Vsevolod Meyerhold - the great director, innovator, stage reformer - until the end of his days was devoted to the only woman, the actress, whom he himself created - Zinaida Nikolaevna Reich. Their path to each other was difficult, but it was the path of outstanding creative people, and in such a situation one can hardly expect anything else.

Vsevolod Meyerhold was born on January 28, 1874 in the city of Penza in the Russified German family. He studied at the Faculty of Law in Moscow, then entered drama courses, was an artist at the Moscow Art Theater, and later a provincial director working according to the method of the Art Theater. Journalists called him a decadent, the first actress of the Alexandria Theater Maria Gavrilovna Savina quarreled with him - she really did not like that the director of the imperial theaters, the subtlest Vladimir Telyakovsky, relied on young directors and took Meyerhold on staff. Even enemies recognized his gift, he made a big name for himself, but the October Socialist Revolution, or, as they say now, the October Revolution brought him to the founders of the new theater.

Meyerhold was a man of the theatre, and for him reality often merged with the game, and the game became a sacrament - this is how his post-October manifestos and photographs in the Red Army uniform should be understood. He was impressionable, jaundiced, superbly educated, prone to introspection and prejudice.

But this kind of reasoning has nothing to do with the human qualities of Meyerhold himself. His zeal and ability to go to the end forced him to change his religion at the age of 21 and from the German and Lutheran Karl Theodor Casimir Meyergold to turn into the Orthodox Vsevolod Meyerhold. (Vsevolod was the name of his youthful idol, the writer Garshin.)

By the time of the meeting with Zinaida Reich, who became the second - along with the stage - the meaning of his existence, Meyerhold was already 47 years old, he was famous, married, had three daughters. But Reich Meyerhold fell in love with Zinaida passionately, selflessly, without memory. Having a thin, intelligent and devoted wife, he felt the need for a different woman, free and liberated. And such a woman turned out to be Zinaida Nikolaevna.

Zinaida Nikolaevna Reich was born on June 21, 1894 in the village of Near Mills near Odessa in the family of a Russified German railway worker. While still in the 8th grade, she fell under the supervision of the police and was expelled from the gymnasium for her political connection with the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. Unlike her father, an old member of the RSDLP, the young schoolgirl chose an extremist party that staked on terror. In this act, youthful maximalism was fully manifested. She threw herself headlong into the revolution.

It was in the editorial office of the Socialist-Revolutionary newspaper Delo Naroda, where Reich served as a typist in 1917, that she became passionately interested in the novice poet Sergei Yesenin, who published in this newspaper. Love broke out instantly, and in August of the same year they got married. Moreover, love completely pushed aside the "politics", which Yesenin did not approve of at all. In the short interval between February and October, Reich, with the same vehemence that only yesterday pushed her into the revolution, now gave herself up to building a family nest. At first, the newlyweds lived apart, as if looking closely at each other, but soon they settled together, and Yesenin even demanded that Zinaida leave her job. They lived without much comfort, but did not live in poverty and even received guests. With pride, Yesenin informed everyone and everyone: "I have a wife." Even Blok noted in surprise in his diary: “Yesenin is now married. Get used to the property.

However, the times were difficult, hungry, one could not even dream of “property”. And therefore, the family idyll quickly ended. For a while, the young spouses broke up. Yesenin went to Konstantinov, the pregnant Zinaida Nikolaevna went to her parents in Orel, where in May 1918 she gave birth to a daughter, Tatyana. Almost two years later, their second child, son Konstantin, was born. But the family nest was gone. As Yesenin's daughter Tatyana wrote: "The parents parted for good somewhere at the turn of 1919-1920, after which they never lived together."

It took extraordinary strength of mind to start life anew. And Zinaida Nikolaevna succeeded. In August 1920, she entered the service of the People's Commissariat for Education as an inspector of the sub-department of people's houses, and in the fall of the following year she became a student at the State Experimental Theater Workshops (GEKTEMAS). It is difficult to say how long Zinaida Reich grieved after the break with Yesenin, huddling with two kids in the Orphanage on Ostozhenka. In any case, she did not remain without admirers, one of whom was the famous critic Viktor Shklovsky. But in the end, fate brought her to Meyerhold. And bringing it together, tied it tightly. Despite the twenty-year age difference, a "relationship" began.

