In what city did Yesenin die. The death of Sergei Yesenin: what really happened Recognition and disappointment
Yesenin's death is described here. With the events of the last day of life, the cause, date, time and place of death are indicated. Posthumous photos, photos of funerals and graves are given. Therefore, all people with an unstable psyche, as well as persons under the age of 21, this information is categorically not recommended for viewing.
Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin
21/09/1895 — 28/12/1925
Cause of death of Sergei Yesenin
According to the generally accepted, official version, Yesenin hanged himself at the age of 30. However, the scale of Yesenin's personality is so great, and the odious acts and habits of Sergei Alexandrovich, complex relations with the current government and the criminal code open up a wide field for disputes about the reasons for the death of the poet. Perhaps even fewer adherents of the alternative version of death. With the light hand of Eduard Khlystalov, a number of questions and conflicting facts regarding the death of Yesenin went to the masses. At the disposal of anyone who wishes are very high-quality posthumous photographs and death masks of Sergei Alexandrovich, documents of the criminal case, testimonies, which allows each person who has watched the series with Bezrukov to form their own “truly correct” idea of the picture of the tragedy.
Court. honey. Expert Gilyarevsky:
Based on the autopsy data, it should be concluded that Yesenin's death was due to asphyxia, produced by squeezing the airways through hanging.
The act of opening the body of Yesenin Date and place of death
Yesenin died on December 28, 1925, in Leningrad, at the Angleterre Hotel. The act of death occurred presumably at 5 o'clock in the morning.
A little about the place of the tragedy: from the French Hotel d'Angleterre is translated as the hotel "England" in our time is located in the very center of St. Petersburg, overlooking the Issakievsky Park and St. Isaac's Cathedral, st. Malaya Morskaya, 24, St. Isaac's Square.
In 1987, the hotel building was completely destroyed; accordingly, room No. 5, where Sergey Alexandrovich died, was not preserved. However, in 1991 the hotel was rebuilt. Now it is functioning, accepting guests. In Yesenin's time, room number 5 was something akin to a modern "suite". That is, not for everyone, but for party functionaries, prominent people, the elite.
Room No. 5 of the Angleterre Hotel, after the death of Yesenin. Photo by Moses Solomonovich Nappelbaum.
Yesenin's death. Parting
The farewell ceremony with the poet took place in Leningrad on December 29, and then in Moscow, where Yesenin's body was delivered by train. It is known that Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin was buried according to the Christian rite, contrary to the rule of the church, which forbids the funeral of suicides. The funeral took place on December 31, 1925.
The funeral of S. Yesenin. On the right is the mother and sister of Sergei Alexandrovich 
Burial place of Sergei Yesenin
Sergei Yesenin is buried at the 17th section of the Vagankovsky cemetery in Moscow. At the moment, his mother Yesenina Tatyana Fedorovna, who died in 1955, is buried next to Sergei Alexandrovich.
Grave of S. Yesenin, Moscow, Vagankovsky cemetery, today. Earlier, the grave of Sergei Alexandrovich looked different:
Yesenin's grave before the installation of the monument. The poet's mother at her son's grave. In the 80s, the grave looked like this:
The first monument on the grave of S. Yesenin Yesenin's death. Circumstances.
Yesenin's suicide act was compiled by the district warden of the 2nd department of the Leningrad police on December 28, 1925. By the hand of the district warden N. Gorbov.
On December 28, 1925, this act was drawn up by me, the district warden of the 2nd department. LGM N. Gorbov in the presence of the manager of the hotel "International" comrade. Nazarov and witnesses. According to a telephone message from the hotel manager, citizen Nazarov Vasily Mikhailovich, about a citizen hanging himself in a hotel room. Arriving at the place, I found a man hanging on the central heating pipe in the following form, his neck was not tightened with a dead loop, but only on one side of the neck, his face was turned to the pipe and grabbed the pipe with his right hand, the corpse hung under the very ceiling, and the feet were about 1.5 meters from the floor, near the place where the hanged man was found, there was an overturned pedestal, and the candelabra standing on it lay on the floor.
When removing the corpse from the rope and examining it, a bruise was found on the right arm above the elbow, under the left eye, dressed in gray trousers, a white nightgown, black socks and black patent leather shoes. According to the submitted documents, the hanged man turned out to be Sergey Alexandrovich Yesenin, a writer who arrived from Moscow on December 24, 1925. Shopping center certificate No. 42-8516, and a power of attorney to receive 640 rubles in the name of Erlich.
Manager - Nazarov
Witnesses (signatures illegible)
Policeman (signature illegible)
District warden of the 2nd department. LGM - N. Gorbov
We leave you, our readers, to judge the reasons that caused Yesenin's death. Here are just the facts:
- At the time of his death, 13 criminal cases were opened against Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin, including the "case of 4 poets."
- On December 21, 1925 (a week before his death), Yesenin left the Gannushkin psychiatric hospital. Whether Sergey Alexandrovich was hiding from the court there or was treating depression now no one will say for sure. But the fact remains: Yesenin was undergoing treatment in a psychiatric clinic.
- Nikolai Leopoldovich Brown refused to sign the protocol, where Yesenin's death was directly called suicide, claiming that the poet had been killed. And Boris Lavrenyov, who was also in Angleterre, published the article “Executed by degenerates” the next day.
- All eyewitnesses of those events note the depression, depression and fatalism of Sergei Alexandrovich before his death. The doctor who treated Sergei Aleksandrovich's drunkenness spoke directly to his relatives about the poet's suicidal intentions.
Yesenin's death. Details
To all apologists for the version of the murder, we recommend a rather curious book by Viktor Kuznetsov, which is called "The Secret of Yesenin's Death". This is a whole scientific study, the sources of which were the archival and documentary funds of the Cheka-GPU-NKVD.
Kuznetsov is a supporter of the murder version. In his book, he gives arguments convincingly proving this version.
We call on everyone to take part in this action and put your signature
PETITION
Running after everything speeding up its movement to a new "train"-epoch broke the strength of the poet. More and more often he speaks about his life in the past tense: “everything rolled away”, “everything flew ... far away ... past ... my heart went cold and my eyes faded”, “I lived everything”, “I lived this life as if by the way, along with others on earth ... ".
From the height of the past years, he is surprised at the past mischief, fun:
Oh, it happened, you break your hat,
Yes, you will lay a horse in the shafts,
Yes, lie down on an armful of hay, -
Just remember what my name was.And where did the posture come from ....
Quite naturally, against this background, the motive of leaving, saying goodbye to life arises:
In the soul - the lemon light of sunset ...,
………………………………
Flowers say goodbye to me
Bowing their heads down,
That I will never see
Her face and fatherland,
………………………
And this deathly trembling
How to accept a new kindness ....
The poet increasingly thinks about his own death as something close and inevitable:
I don't know if I'm sick
Or not sick
But only thoughts
They roam randomly.
In the ears of the grave
The sound of shovels
With a distant sob
Belfry.Himself Deceased
In the coffin I see
Under the alleluia
The groans of the deacon.
I am forever dead to myself
I go lower
Laying on them
Two copper patches.
All the poet asks to be given "in the homeland of the beloved ... die in peace" .
The feeling of fatigue, doom grew like a snowball. Feeling like "like a horse driven in soap", you won't get far. The denouement was approaching...
“Hopeless sadness… has become my song…”
A very important prerequisite for Yesenin's suicide is the tragic component of the poet's worldview.
Hopeless sadness
In the quiet crackle of coals
By my fire
Became my song
says the author of Sick Thoughts. In style, imitative, student, in content, these lines are already Yesenin's. The high tragic note once taken will remain a characteristic feature of Yesenin's artistic world throughout all the years of his work.
The origins of the tragic worldview are in the mental trauma received in childhood.
In our work of 1993 it is said: “The poet was very early disappointed in parental love. This disappointment was due to the circumstances of his childhood ... From the age of two, Yesenin was given to be raised by his grandfather's family ... he felt infinitely lonely ... he dreamed of the time when his parents would take him to their place, ”but the“ loving ”mother was in no hurry for her son, ” and “at some point an event was to occur that finally destroyed the child’s faith in parental love ... given the circumstances of childhood ... the confession of Yesenin the young man is easily explained: “morally, the mother died for me a long time ago ...” ... the poet’s estrangement from his parents continued later » . Modern Russian researchers N. Kubanev and L. Nabilkina, participants in the annual conference in Yesenin's homeland, note: “Yesenin's neurotic character comes from childhood, or rather from relationships with his mother. Yesenin had a very difficult and far from rosy relationship with his mother. Sergei was neither a long-awaited nor a beloved child. The contempt of a healthy, full of strength and natural desires of a beautiful young woman for her "quel" husband, who, moreover, was rarely at home, was transferred to the child. In early childhood, Sergei perceived his mother as a strange woman. A bitter resentment fell on the heart of the future poet and the episode with the shroud: a seriously ill teenager Sergei could not forget his crying mother with "quickly scurrying fingers" that sewed his mortal clothes. So from early childhood, Sergei Yesenin felt inner loneliness, the absence of a dear and loving soul. Thus, it was the psychic trauma experienced in childhood, which consisted in the loss of faith in parental love, that determined Yesenin's tragic worldview.
Already the first literary experiments of Yesenin reveal the sensitivity of the poet's perception to the imperfection of the surrounding world and the human soul. He sees the root, the cause of human suffering and troubles, first of all, in the person himself, in the inertia and conservatism of his nature, which cannot be transformed: “You cannot rebuild a living soul forever.” Only a small part of people - a creatively thinking minority - is able to perceive new ideas, burn with a thirst for self-improvement, but this is such an insignificant part of the total mass that it is not able to have any impact on the life of mankind. “The chant”, calling for transformation, “will stir up ... Bryusov and Blok, will stir up others”, however, everything will remain the same: “the shadow will rise from the east in the same way, the moment will flash in the same way”. The poet is sure that “the face of the earth will not be changed by melodies”, that the evil underlying human nature is eternal: “Forever the deaf hands of the star have stretched out ... Pilate”.
Such judgments of the poet about the “soul” of a person do not allow one to doubt that it was the tragic note that formed the basis, the core of his worldview. Of course, this does not mean that all the richness of the ideological and artistic content of his work was exhausted by it, namely, Yu. Mamleev and O. Voronova reproach me for such a statement. Of course, Yesenin's voice in different periods of creativity, in different works has different, sometimes mutually exclusive, shades. But the statement of this fact does not refute the thesis put forward by us. Pushkin also occasionally has lines of a pessimistic nature (for example: “A gift in vain, an accidental gift, life, why have you been given to me?”), but we don’t classify him on this basis as a tragic poet? There are optimists who fall into melancholy, just as there are pessimists who show signs of unbridled gaiety.
All Yesenin's breakthroughs through the existential dead ends of existence towards the light ended in disappointment and denial of light. The point is not only in the quantitative predominance of works with tragic content, but also in the predominance of quality, which is manifested in the ideological and artistic evolution of Yesenin's themes. From what does the lyrical hero of the poet come to what? From glorifying the homeland, whose “cow's eyes” “there is no better, no more beautiful”, to disappointment (“What is the homeland? Are these dreams? in a cycle of “revolutionary” poems to a bitter conclusion: only “peck and pipe” remained from the revolution, from the hope of finding harmony in love for its loss (as happened with the lyrical hero of “Love of a Hooligan” and “Persian Motifs”).
As an existentialist romantic, Yesenin showed himself not only in his attitude, but also in the images of his work.
The existential horror of the artist before the insoluble contradictions of life, its "lead abominations", which drew into the abyss of despair, is captured in the poems "I am the last poet of the village ...", "The Song of Bread", "Mysterious world, my ancient world ...", poems "Sorokoust ”,“ Black Man ”, etc. This is“ a farewell mass of birches scorching leaves ”, and“ wooden moon clocks ”, which“ croak ... the twelfth hour ”of the poet, and“ stone hands of the highway ”,“ squeezing the village by the neck ”, and the image of a "terrible messenger" pulling "five to the throats of the plains" .
One of the most life-affirming images of Russian folklore, peasant poetry is the image of the harvest. The poet's perception so alters the traditional image of this bright holiday that the very process of harvest appears almost like a universal apocalypse:
Sickle cuts heavy ears,
How swans are cut down the throat.Our field has long been familiar
With an August shiver in the morning.
