Two Lives, Two Destinies. Sketch of S.E. Esenin and N. Kliuev
[4 items]
Boris Iurlov
Two Lives, Two Destinies
Praise to eyelashes and loins,
To smiles, to furious births,
To the fierce caress of hawks,
To the bleeding caress of words,
To nipples, to a lover's thigh,
And to my serpent-heat—
A thousand-stinged thing,
The bottom of countless lives...
— N. Klyuev
This literary page of our newspaper is dedicated to two outstanding Russian poets and the history of their love and relationship. The name of Nikolai Klyuev, his life and work, means little to contemporary readers. The life and creative path of Sergei Yesenin are better known, and his poems are loved, probably, by all Russians. We will try to fill this gap, to the extent possible, and hope that our modest contribution to the revival of Russian spirituality will yield positive results and inspire our readers, those not alien to poetic gift or sensibility, to turn to the original sources, to the creative heritage of the poets of the Russian land, and enrich their souls with true, enduring values.
"Klyuev is a major event in my autumn life," wrote Alexander Blok. And the symbolist poet Andrei Bely called him "a sun-bearer, a people's poet." Here is what literary critic B. Filippov writes about N. Klyuev's work: "It would not be an exaggeration to say that in Russian literature there was nothing equal to Klyuev in terms of refinement and perfection of poetic craftsmanship. There were poets who surpassed Klyuev in the power and intensity of their lyrical voice: O. Mandelstam, V. Khlebnikov, A. Blok, M. Tsvetaeva, but in the realm of pure verbal contribution, N. Klyuev's significance to Russian literature is as great as that of Lomonosov, Pushkin, Bely... Thanks to his unprecedented technical virtuosity, the novelty of his vocabulary and subject matter, Klyuev surpassed all his 'urban' fellow poets, with the exception of Vyacheslav Ivanov. In metaphorical richness, no one can compare with him except V. Khlebnikov... Klyuev's metaphorical wealth is incomparable and inexhaustible..."
It is not surprising that Klyuev's personality and work attracted attention and aroused admiration from such diverse outstanding personalities as V. Bryusov, D. Merezhkovsky, N. Gumilev, Olga Forsh, S. Gorodetsky, and others.
Nikolai Klyuev was born in Northern Russia, perhaps that is why his powerful distinctive poetic gift so captivates the reader and impresses with its strength, artlessness, authenticity, and primordialism. Klyuev published his first poems in 1904. His acquaintance with Sergei Yesenin took place in 1915, when Klyuev was already known to Russian readers.
I was beautiful and winged
In the divine father's dwelling,
And the fragrance of paradise lilies
Was my delight and nourishment.
Deprived of my blessed homeland
And having become human now,
I love the bell-ringing of pines
Praying in the wilderness.
Yesenin was the first to approach the already famous poet with a letter. Klyuev responds, and in his letter, as in subsequent letters, one reads genuine interest, sympathy, and love for Yesenin: "...dear little brother, I consider it a privilege to get to know you and talk with you... I felt so much in your words, thank you, continue them, my dear, and accept me into your heart." Here are a few lines from another letter: "My white dove... For God's sake, don't delay your answer. I kiss you, my nurturer, right on your sweet little mustache."
In his memoirs, S. Gorodetsky wrote: "...The history of their relationship from that moment until Yesenin's final dedication to Klyuev before his death is the subject of an entire book." Who knows, dear reader, perhaps you are the author of this future book, a book about the great eternal Love of two outstanding Russian poets.
As an epigraph to this topic of conversation, I chose the above-cited stanza from Klyuev's poem. It seems to me that it quite accurately reflects the character and intensity of their relationship. "The fierce caress of hawks." Isn't male love sometimes like this? Love-friendship, love-confrontation and at the same time love-understanding, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice.
