Is it true that Yesenin is the author of the obscene poem “Wind from the South”?

On the network you can find an obscene poem attributed to Sergey Yesenin, which begins from the line "The wind blows from the south." We decided to check who the real author of this work.

In April 2021 in one of the Kurgan schools happened Scandal: The student read a poem in the literature lesson, claiming that the lines using obscene vocabulary belong to Yesenin. After video With his performance, it dispersed in social networks, the city administration arranged an audit at school, and with the students they conducted a conversation about the inadmissibility of the use of swear words. Some media, including "Teacher newspaper", Did not question the authorship of Yesenin. “The wind blows from the south” with such an attribution can be found on many sites dedicated to classical poetry: for example, Here, Here And Here.

The main source in such cases is the most complete collected works of the author. At the time of writing, this is Academic Collected Works Sergei Yesenin in seven volumes (nine books), published from 1995 to 2002. The first three volumes correspond to books printed in 1926 immediately after the death of the poet, the rest contains poems, gift inscriptions, documents, photographs and bibliography.

There is no poem, starting from the line “The wind blows from the south”, in the academic assembly. However, in the notes to the fourth of it Mentioned In the section "Poems, which belongs to Yesenin is very doubtful (archival lists) or the source of the text is unreliable (publication)." The source is also indicated here: A. Flegon, "outside the Russian dictionaries."

This book, which is a dictionary of Russian obscene vocabulary on the example of literary quotes, was compiled by the American publisher Alec Flegon. The Academic Collected Works of Yesenin indicates the publication of 1973. It really has such a poem (in any case, the first quatrain), and its author is indicated by Sergey Yesenin.

Among Russian literary emigration, Alec Flegon had a very ambiguous reputation. The writers complained that he printed their books in a pirate way, without permission. Alexander Solzhenitsyn I thought The Flegor of the KGB agent sued because of the publication of the first volume of the Gulag Archipelago. “Published my“ candle in the wind ”with the loss of one typewritten page and did not even make a reservation, but blinded how it hit, without meaning. Published "The first" under the wild name "in the first circle" - and a wild number of typos, rarely 10 per page, otherwise 20–25! And he lost whole pieces of text again (the chapter "Birth of science"), and the names of the actors are distorted. This Flegon published me so carelessly, as if he wanted to cause me as much harm as possible, as if deliberately blazing my book, ”wrote Solzhenitsyn. On the dishonesty of the publisher I complained And the daughter of Stalin Svetlana Alliluyeva, and the poet Andrei Voznesensky.

“The wind blows from the south” is not the only poem attributed to Yesenin, whose primary source is the book “outside the Russian dictionaries”. Compilers of the complete works of Yesenin Mark Two more examples: “Autumn rotten has come for a long time” and “A flock of sparrows flew with a cry.” As in the previous case, there are no earlier references to these poems.

In the preface to his book, Alec Flegon did not hide that he was very freely treated by the sources: “When I was indicating the source, I used the following principle: if the quote was taken from a well -known author or if it does not matter, I believed that it was enough to indicate only the name of the author.” Compiler of a similar dictionary (""Russian mat. Anthology") Farhad Ilyasov in a review article"Dictionaries of the Russian Mata - the history of hoaxes and literary creativity"Wrote that the book of the Flegor is neither a depth of research or seriousness. He draws attention to a large number of frankly joking articles. So, the word "buttock" is explained as "half of the ass."

Therefore, it can be assumed that part of the examples in the book of the flagon is simply invented by the author or borrowed from folklore. This, apparently, applies to the quatrains “The wind blows from the south” - there is no evidence that it was written by Yesenin.

Photo on the cover: Esenin.ru

Incorrect attribution of quote

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