In the homeland of the Yesenins: how does Fedyakino village, from whence did the poet's surname come from, lives now

Sergey Baimukhametov

On September 16, in Moscow, at the Institute of World Literature, an international scientific conference "Yesenin and the literary process of the first third of the twentieth century" was opened. Philologists from many countries of the world take part in it. The conference will continue in Ryazan and end at the S.A. Yesenin in the village of Konstantinovo.

Most likely, its participants will not visit the nearby village of Fedyakino. And in vain. Fedyakino is the birthplace of the Yesenin family. In the fall of 1995, when the 100th anniversary of the poet's birth was celebrated, I shot a film there for the interstate (CIS) television and radio company Mir. Since then, these notes have been preserved.

Seryozha Yesenin

Marina Yesenina's grandfather is a Chinese from Harbin, who rushed to Russia at the call of the revolution, which soon ground him in the camps, like thousands of other internationalists. Mother is a Polish woman, a descendant of those Poles who were exiled to Siberia after the Polish uprising of 1863. Marina is naturally Russian.

Krasnoyarsk in the Soviet years was a special city, in itself and around it - military units, many soldiers. For one of them, Sasha Yesenin, Marina married. Soon, he was still serving, gave birth. When on the first morning the nurses brought her the child and said: "And here is Seryozha," she was surprised: "Why Seryozha?" She wanted to name her son Zhenya. The nurses were also surprised: “How so? If the father is Alexander Yesenin, then the son must be Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin! "

So Seryozha became Seryozha Yesenin. When my father was demobilized, they left for his homeland, in the village of Fedyakino near Ryazan. There, no one is surprised by his name and surname. Because there are five or six families of the Yesenins. And all - albeit very distant, but relatives to each other, including the poet's family, of course.

We are lazy, not curious, and besides, we are slaves of habit. As we run into something well-known, we will not move a single step. They told us that the homeland of Sergei Yesenin is the village of Konstantinovo, so we only go there and take steps.

By the way, the sign "The great Russian poet Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin (1895 - 1925) was born and lived here" is not entirely accurate. The house where he was born burned down in 1922. And this one is already new.

Well, okay, the bottom line is that in Konstantinov there are no more Yesenins - relatives of the same name. And so in old Russian villages - it does not happen. There they live by their surnames. But the fact of the matter is that the Yesenins are newcomers to Konstantinov. The poet's great-grandfather, Osip Yesenin, bought a house here, having moved here from Fedyakin. Grandfather, Nikita Osipovich, in 1871 built a house in which the poet was born. And the name of the Yesenins remained there, in Fedyakin. Yesenin machine operators, Yesenin cattlemen, Yesenin clerks, milkmaids, teachers... The most important thing: to learn about them, you don't have to go far, because Fedyakino and Konstantinovo are three or four kilometers from each other, they are like they used to say, intertwine, that is, the interfacing in the field converge.

But it was only in 1995 that I became so smart. Because Ryazan journalist Valentin Karpushkin brought me to Fedyakino to see his brother Gennady, who was then a teacher there. In that school, opened in 1881, in its new building, built in 1915, Sergei Yesenin in 1918 read his poems to his fellow countrymen. Alas, in 2012 the school was closed - the students were gone. The former have grown, the new ones have not been born. In 1906, there were 2,000 people in Fedyakino, in 2010 - 377. Now it is even less.

We then settled with Gennady with the whole film crew, got acquainted with his colleagues, friends, fellow villagers. And since you live in such close contact, you learn a lot from the inside. As your own. In general, had it not been for such a case, I, like others, would have trampled only Konstantin's tracks.

Few people know about Fedyakino. The village remained untouched. As it is, with an ordinary life. And if Yesenin's poems are sung here, then it is not on official prompting, but just like that. By the way, in 1995 Fedyakino also had its own amateur performances. Here, in the old club, one could hear, for example, songs performed by three generations of Fedyakins from the Pascal family. (Where does such a French surname come from in a Russian village that is nearly 400 years old?). Everything was connected here: old songs, which only my grandmother remembered, and the post-war repertoire of my father, and rock ballads, which were composed by my grandson. And they all converged, of course, on Yesenin's song verses.