Tied up in sheaves of straw,
Each sheaf lies like a yellow corpse.On carts, like hearses,
They are taken to the grave crypt - barn.
Like a deacon, barking at a mare,
The charioteer honors the funeral rank.And then them carefully, without anger,
They lay their heads on the ground
And flails little bones
Knocked out of thin bodies.No one will get up in the head,
That straw is also flesh!..
Ogre-mill - teeth
They put those bones in their mouths to grind them.And, fermenting the dough from the chalk,
Heaps of delicious dishes are baked ...
That's when the whitish poison enters
Put eggs of malice in the jug of the stomach.
The death of one gives life to another - such is the immutable law of nature. It is against the law of death, which makes the existence of any individual finite, that existentialism as a philosophical direction is directed; it is against death, understood in an existentialist way, that the hero of Yesenin's poem rises.
What is not an existentialist landscape depicted in a poem
Like it's raining
From the soul, a little dead,
……………………………………………
Like a graveyard, a garden is dotted
Gnawed bones in birches
and in the poem “Are you my side, side!” :
A cold lantern in a black puddle
Reflects a lipless head ...,
……………………………………….
...between the skeletons of houses
Like a miller, the bell tower carries
Copper bags of bells,
and also in the poem "The golden grove dissuaded":
... every wanderer in the world -
Pass, enter and leave the house again,
………………………………………………………
I stand alone in the middle of the naked plain ...,
………………………………………………………
In the garden, a fire of red rowan is burning,
But he can't warm anyone?
Thus, our attempt to pave the path from the poet's attitude to the existentialist perception of reality is fully justified. It was the existential horror of the heavy tread of the new time, the fear of the inevitability of the entry of man and mankind into a new, post-industrial era, the feeling of the catastrophic nature of what is happening, giving rise to Yesenin's aching melancholy, fear of the new in life, and led to the need to be distracted, to forget:
I'm on all this rusty shit (my italics - A.L.)
I will squint my eyes and narrow ...,
……………………………………………..
And I myself, bowing my head,
I fill my eyes with wine
So as not to see the fateful face,
To think for a moment about something else.
The tragic perception of reality is dangerous not in itself, but in its possible consequences. Together with other factors discussed above (the instability of the poet's emotional sphere, the painful experience of alienation, the collapse of social illusions), the pessimistic worldview convinced the poet of the meaninglessness of existence and the justification of "leaving". But all these factors are only prerequisites for suicide, but not its real cause. The reason is always material, material, it can almost be touched, felt, watching the throwing of an individual immersed in melancholy.
Still, every person is given the strongest instinct of self-preservation, which day and night stands guard over his life.
What reason lulled the vigilance of the instinct, weakened its control over the situation and thereby predetermined the course of events according to a tragic scenario?
Further understanding of the problem will require other - medical criteria for its solution.
“Alcohol showers brains…”
In my opinion, the immediate cause of Yesenin's suicide lies in the field of medicine. I see at least two reasons convincingly explaining the poet's suicide.
The first of them is connected with the so-called “death instinct”, “love of death”, discovered by Z. Freud, the desire of any organic matter to return back to its original inorganic state.
The existence of an unconscious striving for death is easily confirmed by the images and motives of the poet's work.
In a number of poems, Yesenin's hero calls for death:
... it's better then hurry up
Let me go to the grave
Only there I can and only in it
Heal all broken forces,
………………………………………………………………..
I want to die ,
………………………………………………………………..
Learn to be able
Never wake up
………………………………………………………………..
Would choke in this frenzy,
My last, only friend, etc.
Anticipating a tragic "point" at the end, at the very beginning of his creative path, the poet creates a poem "Confessions of a Suicide", which is a dying monologue of a person who decided to end his life. The reasons that prompt the suicide to take this step lie not in the social, but in the personal sphere. It is not society that is to blame for the rejection of life, but the "cold poison in the soul" of a suicide, which does not allow him to "live among people." He says:
And what he lived and what he loved
I myself (my italics - A.L.) madly poisoned.
With my proud soul
I passed happiness side.
Human life in the poem is interpreted as a "funeral song".
Suicide is also mentioned in the poem "Mermaid on New Year's Eve", in which the heroine of the poem, and in fact the poet himself, is obsessed with the desire to take his own life.
In the poem "I'm tired of living in my native land ..." he predicts the way to leave:
In the green evening under the window
I will hang myself on my sleeve.
But the murder weapon was not yet known for sure:
Listen, filthy heart,
My dog's heart.
I'm on you like a thief
He hid the blade in his sleeve.Whether sooner or later I will plant
In the ribs of cold steel.
This poem was written down by the author in the diary of M. P. Murashov at an evening of writers after listening to Glinka's works “Do not tempt ...” and “Doubt”. On the same evening it was read by A. Blok. The latter asked Yesenin: “Sergey Alexandrovich, did you write this seriously or were you influenced by the music?” “Seriously,” Yesenin answered in a barely audible voice.
The poem "Listen, filthy heart ..." is one of the most pessimistic in Yesenin's lyrics. The hero explains the craving for death by the impossibility of finding meaning in life. “If there is anything in the world, it is one void,” he concludes. The ideal of humanity in the form of a just, humanistic world order appears in the poem in the form of an “eternal rotten distance”, to which the poet is tired of “strive”.
In a letter to Masha Balzamova - one of his first, timid loves - the poet admits to his first suicide attempt: “I felt sorry for myself. I could not stand the fact that empty tongues were chattering about me, and ... and now my chest hurts because of it. I drank, though not very much, essences. My breath caught, and for some reason foam began to appear; I was conscious, but in front of me everything was a little obscured by some kind of turbid haze. Then - I don’t know why myself, I suddenly started drinking milk, and everything went away ... ”
The motif of "love for death", widely represented in the early lyrics of the poet, is intensified in his work of the last two years.
The poet complains of fatigue from life, speaks of some serious illness:
I'm tired of living in my native land,
………………………………………………………………….
Tilted over and weighed down
My golden head
……………………………………………………
I'm tired of torturing myself aimlessly,
And with a smile of a strange face
I liked to wear in a light body
Quiet light and peace of the dead (my italics - A.L.),
……………………………………………………………………
Possessed by severe epilepsy,
I became a soul, like a yellow skeleton.
In 1925, Yesenin carried out a long-standing plan and wrote a cycle of "winter" poems. In these verses, the motif of “cooling” to life clearly sounds, the “heart” of the poet “cooled”, and his eyes “faded”, “everything is gone! Thinned my hair ... ", the hero "lived everything. The young men are happy, but for me only the memory of a snowy night is dashingly hushed up. The main idea that pervades the poet's "winter" verses can be expressed by the word "eh ...", which is repeatedly repeated in them.
In Yesenin's "winter" cycle, one of the central motifs is "farewell". The poet says goodbye to youth, to life, to his native side and stepfather's house:
That's why I almost cried
And, smiling, the soul went out, -
This hut on the porch with a dog
It's like I see it for the last time.
Determining the state of the poet in the last years of his life, the critic F. Zhits wrote: “One day I had to see the terrible breath of a hunting bag while hunting - the wings of a not accurately killed woodcock rustled in it. It is this rustling bag that seems to me the work of Yesenin of the last, most mature period.
Actually, everything in Yesenin led to death. He was looking for death, how else to explain the endless drunken scandals, after which he ended up in Bolshevik prisons, lines like “I am ready to go even to a duel”, actualization in Pushkin’s poems “Blessed is he who has not drunk to the bottom and has not listened to the sound of the flute”?
Still, I personally think another cause of Yesenin's death is more likely. The poet suffered from alcoholism.
Alcoholism - in the case of Yesenin - was a secondary disease (that is, due to another, true disease - melancholy, fear of reality that did not suit the poet, trends in the development of civilization, disagreement with the rules of life accepted in society). In The Black Man, the poet's double speaks of this: “Happiness ... is the dexterity of the mind and hands. All awkward souls behind the unfortunate are always known. It's nothing that broken and deceitful gestures bring a lot of torment. In thunderstorms, in storms, in the coldness of life, with heavy losses and when you are sad, seeming smiling and simple is the highest art in the world. Here it is, the real disease, the reason for the development of alcoholism - the alienation and self-alienation of the individual in the modern world, the need to appear, and not to be in a socially and morally degraded society, to constantly “play” the prescribed social role, not to be sincere, not to be yourself.
But whatever the cause of alcoholism itself, this does not make its course any less devastating and destructive.
The development of the disease of chemical dependence is mostly beyond the scope of lyrics, but the symptoms of the disease are well known to modern medicine: the formation of mental and physical dependence on the drug, personality degradation, chronic intoxication of the body and its gradual destruction, the occurrence of somatic and mental diseases (in the case of Yesenin, alcoholic delirium or at least hallucinosis). From 50 to 80% of suicides worldwide are committed as a result of mental states caused by alcoholism. This is an established fact. And, I am sure, it was the alcoholic personality change, the deformation of the psyche that pushed the poet to a fatal step. This was the main component of the death of the poet, the main reason for his premature departure.
Like any poet, Yesenin thought a lot about death, wrote about it, thereby getting rid of melancholy. But all this did not mean the inevitability of suicide. Yesenin and the poem written in blood, I am sure, handed it over to his Leningrad "friend" in order to be saved, saved, stopped (he felt the approach of the "bony"). The tragedy of the poet is that there was no really close, close, not indifferent person to the fate of the poet, who would feel the gravity of the situation, listen, regret, warn, warm with the warmth of his soul.
Today we are talking about alcoholism as the most acute problem of modern Russia. As if in this the great national poet shared the common fate of the Russian people, drank to the dregs the cup of poison, which since the time of Boris Godunov has been persistently treated to the Russian people by rulers indifferent to his fate.
In this sense, the fate of Yesenin should become a lesson for future generations of Russians, who, I hope, will be able to get rid of their harmful addiction and revive the Russian nation.
conclusions
An analysis of the circumstances of Yesenin's death leads us to the conclusion that the poet's suicide occurred as a result of the development of alcohol phobia. It was not Yesenin who committed suicide, he was killed by a "black" double, who managed to "turn off" the poet's consciousness.
With an altered consciousness, Yesenin could think that he was being pursued, he could hear sounds, voices, see people and simply fantastic creatures that persuaded him to commit suicide, frightened him, threatened him. Suicide committed under such circumstances is always spontaneous, and suicides never leave suicide notes. They just don't have time for it.
Thus, Sergei Yesenin was not killed by Trotsky, not Blumkin, and not one of the poet's enemies, he was killed by the main killer of a Russian man, who accounted for much more Russian lives than all the tyrants put together - a drug called "alcohol ”, the main killer and plague of the twentieth century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Arinshtein L. Yesenin's disappeared letter // Literary Russia. - 1989. - September 29. – S. 21.
2. Banchukov R. Myths about the death of Sergei Yesenin [Electronic resource]. – Access Mode: http://www.vestnik.com/issues/98/1208/koi/banch.htm. – Date of access: 31. 03. 2009.
3. In the world of Yesenin: Sat. Art. : / On the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the birth // Comp. A. A. Mikhailov, S. S. Lesnevsky. M. : Sov. Writer, 1986. - 656 p.
4. Voronova O. E. World Yesenian Studies: Modern Aspects of the Interpretation of S. A. Yesenin’s Creativity // Bulletin of the Ryazan State Pedagogical University. S. A. Yesenina. - 2003. - No. 1 (9). - S. 48 - 57.
5. Voronsky A.K. In memory of Yesenin: (From the memories) // Krasnaya Nov. - 1926. - No. 2. - S. 207-214.
6. Yesenin S. A. Selected works. - M .: Fiction, 1983. - 432 p.
7. Yesenin S. A. Collected works: In 6 volumes - M .: Fiction, 1977 - 1980. - 6 volumes.
8. Zhits F. Why do we love Yesenin (sketch) // Krasnaya Nov. - 1926. - No. 5. - S. 216-222.
9. Kubanev N. A., Nabilkina, L. N. Sergey Yesenin - "Russian Hamlet"? [Electronic resource]. – Access mode: http://www.. – Access date: 03/31/2009.
10. Lagunovsky A. M. The artistic concept of reality in the work of S. Yesenin (the problem of alienation) [Text]: author. Dis... cand. philol. Sciences. - Minsk: 1993. - 21 p.
