S.A. Yesenin’s “To Sister Shura” as a Lyrical and Philosophical Poetic Cycle

Abstract

The article is devoted to the complex analysis of the poems “To Sister Shura” by S.A. Esenin (1925), and shows that the ideological and artistic unity, the genre of the dedication message, common characters, historical and literary and author’s context, through images, motifs and metrical basis characterize them as the last completed lyrical and philosophical cycle of the poet. The information presented for the first time from an unsent letter from S.A. Tolstoy-Esenina to M.A. and N.S. Voloshin in November 1925 and a comparative analysis of manuscripts and printed sources, as well as the dramatic circumstances of the poet’s life at that time, significantly complement the creative history of the poems, the real and historical-literary context of the cycle. The article shows that the author’s will in the order of the arrangement of poems was manifested in the texts sent to the newspaper “Baku Worker” (publication did not take place) and put in a typeset copy of the “Collection of Poems.” Built on the principle of genre cyclization, indicated in the dedication, poems “To Sister Shura” develop the idea of the unity of life-path, ancestral roots and national historical memory. The final stanza of each poem serves as a philosophical generalization, and the final one sums up the cycle as a whole. The multi-valued symbolic image of a passerby, dating back to diverse folklore-mythological, biblical and literary sources containing a dialectical idea of a person’s spiritual path, about communion with eternity and the universe, is a complex metaphor, synthesizes the meanings of the concepts, such as path, world, eternity, pilgrimage, homeland.

Keywords

• s.a. esenin
• “to sister shura” poems
• lyrical and philosophical cycle
• genre
• manuscripts
• context
• sources
• poetics