Despite being married to 4 different women, most notably Isadora Duncan (with whom he shared no common language) Russian poet Sergei Yesenin ( 1895-1925) , loved men. He is one of the most popular and well-known Russian poets of the 20th century with his style called “peasants poetry”. His poetry was loved for its simplicity and clarity, bridging both high and low culture, include his poems of love to the various men in in his life. During WWI he had a relationship with the poet Leonid Kannegisser, (later the assassin of Moisei Uritsky of the secret police) while during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, gay writers continued writing but gay-positive work was not encouraged under the Soviet regime (after 1933, when Stalin recriminalized homosexuality, no gay-themed works were published.) By the mid 1920’s Sergei entered into a three year relationship with another fellow poet Anatoly Marienhof, to whom many poems are dedicated, inspired by or written about. Sergei was a rebellious writer, suffering through bouts of alcoholism, violent behavior, depression and plagued by his inner demons when he hung himself in a Leningrad hotel at the age of 30. Perhaps it was his failed marriages or the disillusionment that he must have felt when the revolution that he supported failed to live up to his expectations or that he was a gay man who had simply yielded to the worlds pressures and no longer wanted to fight…we will never know.
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