Contemporaries gave Zinaida Reich the most controversial assessments. Some describe her as a beauty, a devoted wife and a wonderful mother. In other memories, she looks exalted, unbalanced, by no means beautiful, but possessing a certain sex appeal, a woman who could not help but give reasons for jealousy to both husbands. First Yesenin, then Meyerhold.

Arriving at Meyerhold's studio, Reich was carried away by his creative ideas for creating a new, avant-garde theater. Not finding herself in the revolution, she fell into the emotional, sensual environment of Meyerhold, and he was able to discover what was hidden so deeply in her. “The master built a performance, as they build a house, and to be in this house, even a doorknob, was happiness,” the actors said about the great Meyerhold.

Their meeting was fateful. Looking for his Galatea, he fell in love with a young student. In 1921, students of GEKTEMAS, walking to study along the alleys between Tverskaya and Bolshaya Nikitskaya, often noticed a strange figure - looking closer, they realized that there were not one, but two people under the Red Army overcoat. The teacher was hugging their classmate, the twenty-five-year-old beauty Reich. Those around him did not like it: those who loved Meyerhold did not forgive Reich for his love. Enemies, of which Meyerhold had many, did not forgive him either.

Like Stanislavsky, Meyerhold was a chaste man, and gossipers around the theater never found "plots" in his personal life that could give food to their imagination. For Meyerhold, personal life and stage work were separated from each other. If he was carried away at times, as, for example, by the charming Nina Kovalenskaya, then his feelings invariably remained in the spiritual and platonic sphere. Reich, on the other hand, united the halves of Meyerhold's being into one whole: home and stage, work and love, theater and life.

Meyerhold went to Reich from the woman with whom he had lived all his life. They met as children, got married during their student years, and his wife supported him in sorrow and in joy - besides, they had three daughters. But he acted in the spirit of his ideas about duty, responsibility and masculine deed: he cut off his past life and even took a new surname - now his name was Meyerhold-Reich. He set out to create his beloved again - she was to become a great actress.

It is clear that Vsevolod Emilievich passionately loved his wife and was in a state of jealous excitement all his life. Director Valentin Pluchek said that once, during the rehearsal of "The Bath", Reich flirted a little with Mayakovsky - it seems that she was flattered that he laid eyes on her. And when Mayakovsky went to smoke in the lobby, and Zinaida Nikolaevna followed him, Meyerhold announced a break, although the rehearsal had barely begun, and immediately joined them. It's not that he didn't trust his other half. But, feeling the full extent of her femininity, he preferred to look after, without vouching, apparently, even for friends. But who truly gave rise to jealousy was Yesenin, who suddenly appeared in the life of a happy couple. After all, becoming the wife of the famous Meyerhold (and soon his first actress), Reich again aroused the selfish interest of the scandalous poet. Meyerhold's biographer recalled that the only person to whom the violent and drunk Yesenin obeyed was, oddly enough, Vsevolod Emilievich. The prodigal father appeared at the Meyerholds' house, could demand in the middle of the night to show the children whom Vsevolod Emilievich, by the way, adopted. But this is not enough: Yesenin began to meet with Reich on the side.

When Yesenin committed suicide, Reich had a severe seizure. The devoted Meyerhold gave her medicines, changed compresses, and accompanied her to her funeral. Reich was moving away from the experienced shock for many years.

We dare to assume that she loved both, although in different ways. Yesenin - passionately and obsessively. Meyerhold - clearly, joyfully and gratefully. Arriving from a rehearsal, she could declare to the whole house: “Meyerhold is a god!”. And immediately reprimand your deity for a petty domestic fault. She sought to free him from household chores so that the master could belong entirely to creativity. He, in turn, trusted her aesthetic instinct, often consulted on sketches for performances.

