Sergei Yesenin arrived in Petersburg at twenty with a notebook of poems and — deliberately, they say — in bast shoes. Blok recommended him to the editors. Within a year he was famous.
He was born in Konstantinovo, in Ryazan province, in 1895. A peasant family, an Old Believer grandfather. Then Moscow, Petersburg. Radunitsa was his first collection.
"I do not regret, do not call, do not weep," "Letter to My Mother," "Shagane, my Shagane," "The Black Man" — a lyric poetry of the village, of youth, of a Russia passing away.
Isadora Duncan, the American dancer: a marriage that lasted a few years. Scandals, drinking, a psychiatric clinic.
In December 1925, in the Angleterre hotel in Leningrad, he wrote a last poem in his own blood and hanged himself. He was thirty years old.