S. Yesenin Moscow tavern.

S. Yesenin Moscow tavern.

L. Type. State publishing house of a name tov. Bukharin. 1924, 44 p. Soft cover, size 16 x 23 cm. Good condition. The cover is photocopied, private library seals, restoration marks on the edges of the pages, bookseller's lettering on the last page.

"Moscow kabatskaya" is a collection of poems by Sergei Yesenin, published in July 1924 in Leningrad. The collection included 18 poems, traditionally divided into "Poems-as an introduction to" Moscow kabatskaya"", two internal cycles — actually" Moscow kabatskaya "and" Love of a hooligan "— and" Poem as a conclusion "("I do not regret, I do not call, I do not cry"). The Moscow kabatskaya cycle, which included four poems, was previously published in Yesenin's 1923 Berlin collection Poems of a brawler, and in early 1924 one of them ("Yes! Now it's decided. No return...") and two additional ones were published under this title in the third issue of the imagist magazine "Hotel for travelers in the beautiful". Once again during the author's lifetime, "Moscow kabatskaya" was included in the collection "Poems (1920-24)".

The idea of" Moscow kabatskaya " originated with Yesenin in the spring of 1923, when the poet was in Paris. Already in the Berlin collection of Yesenin 1923 "Poems of a brawler" included under the General title "Moscow kabatskaya" four poems — " Yes! Now it's decided. No return...", "again drinking here, fighting and crying...", " Rash, harmonica! Boredom… Boredom... " and " Sing, sing. On the damned guitar...", while in the introduction to the book, Yesenin pointed out: "The last four poems of Moscow kabatskaya appear for the first time." The entire cycle was dedicated to Yesenin's colleague in the" Order of imagists " — Alexander Kusikov. During his stay in France, Yesenin had already planned to publish the entire cycle "Moscow kabatskaya" as a separate book — the cover with the text "Yesenin. Moscow kabatskaya. Imagists. Paris. 1923", but what poems he intended to include in this edition is not known for certain.

Work on the theme continued after returning home in August 1923, and in early 1924, in the third issue of the magazine imagists "Hotel for travelers in the beautiful" under the title "Moscow kabatskaya" were printed " Yes! Now it's decided. No return... "and two more poems —" I have only one fun left... " and " I was never so tired...". Perhaps further publications were planned in the magazine format, but disagreements with the editorial Board of" Hotel " led to the fact that Yesenin ceased to be published in this magazine. In February 1924, the poem " Yes! Now it's decided. No return... "with the title" from the cycle "kabatskaya Moskva "" was also published in the magazine "Leningrad". In December 1923, in Krasnaya Novi and in early 1924 in Russian Sovremennik, poems appeared under the General title "Love of a hooligan" — this cycle, completely written in the second half of 1923, was included by Yesenin in the final draft of the book"Moscow kabatskaya".

By the end of 1923, Moscow kabatskaya was completed. Negotiations began on its publication, which took place with the participation of V. I. Volpin, and at the beginning of 1924 at the creative evening of Yesenin in Petrograd, money was raised for the publication. The manuscript was interested in the head of the Petrograd (by that time already Leningrad) Department of the Gosizdat I. In the end, the book was printed in the printing house of Gosizdat, although it was positioned as an author's collection and paid for by Yesenin himself. The cost of three thousand copies was 27 chervonets.

During the preparation of the publication, the censors removed two poems — " Sing, sing. On the damn guitar... " and " I have only one fun left...", but their names are preserved in the table of contents. In the poem "again drink here, fight and cry..." two stanzas were crossed out (the fourth and sixth in the full version). After the book was published in July, Yesenin personally delivered it to familiar addresses in Leningrad, and then the circulation went to Moscow — " Book chronicle "(#15 for 1924) dates the appearance of" Moscow kabatskaya " on sale August 1-15. Later, during Yesenin's lifetime, "Moscow kabatskaya" was included in the collection "Poems (1920-24)»; in this version of the cycle there were five poems — " I will not deceive myself...", " Yes! Now it's decided. No return...", "they drink here Again, fight and cry...", "the Rude are given joy..." and "This street is familiar to me...". Completely included in the collection and the cycle "Love of a bully" under the General title, but without the dedication of Miklashevskaya. Poems from "Moscow kabatskaya" (including " Rough is given joy...") and "Love of a bully" were included in the author's lifetime "Collection of poems", but were not allocated to a special section.

Despite a later assessment, according to which "critics of various aesthetic beliefs and group preferences — all, as if in concert, literally betrayed" Moscow kabatskaya" anathema", the book received a number of positive reviews after its release. In particular, there were many of them even before the book was published — in the Wake of public readings by Yesenin or from people familiar with the project of the book. Already in August 1923, the correspondent of Izvestiya VTSIK S. Borisov wrote that in the poems of "Moscow kabatskaya" " there is a new big stream in Yesenin's poetry. The power of language and image leaves far behind the poetry of Blok, which is related to it in romanticism." A. K. Voronsky, who was familiar with the texts of the poems of the cycle in the period preceding their publication, in December 1923 in the magazine "Searchlight" recognized them as "terrible, masterful and sincere" and wrote about their "tender lyricism". spiritual self-purification "and a turn to" romantic idealism". Osorgin noted the inner beauty of these poems.