In the theater, Reich was not loved and constantly humiliated. Meyerhold, taking care of the peace and spiritual comfort of his wife, was ready for anything. He did not even tolerate an ironic tone in relation to Reich. Once, at a gathering of the troupe, he announced that he wanted to stage Hamlet. Actor Nikolai Okhlopkov (memorable to the general public for the role of Vaska Buslay in the film "Alexander Nevsky") imprudently asked: "And who is in the lead role?" Meyerhold seemed to answer in earnest: "Of course, Reich." The unrestrained Okhlopkov laughed: "If Reich is Hamlet, then I am Ophelia ..." And he was immediately fired.

But Meyerhold’s main merit to his wife was not that he stood guard over her professional reputation, that he adopted children and provided them with a sense of security and a reliable home, that he made a good actress out of a helpless debutante who knew hot audience delight, the main thing is that he gave her long years of mental health, protecting her from the disease that overtook her in her youth and relapses of which appeared only after a decade and a half, provoked by the newspaper persecution of Meyerhold and the closure of the theater.

At the age of 26, in early 1921, Reich experienced a cascade of ailments: typhoid fever, lupus, and typhus. The future spouses were still on "you" when Zinaida Nikolaevna, to Meyerhold's amazement, suddenly said: "Knives stick out of your heart." These were the first symptoms of brain poisoning with typhoid poison. Such intoxications usually lead to violent insanity (and Zinaida Nikolaevna had an alternation of several manias). But the attacks soon pass, although the consequences may accompany the patient to the very grave. Meyerhold knew that in order to be cured one had to download Reich interesting work and protect from anxiety. What he did throughout his life together. By the way, he was generally interested in the physiology of the brain. In his youth, while preparing for the role of Treplev in The Seagull, he deliberately brought himself to insanity and with great difficulty got out of this state on his own. In a word, Meyerhold knew how to deal with his wife, who had experienced an attack of insanity. It is he who should be credited with the fact that if Reich recalled the lunatic asylum, where she visited in her youth, she recalled ... with humor.

Newspapermen admired the inhuman cries of her heroines. But the fact is that on stage Reich behaved like in life. One day she found that her purse had been taken out of her at the market, and she screamed. And it was so terrible that the shocked thief returned, quietly gave her the stolen goods and ran away.

Rumor imputed Reich to blame, as if she excommunicated comrades-in-arms and students from Meyerhold. But, according to the director of the Museum-Apartment of Meyerhold, Natalia Makerova, if she excommunicated, then only those with whom the break was inevitable without that. This happened to the favorite of the Moscow public, Maria Babanova, in whose dismissal many saw the hand of Reich. But rather, this exile is connected with Meyerhold's disappointment in his student, who believed that Babanova had a narrow role as an ingénue, the possibilities of which she had allegedly exhausted. Offended by the teacher, but never publicly condemning him, the actress subsequently brilliantly refuted this misconception by playing the heroine, the legendary Tanya, in the performance of the same name based on the play by Arbuzov at the Revolution Theater.

The last performance for Meyerhold was the French love melodrama of the Dumas son, The Lady of the Camellias. The master staged the performance exclusively for Reich and counting on Reich. And it was necessary to have great courage, so that during widespread Stalinist repressions make bourgeois melodrama the song of your love.

The premiere took place on April 19, 1934 and was a huge success with Muscovites. It was almost impossible to get into a performance that lacked even a hint of any ideology or social significance. The audience, yearning for true feelings, sought to see what was disappearing so quickly from all Soviet scenes of that time, they simply sympathized with the personal tragedy of a man, a woman.

In this performance, Zinaida Nikolaevna was magnificent; even the critics who always attacked her admitted it. Yuri Olesha called her a creature "with cherry eyes and absolute femininity." An unusually elegant, refined "French" beauty reigned on the stage. She was torn between feeling and morality, between passion and morality. The purity of the relationship between Margarita and Armand was unusually touching. There was no hint of any eroticism in the love scenes, everything was restrained and sublime tones. Her partner, Mikhail Tsarev, an excellent actor, later People's Artist of the Soviet Union, chief director of the Maly Theater, looked somewhat rustic in comparison with Reich. He lacked the elegance, the natural looseness of a true aristocrat.