After their acquaintance, the poets were almost inseparable. They participated together in theatrical performances organized by S. Gorodetsky. Together they read their poems in literary salons and magazine editorial offices, performed in the infirmaries of the Martha and Mary Convent in Moscow. Klyuev called Yesenin "Serezhenka, little lark." Together they attended famous gatherings of writers at the widow Ivanova's and the Merezhkovskys', they were received by the tsarina in Tsarskoye Selo and in the circle of future left Socialist Revolutionaries. Among major writers, naturally, only the great proletarian writer M. Gorky completely rejected Klyuev. Yesenin's acquaintances and friends, whose numbers were growing every day, also regarded Klyuev with great prejudice and dislike. Thus, in the memoirs of Yesenin's friend Chernyavsky, we can read the following: "He (Klyuev) completely subjugated our Sergunka: he ties his belt, strokes his hair, watches him with his eyes... After returning from his first trip to Moscow, Sergei (told me) how Klyuev was jealous of the woman with whom he had his first city romance: 'As soon as I reached for my hat, he would fall to the floor in the middle of the room, sit and howl at the top of his voice like a woman: don't go, don't you dare go to her!'"
From Yesenin's letters and the memoirs of contemporary friends, as well as from other indirect indications, we learn that Yesenin resisted Klyuev's passionate advances, but in the end, he always yielded to Klyuev's feelings, recoiled from him, was even ready to kill him, but then was drawn to him again.
On the back of a photograph in March 1916, Yesenin wrote: "My dear Kolya! For many years I will carry your love with me. I know that this image will make me cry (as one cries over flowers) many years from now. But this longing will not be for lost youth, but for your love, which will be like an old friend to me. Your Seryozha. 1916."
My lips are a burning desert,
My throat is a riverbed where stones and sand lie,
I burn for the Golden-robed Son,
Whose curls are the west, and eyes the east...
I am sunny-bearded, pink-eared and tender,
My palm is a tambourine, my nipples sweeter than honeycomb,
Be lavish in caresses like a wife, boundless in kissing,
Part your loins, enter me like fruit!
— N. Klyuev
Yesenin admires and bows before Klyuev as a poet; he was attracted by his will, the integrity of his nature, his enormous poetic gift that captured the soul completely. At the foundation of this unique talent lay the esoteric, what Klyuev would call the "deep Russia," hidden from indiscreet eyes. The religion of this secret Russia was Christianity or Christhood, with which Klyuev was well acquainted, having been brought up in this environment. In Christhood, as Emmanuel Rais, a researcher of Klyuev's work, writes, "judging by the obviously fragmentary and unreliable information available, remnants of Russian pre-Christian or even Dionysian elements of ancient paganism have been preserved, as well as elements that cannot be reduced to any belief system known to science, possibly representing a specific religious essence of the Russian spirit. It is possible that the Khlysts represent Russia's secret not yet revealed to the world." O, hasten, brothers, to us, To our wondrous temple, where dawn-candles burn, Where the pre-altar incense Mists of drowsy riverside meadows!
To serve the Matins of love,
To taste the blood, the living bread...
Who lives, let your soul not harden
To the mountain trumpets and the calls of heaven!
The friendship of Yesenin and Klyuev began during the First World War. When Yesenin was drafted into the army, Klyuev was terribly homesick, and Yesenin also reached out to him, as evidenced by their personal correspondence. In 1916, a new book of poems by N. Klyuev, "Worldly Thoughts," was published, which was unconditionally accepted by both readers and critics, and Klyuev became a universally recognized authority. Their first disagreements date back to approximately this time. But for now, they continued their affairs together, continuing to appear everywhere reading poems. Gradually, Yesenin's talent also matured, and he began to gain popularity among average readers, who found "darling Yesenin" more accessible, so cozy, simple, and charming. He was difficult not to love, just as it was difficult to truly love Klyuev—withdrawn, unapproachable, dangerous.
