Sergei Yesenin

Sergei Aleksandrovich Yesenin (1895 to 1925) was a Russian lyric poet, one of the most popular Russian poets of the twentieth century. Born into a peasant family in the village of Konstantinovo in the Ryazan region, he began writing poems as a boy, moved to Moscow in 1912 and to Petrograd in 1915, where Alexander Blok and others helped launch his career and he joined the circle of peasant poets. His early verse, collected in Radunitsa (1916), draws on village life, folklore and religious themes. After the revolutions he helped found the imaginist movement with Anatoly Marienhof in 1918, and he wrote the long poems Pugachev, The Black Man and Anna Snegina, the last of which came out in 1925. His life was marked by four marriages, among them one to the dancer Isadora Duncan, by stories of heavy drinking, by arrests and by hospital stays in 1924. He died in Leningrad on 28 December 1925 at the age of thirty, and he is buried at the Vagankovo Cemetery in Moscow.