After the book was published, the critic A. Lezhnev was sympathetic to it in the literary review of the magazine "Print and revolution". he was one of the first to note "Moscow kabatskaya" as a turning point in the life and work of Yesenin. According to Lezhnev, "[Z]a "terrible" name "Moscow kabatskaya" hides soft lyrical poems, sad and plaintive." At the same time, he rated the "tavern" part of the collection as the weakest, responding positively to the cycle "Love of a hooligan", whose poems he called the first love poems in the work of Yesenin, demonstrating even for him an extraordinary tenderness and sincerity. Lezhnyov also gave high praise to the technical side of Yesenin's works in this cycle, noting "the transparent, approaching Pushkin's verse that distinguishes the last phase of his work". I. M. took a similar position. Mashbits-Verov, in the magazine "October" contrasted the love cycle that makes up the second half of the book, "pubs and defiant hooliganism" of its first half and previous editions. Noting as disadvantages of the cycle a certain rhythmic and compositional monotony, Mashbits-Verov at the same time pointed to the "piercing musicality" of the rhymes, the deepening melody and harmony of the poems. Innokenty Oxenov, noting with displeasure in Zvezda Yesenin's departure from "native peasant soil", stressed that his poetry is inseparable from biography and should be considered in accordance with "the strongly built body of his work". One of the strongest in the entire collection, Oxenov called the poem " the mysterious World, my ancient world...", which he considered as a description of the"tragedy of the old village".

However, in the criticism after the release of "Moscow kabatskaya", negative reviews really prevailed, and if some critics denied the artistic merits of the works themselves, while others, paying tribute to the talent and vital truthfulness of the author, at the same time attacked the potential ideological danger of Kabatsky's poems. The tone was set by Voronsky, who in the first issue of Krasnaya Novi for 1924 saw in Yesenin's poems a special spirit of the time, characterized by "loss of faith in our revolution". Recognizing Yesenin's talent in portraying "kabatstva", the critic considered that the poems could have a corrupting influence on Soviet society (Voronsky's special attention from this point of view was caused by the poem" I have only one fun left...", which was not included in the published version of the collection). The lyrics of "Love of a bully" in this context remained out of the reviewer's field of attention. Figure Of Rappa G. Lelevich in the magazine" October " reproached Yesenin that he refused to poetize the old village, "does not yet look at modernity in a proletarian way", is not able to accept the revolutionary renewal, which was the reason for the appearance of"sinister drunken poems". In the" Young guard " Lelevich was even tougher, saying that Yesenin "declassified, broke away from the ground", and the poems of "Moscow kabatskaya" declared in every sense hopeless. The same scathing assessment was given to them in the "Russian contemporary" By I. Gruzdev, who wrote about "sluggish verse", "verbal tastelessness" and"thematic helplessness". Even Yesenin's "hooliganism" itself — for example, in the fourth stanza of the poem " Don't swear! Such a thing! ... " - he found unconvincing and insincere. In this light, according to Gruzdev, stands out the final poem of the book ("I do not regret, I do not call, I do not cry..."), which "should once again remind us what a wonderful lyric we lose in it." V. Druzin in "Krasnaya Gazeta" stated: "His original sin — the lack of development of the verse-came out." Selikhanovich in the newspaper" Baku worker", echoing Lelevich, wrote that "the old Moscow has died in his (Yesenin's) soul, and the new, labor and heroic, he has not yet stuck", as a result of which in his poems "with Baudelaire force" sounded accusations of the revolution in deception. The poem "This street is familiar to me...", which G. Adonts called "fetovschina", and V. Lebedev — "penitent poetic katzenjammer", received sharp reviews.

Even some of the reviewers (Mashbits-Verov, I. N. Rozanov) defended Yesenin from the attacks of his colleagues, who proved that the "kabatskaya" life is drawn in such tones in his poetry that it does not cause any desire to surrender to it, and, therefore, from this point of view, "Moscow kabatskaya" is harmless for the reader. Only later, in the light of the works that appeared after "Moscow kabatskaya", a number of critics came to conclusions about the regularity of "hooligan" and "kabatskaya" lyrics in the creative development of Yesenin; in particular, the emphasis shifted once again in the reviews of Voronsky, who in 1925 again noted in the poems of the cycle not so much "decadence" and Bohemianism, but rather emotional saturation, thirst for life, and craving for the earth. A. I. Romm wrote in the same year that the entire collection "Moscow kabatskaya" from beginning to end represents the development of a purely Yesenin line of "the purest elegiac lyricism in modern Russian poetry".

The first poems of "Moscow kabatskaya", which were included in the collection "Poems of a scandalist", caused a negative response from the emigrant critic N. Svetlov (Svinin) in the Harbin newspaper "Russian voice". Svetlov, like the Soviet critics, who saw in them a painful break between Yesenin and rural themes, blamed it, however, on the Soviet government, which, in his opinion, destroyed the peasant way of life, and drove the creative intelligentsia to a dead end by the demands of "proletarian utility" and the rejection of "petty-bourgeois" romanticism.

It is possible that the negative reviews that prevailed in literary criticism in the first time after the release of "Moscow kabatskaya" did not reflect the reaction that the collection caused among ordinary readers. For example, in the newspaper" Baku worker", an eyewitness of Yesenin's speech at the Baku student club noted that "Moscow kabatskaya" and "Rus Sovetskaya" had the greatest success among the public, while "the Song of the great campaign" was received with restraint. The enthusiastic reaction of the audience at Yesenin's paid evening on April 14, 1924 in Leningrad was reported by Vladimir Piast, according to whom, the audience did not let the poet leave the stage until he was completely exhausted. At the same time, on the poetry reading cycle in the Yermakivka (homeless shelter in Moscow) in August of the same year listeners of "household stuff" of life "bandits" and "prostitutes" was not impressed, unlike the other lyrical poetry — including "Dissuaded Golden grove..." and "Letter to mother".