All the days that we worked on the film, Seryozha Yesenin was with us. Of course, he himself is interested: not every day and not every boy gets to take part in the filming for TV of the Commonwealth of Independent States, there will be something to tell and show to friends at the school. There, in the regional center Rybny, Seryozha mastered the profession of a mechanic, because cars are his tendency since childhood. By the age of ten, he knew how to drive everything that snorts and moves. And, in the end, he became a mechanic. More precisely, as a mechanic-officer, combining already in adulthood two boyish passions - for military service and for technology.

We, of course, were glad to Seryozha, exploited him as best we could. They filmed him with his father and mother (Sasha is a shepherd, Marina is an accountant), took him everywhere, persuaded to give books about Yesenin to numerous guests of the Yesenin holiday in Konstantinov, guidebooks to the Ryazan region, booklets about the Yesenin museum - with his autograph. They showed in the shot in close-up that the boy had developed a painting for himself - exactly like that of the great namesake.

Pontius Pilate as a love potion

Yesenin remained in the memory, in the perception of many as a unique nugget, all from his gut, never ending academies, “a sonorous bum, an apprentice among the language-maker,” as Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote about him in his epitaph poem.

Yes, Yesenin tried. He portrayed Vanechka in a red shirt, at a meeting with Blok he said something like: we don't understand yours... Then he put on a silk top hat, kid gloves, looked like a European dandy. Probably not only because I traveled abroad, and not just like that, but with a hint: I'm different, not what you think! But it was too late. So it remained in the minds of many a nightingale-nugget.

in half with the city bully-drunk. And behind everything outside, behind chrome boots or a top hat, for partying drunks or attempts to shake off the obsession, few people noticed when, where, how Yesenin managed to become an educated person.

It is understandable when Blok writes a separate study on the poetry of spells and spells. That “the whole area of folk magic and rituals ... turned out to be that ore where the gold of genuine poetry shines; that gold that provides book... poetry - up to the present day".

And when spontaneous, native poetry is combined with religious bookishness, and even with the black book, then the formidable fifth procurator of Judea, Hegemon Pontius Pilate, is used as a love spell in an eighteenth-century love spell-spell. In the most ordinary Russian life at the beginning of the eighteenth century! Think about it, imagine: 1714, the village of Izosimovka, a kurnaya hut, a man in love, a sufferer and an old witch, who teaches him how to add sweetness to himself - in the name of ...the fifth procurator of Judea, the Roman horseman Pontius Pilate! True, he turns into a "demon" and "Pilatate" there, and is written with a small letter, but the good fellow who conjures, does not think about him:

“In the name of Satan, and the judge of his demon, the venerable demon Pilatate hegemon ... She could not live, be, eat, or drink without me, like a white fish without water, a dead body without a soul, a baby without a mother..."

I can say one word: love...

And also note: in the Russian conspiracy, Hegemon Pilate turned into a judge of Satan (!), Into a venerable (!) Demon.

Blok's "Poetry of Conspiracies and Spells" was first published in 1908, when Yesenin was still in school, in Spas-Klepiki. And not in a noticeable magazine and newspaper circulation, but in an academic edition, probably "boring" for the bohemian-decadent-hysterical atmosphere of those times. Five years later, Yesenin appeared in St. Petersburg. The first recognition, the books, the revolution - a lot fit into the next seven years. Only seven years in which the white-haired village boy has become a recognized poet. And now he, like an echo of Blok's reflections on the poetry of conspiracies and spells, responds with the "Keys of Mary".

“The horse, both in Greek, Egyptian, Roman and Russian mythology, is a sign of aspiration, but only one Russian peasant guessed to put him on his roof, likening his hut under him to a chariot ... All our skates are on the roofs, roosters on the shutters , pigeons on the princely porch, flowers ...are not of a simple ornamental character, this is a great significant epic of the outcome of the world and the purpose of man".