11. Mamleev Yu. V. Yesenin and the crisis of modern civilization // Century
Sergei Yesenin: International Symposium. M., 1997. Issue. 3. - S. 368-375.
12. Khlystalov E. A. Unknown Yesenin // Moscow. - 1990. - No. 8. - S. 198-199.
The cause of Sergei Yesenin's suicide
The article proves that the initial reason for Sergei Yesenin’s suicide was the negative emotional conditions surrounding the poet during all his life. Among them were the peculiarities of the artist’s emotional sphere, his traits of character such as excessive vulnerability, suspiciousness, drastic mood alterations; excruciating experience of self-alienation, alienation from the society, caused by the failure of his social hopes (degeneration of the Revolution, anxiety about the lot of the state and Russian rural population); psychic trauma experienced in childhood which is called forth his tragic worldview. All the reasons mentioned had a destructive impact upon the poet's mind; they led to the necessity of finding oblivion and, as a result, caused his chronic alcoholism. Mental phenomena begotten by the disease such as alcoholic delirium and hallucinosis led to the tragedy in the Hotel Angleterre. Website of Alexander Lagunovsky
Goodbye my friend, goodbye.
My dear, you are in my chest.
Destined parting
Promises to meet in the future.
Goodbye, my friend, without a hand, without a word,
Do not be sad and do not sadness of the eyebrows, -
In this life, dying is not new,
But to live, of course, is not newer.
Farewell poem by S. Yesenin.
On December 28, 1925, the body of the best poet of the young Republic of Soviets, Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin, was found in an expensive room in the Leningrad hotel "Angleterre" ("International").
The poet's life ended at the age of 30.
He left the mortal world at the peak of his creativity...
His death is one of the mysteries of the 20th century.
And for more than 90 years, the death of the poet has haunted historians, researchers and admirers of his work.
What really happened at the Angleterre Hotel?
And to this day, fierce disputes about whether he committed suicide or was killed do not stop, do not subside ...
Before dwelling on the circumstances of the death of the poet, I would like, albeit briefly, to talk about the last years of Yesenin's life.
I must say that in these - the last - years of the poet's life, he was subjected to massive psychological persecution.
E. A. Khlystalov in the book “The Secret of the Angleterre Hotel” wrote:
“Impractical in life, easily excitable, hating lies and hypocrisy, in addition to a huge number of friends and admirers, with his directness he made open and secret enemies, easily provoked scandals, always remaining wrong. They wrote anonymous letters to him, threatened him with murder, repeatedly attempted on his life, severely beaten, robbed and robbed. Knowing the value of his work, a vulnerable and “unprotected” person, he was very upset by the bans on the publication of his poems, when at that time mediocre poets were printed in millions of copies.
S. A. Yesenin could not remain indifferent and gave a decisive rebuff to literary mediocrity and adventurers. It is in his fundamental assessments of the "creations" of the then poets that the main reason for his well-known performances, nicknamed scandals for some reason, lies. He was openly persecuted, skillful intrigues were woven, and gossip was spread. Finally, he was publicly declared an anti-Semite, which at that time was one of the most serious crimes.
I must say that many writers of the new wave did not hide their hatred for the Russian poet Yesenin.
They openly persecuted him, weaved skillful intrigues against him, spread gossip, anecdotes, fables.
He was repeatedly beaten and declared an anti-Semite.
- Well, what an anti-Semite I am! - he tearfully complained to his constant adherents, who loved to cling to his fame and at the same time drink and eat tightly at his expense. - I love Jews, they love me too. I have Jewish children. I am the same - anti-Georgian ...
But Yesenin was subjected not only to psychological persecution.
In addition, the Chekists did not leave him alone.
The poet was constantly under their supervision and surveillance (beginning on January 11, 1920 - after his speech at the Domino cafe, as a poet "looking for scandalous speeches against the Soviet regime").
Yesenin's contemporaries wrote in their memoirs that they often had to run with the poet through the gateways, confusing the tracks in order to break away from the "tail".
And all because Yesenin allowed himself to have his own opinion on any issue. And it was not always flattering for party apparatchiks.
Unlike many, he always spoke out loud.
Soon he was labeled an "enemy of Soviet power"
- You what? Do you really think I'm a counterrevolutionary? - he asked his friend poet V. Erlich. - Drop it! If I were a counter-revolutionary, I would behave differently! I'm just at home. Understand? At home! And if I don't like something, I scream! That's my right. Just because I'm at home. I will not allow a White Guard to say about Soviet Russia what I say myself. This is mine, and I am the judge of this!
13 criminal cases were fabricated against Yesenin!
As a counter-revolutionary, Yesenin repeatedly sat in the Lubyanka.
About his first imprisonment in this prison on December 4, 1920, he wrote to his friend Ivanov-Razumnik:
“Dear Razumnik Vasilyevich!
Forgive me, for God's sake, for not being able to answer your letter and postcard. So it all happened unexpectedly and stupidly. I already got ready for 25 Oct. to leave, and suddenly instead of Petersburg I had to find myself in a prison of the Cheka. This somehow stunned me, offended me, and I had to weather for a long time. A lot has accumulated during these 2 1/2 years, in which we did not see each other. I tried to write to you many times, but our careless Russian life, which is like an inn, knocked the pen out of my hands every time. I wonder how else I could write so many poems and poems during this time. Of course, the internal restructuring was great. I am grateful for everything that stretched out my gut, put it into shape and gave it a tongue. But I lost everything that made me happy before from my health. I became rotten. Probably, you have already heard something about this ... "
Judging by the letter, on October 25, 1920, Yesenin was already sitting in the Lubyanka. The letter is dated December 4th.
It turns out that the poet was in custody for two and a half months?
In the magazine "Ogonyok" (No. 10) for 1929, a large essay by Chekist T. Samsonov was published under the loud title "A Novel Without Lies" + "Zoyka's Apartment".
The author, admiring his decisive actions, tells how he arrested Yesenin and his companions and sent them to Lubyanka, where he even ordered a group photo of the detainees.
And that was in 1921.
This means that this was already the 2nd "visit" of the poet to the Lubyanka ...
In 1922-1923, for more than a year, Sergei Yesenin traveled around Europe and America.
Upon returning to Moscow, Yesenin developed a stormy activity:
- began to fuss about the formation of a publishing house, where the works of Russian writers and poets would be printed,
- signed collective letters to the government,
- united peasant poets around him.
And then - in the summer of 1923, Yesenin and Trotsky met.
I must say that Leon Trotsky was seriously interested in the poet. And tried to tame him. He "patronized" and "looked after" him with the help of his henchman - Chekist Yakov Blumkin and his son Lev Sedov.
Natalya Sidorina in the book "Golden-domed. Secrets of the life and death of Sergei Yesenin" writes:
“What the poet and tribune of the revolution spoke about in the Kremlin in August 1923, we will never know in detail. Apparently, the tribune made a last attempt to reason with the recalcitrant poet and even offered a large sum of money for publishing needs. Unless Yesenin exaggerates all this in a letter to Isadora Duncan, written on August 20, trying, under a plausible pretext, to escape from the society of the famous dancer.
Trotsky’s readiness to give Yesenin, under certain conditions, money for the publication of a peasant magazine is described in his memoirs (obviously, according to Blumkin or according to rumors) Matvey Roizman and immediately notices that Yesenin refused right in his office, to the displeasure of Blumkin, the organizer of the meeting.
One way or another, but this Kremlin conversation was followed by events that abruptly changed the attitude towards Yesenin on the part of those in power and, above all, Trotsky, as evidenced by the documents of the Secret Department of the GPU. The spring was compressed.
And so, starting in September 1923, Yesenin, every now and then, was detained by police officers.
He was repeatedly taken to the emergency room of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department.
He was charged with hooliganism and incitement to pogroms.
And what's interesting.
The people "injured" by Yesenin came to the nearest police station or called the guard policeman and demanded that the poet be brought to justice, showing good legal training. They even named the articles of the Criminal Code, according to which Yesenin should have been judged.
And in all cases, the detention took place clearly according to the same scenario - Yesenin always found himself in a state of intoxication. As if someone was just waiting for that hour, the moment when he would go out into the street after the feast.
As a rule, the incident began with a trifle. Someone made a remark to Yesenin. That one exploded. They called the policeman. The guardian of order, with the help of janitors, dragged Yesenin to the department by force. The detainee, of course, resisted, called the law enforcement officers bribe-takers, corrupt skins, etc.
Later, reports of representatives of the authorities appeared in the file about threats from the poet, about insulting the worker-peasant police by him.
In all cases, there were other people with Yesenin.
For example, poets A. Ganin, I. Pribludny, A. Mariengof and others.
But they were not only not detained, but they were not even interrogated ...
Alexander Meliksetyan, Candidate of Pedagogical Sciences:
“Look at the last months of the poet's life - continuous persecution and endless provocations. It seems that they are on their heels, catching on anything. Yesenin's entourage is now made up of service people. Rather, he finds himself surrounded by them ...
All the time they kept him at gunpoint ... "
On November 20, 1923, the poets Sergei Yesenin, Alexei Ganin, Sergei Klychkov and Pyotr Oreshin entered the dining room on Myasnitskaya Street.
They bought beer and discussed publishing and the forthcoming meeting in the evening in the Union of Poets. If Yesenin still had some means of subsistence, then Ganin, Klychkov and Oreshin dragged out a beggarly lifestyle. And, of course, they could not rejoice about this.
And a man in a leather jacket settled down at the neighbor's table. It was the responsible controller of the Moscow Union of Consumer Societies, Mark Rodkin.
Under the influence of alcohol, the tongues of the poets were untied. And they began to caustically walk about the current government, while focusing especially on the nationality of the most famous Bolshevik leaders.
Rodkin reprimanded them.
To which Yesenin advised Oreshkin: “Give him a beer in his ear!”
M. V. Rodkin ran out into the street, called the police and accused the poets of anti-Semitic conversations and insulting the leader Trotsky.
Yesenin called him a "Jewish muzzle."
The poets were arrested.
Friends continued to play tricks in the police department.
There they, according to Rodkin, “sang in a distorted form with an emphasis on “r”, imitating a Jewish accent: “We all came out of the nagoda, the children of the Tgudova family ...”
This is how the famous “Case of Four” appeared - “Case No. 2037”.
The poets were accused of “conducting anti-Semitic agitation aimed at inciting ethnic hatred, that is, of a criminal act under Art. 83 of the Criminal Code".
At the same time, furious persecution was launched on the pages of the press. Although the case, as the poet Sasha Krasny (Alexander Davydovich Bryansky) noted, was “empty”.
The poet was accused of all worldly sins. Every single day, 3-5 articles were necessarily printed in newspapers and magazines. They demanded the most severe sentence for the poet.
Leading this persecution:
- Lev Sosnovsky (former criminal, party publicist, supporter of Trotsky, one of the organizers of the execution of the royal family) and
- Boris Volin (organizer of mass executions of peasants in the Vologda, Bryansk and Oryol provinces).
Both of them were editors of Moscow newspapers and magazines.
According to this Sasha Krasny, Yesenin said in those days: "They want to destroy me."
Despite the smear campaign launched by the newspapers against Yesenin demanding severe punishment for the poet, all four were released a few days later. And the case ended in a friendly court.
It took place on December 10, 1923 at the Press House with the active participation of L. S. Sosnovsky.
The poets were charged with "antisocial, hooligan, Black Hundred behavior."
As a result, 4 poets got off with "public censure".
However, the opinion of Yesenin as an anti-Semite took root in the minds of the public, who closely followed the process.
And the newspapers continued to persecute Yesenin.
Articles, notes, feuilletons were published daily.
Their authors demanded the annulment of the decision of the comrades' court and the severe punishment of the anti-Semite.
The poet was boycotted. It was not accepted in editorial offices and publishing houses.
The people began to form an opinion that Yesenin was a “hooligan, drunkard, fist-fist”…
Particular zeal in the persecution of the poet was shown by the "proletcultists", inspired by the people's commissar of education Lunacharsky, Trotsky, Bukharin.
