Our Notes & References

First edition of this important collection, considered by Esenin as “the most characteristic and what I consider [my] best”, and conceived in Europe in company of Isadora Duncan, his newlywed wife.

With the first publication of Esenin’s famous and provocative cycle Moscow of the Taverns, censored in the USSR, which banned this edition.

At the end of March 1923, Sergei Esenin (1895-1925) handed over the manuscript written in 1922-23 to the Berlin publisher I. T. Blagov. Quiclly released in June, these ‘scandalous’ poems include in particular for the first time four uncensored poems of his daring and popular cycle Moskva Kabatskaia [Moscow of the Taverns]: “Da! Teper resheno! Bez vozvrata” [“Yes! It’s settled! Now and forever”], “Snova poiut zdes, derutsia i plachiut” [“They are drinking here again, brawling, sobbing”], “Syp, garmonika! Skuka, skuka” [“Shoot, accordion! Boredom, O boredom”], and “Poi zhe poi na prokliatoi gitare” [“Sing, sing with the damned guitar”]. Printed without any separation from each other, the poems were dedicated to Esenin’s friend, the poet Aleksandr Kusikov.

The themes of hooliganism and desperate drunkenness in this cycle were deeply autobiographical. During Esenin’s life in Russia and travels in Europe, he was the subject of continuous scandals and sometimes even criminal cases involving debauchery and fights. Upon his return to Russia, he developed his Moskva Kabatskaia into a separate work and made four attempts to publish this “problematic” work (Bubnov). The collection was eventually issued in 1924 with omissions and without several poems, including the aforementioned “Poi zhe poi na prokliatoi gitare” [“Sing, sing with the damned guitar”].

Our first edition also includes Esenin’s other famous poems “Ispoved khuligana” [“Hooligan’s Confession”], “Ne zhaleiu, ne zovu, ne plachu” [“I don’t pity, don’t call, don’t cry”], “Pesn o sobake” [“A Song About a Dog”], and a chapter “Uralskii katorzhnik” [“The Ural Convict”] from the poem “Pugachev” (1922).

“I feel like a master of Russian poetry and therefore I am pulling words of all shades into the poetic speech, there are no unclean words. There are only unclean ideas. The embarrassment of my bold word lies not to me, but to the reader or listener”, Esenin wrote in the preface, foreseeing the critics’ uneasy reaction to his use of ‘vulgar’ and ‘base’ vocabulary.

Scarce outside Russia: we couldn’t trace any example being offered at auction in recent decades.

Bibliography

Missing in the Rozanov and the Lesman collections, who both had the 1924 Soviet edition of ‘Moscow of the Taverns’.

Bubnov S. A., “Kniga stikhov S. A. Esenina “Moskva Kabatskaia” v vospriiatii sovremennikov poeta”, Izvestiia Saratovskogo Universiteta // Filologiia. Zhurnalistika, vyp. 3, T. 14, 2014.