Malaya Morskaya St., 24, Saint Petersburg, Russia, 190000
On December 28, 1925, at 10:30 a.m., in room number five of the "International" hotel (formerly "Angleterre," now the hotel has returned to its historic name), a man was found hanging from the central heating pipe. According to the presented documents, the man who hanged himself was Sergey Alexandrovich Yesenin, a writer…” (from the "Incident Scene Inspection Report"). Thus ended the life path of the 30-year-old Russian poet.
By the way, he stayed in a room that was only given to party workers and prominent cultural figures. Sergey Yesenin invited close friends to visit him, among whom were the married couple Ustinovs and Wolf Ehrlich. The latter later recounted that on December 27, the day before the suicide, the poet handed him a sheet of paper with the well-known poem “Goodbye, my friend, goodbye…” Yesenin, according to him, urged him to read the poem when he was alone.
Friends and acquaintances of the poet agree that Yesenin’s alcoholism was the primary cause of his premature departure “to that land where there is peace and bliss.” The poet himself, answering questions on December 5, 1925, when filling out an outpatient card, wrote in the “Alcohol” section: “A lot, since age 24.” There, in the doctor’s handwriting, it was mercilessly noted: “Delirium tremens. White fever, hallucinations.” At the beginning of his bohemian life, the young healthy body of the Ryazan lad coped with the obligatory party drinking. Yesenin even managed to organize “detox” days. In 1921, he happily noted in a letter to his friend Anatoly Mariengof: “…I won’t drink like that anymore, and today, for example, I completely refused just to see drunk Grishka. My God, what filth that is, and I was probably even worse.” But the poet never lasted long. In the last year of his life, Yesenin became, in Mariengof’s words, “a man for no more than one hour a day. After the first morning shot, his consciousness darkened.”
In 1922, Sergey Alexandrovich complained in a letter to his poetic “mentor” Klyuev: “I am very tired, and my last binge illness has completely worn me out.”
While in America with his wife Isadora Duncan, Yesenin drank himself into epileptic seizures. To be fair, not only from the amount of whiskey consumed but also its quality. At that time, America was shaken by Prohibition, so in the morning one had to take homemade moonshine surrogates. A. Duncan wrote in the “Herald Tribune” newspaper, trying to somehow justify her husband and explain his drunken rampages with mirror smashing in hotels: “The episodes of mental disorder that Yesenin suffers from are caused not only by alcohol… but also by blood poisoning from the consumption of ‘forbidden’ American whiskey, which I have certification from a famous New York doctor who treated Yesenin during such seizures in New York…”
Supporters of the theory of the poet’s violent death heavily emphasize Yesenin’s fatal conflicts with the authorities.
This is complete nonsense! When in the late 1980s the first articles appeared claiming that Yesenin was killed by the GPU, I analyzed all three versions of the poet’s murder discussed in the press: death from a skull fracture caused by a blow with a revolver handle or an iron, death from suffocation with a pillow or sleeve, and death from a gunshot wound to the head. Many even managed to see a bullet hole and 20 grams of brain matter on his face in postmortem photos. There were conflicts, but only due to the poet’s tavern brawls. Yesenin was taken to the police station 10 times. But not for torture, rather for “sobering up.” I quote his fellow poet Khodasevich, who knew Yesenin well: “Regarding Yesenin, an order was issued in 1924 to the police—to take him to the station for sobering up and release him without further proceedings.”
The authorities treated the singer of “Soviet Russia” quite tenderly. The only poem that could be stretched to be critical of the authorities is “The Land of Scoundrels.” There, Yesenin has a character named Leibman with the nickname Chekistov. For those who don’t know, one of the revolutionary leaders Trotsky-Bronstein’s real name was Leib. Could this coincidence have mortally offended Leib Davidovich? There are other “terrible” words spoken by Makhno (the bandit Nomakh in the poem): “Herd! Herd! …Your equality is deception and lies. For fools—a good bait. For scoundrels—a decent catch.” But a bandit is supposed to say scary things—that’s what a bandit is. That’s all the dissidence there is.
But how many heartfelt lines Yesenin poured onto paper in favor of Bolshevik causes! And on Lenin’s death, the poet responded as only a great lyrical poet could: “And so he died… The one who saved us is no more. And those he left behind must chain the country in concrete in the raging flood.” Yesenin’s hostility toward the Bolsheviks is a myth. Of course, when drunk, Sergey Alexandrovich would start to riot and sometimes say all sorts of indecencies, but the authorities treated his tavern rebellion indulgently. If he had been a danger to the authorities, he would have been easily accused of some conspiracy and killed, like the poet Nikolai Gumilev. Yesenin was on good terms with many Chekists. In particular, he liked to drag along the famous Chekist assassin Yakov Blumkin to parties, who in the summer of 1918 had personally executed the German ambassador. According to Khodasevich, for a thrill, Yesenin could suggest to an honest company to go watch the execution of “counter-revolutionaries.” “I can arrange this for you through Blumkin in a minute,” the fired-up lyrical poet seriously declared.