The “drunkard and hooligan”, repeatedly “hewn” by the newspapers, wrote shortly after the friendly court in the article “Russians”:
“There was no more disgusting and filthy time in literary life than the time in which we live. The difficult state of the state over the years in the international struggle for its independence, by accidental circumstances, put forward revolutionary sergeant majors into the arena of literature, who have services to the proletariat, but not at all to art.
Having worked out for themselves the point of view of a common front, where every fog may appear to short-sighted eyes as a dangerous army, these types developed and strengthened Prishibey's morals in literature.
- Rr-a-converge, - they say, so yours, so-and-so. Where is it written that they gathered in the evenings and sang songs?
Some types, being in such a blissful stupor and intoxicated by the fact that in the barnyard and sow passes for the queen, they went so far as to really begin to defend the point of view of the barnyard.
This belongs to the type that is often signed by the surname Sosnowski.
The little potato journalist, taking advantage of the indulgences of the gracious leaders of the proletariat and having as close a relation to literature as a star from heaven to the sole of his boot, has been trumpeting for almost seven years all about the same thing, that modern Russian literature is counter-revolutionary and that the personalities of fellow travelers are subject to very I highly doubt..."
From November 26, 1923, the poet was wanted by the People's Court of the Krasnopresnensky District, because Judge Komissarov issued a decision on his arrest.
The poet was charged with:
- public insult of individual representatives of the authorities in the performance of their official duties,
- counter-revolutionary actions and
- hooliganism.
Employees of the GPU and the police throughout Moscow are looking for Yesenin.
He, not having his own room, spends the night with various friends.
However, the GPU officers could not arrest Yesenin ...
On December 17, 1923, Yesenin was forced to hide from unbridled slander and slander in a dispensary (Bolshaya Polyanka, 52).
He stayed there until the end of January 1924.
One after another, several more criminal cases are initiated against the poet.
They try to judge him, but he is not at the meetings.
On February 13, 1924, he was taken by ambulance to the surgical department of the Sheremetyevo Hospital (now the Sklifosovsky Institute).
The poet was walking or riding in a cab, his hat flew off. He wanted to catch her, slipped, fell on the window pane and cut his hand deeply.
It was here, in a hospital bed, that he wrote his famous Letter to Mother. And the words: “They write to me that you, melting the alarm ...” were written by him because the first days the state of the poet caused fear among the doctors, and they did not let anyone see him. Relatives and friends who came to the hospital wrote notes to him.
Yesenin learned a secret from the attending physician: the GPU and police officers came for him, there is a warrant for arrest.
The doctor refused to hand over the seriously wounded Yesenin to people in leather jackets, saying that he was in critical condition and could not walk. From the doctor, the security officers received an obligation that he would inform the police about the time of the poet's discharge.
Something urgently needed to be done.
In order not to let the doctor down, friends transferred Yesenin for further treatment to the Kremlin hospital.
From there, he was discharged three days later and went into hiding.
Under the then existing system of informing and espionage, it was not difficult for the valiant security officers to find Yesenin in Moscow.
This time the poet was saved by P. B. Gannushkin, a well-known psychiatrist who treated some proletarian leaders and therefore had great authority in society. Having no formal right to do so, he gave Yesenin a certificate that he was suffering from a serious mental illness. And the poet was left alone for a while.
Until September 1924, Yesenin traveled around the cities of the country, appearing in Moscow for several days and disappearing again ...
In an effort to hide from the persecution of the authorities, on September 3, 1924, Yesenin, unexpectedly for everyone, even the closest and dearest, leaves Moscow for Baku.
Goes there without prior arrangement with anyone.
What for?
Why so hasty?
It is quite clear that he fled from the mortal danger that was approaching him.
True, he did not have peace in the Caucasus either.
Arriving in Baku around September 6-7, he ran into Yakov Blumkin at the New Europe Hotel.
It was a well-known provocateur, the murderer of the German ambassador Mirbach. Using the patronage of Trotsky and other leaders, Blumkin could commit any atrocity.
Here he raised a pistol to Yesenin.
Blumkin was barely reassured.
The poet, knowing that he could get away with any crime, leaving his things, fled to Tiflis.
On September 20, he returned to Baku, acquiring a pistol and ready to stand up for himself.
The poet was taken under his protection by the editor-in-chief of the Baku Rabochiy newspaper and the secretary of the Bolshevik Party of Azerbaijan P. I. Chagin. Yesenin was constantly under guard.
He stayed in the Caucasus until the end of February 1925.
And on March 1, 1925 he returned to Moscow. But he did not stay in the capital for a month.
On March 27, Yesenin, unexpectedly for everyone, “drove off to Baku” again.
What made Yesenin again leave the capital, where he had a lot to do with the publication of new poems?
And it was connected with the case of the poet Alexei Ganin.
He hated the leaders of the Bolshevik Party and often stated that the Bolshevik government, being hostile to the peasantry, would soon fall. And that some “new government” will come to replace it. Once he told Yesenin that such a government had already been formed. He offered him the post of Minister of Public Education. And he even added the name of Sergei Yesenin to the proposed list of ministers of the new government.
Upon learning of this, Yesenin flared up, demanded to cross out his last name and advised not to do such things.
Ganin immediately, on a table in a cafe, instead entered the 18-year-old poet Ivan Pribludny.
Together with his like-minded people, Ganin wrote a program to save Russia from the “yoke of the Jewish International”, putting forward the idea of the “Great Zemsky Sobor” and cleansing the country from the “capturers who enslaved it”, by which, of course, the Jews were meant.
Ganin's risky behavior annoyed Yesenin's mistress and secretary, Galina Benislavskaya. She was afraid that he would expose her idol to a blow. It is possible that, being an informant for the OGPU, she provided the Chekists with compromising evidence.
On November 11, 1924, Ganin was arrested in Moscow, in Starokonyushenny Lane, house 33, apartment 3. He was arrested as the head of the Order of Russian Fascists.
During the investigation, Ganin lost his mind and was placed for examination at the Serbsky Institute.
On March 27, 1925, a meeting of the collegium of the GPU on the case of A. Ganin and his friends was scheduled.
Psychiatrists recognized the poet Alexei Ganin as mentally ill, insane.
However, despite this, he was sentenced to death.
And on March 30, the sentence was carried out ...
Did someone warn Yesenin, or did he himself see the danger and hide in the Caucasus?
Natalia Sidorina:
“Who managed to warn Yesenin? Perhaps Galina Benislavskaya, associated with the Cheka. At that time, she was still trying to rescue Yesenin: his romance with Sonya Tolstaya was just beginning (they met on March 5), and she, Galina Benislavskaya, was in charge of all his literary affairs, patiently enduring his inattention to her and, at the same time, without losing hope. True, she already had a new interesting acquaintance, Trotsky's son Lev Sedoy.
Yesenin ended up in the Caucasus.
But the Chekists, of course, did not forget what kind of friendship he had with Ganin ...
I must say that in the eyes of many Chekists and prominent party members, Yesenin was a person not only unreliable, but also politically dangerous. He was considered a "fellow traveler", a person who was rather critical of the Soviet government.
Not coincidentally, in one of his poems, he said:
I'll give my whole soul to October and May,
But I won't give you my sweet lyre.
In addition, the poet more than once spoke negatively about Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev. Yesenin did not remember only Stalin.
Against the backdrop of an intensifying inner-party struggle, his unpredictable lyre could become quite dangerous.
Dmitry Mityurin in the essay “I won’t give Lyra dear ...” writes:
“... The intelligence officers who worked for Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev could only make extremely negative forecasts regarding Yesenin. And since, under certain conditions, the inner-party struggle could spill out onto the streets, the question arose, how would poets behave in such a situation, who, as you know, are more than poets in Russia? And how will the most famous of the poets, Yesenin, behave? Won't he throw a more graceful cry "Kill the Jews, save Russia"? The forecast turned out to be extremely negative, which means that the motive for a political assassination appears to be quite sufficient.”
So Yesenin had every reason to stay away from Moscow.
In early April 1925, in Batumi, he was attacked by unknown persons.
In his letters to Benislavskaya, he wrote:
“I didn’t write in Baku because I’m sick... We were robbed by bandits (at Vardin)... When I found myself without a coat, I caught a very cold.”
In the second letter, he wrote that his illness was "the result of the Batumi cold."
In June 1925 Yesenin returned to Moscow.
But he lived in the capital a little, constantly leaving for his homeland in Konstantinov, to his friends and acquaintances in the Moscow region.
Yesenin rushed around the country, knowing that at any moment he could either be arrested or killed from around the corner.
The poet Nikolai Aseev wrote:
“He began to look around suspiciously and terribly. And leaning across the table towards me, he whispered that he was being watched, that he couldn’t be left alone for a minute, well, yes, he didn’t miss either - and, hitting his pocket, he began to assure that he always had with him " doggy", that he will not be given into his hands alive, etc. ".
For those who don't know, Browning was called "dog".
At this time, the poet broke with Benislavskaya.
He became close with Sophia Tolstaya.
And on July 25 he left for Baku with her.
He wrote a lot there.
On September 6, he was returning by train to Moscow.
There was a scandal. Yesenin wanted to go to the dining car. The GPU guard would not let him in. Diplomatic courier Alfred Roga, who was riding in the car, made a remark to Yesenin. The poet flared up, rudely answered. Another passenger, Yuri Levit (a close acquaintance of the all-powerful Lev Kamenev), entered into the conflict. Yesenin turned to him and insulted his nationality with two words.
Roga and Levit, through the office of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, filed a lawsuit against the poet, demanding "retribution." Court secretary V. Goldberg scribbled threatening instructions to Yesenin. They took a written undertaking not to leave him. Yesenin's position was becoming threatening.
Another criminal case was initiated against Yesenin.
The threat of arrest and trial hung over him again.
Yesenin drank ...
The way out of the difficult situation was suggested by the sisters of the poet Katya and Shura - to "hide" in the clinic of Moscow University.
Sofia Tolstaya agreed with Professor P. B. Gannushkin on the poet's hospitalization.
The poet himself did not agree for a long time.
However, on November 26, 1925, he was still forced to go to a psychiatric clinic (“psychos are not judged”).
Professor Pyotr Gannushkin took care of him here, protecting him from bailiffs and all those who sought, by all means, to “put” him in prison.
He even gave him a certificate for this:
"Certificate
The office of the psychiatric clinic hereby certifies that the patient Yesenin S.A. has been treated in a psychiatric clinic since November 26 of this year. and to the present; due to his health, he cannot be interrogated in court.
Clinical assistant Gannushkin.
Chekists came to the clinic to arrest Yesenin, but the doctors did not extradite him.
Eduard Khlystalov:
“Feeling safe, the poet began to work actively. A strict regime, the care of doctors, regular meals had a positive effect on his health. Friends and acquaintances who visited Yesenin in the clinic noted the poet's excellent appearance, wit and high spirits.
From the first day, Yesenin was loved by all the clinic staff. The drunkard, anti-Semite, hooligan and treacherous seducer of women's hearts known in the newspapers actually turned out to be completely different: modest, childishly shy, friendly and constantly smiling. There was really no arrogance, narcissism."
In the clinic, Yesenin wrote 15 poems. Including such masterpieces as: “You are my fallen maple, icy maple ...”, “You don’t love me, you don’t regret ...”, “Who am I? What am I? Only a dreamer…” etc.
According to the condition, the poet had to be treated for two months.
However, he soon felt the danger to his life and decided to leave the hospital at an opportunity.
On December 21, Yesenin was able to leave the clinic and never returned to it.
The attending physician Aronson visited relatives and acquaintances and asked them to persuade the poet to come back.
On December 22 and 23, Yesenin went to publishing houses. Visited A. R. Izryadnova and son George (Yuri), daughter Tatyana and ex-wife Zinaida Reich.
At night he left for Leningrad.
Only a few people knew about it. He always carefully concealed from everyone where he was leaving.
This time I trusted only Vasily Nasedkin.
He was known from joint studies before the revolution at the Shanyavsky People's University. In addition, Nasedkin became his relative by marrying his sister, Ekaterina Yesenina. Before the trip, Yesenin did not have time to receive a fee and asked Nasedkin to send him money to the address of the Leningrad poet V. Erlich.
On the morning of December 24, Yesenin arrived in Leningrad.
At the station, he hired a cab and came with things to Wolf Erlich.
He arranged for him not in an apartment, but in the Angleterre Hotel in number five on the second floor. This hotel was intended for responsible persons, Chekists, military and party workers. A person from the outside could not settle in it.
