“An absurd woman besides a stranger”: how Yesenin and Duncan got married and broke up

Shortly before the ceremony in the Khamovniki registry office in Moscow, the American asked the Russian secretary and translator to correct the date of birth in his passport, “it will soon be no longer needed”: “This is for Ezenin,” he said. halve the age gap of 18. Then he received Soviet citizenship, and first of all, both spouses took the double surname of Duncan-Yesenin, which greatly amused the poet himself. Coming out of the registry office, Yesenin exclaimed joyfully: “I am Duncan now.”

The stormy and rather scandalous relationship of two undoubtedly talented people did not last more than a few years and did not bring both of them as much joy as serious emotional wounds. After parting, both Yesenin and Duncan did not live long and died very tragically – nevertheless, their memories have been preserved over the centuries and throughout the history of their very extraordinary relationship.

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Sergei Yesenin, Isadora Duncan and her adopted daughter Irma, 1922

Global Outlook Press

Both aspire to be leaders and revolutionaries, each claiming leadership in their own field. After the departure of many important Russian poets, the death of Gumilev and Blok and the self-elimination of Mayakovsky from the literary scene, he either “equaled the pen with the bayonet” or plunged into political propaganda and advertising, Sergei Yesenin feels like “Poet No. 1”, he received appropriate awards and created his own literary side – his imagination, – not without loyal supporters, students and state support, eventually leaving the image of “just a village poet”. Even before the revolution, Sergey Gorodetsky, who, together with Nikolai Gumilyov, was the organizer of the “Workshop of Poets” and then patronized the so-called new peasant poets, wrote in his memoirs about this Yesenin era:

“Yesenin could not stand it when he was called the shepherd’s child Lelem, when they made him a mere peasant poet. I remember his anger very well. He wanted to become a European, and even then he consciously began to become the first Russian poet. It was his revolution, his salvation.”

Isadora Duncan by the way, he was considered a true innovator of dance, the founder of his own direction, even his own dance system (“free dance”), which aroused interest all over the world and began to influence classical ballet, including in Russia. She was called the “divine sandal”: abandoning the traditional pointe shoes, corsets and ballerina grip, she walked barefoot on stage in light translucent chitons, trying to throw her private bridges both into antiquity and on Wagner’s musical and philosophical themes. , Nietzsche, Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert and Tchaikovsky. Dropping out of the once useless school and starting his career at the age of 18 with “exotic dances” in Chicago nightclubs, Duncan eventually grew up in what the famous ballet critic Valerian Svetlov called the “Schliemann of ancient choreography”. In 1909 she opened her own dance school in France, and in 1903 she and her brother started the construction of a private temple on Kopanos Hill in Athens, where the Isadora and Raymond Duncan Center for Dance Studies still operates.

A successful and famous 44-year-old dancer was brought to post-revolutionary hungry Moscow by an unexpected zigzag of fate – either a thirst for new experiences or a desire to escape depressing memories: in 1913, both of her children – daughter Derdry and son Patrick – were born in Paris. She died after falling into a car from a bridge across the Seine with a nanny in , and her last son, who appeared in 1914, died within hours of giving birth. In any case, Duncan immediately responded to the unexpected call of the RSFSR People’s Commissar of Education Lunacharsky, who offered to open a dance school in Moscow in 1921, with the promise of financial support from the proletarian state and bourgeois traditions. Europe I’ve been to. From now on I will be just one comrade among comrades, developing a broad work plan for this generation of humanity. Saying goodbye to the inequality, injustice and animal cruelty of the old world, I have made my school unrealizable!

“Isadora Duncan, seized by communist ideology, arrived in Moscow in 1921,” said artist Yuri Annenkov. “Raspberry-haired, sullen and sad, pure in thought, generous in heart, ridiculed and defiled by revelers from all over the world, and nicknamed “Dunka” in Moscow, he opened a plastic school for proletarian children. The ballerina Balashova, who left Russia, was assigned to her in Prechistenka.”

The first meeting of Yesenin and Duncan, which took place in the apartment of the avant-garde artist Georges Yakulov, on the poet’s birthday, October 3, 1921, is described very differently, but combined with the fact that they immediately felt familiar. Yesenin refused to speak any language other than Russian in principle, and Duncan spoke English, knowing only a few Russian words. The dancer’s press secretary, Ilya Schneider, explained how Yesenin burst into the workshop and asked “Where is Duncan?” He remembered yelling. – and then knelt before her, lay down on the sofa, stroked her hair. “He read me his poems, I didn’t understand anything but I heard it was music and these poems were written by a genie!” said Isadora later.