Against the backdrop of developing alcoholism, some character traits that had previously been present in tolerable doses became aggravated. Yesenin became pathologically touchy, and he was increasingly seized by bouts of black melancholy. In May 1925, seeing the poet, prose writer A. Vronsky said: “For the first time, I sharply felt that he would not live long and that he was burning out.”
The death mania in the last year literally consumed the poet. Researchers of his work note “about 400 mentions of death in S. Yesenin’s works, more than a third of which fall on the last two years, and in half of these poems the poet speaks of his own death, of suicide.”
“When I die, then you will know whom you have lost. All Russia will weep,” the poet increasingly repeated to his friends. Two months before his death, in his last poem “The Black Man,” he wrote about himself: “My friend, my friend, I am very, very ill.” Not long before, Yesenin wrote with an unsteady hand in his poems: “Possessed by a heavy falling sickness, my soul became like a yellow skeleton.” The poet had previously tried to kill himself. He lay down under the wheels of a country train, threw himself into an oil reservoir in Baku, cut his veins with glass. But then friends were nearby, and tragedy was avoided.
Three weeks before the tragic outcome, the poet’s friends managed to have him admitted to a Moscow clinic under the supervision of Dr. Gannushkin, a great admirer of the poet’s talent. The goal was twofold—to save the poet from prosecution (in September, Yesenin caused a drunken scandal on a train with anti-Semitic escapades directed at Kremlin officials traveling in the same car) and to get some treatment at the same time. Yesenin told Mariengof about his last treatment: “I feel very good here… only a little irritated that a blue lamp burns day and night… and also—they don’t allow me to close the door… Everyone is afraid that I will commit suicide.” The farewell poem “Goodbye, my friend, goodbye… In this life, dying is nothing new, but living, of course, is no newer” was written by Yesenin in blood on a notebook sheet a day before his tragic death.
Advocates of the murder theory are inspired by a number of details in the description of the scene and the body of the hanged man. They claim that Yesenin, being 1.68 m tall, could not have hanged himself from a ceiling over 4.5 meters high, especially on a vertical heating pipe. They also like to point out the indented groove on the frontal part of the head (visible even on the poet’s postmortem masks), the presence of a dark spot on the upper eyelid of the right eye, a bent arm supposedly clutching the pipe, undamaged laryngeal cartilages, the absence of a “strangulation groove,” and many other minor details. In 1989 and 1992, two independent forensic medical examinations were conducted by the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation. The verdict of both was absolutely discouraging for supporters of the murder theory. All questions have answers.
The investigative experiment showed that a belt (Yesenin hanged himself with a suitcase strap) can be secured and a load of up to 100 kg applied to the free end without the belt slipping. The hotel ceiling height is not 4.5 m but only 3.5 m. With a 1.5 m stand (a nightstand of this height was found overturned in the hotel room) and the suicide’s height of 1.68 m, the knot can be firmly secured under the ceiling. The investigation established that “the indentation in the soft tissues of the frontal area was formed as a result of prolonged contact with a cylindrical object (i.e., the steam heating pipe), a hot object…” Therefore, the groove remained until the funeral. The dark spot on the upper eyelid is not a bullet mark but a spot from “drying of the apex of the skin fold formed… by contact of the face with a cylindrical object.” The strangulation groove is clearly visible even in retouched photos. The laryngeal cartilages do not necessarily have to be damaged during hanging, especially when the noose is not tightened, as was the case with Yesenin. Airway closure during hanging does not play the main role. The main factor in such cases is the compression of the neck vessels. This sharply increases intracranial pressure, and the person almost instantly loses the ability to coordinate actions and free themselves from the noose. Many who decided to scare their loved ones by “pretending” to hang themselves actually ended up dead. Yesenin, apparently, instinctively tried to hold himself during the brief agony by clutching the pipe with his right hand. That is why it stiffened in a bent position.
“Suicide can also be committed for aesthetic reasons, from a desire to die beautifully, to die young, to evoke special sympathy. Yesenin’s suicide, the most remarkable Russian poet after Blok, caused a cult of his personality,” wrote the outstanding Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev upon the poet’s death.
Anatoly Mariengof wrote in his memoirs that Yesenin “caught fame the day after his death.”
Sources:
https://diletant.media/articles/26436359/
http://www.stoletie.ru/vzglyad/jeshhe_raz_o_smerti_jesenina_563.htm
https://ser-esenin.ru/biografija/stati/750-skolko-bylo-eseninu-na-moment-smerti.html