So the noble son Blok and the peasant son Yesenin agreed that true poetry originates in the depths of folk images of the world and ideas about the world, in the depths of language, dark legends.

To realize this simple truth, to formulate it as a theory, poetics, one must go a long way in the formation of the mind and soul.

Guilty without guilt Kriushi

Another mystery of Yesenin is the seemingly clear poem "Anna Snegina". This is strange to me: why did Yesenin split the action of the poem into two villages - Radovo and Kriushi? With signs placed quite clearly: Radovo is rich and beautiful, and in Kriushi people are poor and spiteful.

The village, then, is ours - Radovo,

Yards, read, two hundred.

To the one who looked around it,

Our seats are pleasant.

We are rich in wood and water,

There are pastures, there are fields.

And all over the land

Poplars are planted ...

But people are all sinful souls.

Many have eyes like fangs.

From the neighboring village of Kriushi

The men looked sideways at us.

Their life was bad,

Almost the whole village gallops

And plowed with one plow

On a pair of worn-out nags.

Meanwhile, it is the Kriushin peasants who ask about Lenin and are doing what was just, according to the then revolutionary concepts, a deed - they take away the house and land from the landowner Anna Snegina.

There are many questions here. Firstly, the actual village is not called Kriushi, but Kriusha - by the name of the winding river. Kriusha. Secondly, it was not the last one then, and now it is not the same. According to the 2010 census, the population there is three times more than in Konstantinov or Fedyakin.

We specially came there, filmed the village, talked with people. They still take offense at the poet. One of the grannies said that they have something better than in Konstantinovo, because the land is sandy, and in Konstantinovo, like rain, so mud. And most importantly, the Kriushin men are not to blame for anything. They did not take away the house and land from Anna Snegina - the poet's adolescent, youthful love.

And this was done by Konstantin's peasants, fellow villagers and Yesenin's neighbors. (That is, the Rada, if according to the poem.) Moreover, they wanted to take not only the land, but also to burn down the house of the last landowner of Constantine, Lydia Ivanovna Kashina (the prototype of Anna Snegina). The same house where Yesenin was a boy and where the museum of the poem "Anna Snegina" is now. The poet's sister said that Sergei was at that stormy village meeting, and it was he who persuaded the vengeful peasants not to destroy the estate.

So why did Yesenin divide the action into two villages? On purpose to shade black and white? Let's say, although in fact he only confused the situation, since the “good”, by the then Soviet standards, is being done by the “bad” Kriushin peasants. Let us assume that this confusion is a reflection of the poet's conflicting views and sympathies.

But writing such a poem is also very inconvenient - the plot develops with a creak. The story is conducted in the first person, the action takes place - in two places. More precisely - in three. The narrator himself does not live there and not here - at the mill. So the author-hero-storyteller has to make ends meet, then walk, then go on a cart to Kriushi, to Radovo and back. And somehow explain their movements.

Yesenin, feeling this, cloudes the plot. Indeed, in the poem, nowhere directly, it is not specified exactly where the house of Anna Snegina is located - in Radov or in Kriushi? In Kriushi it is impossible. The question arises: why did the landowners build their estate, settled in the most seedy village? And therefore, according to the plot of the poem, it turns out that it seems to be in Radov: the Kriushinsky troublemaker-rebel Pron Ogloblin harnesses his horse and goes to Anna Snegina in a cart. If Snegins lived in Kriushi, then there is no need to go anywhere, you can walk on foot. However, it is not said for sure that the estate of the landowner is in Radov. Because, again, the reader will have a question: why are the Kriushin peasants trying to take away the land from the Rada landowner, and in general, what are the Rada peasants doing and thinking at this time? And there are no Rada men in the poem as such. At all.

In general, fog. Although, it would seem, why suffer? Combine the action in one village, as it really was - and all the points are set. But no. Yesenin with incomprehensible stubbornness adheres not to the natural course of events, but to an artificial, invented plot. Why?

