A poet of peasant memory and revolutionary dissonance
He later recalled that he had embraced the Revolution “in my own way, from a peasant standpoint.”
Sergei Yesenin grew up in a peasant family and gave the memories of the Russian village and the imagery of oral folklore a modern lyric form. He initially supported the October Revolution from what he called a peasant standpoint, but became disenchanted as industrialisation and state power diverged from the socialism he had imagined. A leading poet of Imaginism, he recorded both the revolutionary period’s sense of release and the losses produced by urbanisation. He died by suicide in Leningrad in December 1925, a death remembered as an emblem of the darker tensions in NEP culture.
Career Timeline
- 1914First published poem, “The Birch Tree”
- 1915Breakthrough in Petrograd literary circles
- 1916First poetry collection, Radunitsa
- 1919Signed the Imaginist manifesto
- 1922–1923Toured Europe and the United States with Isadora Duncan
- 1924Announced the dissolution of the Imaginist group
- 1925Published Anna Snegina
- 1925Died in Leningrad in December