Duncan Yesenin’s work did not really appreciate, even before the wedding he spoke with his friend poetess Elizaveta Styrskaya: “I want to write, but she dances. I don’t like to dance. I do not understand them. I hate to hear you get applauded in the theatre. It’s non-Russian art, so I don’t like it.”

Anatoly Mariengof, Yesenin’s close friend, recalled the scene of the first meeting between Yesenin and Duncan in a completely different way, and according to his version, Isadora was the main initiator of the acquaintance: “Duncan arrived at the first hour of the night. Red, flowing chiton in soft curves, red hair with copper reflections, large body, walks with light and soft steps. He looked around the room with eyes like plates made of blue tiles and fixed them on Yesenin. A small soft mouth smiled at him. Isadora lay down on the sofa, and Yesenin at her feet. She plunged her hand into her tresses and shouted, “Solotaia golova!” she said. One way or another, but around four o’clock in the morning they parted together, and then they were often seen together – in Moscow cafes, theaters, parties – a blond attractive young man and an attractive mature woman, experiencing. partly maternal feelings for him. They immediately became the main topic of discussion in bohemian circles, and this did not seem to bother them at all.

Duncan had previously promised never to marry, but he broke his vow to take Yesenin with him on a journey to Europe and America, from which he no longer wanted to part. Moscow life clearly did not work out, and this, of course, was quite predictable, at the same time, the dancer continued to be invited on tour to the USA and Europe. In addition, her mother died in Paris, and the couple began to urgently prepare for separation to make it easier for them to go through all the bureaucratic procedures. But even before the trip, they quarreled with dishonoring, assault, loud scandals and breakups, but up to a point they always turned to each other.

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Isadora Duncan and Sergei Yesenin

AP

In the autumn of 1922, when Yesenin found himself abroad with Duncan, visiting a long series of countries, he was soon forced to accept a simple truth: no one knew him as a poet, but only as a friend of the great Duncan. . Thus, while walking around New York and seeing a photo of himself on the front page of one of the newspapers in the window of a newsstand, Yesenin was very surprised. I bought a dozen newspapers, I’m hurrying home, I think – I need to send it to someone else, ”he said in letters to his friends. – And I ask someone to translate the signature under the portrait. They translate for me:

“Russian peasant Sergei Yesenin is the husband of the famous, unique, attractive dancer Isadora Duncan, with immortal talent …” etc. could not calm down. Here is your victory! That evening I went down to the restaurant and drank too much as I recall. I drink and cry. I really want to go home.”

In August 1923, Isadora finally returned Sergei to Moscow and immediately left him alone in Paris, and at last she told the same Ilya Schneider: “I brought this boy home, but I have nothing else to do with him.” This is where the story of their relationship actually ended. About his wife, whom he once admired, Yesenin already said completely rude things to his friends: “Here she is stuck, it sticks like molasses!”, “Izadora, adye”, “A woman who, besides a stranger, is ridiculous.” In October of the same year, he sent her a “victorious” telegram: “I love someone else. Married and happy ”(the original version was even more defiant). However, the “other”, to which Yesenin later returned easily, as if not leaving, was a journalist Chekist, whose most devoted admirer, admirer and voluntarily secretary, Galina Benislavskaya, with whom Yesenin never married. Later he left his memories and committed suicide at the poet’s grave at the Vagankovsky cemetery.

Isadora Duncan never let her say a single bad word publicly about her only husband, even after her suicide in 1925 – she tried to protect him from press attacks in the room of the Leningrad hotel where they were staying after the marriage. He wrote to Parisian newspapers with the following letter: “The news of Yesenin’s tragic death caused me the deepest pain. She had youth, beauty, genius… She destroyed her young and beautiful body, but her soul will forever live in the souls of the Russian people and all those who love poets… I categorically protest nonsense. and the unreliable statements published by the American press in Paris… I mourn his death with bitterness and despair.”

Isadora passed away a year and a half after Yesenin’s death. As was her custom that day, she was riding a cabriolet in a long draped scarf—and the hem of that scarf slipped behind the wheel of the car and she wrapped herself around the bars. The ensuing tugboat broke her neck, she.