Even the village general store of Konstantinovo looks like a rickety henhouse. Salted herrings. Several brands of vodka. Sticky boiled sweets of a kind people stopped eating fifteen years ago. Round loaves of black bread, twice as heavy as the ones you buy in town, looking as if they are meant to be sliced with an axe rather than a knife.
Inside the Yesenins' cottage, wretched little partitions that do not reach the ceiling divide it up into what are more like cupboards or loose boxes than rooms. Outside is a little fenced-in yard; here there used to be a bathhouse where Sergey would shut himself in the dark and compose his first poems. Beyond the fence is the usual little paddock.
I walked around this village, which is exactly like so many others, where the villagers' main concerns are still the crops, how to make money, how to keep up with the neighbours, and I am moved: the divine fire once scorched this piece of countryside and I can feel it burning my cheeks to this day. Walking along the steep banks of the Oka, I stare in the distance with wonderment - was it really that far-off strip of Khvorostov wood which inspired the evocative line:
The forest clamorous with a wood-grouse's lament...
And is this the same peaceful Oka, meandering through water meadows, of which he wrote:
Hayricks of sun stacked in the waters' depth...
What a thunderbolt of talent the Creator must have hurled into that cottage, into the heart of that quick-tempered country boy, for the shock of it to have opened his eyes to so much beauty - by the stove, in the pigsty, on the threshing floor, in the fields; beauty which for a thousand years others had simply trampled on and ignored.
trns. by Michael Glenny
