ABSTRACT
when impulses as adult and comprehending as that, rising moreover among the workers themselves, are extinguished under the incombustible gas-blanket of party machine control and paid-for propaganda, you can easily imagine what becomes of those more naïve and childlike serious capers in which the lyric spirit at its purest always did, and pray God always will, express its totally impractical exuberance. Their sad story is told briefly in the dissoluteness and the death of Sergei Yessenin. It is a fixed item of the false sophistication of Marxians— sophistication which was once naïve enough, remember, to conceive “reality” as practical “human-sensible action”*—that the tendency of artists to adopt a freely experimental, slightly vagabondish mode of life, as irrelevant as possible to social classes or any other fixed and practically regulated categories of being, is a passing incident, a symptom merely of the decomposition of the capitalist regime. It is only necessary for a Marxian to say “bourgeois Bohemia,” and any unfortunate poet or other seeker for a sheer and various experience of life, is there- with chloroformed, ticketed and pinned away in a glass box, and human knowledge has no more to see or say 46about him. Poets, however, were minstrels—minstrels were privileged magicians—before bourgeois society ever struck a tap-root into the earth. They will be so when bourgeois society, desperately practical in its decadence, has carried the desperately practical sophistication of these Marxians with it, as properly belonging to it, into the remote horizons of history. Therefore let us approach the “café period” of Russian post-revolutionary poetry, and the sad bloom and drooping of Yessenin with a little psychological common-sense.
