ABSTRACT
Yessenin accepted the Bolshevik revolution with an immediate unreserved faith and fervor to be found in not more than six writers who had any standing to lose. Yessenin was a representative of lyric poetry—that is, of the creative artist in his purest essence. In such a system of belief the deafness of the man-of-action to the lyric poet’s plea for some clear place in life, is inhumanely absolute. It was the twofold misfortune of Yessenin’s lyric nature to be born into an age of gigantic concentration upon a practical undertaking, and into a company of engineers whose blue-prints took the form of metaphysical demonstrations that the universe itself, or man and all society and all history, is that undertaking. Conceiving the revolution as a gesture, adhering to it in the face of all the world with glorious abandon, and yet ignoring utterly both the practical predicament and the theoretic hypotheses of the Bolsheviks.