Here Yesenin intended to live permanently and publish a literary magazine.
Arriving at the hotel, Yesenin immediately gathered friends and acquaintances. The Ustinovs lived in the hotel. He knew Georgy Ustinov for a long time, he worked in the Leningrad Vechernyaya Gazeta. His wife - Elizabeth - was 10 years younger and did not work.
Yesenin always had 8-10 people.
He read new poems, talked about his creative and life plans.
He did not hide that he was in a psychiatric clinic.
He intended to start publishing a literary magazine in Leningrad, and asked me to find him an apartment.
He said that he broke up with Sophia Tolstaya. But he did not see any tragedy in breaking up with her.
By this time, Yesenin was receiving 1,000 rubles a month from the State Publishing House for a collection of poems. Then it was a lot of money. Fees came from other editorial offices and publishing houses, that is, the poet was financially provided with prosperity.
In Leningrad, he led a sober lifestyle. Upon arrival, he delivered two half-bottles of champagne to his friends, and in the future there is no information that Yesenin was drunk.
The samovar was constantly boiling on the table. The poet widely treated his friends with delicacies bought in the store.
It should be noted that December 27 was Christmas, then still celebrated in Russian families. On the occasion of this holiday, alcoholic beverages were not sold. And there was only one case when a janitor bought five or six bottles of beer for Yesenin and his company.
In recent months, Yesenin was afraid of murder and constantly kept someone near him.
In the book "The Right to the Song" V. Ehrlich wrote:
“Yesenin stands in the middle of the room, legs apart, and crumples a cigarette. - I cant! You understand? Are you my friend or not? Friend? So here it is! I want us to sleep in the same room. Do not understand? God! I'm telling you for the hundredth time that they want to kill me! I, like a beast, feel it! Well, speak! I agree? - I agree. - Well, that's fine! - He's completely sober. ...Double coupe. Getting ready for sleep. - Yes! I forgot to tell you! But I was right! - What? - And about the fact that they wanted to kill me. Do you know who? Today, when they were saying goodbye, he himself said: “I,” he says, “Sergey Alexandrovich, twice approached your room! Your happiness is that you were not alone, otherwise you would have slaughtered! - Yes, why is he you? - Oh, yes! Nonsense! Well, sleep well."
At the request of Yesenin, Wolf Erlich stayed in the hotel for the first two nights in his room. Perhaps spent the night and the third.
The poet did not advertise his stay in Leningrad. Many of his acquaintances and even old friends did not know about his presence in Leningrad.
In the room, the poet composed poems, read them to Ustinov, Erlich, was full of a thirst to work.
Elizaveta Ustinova remembered that the poet went to the porter and ordered him not to let anyone in: he was afraid of someone from Moscow.
December 27 - Sunday - Yesenin took a bath in the morning.
In the presence of E. Ustinova, he gave V. Erlich a piece of paper. When Ustinova asked permission to read, Yesenin did not allow it. According to Elizabeth and according to Erlich, the poem “Goodbye, my friend, goodbye ...” was written in blood on the sheet. Ustinova Yesenin said that there was no ink in the room, and he wrote the poems in blood. He showed her the hand where she saw fresh scratches.
From about two o'clock a festive table was organized in Yesenin's room. They ate a cooked goose, drank tea. There were no alcoholic drinks.
The room was attended by: Erlich, Ushakovs, writer Izmailov, Ustinovs, artist Mansurov. The poet Ivan Pribludny came in for a short while.
And no one noticed any mental abnormalities in Yesenin that could persuade him to commit suicide.
By six o'clock in the evening there were three of us: Yesenin, Ushakov and Erlich.
According to Erlich, at eight in the evening he went home (Nekrasova street, house 29, apt. 8). And he didn’t stay overnight at Yesenin’s because in the morning he had to go to the doctor’s office and get money for Yesenin. Yesenin and Ushakov remained in the room.
Having reached Nevsky Prospekt, Erlich allegedly remembered that he had forgotten the briefcase where the power of attorney was located. He returned back to the hotel and went to Yesenin's room. Ushakov was gone.
Wolf Erlich:
“I returned from Nevsky for the second time: I forgot my briefcase. Yesenin sat at the table calmly, without a jacket, throwing on a fur coat, and looked through old poems. A folder was spread out on the table. We said goodbye a second time."
Erlich took the briefcase and left.
The newspapers reported that the poet went down to the porter at about ten o'clock in the evening and asked not to let anyone in...
That's all that is known about the last hours of Yesenin's life ...
On the morning of December 28, E. Ustinova came to Yesenin's room and knocked on the door. There was no answer. She began to knock persistently, no one responded.
After some time, W. Erlich came up. The two of them started knocking.
Feeling unkind, Elizabeth turned to the hotel manager V. M. Nazarov. He, pretty tinkering, opened the lock and, without looking into the room, left.
Ustinova and Erlich entered without noticing anything suspicious. Ustinova walked across the room. Wolf laid his coat on the couch. Ustinova raised her head up and saw the suspended corpse of the poet...
They quickly got out.
Nazarov called the police department.
From the testimony of the hotel manager V. M. Nazarov:
“... I, citizen V. M. Nazarov, came to the hotel at about 10 am, after ten in the morning, or rather half past eleven, Ustinov’s wife came, who lives in the same hotel at No. 130 and asked for a key ... Citizen Ustinova told me that she could not reach out to the tenant, citizen Yesenin. Opening the lock with great effort, as the key was sticking out from the inside, I went. In less than 2 minutes, citizen Ustinova and citizen Erlich who came to her caught up with me and clutching my head in horror say that go to room number 5. Entering the room, I saw citizen Yesenin hanging in the front right corner on a rope tied to the incoming central heating pipe, I took everyone out of the room and immediately called the 2nd police station with a request to send a representative to draw up a protocol.
I can’t show anything else, in which I subscribe. V. Nazarov.
Very soon, the district warden of the 2nd police department, Nikolai Gorbov, appeared at the scene.
And the first document related to the death of Yesenin was born:
“The act of Yesenin’s suicide on December 28, 1925 was drawn up by the district warden of the 2nd department of the Leningrad police N. Gorbov in the presence of the manager of the International Hotel, comrade. Nazarov and witnesses. Arriving at the place, I found a man hanging on the central heating pipe in the following form: the neck was not tightened with a dead loop, but only on one right side of the neck, his face was turned to the pipe, and with his right hand he grabbed the pipe, the corpse hung under the very ceiling and the legs were about 1 1/2 meters, near the place where the hanged man was found, an overturned pedestal lay, and the chandelier standing on it lay on the floor. When removing the corpse from the rope and examining it, a cut was found on the right arm above the elbow on the palm side, scratches on the hand on the left arm, a bruise under the left eye, dressed in gray trousers, a white nightgown, black socks and black patent leather shoes. According to the documents presented, Yesenin Sergey Alexandrovich, a writer who arrived from Moscow on December 24, 1925, turned out to hang himself. Shopping center certificate No. 42-8516, and a power of attorney to receive 640 rubles in the name of Erlich.
The poet Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky, the critic P. Medvedev, and the writer M. Froman signed as witnesses for this "Act".
Below is the signature of V. Erlich. She, apparently, was completed later than everyone else, when he presented a certificate and a power of attorney to the district warden
Independent researchers (Khlystalov, Kunyaev and others) drew attention to the fact that the act of examining the scene of the incident was drawn up by N. Gorbov superficially, unprofessionally. And from a professional point of view, the document is bewildering.
Firstly. N. Gorbov was obliged to draw up not an “act”, but a “report” of the inspection of the scene.
Secondly, be sure to indicate the time of the inspection, the names and addresses of witnesses.
The inspection had to begin without fail in the presence of attesting witnesses, so that they would then confirm the correctness of the entry in the protocol.
Thirdly, N. Gorbov was obliged to examine the corpse with the participation of a forensic medical expert or, in extreme cases, a doctor.
Fourthly, the scene of the incident was not examined properly: the situation in the room, the condition of the door locks and window locks, the presence of a key in the keyhole, the heating pipe on which the poet allegedly hanged himself, cadaveric changes, and so on, were not described.
It was not indicated in what condition the things in the room were: they lay neatly or were scattered.
Nothing is clear about the clothes on the body of the deceased. Was it torn, unbuttoned, deflated, or was in a normal and tidy condition. Were there blood stains or any other stains on the floor, table, bed. What object was cut on the hand of the corpse. Where the poet took the rope for hanging.
It should be noted that the artist Svarog was at the scene of the incident, who made an instant drawing of the poet's body on the floor of the hotel room.
The figure clearly shows that Yesenin was subjected to violence, his clothes hung in disarray on parts of his body. Before photographing, the clothes were put in order.
Fifthly, the act does not indicate the time of its compilation. There are also no marks on the beginning and end of investigative actions.
Sixthly, the district warden did not attach material evidence (rope, razor, other items) to the case.
Seventh, he did not write about how the persons who discovered the corpse got into the hotel room.
Eighth, Gorbov lost sight of the numerous wounds on the body of the murdered poet (they are clearly visible in the photograph) and did not begin to find out their origin.
I did not find out under what circumstances Yesenin had a bruise under his left eye. The Ustinovs and Ushakovs, who saw the poet in the evening, reported that the poet had no bruise in the evening.
Perhaps the poet was beaten before his death?
Ninthly, the act itself is written with spelling errors, and the facts presented in it are reflected in inert language. Gorbov, at one time, worked as a typesetter in a printing house, and then as a political commissar in the troops, so it can be assumed that the act was not written by him.
Any specialist in forensic science can immediately say that on the basis of this act it is impossible to make a conclusion about suicide.
In addition, three witnesses did not see the corpse in the noose. The district police officer could well write anything in the act.
The act of medical examination, drawn up by the forensic medical expert A. G. Gilyarevsky, also seems doubtful:
"Deed of opening
On December 29, 1925, in the mortuary department of the Obukhov hospital, an autopsy was performed on the corpse of citizen Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin.
The deceased is 30 years old. Physical development is correct, fatness is normal. The skin is pale. The pupils are dilated evenly. Nose openings are free, lips are closed. The tip of the tongue is pressed between the teeth. The genitals are normal, the anus is clean. The lower limbs are dark purple in color. They have petechial hemorrhages. In the middle of the forehead there is a depressed vertical furrow 4 cm long and 1.2 cm wide. An abrasion under the left eye.
Above the larynx on the neck there is a red furrow. It is directed upwards from the left and ends near the auricle. On the right, the furrow goes up to the back of the head. The width of the furrow corresponds to the diameter of the goose feather. In the lower third of the right shoulder there is a 4 cm long scratch on the skin. In the lower third of the left shoulder there is a horizontal scratch and 3 vertical scratches. The length of each of them is about 3 cm. No other damage was found.
The skull has no damage. A bruise is observed in the place of the depressed furrow on the forehead. The weight of the brain is 1920 grams, the vessels are normal. The medulla glistens at the sites of incisions. The abdominal organs are located correctly. The peritoneum is smooth, intestinal loops are red. There are traces of food mixture in the esophagus. Foamy mucus is observed in the larynx and trachea. The lungs are located freely in the chest. The size of the heart corresponds to the fist of the deceased. Valves and holes are in good condition.
300 grams of a semi-liquid food mixture was found in the stomach. It gives off a faint wine smell. The spleen capsule is wrinkled. The liver is dark red. The kidneys are dark red. The renal canal is normal.
Conclusion
Based on the autopsy data, it should be argued that the death of Sergei Yesenin came from asphyxia. It arose as a result of compression of the respiratory tract through hanging. The indentation found on the forehead could be the result of pressure during hanging. The dark purple color of the lower extremities and punctate bruising on them indicate that the deceased was in the loop for a very long time. Wounds on the upper limbs do not pose any danger to life.
Signatures:
Forensic medical expert Gilyarevsky.
Witnesses - illegible signatures.
However, for some reason, this act does not indicate all the injuries that were on the face of the poet.
This is confirmed by the photo of Yesenin, preserved in the National Public Library in St. Petersburg in a special department. In this photograph, a bullet hole in the poet's forehead and a blow mark under the right eye are clearly distinguishable. This blow could have been inflicted with the handle of a pistol, which, by the way, the poet himself had.
