The Last Poet of the Village

The great Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, while second in popularity with his countrymen only after Pushkin, is perhaps best known outside of his homeland for his brief marriage to Isadora Duncan. After their relationship broke up, Yesenin hung himself. Or perhaps he was murdered-their were a great many "suicides" during the Stalinist purges. His great contemporary rival, Vladimir Mayakovsky, wrote a poem "To Sergei Yesenin" castigating him for "taking the easy way out"-only to commit suicide himself (again, questionable) a few years later. Sadly, Yesenin, still immensely popular in the post-Soviet Union, has barely been translated into English. This bilingual edition (original Russian side-by-side with my translation) is an attempt to rectify that.