Sergey Yesenin was born on 3 October 1895 in the Ryazan Province. He didn’t spend much time with his parents and he was substantially brought up by his grandparents. Yesenin began to compose poetry when he was nine.
In 1912 he moved to Moscow and found a job. At first Yesenin worked in a bookshop and then in the printing establishment. A year later he entered Moscow State University and attended there for eighteen months. Russian folklore affected Yesenin’s early poetry. In 1915, a young poet moved to St. Petersburg and met Andrei Bely, Alexander Blok, Nikolai Klyuev and Sergey Gorodetsky there. It is known that Alexander Blok tried his best to promote Sergey Yesenin as a poet.
The first Yesenin’s book was published in 1916. It was called Radunitsa. Yesenin became one of the most famous poets in those days for his touching poesy about simple life and love. In 1913 he married Anna Izryadnova who was his colleague in the publishing house. They had a son.
When Yesenin moved to St. Petersburg he became acquainted with Klyuev who became his close friend. They lived together for some time. In 1916 he was drafted into the army till 1917. Yesenin was also confident that the October Revolution would be an incitement for a better life and he supported it but later was disappointed. Yesenin occasionally criticized the Bolshevik rule in his works.
In 1917 he married Zinaida Raikh who was an actress. It was his second marriage. They had 2 children, Tatyana and Konstantin. Subsequently Sergey and Zinaida fell out and did not live together. In 1921 they divorced. Their son became a prominent soccer statistician and Tatyana became a writer.
In September 1918, Yesenin founded his own publishing house called "Трудовая Артель Художников Слова".
In 1921 he made the acquaintance of Isadora Duncan who was a dancer, eighteen years his senior. She did not speak Russian and Sergey did not know foreign languages. In 1922 they married. He accompanied Isadora on a tour of Europe and the USA but his dipsomania was out of control. Yesenin often razed hotel rooms and made a disturbance in public places. These facts surfaced in the international press. This marriage was not long and in 1923 he arrived in Moscow. After a while Yesenin met Augusta Miklashevskaya who was an actress. He was in a relationship with her.
Yesenin also had a son by Nadezhda Volpin that year. She was a poet. His son, Alexander Esenin-Volpin, became a poet too. Afterwards he left the USSR and became a mathematician in the USA. Sergey Yesenin did not know him.
The last 2 years Yesenin was addicted to drink but at the same time he wrote some of his best poems. In 1925 he married Sophia Andreyevna Tolstaya who was a granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy. She was his fifth wife. She tried to help him jolt out of his depression.
His last poem was written in his own blood. The next day Yesenin hanged himself in the Hotel Angleterre at the age of thirty. Yesenin was buried in Moscow’s Vagankovskoye Cemetery.
