Episode Details

Sergei Esenin — Fifteen More Poems (1914)

Fifteen lyrics by Sergei Esenin, all from 1914 — the year the nineteen-year-old village poet broke into print: bogs and marshes under a blue kerchief of sky, a ride through fresh snow with a woodpecker hammering above the pine's white headscarf, a village out of Shevchenko, a slumbering bell waking the fields, the blacksmith urged to temper his impulses into steel, and the most famous good morning in Russian poetry. Then the year darkens and deepens: Saint Yegory musters his white wolves on the uplands, a mother prays before her icon for a son at the war, the peasant's bogatyr whistle routs an army, Belgium stands proud and unenslaved, and the folk tale of the little orphan Masha — whose tears Grandfather Frost freezes into pearls — gives way to patterns embroidered for a fallen hero, mysterious tracks in bewitched snow, and a coachman racing his bells through the winter evening.

The fifteen poems, in order: Bogs and Marshes… (Топи да болота); Fresh Snow (Пороша); The Village (Село); The Slumbering Bell… (Колокол дремавший); The Blacksmith (Кузнец); Good Morning! (С добрым утром!); Youth (Юность); Yegory (Егорий); A Mother's Prayer (Молитва матери); A Bogatyr's Whistle (Богатырский посвист); Belgium (Бельгия); The Little Orphan (Сиротка); Patterns (Узоры); What Is This? (Что это такое?); The Coachman (Ямщик). By Sergei Esenin, in new English verse translations made for this show, read aloud over a gentle instrumental bed.

Esenin.

KacheliTV — Russian classics, read aloud.