Some independent researchers believed that this act of autopsy was not objective enough.
Evgeny Chernosvitov - forensic expert, psychiatrist:
“Many essential details are not linked in the act of death. They will cause bewilderment even among medical students. For example, there is a clear discrepancy between the pathological data of the study of the brain and other internal organs. The condition of the latter indicates that death was due to asphyxia. But with strangulation, cerebral edema is mandatory. Gilyarovsky (the doctor who performed the autopsy) does not find a single sign of swelling. The brain described by him may correspond to death, which occurred, for example, from cardiovascular insufficiency or poisoning ... "
Eduard Khlystalov:
“Not taking upon ourselves the right to judge the quality of Gilyarevsky's conclusions, one cannot but express doubts that the act was written by Gilyarevsky's hand. (At present, the deed is partly torn to shreds in the most important place, so that each researcher can reconstruct it at his own discretion.) In any case, the identification of the handwriting was not carried out. Doubt about the authenticity of the act is caused by the following.
1) The act is written on a plain sheet of paper without any details confirming that the document belongs to a medical institution. It does not have a registration number, a corner stamp, an official seal, a signature of the head of a hospital department or an expert bureau.
2) The act was written by hand, hastily, with smeared ink that did not have time to dry. Such an important document (concerning not only such a famous person as Yesenin, but also any person), the medical examiner was obliged to draw up in two or more copies. The original is usually sent to the interrogating officer, and a copy must remain in the files of the hospital.
3) The expert was obliged to examine the corpse, indicate the presence of bodily injuries and establish their causal relationship with the onset of death. Yesenin had numerous traces of previous falls. Confirming the presence of a small abrasion under the eye, Gilyarevsky did not indicate the mechanism of its formation. He noted the presence on the forehead of a depressed furrow about 4 centimeters long and one and a half centimeters wide, but did not describe the condition of the skull bones. He said that "the pressure on the forehead could have come from the pressure of hanging," but did not establish whether this injury was intravital or post-mortem. And most importantly, he did not indicate whether this “indentation” could cause the death of the poet or contribute to it, and whether it was formed from a blow with a hard object ...
4) The conclusions in the act do not take into account the full picture of what happened, in particular, nothing is said about the loss of blood by the dead.
5) The medical examiner notes that "the deceased was hanging for a long time", but does not indicate how many hours.
“I completely rule out the possibility of a careless attitude of the authorities to the death of an ambiguous figure, like Yesenin, which means that a set of oversights and inconsistencies during the interrogation was deliberately inspired. For what? There is only one answer: to hide the cause and circumstances of the death of the poet.
The investigation is still questionable.
It was embarrassing that the investigation ended very quickly. Acts and several protocols of inquests - and that's all.
There was no protocol with a description of the scene.
An investigative experiment was not carried out.
In January 1926, the investigation was not replenished with a single document and was terminated ... "
For many years, at the suggestion of the authorities, who never conducted a detailed investigation into the circumstances of death, it was believed that the poet had committed suicide.
Only close friends of Yesenin doubted this. But due to the difficult political situation in the USSR and 13 criminal cases brought against the scandalous poet, they did not dare to publicly challenge the official version.
And today the official version, the one that is given in encyclopedias, is the same - we are talking about suicide.
Such was it in Soviet times.
This remains to this day...
But many tend to believe that the poet was murdered villainously.
What a ruthless massacre took place.
And that all the events that followed are nothing more than a systematic action. Moreover, not only by "covering up the traces" of the crime, but also by the exclusion of Yesenin from Soviet literature, all sorts of compromise of his image and name.
After all, as we know, later Yesenin's poetry was banned, and his name was ordered to be forgotten.
For reading the poet's poems, Article 58 relied (an article in the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, which entered into force on February 25, 1927 to counter counter-revolutionary activities). And they received it.
It was believed that decadent poetry was harmful to the Soviet people - and the campaign against the “Yeseninism” continued for more than a decade ...
I would like to cite a few statements of Yesenin's contemporaries.
A) On December 30, 1925, the Leningrad Krasnaya Gazeta published an article (obituary) by Boris Lavrenyov “In Memory of Yesenin” in the evening edition.
On December 28, he was at the Internationale - Angleterre and saw Yesenin dead. And on the eve late in the evening I ran into Mikhail Froman with the ubiquitous Imaginis Vova Erlich.
This article was subtitled: "Executed by degenerates."
And with the epigraph: "And you will not wash away the righteous blood with all your black blood of a poet."
And the article ended like this:
“And my moral duty instructs me to tell the naked truth once in my life and call the executioners and murderers - executioners and murderers, whose black blood will not wash away the blood stain on the shirt of the tortured poet.”
B) The artist Vasily Svarog was one of the few who saw the still untidy corpse of Yesenin.
It was he who made the drawing of the dead Yesenin without makeup.
Here is what he said in 1927:
“It seems to me that this Erlich gave him something at night, well ... maybe not poison, but a strong sleeping pill. No wonder he "forgot" his briefcase in Yesenin's room. And he didn’t go home to “sleep” - with Yesenin’s note in his pocket. It was not in vain that he was spinning nearby all the time, probably, their whole company was sitting and biding their time in neighboring rooms. The situation was nervous, there was a congress in Moscow, people in leather jackets walked in the Angleterre all night. Yesenin was in a hurry to kill, so everything was so awkward, and many traces remained. The frightened janitor, who was carrying firewood and did not enter the room, heard what was happening, rushed to call the commandant of the hotel Nazarov. Where is that janitor now?
At first there was a “noose” - Yesenin tried to loosen it with his right hand, so his hand stiffened in a cramp. The head was on the armrest of the sofa when Yesenin was hit above the bridge of the nose with the handle of a revolver. Then they rolled him up in a carpet and wanted to lower him off the balcony, a car was waiting around the corner. It was easier to steal. But the balcony door did not open wide enough, leaving the corpse by the balcony, in the cold. They drank, smoked, all this dirt remained ... Why do I think that they rolled it into a carpet? When I was drawing, I noticed a lot of tiny specks on my trousers and a few in my hair... they tried to straighten their arm and slashed the tendon of their right hand with a Gillette razor, these cuts were visible... They took off their jacket, wrinkled and cut, put valuables in their pockets and Then they took everything away ... They were in a hurry ... They hung up in a hurry, already late at night, and it was not easy on a vertical riser. When they fled, Erlich stayed to check something and prepare for the version of suicide ... "
C) Immediately after the death of the poet, his friend Vasily Knyazev - he spent the night in the morgue of the Obukhov hospital near Yesenin's body - wrote a poem.
It begins with the following stanza:
In a small dead room by the window
Golden head on the chopping block:
The stripe on the neck is not visible -
Only blood turns black on the shirt ...
D) As Ekaterina Alexandrovna, the poet’s sister, told her daughter, Natalya Vasilievna, her husband, Vasily Nasedkin, the first thing he said at home:
“It doesn't look like suicide. It seems that the brains crawled out on the forehead.
According to Natalya Vasilievna, her mother knew about the murder.
Augusta Miklashevskaya also believed that Yesenin was killed.
D.S. Kulikov, a lawyer, a student of A.F. Koni, who knew Yesenin, had no doubt that Yesenin was killed.
E) The emigrant newspaper Slovo, published in Riga, on January 5, 1926, reported on the murder of Yesenin.
F) F. A. Morokhov (Professor, pathophysiologist) writes:
“A family of old Petersburgers lived in the house where I live, who told me that their parents worked at the Angleterre Hotel, at that time called the Internationale and run by the GPU. Their father worked as a coachman, and their mother as a cleaner. They said that when Yesenin died, all the hotel employees talked about the murder.
G) The actor Anatoly Mikhailov, who as a boy took part in the funeral of Yesenin, said that many people spoke about the murder of the poet in those days in Moscow and at the same time added that the truth, as always, would not be made public.
In his poem "The Execution Continues" he writes:
... The four of them fell, tormented and cut,
And then the lifeless was put into a noose ...
After the death of the USSR and the disclosure of the archives, many publications, books, documentaries appeared, which carry out a different, unofficial version - Yesenin was killed.
They write about it, for example:
A) Writer Nikolai Astafiev in his book Tragedy at Angleterre.
B) Writer Viktor Kuznetsov in his work "The Secret of Yesenin's Death".
C) MUR investigator Colonel Eduard Alexandrovich Khlystalov in his book “The Secret of the Angleterre Hotel”.
D) Writer Sergei Kunyaev in his essay "The Death of a Poet".
E) The poet Natalya Sidorina in her book “Golden-domed. Secrets of the life and death of Sergei Yesenin.
E) Writer Vitaly Bezrukov in his novel Yesenin.
This view is also shared by:
- F. A. Morokhov (Professor, pathophysiologist from St. Petersburg),
- E. V. Chernosvitov (doctor, forensic expert),
- Yu. P. Dubyagin (criminalist), and others.
In his novel, Vitaly Bezrukov described how, in his opinion, the murder of Yesenin took place, naming the name of the alleged killer - the Chekist poet Blumkin - and the customer - Trotsky.
From Bezrukov's novel "Yesenin":
“... Erlich hurriedly grabbed the briefcase and realized that the revolver was in it: Yesenin did not suspect anything ... Yesenin closed the door behind him ...
... The door opened without a creak, the hinges, apparently, were greased in advance, and Blumkin entered the room, followed by a GEP officer and that decoy "white officer" who was with Yesenin in the cell on the Lubyanka. He locked the door behind him. Yesenin saw Blumkin - his heart sank in mortal anguish. He shouted in despair: “Black man! Black man!" - and threw a Russian accordion into his face. Blumkin fell to the floor. Yesenin rushed to the suitcase, put his hand in, but there was no revolver! "Oh, Erlich, Judas! .."
Two others at once fell on one Yesenin, sat him on a chair, threw a noose around his neck. Yesenin wheezes, clutching the rope with his right hand. Blumkin jumped up ... and with a revolver from the whole swing of the handle in the face! Yet! Yet! One hits, two hold! The eye is out! The bridge is broken! The poet is limp, calmed down.
And here is how Sergei Kunyaev described the murder of Yesenin:
“… The door opened…
How many people entered the room? Obviously we will never know. However, I am convinced that they lay in wait for a convenient moment when the poet alone would remain in the room. And this moment has come.
Yesenin resisted desperately. A blow to the bridge of the nose apparently stunned him. Bleeding, he tried to escape from the hands of the executioners. But the assassins had already thought of their plan. Once the poet wrote that he would hang himself "on a green evening under the window." Was it not this phrase that suggested the plan of action to the criminals?
With what did they strangle him, was it not with a jacket, which they did not find later? And is it not because the trachea and larynx remained intact, and the tongue was bitten? For some reason, I am sure that when the killers dragged the poet to the steam heating pipe and hung him on the belt from the suitcase, he was still alive. He clung to the pipe with his hand. Unclenching his hand then was impossible. By morning she was ossified and did not unbend for a long time.
They hastily searched the room. They smoked, throwing cigarette butts on the floor. Rummaged through his things. Looking for some manuscripts. And some of them were taken away. But not all. Yesenin, obviously, foresaw the possibility of such an end. And, as A. Izryadnova testifies, his first wife, whom no one knew about, destroyed his manuscripts in her house, where they certainly could not follow him.
…When it was all over, they took the key, locked the door and put it in the keyhole. Then they left the room. How? Obviously, they closed the door behind them, capturing the key from the opposite side with the "extractor" - a tool used by hotel thieves ... "
The question naturally arises:
Who benefited from the death of Sergei Yesenin?
Dozens of researchers answer these questions in approximately the same way.
And they call the name of Leon Trotsky.
And they claim that Yesenin was killed. And that it was not an "accidental" murder.
The great Russian poet simply could not help but be "liquidated", as they said in those days.
And not at all for their “bold” conversations, numerous scandals and brawls ...
And for the poems he wrote.
For poems, where Yesenin spoke with hatred and contempt about some of the leaders of the then regime.
It must be said that, having accepted the October Revolution, at first Yesenin supported it. However, I quickly realized what it was.
And already in 1919, in his poem "Mares' Ships", he wrote:
Azure will not stick out its claws
From a blizzard cough-stench;
Flies under the neighing of storms
Skulls golden coniferous garden.
Do you hear?
Do you hear a loud knock?