Perhaps because the soul resists. Doesn't allow. Yesenin, after all, nowhere does not have poems about his bad village. Because the village is childhood. And it was harmonious. A special warm and cozy world, where there is no place for blood and dirt. And the soul, despite all the reasons, did not allow the poet to write what was in reality. In the village of childhood and adolescence, where there was first love, where there was "a girl in a white cape" (Anna Snegina), there can be no confusion, evil and ruin. Must not be. He won't allow it. And therefore, willingly or unwillingly, he takes out everything bad outside his world, outside the limits of Radov-Konstantinov. There, into the ill-fated "your" class chaos! In ...Kriushi!

And let us also take into account, by the way, that the real Kriusha for Radov-Konstantinov is not at all a "neighboring village", as it is written in the poem. The actual village of Kriusha is not only far from Konstantinov, but also across the river. Behind the wide Oka. It is also necessary to go and go from the Oka. That is, Konstantinovo-Radovo has almost nothing in common with the Kriushi. And it turns out that Yesenin took the name of the village to denote a "bad village", with which he is not associated with golden memories of childhood and adolescence.

So forgive the poet, Kriushi are real.

And one more thing: the river, according to the signs of the people's consciousness and subconsciousness, is a borderline, a border behind which something unknown and alluring is hidden, and most often there is a threat.

Pig ears

They said that our film, which aired on Channel One TV in the program of the interstate television and radio company "MIR" - turned out. (Operators - Igor Chesnokov and Alexander Terentyev, author, director and presenter - me.) Many Moscow acquaintances called, they said all sorts of words: they say, it touches you to tears, in the most literal sense. One poetess from Altai not only phoned a Moscow television studio, but even found out my home phone number to tell me what she thinks and feels.

We tried not to bump into the sentimental, stamped "Yesenin lyrics", but to show the everyday life of the poet's native land against the background of his fate. They showed him to fellow countrymen who now live here. For example, Aunt Raya and Uncle Vanya Anastasyin tell in the film that street nicknames are still in use in Fedyakin, and some of them go back to the 19th century! The same aunt Raya is nicknamed Vodyanushka, because her grandfather (!) Worked at a water mill. (By the way, that miller from Anna Snegina was not Aunt Raya's grandfather?) And Uncle Vanya is a Milkman, because after the war his father was an authorized milk collection officer. They say about Yesenin that at one time he seemed to be called the Monk, because - laughs Aunt Raya - "ladies and girls hesitated."

In general, as it fell on the soul - and filmed, and went on the air. Except for one frame - twenty seconds.

A song to Yesenin's poems sounds off-screen, scenes from Fedyakin's everyday life float across the screen. Early morning:

- a woman with a milk tray hugs a cow;

- a man throws hay from a haystack, and an impatient calf picks it up on the fly;

- a gray dappled horse appears slowly out of the fog;

- the old man walks along the road along the green winter, with a knapsack on his shoulders, like a walker or a wanderer from former times;

- the rooster walks around the chicken perch, imperiously akimbo;

- grandmother and a cat at the window greet the day;

- the white-haired boy squints in the sun...

And there was one more shot: the hostess in the pigsty dumped the feed into the trough, but the pig does not eat, she turns away. So the hostess grabbed her by the ears and pulled her, turned her to the trough, and at the same time to the video camera. The pig is healthy, the uterus is pregnant, the ears are large and strong. And here it is, this frame, someone at the last moment, when driving to an on-air cassette - cut out. He probably thought it was "ugly", "unpoetic." You see, I didn't like the pig.

What can I say. It remains only to make a helpless gesture.

P.S. In July this year, the Fedyakino club hosted a presentation of Viktor Shilin's book “Fedyakino, Fedyakino, native lands”.

“Thanks to the book, I want people to learn about Fedyakin far beyond the Ryazan region”, - said the author. - The book appeared largely thanks to my father. He instilled in me a love for my small homeland. When I bought a tape recorder from my first paycheck, my father asked: "Write down your grandfather how he sings "Fedyakin's sufferings", as they sounded then, back in the 19th century."