Video: Sergei Yesenin and Isadora Duncan: why a stormy romance ended in a tragic ending
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
"And he called some woman of forty-odd years a bad girl and his cute …" - so Sergey Yesenin wrote about his wife, Isadore Duncan … Their union lasted only three years. Constant scandals and stormy showdowns, however, were fruitful for creativity. They were separated by a lot: a language barrier (he did not speak English, she knew a few words in Russian), an 18-year difference in age and mentality. And they were united by the fact that they were equal in strength of talent and popularity. She was a world famous American dancer, he became a world famous Russian poet.
Isadora Duncan's romance with Yesenin was as short-lived as her romance with the Soviet regime. She enthusiastically accepted the 1917 revolution and expected great changes from it. She herself was called a revolutionary, but in a different element - choreography. Isadora Duncan danced without pointe shoes and corset, in light tunics, barefoot. She was called "the living embodiment of the soul of dance", and later recognized as the founder of modern dance.
However, Duncan's choreography was assessed ambiguously: her dance vocabulary was often called meager, they said that she was too old and heavy for dance and was mostly engaged in pantomime.
In 1921 she wrote to the People's Commissar for Education of the USSR Lunacharsky: “I'm tired of bourgeois, commercial art. I want to dance for the masses, for working people who need my art and who have never had the money to look at me. In response, Lunacharsky invited Duncan to Moscow with a proposal to open a dance school.
When Isadora went to Russia, she expected anything, just not what the fortune-teller had predicted for her: she would marry in a new country. She was 44 years old and never married. That evening, when the 26-year-old Yesenin first saw Isadora Duncan, she danced to the "Internationale" in a red tunic, symbolizing the victory of the revolution. They got to know each other and talked specifically: everything she said to him in Russian was "golden head", "angel" and "vychort".
Duncan and Yesenin got married in the USSR in 1922. Soon after that they went abroad - the dancer went on tour in America and Europe. But Yesenin was presented there exclusively as the husband of the famous Duncan, he drank a lot and did not find a use for himself. He wrote about America: “Americans are a very primitive people in terms of internal culture. The domination of the dollar has eaten away in them all the aspirations for any difficult issues."
The union of the poet and the dancer was often ridiculed, in Moscow Isadora was nicknamed "Dunka the Communist", and in the evil epigrams they wrote: "Where did the airplane take Yesenin? To ancient Athens, to the ruins of Duncan."
In 1923 they parted. Both soon after parting died tragically. Yesenin was found hanged in the Angleterre hotel, Isadora Duncan also died of suffocation - a long scarf tangled in the wheel of a convertible.
The name Isadora Duncan forever entered the history of dance, although she was not the only dancer who destroyed traditional ideas about classical choreography - at the beginning of the 20th century she could compete with her in popularity Mata Hari: dancer, spy, courtesan
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