This is a rake of dawn through the forests.
With oars of severed hands
You are rowing into the land of the future.
Sergei Yesenin's poem "The Land of Scoundrels" became a real challenge to the Bolshevik authorities, in which the poet says with the words of Nomakh (Makhno):
Gangs! Gangs!
Countrywide.
Wherever you look, wherever you go,
You see how in space
on horseback
And no horses
Hardened bandits are jumping and walking.
These are all the same Disbelievers like me ...
………………………….
And sometime, sometime...
funny guy,
Smelled to the bone
steppe grass,
I came to this city empty handed
But with a full heart
And not an empty head.
I believed... I burned...
I went with the revolution
I thought that brotherhood is not a dream and not a dream,
That all will merge into one sea -
All hosts of nations,
Both races and tribes.
………………………….
Empty fun.
Some conversations!
So what?
Well, what did we take in return?
The same crooks came, the same thieves
And with the revolution
Everyone was taken prisoner...
One of the main characters of this poem is the commissioner of the Chekists (Leibman), "a citizen from Weimar", who arrived in Russia, in his words, "to tame fools and animals."
The powerful “tribune of the revolution” Lev (Leiba) Trotsky is easily guessed in it (he lived in exile in the city of Weimar).
Speaking about Russia, Chekistov teaches:
And your people are sitting, loafer,
And he doesn't want to help himself.
No mediocrity and hypocrisy,
Than your Russian lowland man!
Lev Davidovich considered murder a justified means of asserting the communist idea:
“We must turn Russia into a desert inhabited by white Negroes, to which we will give such a tyranny that even the inhabitants of the East have never dreamed of. Through bloodbaths, we will bring the Russian intelligentsia to complete stupefaction, to idiocy, to an animal state ... "
In this Yesenin poem, he speaks of the Russians like this:
Lived all their life as beggars
And they built temples of God ...
Yes I had them a long time ago
Rebuilt into latrines.
In the "Country of Scoundrels" Yesenin smeared Trotsky for centuries.
And such a “chief villain” could hardly forgive ...
Natalia Sidorina:
“L. D. Trotsky, apparently, was well acquainted with the poem and with the materials of the Secret Department of the OGPU, since they affected him personally. It was not possible to tame Yesenin. He paid with ingratitude for interest in his work, and for the opportunity to publish, and even for Blumkin's services such as being rescued from the Lubyanka. Such ingratitude leads to "suicide."
Once, in a drunken company (it was in Berlin), Yesenin said to the émigré writer Roman Gul:
“I will not go to Moscow while Leiba Bronstein rules Russia. He shouldn't rule."
Hearing these words, the informant of the Main Political Directorate, the poet Gleb Alekseev, passed them on to their intended purpose.
Trotsky, of course, knew about all such attacks against him.
And how could he then relate to Yesenin?
And in those days, anti-Semitism was a criminal offense in the USSR, for such attacks they could well have been put up against the wall. Any other and would put.
But they decided to remove the famous poet in a different way.
Trotsky-Chekistov could not possibly like the poetry of the Russian peasant poet. Such as Yesenin, he fiercely hated and despised.
After all, it is no coincidence that after a magnificent funeral, the poet's poems were banned in the USSR.
The enemy of Yesenin was not satisfied with his poetry of recent years, which was alien to October.
The Demon of Revolution himself wrote about this in Pravda:
"The poet died because he was not akin to the revolution."
The Ryazan brawler allowed himself sharp attacks against the members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), characterized the Civil War as "vile and evil savagery", which ruined thousands of the finest talents:
They have Pushkin
Lermontov,
Koltsov,
And our Nekrasov in them.
I am in them.
They even have Trotsky
Lenin and Bukharin.
Is it because of my sadness
The verse blows
Looking at them
Unwashed hari.
In a word, "haris" remembered everything and did not forgive anything.
No wonder Lenin called Trotsky "Judas", spoke of his "Jesuitism" and "refined treachery."
Yesenin perfectly understood what awaited him for such verses from "unwashed mugs" and wrote, anticipating his tragic fate:
And the first
I need to hang
Crossing my arms behind my back
For the fact that the song
hoarse and sick
I interfered with sleep
Native country...
My life, or you dreamed of me ...
Vladimir Vetrov
On December 28, 1925, at 10:30 a.m., in the fifth room of the International Hotel (formerly the Angleterre), “a man was found hanging from a central heating pipe. According to the documents presented, Yesenin Sergey Alexandrovich turned out to be hanged,
writer ... "(from the" Act of Inspection of the Scene of the Incident ").
This is how the 30-year-old Russian poet ended his life.
Yesenin's suicide did not raise any doubts among his contemporaries. Everyone who knew the poet closely was extremely unanimous - Sergei Alexandrovich voluntarily left the mortal world. But 60 years have passed, and against the backdrop of anti-communist hysteria, versions about the villainous murder of Yesenin by “commissars in dusty helmets” began to appear like mushrooms after the rain, one more than the other. In Russia they cannot help but consider their well-known poets great martyrs, because "a poet in Russia is more than a poet."
TV film "Sergey Yesenin" shown on television from the same opera. According to Sergei Bezrukov, who played the main role in it, the goal of the film is noble - to posthumously save Yesenin from the "shameful stigma of the gallows." The end justifies the means, because the authors of the film, neglecting historical facts, twisted everything so much that you begin to doubt that they are generally familiar with the memories of the poet’s acquaintances and carefully read Yesenin himself.
Now, without any politics and KGB devilry - about the singer of the "Moscow Tavern" from the words of his acquaintances and his autobiographical creations. After all, "as for the rest of the autobiographical information, they are in my poems."
Main ailment
Friends and acquaintances of the poet agree that Yesenin's alcoholism became the primary reason for his premature departure "to that country where peace and grace."
The poet himself, answering questions on December 5, 1925 when filling out an outpatient card, in the column "Alcohol" answered: "A lot, from the age of 24." In the same place, the hand of the attending physician ruthlessly deduced: “Delirium tremens. Delirium tremens, halluc. (hallucinations)."
At the beginning of his bohemian life, the young healthy body of a Ryazan guy coped with the obligatory party libations. Yesenin even managed to organize "unloading" days. In 1921, he notes with pleasure in a letter to his friend Anatoly Mariengof: “... I won’t drink like that anymore, and today, for example, I even completely refused to look at the drunken Grishka. My God, what a disgusting thing it is, and I have probably been even worse. But for a long time the poet was not enough. In the last year of his life, Yesenin became, in the words of the same Mariengof, “a man no more than one hour a day. From the first, morning, glass, consciousness was already darkening.
In 1922, Sergei Alexandrovich complained in a letter to his poetic "mentor" Klyuev: "I am very tired, and my last drunken illness made me completely shattered."
While in America with his wife Isadora Duncan, Yesenin drank himself to epileptic seizures. In fairness, it must be said that not only on the amount of whiskey drunk, but also on its quality. At that time, America was shaken by the "dry law", so in the morning you had to take moonshine surrogates on your chest. A. Duncan wrote in the Herald Tribune newspaper, trying to somehow shield her husband and explain drunken covens with breaking mirrors in hotels: “The attacks of mental disorder that Yesenin suffers from do not only come from alcohol ... but also blood poisoning from drinking“ forbidden "American whiskey, in which I have the certificate of a famous New York doctor who treated Yesenin with similar seizures in New York ... ".
About relationships with authorities
Adherents of the version of the violent death of the poet are pressing with might and main on Yesenin's fatal conflicts with the authorities. There were conflicts, but only on the basis of the poet's tavern rampage. Yesenin was taken to the police station 10 times. But not in order to torture, but for "sobering up". I quote his colleague V. Khodasevich, who knew Yesenin closely: “Regarding Yesenin, an order was given in 1924 by the police - to be taken to the station for sobering up and released without giving further progress to the case.”
The authorities were rather touching towards the singer of "Soviet Russia". The only poem that, with a huge stretch, can be classified as critical in relation to the authorities is “The Country of Scoundrels”. There, Yesenin has a hero named Leibman with the pseudonym Chekistov. If anyone does not know, the name of one of the leaders of the revolution Trotsky-Bronstein is Leib. Could this coincidence have mortally offended Leib Davidovich? There are other “terrible” words that Makhno utters (in the poem, the bandit Nomakh): “A herd! Herd! …Your equality is a deceit and a lie. For fools - a good bait. Scoundrels - a decent catch. But a bandit must say horror stories, that's why he is a bandit. That's all dissidence.
But how many heartfelt lines Yesenin poured out on paper in favor of Bolshevik affairs! And the poet responded to the death of Lenin in the way that only a great lyric poet can respond: “And now he died ... The one who saved us is no more. And those whom he left, the country in a raging flood must be shackled in concrete.
Yesenin's hostility to the Bolsheviks is a myth. Of course, Sergei Alexandrovich began to play tricks on the drunken shop and used to utter all sorts of obscenities, but the authorities were indulgent towards his tavern-like frontierism. If he was a danger to the authorities, he would easily be accused of some kind of conspiracy and would be slapped, like, for example, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov.
Yesenin was on a short footing with many Chekists. In particular, he liked to drag the famous Chekist-mokrushnik Yakov Blyumkin along with him to parties, who decided in the summer of 1918 the German ambassador himself. Yesenin, according to Khodasevich, for courage could offer an honest company to go and see the execution of the "contra". “I’ll arrange it for you through Blumkin in one minute,” the inflamed lyric poet quite seriously declared.
“I see myself deceased in a coffin…”
Against the background of developing alcoholism, some character traits that were previously present in tolerable doses became aggravated. Yesenin became pathologically touchy, he was increasingly seized by bouts of black melancholy. In May 1925, when he saw the poet, the prose writer A. Vronsky said: “For the first time I acutely felt that he would not live long and that he was burning out.”
The mania of death in the last year literally ate the poet. Researchers of his work note "about 400 cases of mentioning death in the works of S. Yesenin, more than a third of them occur in the last two years, and in half of these poems the poet talks about his death, about suicide."
“If I die, then you will find out who you have lost. All of Russia will cry, ”the poet repeated more and more often to his friends.
Two months before his death, in his last poem, "The Black Man," he writes about himself: "My friend, my friend, I am very, very sick."
A little earlier, Yesenin wrote with an unsteady hand in his poems: “Obsessed by a severe epilepsy, my soul became like a yellow skeleton.”
The poet had tried to commit suicide before. He lay down under the wheels of a suburban train, in Baku he threw himself into an oil storage, cut his veins with glass. But then friends were next to him and the tragedy was avoided.
Three weeks before the tragic denouement, the poet's friends managed to put him in a Moscow clinic under the supervision of Dr. Gannushkin, a great admirer of the poet's talent. There were two goals - to save the poet from prosecution (in September, Yesenin made a drunken brawl on the train with anti-Semitic escapades against the Kremlin officials traveling with him in the same carriage) and at the same time to receive medical treatment. Yesenin told Mariengof about his last treatment: “I feel very good here ... it’s just a little annoying that a blue light is on day and night ... and also they don’t allow me to close the door ... Everyone is afraid that I will commit suicide.”
The farewell verse “Goodbye, my friend, goodbye ... In this life, dying is not new, but living, of course, is not newer” written by Yesenin in blood on a notebook sheet a day before his tragic death.
Poets death
Apologists for the version of Yesenin's murder are inspired by a number of moments in the description of the place of the tragedy and the hangman's body itself. They claim that Yesenin, having a height of 1.68 m, could not hang himself under a ceiling more than 4.5 meters high, and even on a vertical heating pipe. Further, they like to point out a depressed furrow on the frontal part (it is noticeable even on the death masks of the poet), the presence of a dark spot on the upper eyelid of the right eye, a bent arm, supposedly clasping the pipe, intact cartilage of the larynx, the absence of a “strangulation furrow” and many other trifles. In 1989 and 1992, two independent forensic examinations were carried out by the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation. The verdict of both is absolutely disappointing for supporters of the murder version. All questions have answers.
The investigative experiment showed that it is possible to fasten the belt (Yesenin hanged himself on the belt from the suitcase) and apply a load of up to 100 kg to the free end, while the belt does not slip off. The ceiling height of the hotel is not 4.5 m, but only 3.5 m. With a stand of 1.5 m (a bedside table of this height was found overturned in a hotel room) and a suicide height of 1.68 m, you can firmly fix the knot under the ceiling.
