Lot 52A email save

ESENIN, Sergei Aleksandrovich (1895-1935), Preobra

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[Moscow]: Imazhinisty, 1921. 47 pp., 8vo (235 x 155 mm). Original green wrappers. Condition: wrappers slightly discolored with occasional staining and repairs to verso, some spotting internally. presentation copy from the famous russian peasant poet. This is the revised edition of a book first published in 1918. Esenin was not only one of the most popular Russian poets of his generation; he was the most self-destructive. With his dependance on wild sex and alcohol, Esenin lived the life of a rock star. This self-styled "poet of the people" was so famous that he read his work to the tsarina and her daughters. While Leon Trotsky had little use for him, Maxim Gorky reportedly wept when he heard Esenin's poems. Vulgar, cynical and rowdy, the handsome moody poet at first embraced the Bolshevik Revolution and later grew disillusioned with it. In 1922, he married for the third time the much older dancer Isadora Duncan. It was not a happy union: the press reported on his drunken rages and destroyed hotel rooms as she toured Europe and the United States. He returned to Russia and married a granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy in 1925, but she could not control his erratic behavior. Growing more despondent, he slashed his wrists and wrote his last poem in his own blood (there was no ink) and then hanged himself. Although he was given a state funeral, most of Esenin's works were denounced for "hooliganism" and it was not until the 1960s that he was fully "rehabilitated."

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