Time passed, the circle of Yesenin's fans grew, but serious critics still placed Klyuev first. In 1917, Yesenin tried to break with Klyuev, to escape from under his influence and patronage, to go his own way. Unfortunately, there is much to suggest that at the root of this decision was also ordinary envy of another's talent. In conversations with acquaintances, Yesenin reinterpreted Klyuev's work, and what had previously aroused his admiration was now subjected to ridicule. All this was gleefully picked up by his entourage and transmitted in letters, memoirs, and conversations. Yesenin wrote a satirical poem about Klyuev:
From Vytegra to Shuya
He plowed the entire land,
And chose the nickname Klyuev,
Humble Nikolai.
Monkishly wise and gentle,
He's all in the carving of speech,
And Easter quietly descends
From his naked head.
And there, beyond the resinous hill I go, hiding my path,
Curly-haired and merry,
Such a roguish me.
Klyuev's poetic response to Yesenin was, in fact, written a little earlier in the following poem:
White flower Seryozha,
Like a centaur in likeness,
Has fallen out of love with my tale.
Like bells for communion,
Mother's icons, I loved him.
And in the eternal distance
Bright, triple-crowned,
He was foreseen by me.
Though I am not handsome,
Sickly and bald,
But my soul is like a dream...
The October revolution was not only a turning point in the life of Russia and its peoples but also in the personal lives of the two poets. From then on, they would each follow their own passionate path, both would suffer martyrdom, and both would achieve immortality. But always between them, wherever they were and whomever they loved, there would be an indissoluble spiritual bond, consecrated by divine providence.
(continued in the second supplement)
This article, which centers on a love affair between two classic modernist poets, exemplifies the revisionist impulse of some 1990s exponents of unconventional sexual identities in Russia, who sought to restore figures unfairly marginalized for their expression of homosexual desire to their rightful place in history and the literary canon.
In their effort to bridge the gap between an early post-Soviet present and a pre-Soviet moment that preceded poet Nikolai Klyuev’s (1884-1937) tragic clash with the arbiters of official Soviet aesthetics, the author of this piece presents readers with a scene of prelapsarian purity. Klyuev’s homosexual desires, for which, it is implied, the Soviet state apparatus would ultimately destroy him, seem aligned with a kind of elemental Russianness, in turn inextricable from the marginalized religiosity of the Russian Orthodox sect known as the Khlysty (flagellants), whose ascetic theology had inspired some of Klyuev’s work. For some early post-Soviet exponents of LGBTQ identities, a search for an “elementally Russian” version of homosexuality or sexual and gender fluidity led to the expression of Russian-religious, and in some cases, Russian-nationalist sentiments. Active identification with distinct national and religious traditions was subversive in the Soviet context, and a number of writers, on the cusp of the late-Soviet and post-Soviet eras, combined this affinity with elements of Russian national or nationalist or religious identities. One example of this tendency was the artist Timur Novikov (1958-2002), who led a neo-conservative turn in the post-Soviet art world. After his AIDS diagnosis, Novikov, who never publicly admitted his homosexuality, retreated into an intensifying Russian-religious conservatism.
This article’s counterpoint to Klyuev is the poet Sergei Esenin (1895-1925), a darling of the early-Soviet literary milieu whose suspected romantic entanglement with Klyuev has long been the object of scholarly speculation. Esenin is presented as the lesser talent of the two, who accordingly enjoyed greater popularity in a darker age. In this historical framing, the start of the Soviet period marked a rupture with a culture and spirituality that the article’s author wishes to recuperate.
At odds with this desire to suture the pre-Soviet past to the post-Soviet present is the historical truth that exiled anti-Bolshevik élites often took a dim view of homosexuality. Among the anti-Soviet émigrés of the early twentieth century, many of whom regarded themselves as the true guardians of Russian culture and religion against Bolshevik degeneracy, vehement antipathy for male homosexuality was rampant. For instance, Russian cultural historian Simon Karlinsky led an embattled career as a champion of LGBTQ identity in Russian literature and culture, becoming an advocate of restoring effaced LGBTQ elements in the study and teaching of the Russian cultural canons. These efforts encountered strong resistance from members both of the Western academy and Russian émigré communities, who regarded Karlinsky’s scholarship as an artificial attempt by fringe Western interests to impose their own proclivities on the Russian cultural legacy.