The investigation found that “an indentation in the soft integument of the frontal region was formed as a result of prolonged contact with a cylindrical object (i.e. with a steam heating pipe), with a hot object ...”. Therefore, the furrow was preserved until the funeral. The dark spot on the upper eyelid is not a bullet mark, but a spot from "drying of the top of the skin fold, formed ... upon contact of the face with a cylindrical object." The strangulation furrow is clearly visible even in retouched images. The cartilages of the larynx do not have to be damaged during hanging, especially when the loop is not tightened, which was the case with Yesenin. Airway closure during hanging does not play a major role. The main thing in such cases is clamping of the vessels of the neck. At the same time, intracranial pressure rises sharply, and a person almost instantly loses the ability to coordinate his actions and free himself from the loop. Very many who decided to scare their loved ones by hanging themselves "pretend", went to another world for real. Yesenin, obviously, instinctively tried to restrain himself in a moment of short agony, grabbing the pipe with his right hand. So she had him and stiffened in a bent position.
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On December 28, 1925, in the 5th room of the International Hotel (formerly Angleterre), the body of Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin was found hanging in a rope loop tied to a steam heating pipe. The official version was that the poet had committed suicide. But the more time passes from the day of Yesenin's death, the more terrible, confusing, more mysterious the circumstances of his death become.
In the media, there are new and new versions about the cause of the death of the poet. All of them boil down mainly to the fact that the poet did not commit suicide, but was killed.
The versions are based mainly on the memories of contemporaries, understanding the political situation in the country, studying the last days and hours of the poet's life. Great importance is attached to the analysis of documents - the act of examining the scene, the act of forensic medical examination of the body, the study of posthumous photographs and masks of the poet. The authors of the proposed versions are poets, journalists, philosophers, teachers, former investigators. But among them there are no professionals - criminologists, forensic doctors, prosecutors. "As it often happens with us, the work of restoring the truth was undertaken by enthusiasts, ascetics," Candidate of Pedagogical Sciences A. Meliksetyan notes proudly. Recognizing the unconditional right to journalistic, poetic and other investigations, I believe that it is necessary to study and analyze all documents and materials related to the death of S. A. Yesenin, as well as evaluate "versions" only from a professional point of view. It must be emphasized that the purpose of this article is not to clarify the possible causes of the "murder" or "suicide" of the poet, but to establish the cause of death.
Let us return to the events immediately preceding Yesenin's death. To do this, we will use the book of the famous Yesenin scholar Y. Prokushev. The author writes: “On December 7, Yesenin sent a telegram from Moscow to the Leningrad poet V. Erlich: “Find two or three rooms immediately. On the 20th I move to live in Leningrad. Telegraph. Yesenin." On December 21, Yesenin leaves the Moscow clinic. On December 24, he is in Leningrad. Erlich has not yet managed to find even one room for him. Yesenin decided to settle in the Angleterre Hotel. Y. Prokushev continues: "December 25, 26, 27 Yesenin met with his Leningrad acquaintances and friends ... On the second day after their arrival, they drank tea, Yesenin again read poetry, including "The Black Man". Spoke:
Let's rent an apartment together with Georges (G. A. Ustinov. - A. M.). Aunt Liza (E. A. Ustinova) will be the hostess. Let's take the magazine from Ionov. I will work. You know, we only mess around on holidays, and then we go to work, "V. Erlich recalled. It seemed that nothing foreshadowed trouble.
And suddenly ... We have before us the original act of inspection of the scene, drawn up on December 28, 1925 by the district warden of the 2nd department of the LGM M. Gorbov (hereinafter, the style and punctuation of the originals are preserved): "... A man was found hanging on a central heating pipe in the following form, the neck was not tightened with a dead loop, but only with the right side of the neck, the face was turned to the pipe, and the right hand was grabbed by the pipe, the corpse hung just under the ceiling and the legs were about 11/2 meters, near the place where the hanged man was found , there was an overturned pedestal and the chandelier standing on it lay on the floor.After removing the corpse from the rope and upon examination, it was found that a cut was found on the right arm above the elbow on the palm side, and there were scratches on the left hand on the hand ... According to the documents presented, the hanged man turned out to be Yesenin Sergey Alexandrovich, writer.
Of course, from a forensic point of view, the document was drawn up at an extremely low professional level: the situation in the room, cadaveric changes, etc. are not described.
The poet V. Rozhdestvensky wrote that day: “The empty corridor of one of the “hotels for visitors.” The door is wide open. Yesenin: Already fading, but still golden hair scattered across the dirty floor among rubbish and trampled cigarette butts ... "Consequently, after being removed from the noose, the body was initially placed on the floor, and not on the sofa, as a number of authors claim. This detail will play a certain role in the analysis of the versions of the adherents of the poet's murder.
One of the supporters of the version of the poet's murder raises the question of the need for an investigative experiment. What confuses him? "... The height of Sergei Yesenin is about 168 cm, which means that by raising his hand, he could not exceed two meters. Let's assume that the poet stood on a pedestal, the maximum height of which is 1.5 meters. In order to tighten the loop on the steam heating pipe "under the very ceiling, "Yesenin had to jump from a place 1.5 meters in height and instantly wrap the belt from the suitcase around the pipe so as not to break. Is this possible? I think not," the author argues. "Could he, being of average height, reach the pipe, to which the rope was supposedly tied?" - the former investigator Khlystalov, in his turn, doubts. This significant "supposedly" casts doubt on the act of examining the scene without any reason: "... Found hanging on a central heating pipe ..." But experts are well aware that there are certain relationships between the length of the body and the length of individual bones. So, the length of an arm with a height of 168 cm is 60-70 cm. At what height could Yesenin tie a loop? The act notes: "... the legs were about 11/2 meters." Taking into account the length of the body and the length of the arm, the noose could be tied at a height of about 4 meters, which does not contradict the entry in the act: "... right under the ceiling." Amateur researchers believe that it is impossible to hang yourself on a vertically located pipe, since under the weight of the body the rope must necessarily slide off. Is it so? A group of experts of the Bureau of Forensic Medical Examination of Moscow was presented with a photograph of a hotel room, on the reverse side of which there is an inscription: "May 18, 1966, the 5th room of the Leningradskaya guest room, formerly Angleterre, where Yesenin lived and died" . During the experiment, during the study, V.N. Through mathematical calculations and experiments, it was established: "1. The ceiling height of room 5 of the Leningradskaya Hotel (formerly Angleterre) in the presented photograph is no more than 352 cm. 2. A person 168 cm tall with a stand 150 cm high can firmly fix the (hemp, cotton, silk rope) with a diameter of about 3.7 cm at a height of 358 cm. Thus, the arguments about the impossibility of fastening the rope "under the very ceiling" and its slipping are groundless. There was also no need to "jump".
Yesenin's body was found hanging in a noose. In the practice of judicial and investigative bodies, asphyxia (suffocation) caused by mechanical causes is most often encountered - when hanging, squeezing the neck with a noose, hands, closing the mouth and nose, etc. When hanging, death occurs due to compression of the neck with a noose, which is tightened the weight of the body. In no case should you confuse hanging with strangulation. During an external examination of the deceased, a characteristic and reliable sign is an depression on the neck - a strangulation furrow. The furrow is a negative imprint of the material of the loop, reflecting its characteristic features: the width, the presence of nodes, the structure of the tissue of the loop, etc., and is expressed the better, the longer the corpse was in the loop. When hanging, the strangulation furrow is always directed obliquely upwards. This is due to the fact that one part of the loop (the free end) is strengthened by some object, in this case, by the pipe, the other, the loop itself, is dragged down by the weight of the body. In this case, the greatest depression of the furrow is formed on the side of the loop opposite to the node.
This small digression is necessary for a better understanding of the versions of the murder adepts.
E. Khlystalov in a book with the categorical, categorical title "The Mystery of the Murder of Sergei Yesenin" is perplexed: "In the first photo, the dead poet lies on the sofa ... and no matter how much I peered at the photo, I did not see signs of death from suffocation. There was no sticking out of mouth of the tongue, giving the face of the gallows a terrible expression. Well, why distort, Mr. former investigator? Both in the photographs and in the act of the forensic medical examination of the corpse, the tip of the tongue, sandwiched between the teeth, is noted - "a tongue sticking out of the mouth," using the terminology of the former investigator. The tip of the tongue clamped between the teeth, according to many forensic professors, is one of the signs of death from asphyxia when the neck is squeezed with a noose. By the way, about Khlystalov’s photographs: the doctor-philosopher E. Chernosvitov in an interesting article “Once again about Yesenin’s death” remarks: “But I also could not believe that investigator Khlystalov “about ten years ago ... an unknown person sent to the investigative department envelope with two photographs. Yesenin is depicted on them. We read further: “Later, at our personal meeting, Eduard Alexandrovich (Khlystalov) admitted that “all this was necessary in order to present cruel material more interestingly.” This is reminiscent of speculation on the tragic death of the poet.
Obviously, having felt all the precariousness of his version of the murder, Khlystalov is looking for new arguments and agrees to deny the presence of a strangulation groove on the poet's neck: "Why is the strangulation groove not visible on the deceased poet? It does not disappear on the neck of a hanged or hanged person, it has a pronounced purple color" . However, it would do no harm for an investigator, even a former one, to first of all look into the act of the forensic medical examination of the corpse, which, by the way, he repeatedly refers to in the future.
To be continued
Reading documents...
A STUDY of the body of S. A. Yesenin was carried out on December 29, 1925 in the deceased Obukhov hospital by an experienced forensic expert, a graduate of the St. Petersburg Military Medical Academy A. G. Gilyarovsky. The act of opening is made by hand, its lower left corner is torn off, the torn fragments are stored in the enclosed envelope. In the autopsy report it is written: "There is a red furrow on the neck above the larynx, the other stretches upwards from the left, lost near the auricle in front." Thus, judging by the description, on the neck of the poet there was a single open strangulation furrow, obliquely ascending from bottom to top, from right to left. Such a furrow, as noted, is characteristic of tightening the loop with the weight of the body, i.e., for hanging. Supporters of the murder of the poet believe that if there is no dead loop around the neck, the person cannot die. Moreover, Yesenin's larynx cartilages were intact. Loops are closed (closed) and open (open), hang yourself, as forensic practice shows, you can on any of them. Not every case of hanging occurs damage to the cartilage of the larynx, especially if the loop on the neck was located "above the larynx". Also untenable from the forensic and forensic points of view is Professor F. Morokhov's assertion that hanging "on belts is extremely difficult, if not impossible." But it is not clear why those who are trying to uncover the secret of the death of S. A. Yesenin stubbornly talk about the "belt". Indeed, in the act of examining the scene of the incident it is written: "When removing the corpse from the rope ...", in the act of examining the corpse - "a furrow as wide as a quill pen." So what is it - a rope, as written in the documents, or a belt?
A group of prominent scientists - forensic doctors, consisting of Professor V.N. Kryukov, associate professor V.O. Plaksin, experts S.A. Nikitin and S.S. Abramov, having studied a number of post-mortem photographs, came to the conclusion: "Strangulation, ascending posteriorly open a furrow in the upper third of the neck, which was formed during hanging, from compression of the neck by a loop of twisted rope, possibly connected with a belt, wide braid, etc. ". Still a rope!
S. Kunyaev, in his passionate, honest study, permeated with pain for the fate of the poet, cites the testimony of G. Ustinov: “The corpse held on to the heating pipe with one hand. Yesenin did not make a loop, he wrapped his neck with a rope just as he wrapped it with a scarf. He could jump out any minute." But can a person "jump out of the loop"? Is self-rescue possible when a noose is tightened around the neck? Two professors of forensic medicine - Minovichi in Romania and Fleichmann in Germany - carried out on themselves, as is often the case in medicine, the most dangerous experiments. Professors caused asphyxia in themselves by squeezing the neck with a soft rope thrown over the block. Assistant doctors after a predetermined time removed them from the loop. The feelings of the researchers almost completely coincided. Both scientists emphasized that there was an immediate desire to throw off the noose. They knew that they should stop the risky experience, but "could not even lift a finger." The conducted studies essentially rule out the possibility of self-rescue in the loop, and even more so the possibility of "jumping" out of it.