Sergei Aleksandrovich Esenin (his name also appears as Sergey Yesenin) was born into a Russian peasant family in 1895. Between 1909 and 1912 he attended the Spas-Klepiki church boarding school and it was during this time that he started to write poetry. When he was 17, Esenin moved to Moscow wehre he joined a group of peasant and proletarian poets, the «Surikov» circle. His work was first published in the jounal Mirok in 1914 and a collection of verse, Radunitsa, followed in 1916. Esenin’s early work centred on traditional village life and the folk culture, as well as sometimes dealing with religious themes. In 1916-17 Esenin was in military service in Tsarskoe Selo but deserted from the army after the 1917 February Revolution, rejecting the policies of the Bolshevik regime. After this he became a founding member of the Imaginist movement, advocating absolute independence for the artist. These new works shocked conservative critics with their avant-garde nature and playful blasphemy. Amongst his most well known pieces are: Pugachev (1922),a verse tragedy concerning the peasant rebellion of 1773-75; Confessions of a Hooligan (1921), which revealed a darker and more tortured side to Esenin’s personality; and The Black Man, which is considered Esenin’s most ruthless analysis of his failures and alcoholic hallucinations. With regards his personal life, Esenin had a son with Anna Izriadnova, with whom he lived from 1913 — 1915. He then married Zinaida Raikh in 1917 and they had two children together before divorcing in 1921. A year later he married famous American dancer Isadora Duncan, but they separated in 1924. It was also around this time that Esenin broke with the Imaginists and their style of writing. In 1925 he married a granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy, but again the marriage was short lived. Later in 1925, Esenin suffered a nervous breakdown. On 28th December that year, aged thirty, he committed suicide by hanging himself in his room in the Hotel d’Angleterre in Leningrad. Before his death, Esenin slashed his wrists and wrote with his own blood: «In this life it is not new to die, but neither it is new to be alive.»
