent: “I never lie with my heart…”

And, then, he did not want, like Mayakovsky, to be a poet “for something.” By the way, all the “hundred volumes of his party books” did not help the latter, and his death also closely resembles suicide.