Here is one of the reviews about the performance: “In the parting episode, Margarita and Arman had a dialogue in muffled voices, trying to be outwardly calm and holding back tears with all their might. And only once did Armand stroke his beloved's cheek, wiping away an uninvited tear, and this modest gesture made an amazing impression on the audience. The silence in the hall was replaced by sobs and blowing noses.

But once in the hall there was a spectator who not only appreciated the amazing decoration and beauty of the French aristocratic court, he understood the subtext of the performance, the desire for a beautiful, prosperous life free from ideology. That spectator was Stalin. And in 1938, the Committee for the Arts adopted a resolution on the liquidation of the Vsevolod Meyerhold Theater. The last performance of The Lady of the Camellias took place on the evening of January 7th. Having played the final scene - the death of Margarita - Zinaida Nikolaevna lost consciousness. She was carried backstage in her arms. The theater was closed as "hostile to Soviet art".

So, the Meyerhold Theater was closed, and a real protracted persecution of the famous director began. Newspapers blackened his work in every possible way, and a woman tormented by her ghosts rushed about in his house. The suspicious, vulnerable, cornered old man looked after his wife like a nanny, and she struggled, trying to break the ropes that tied her to the bed. The doctors did not encourage him, and he, perhaps no longer believing in anything, brought her a drink and wiped her forehead with a damp towel. Miracles rarely happen, but sometimes they do happen: Meyerhold, who was crouching in the next room, was awakened by indistinct muttering, he went in to his wife and saw that she, sitting up in bed, looked at her hands and said in an undertone: “What dirt ...”

He brought warm water, spoke to her - and realized that Zinaida Reich had regained her sanity.

Meyerhold was arrested on June 20, 1939 in his Leningrad apartment. Two days later, he was transported by train under escort to Moscow, where he spent several months in various prisons. He was accused of being a spy for the British and Japanese intelligence services and, using the most cruel methods, he was forced to confess his guilt. In January 1940, he wrote a statement addressed to V. Molotov. “They beat me here - a sick, 65-year-old man was laid face down on the floor, they beat me with a rubber band on my heels and back when I was sitting on a chair, they beat me with the same rubber on my legs from above with great force in places from the knees to the upper parts of the legs. In the following days, when these places of the legs were flooded with profuse internal bleeding, these red-blue-yellow bruises were again beaten with a tourniquet.

But the letter had no response. On February 1, 1940, Meyerhold was tried, sentenced to death with confiscation of property, and the next day the sentence was carried out. He never found out that his beloved Zinaida had been dead for seven months.

On the day when Vsevolod Emilievich was arrested, a search was carried out in their Moscow apartment in Bryusovsky Lane. Probably, Zinaida Nikolaevna foresaw trouble: she prudently sent her two children from her marriage to Yesenin - Tatyana and Konstantin - from home. A few days later, on July 15, 1939, she was found half-dead in her own bedroom, with multiple stab wounds. To the ambulance doctor's attempts to stop the bleeding, she replied: "Leave me, doctor, I'm dying ..." She died on the way to the hospital.

It is still not known exactly what happened on that fateful day. All valuables - rings, bracelets, gold watches - were left lying on the table next to the bed. Nothing was missing from the house. Someone claimed that the housekeeper, who was found with a broken head, frightened off the thieves.

In Meyerhold's apartment, divided into two separate ones, Beria moved his driver with his family and his secretary. It is likely that the political elite in this way solved the housing problems of their employees, without wasting time on arrest, interrogation and court comedy: a huge, by the standards of the thirties, an apartment in the "House of Artists" near the Central Telegraph was a very fat jackpot.

The emergence of a version indicating the involvement of the authorities in this crime was facilitated by the circumstances that the Western press was agitated by the arrest of Meyerhold, foreign correspondents called Zinaida Nikolaevna, asked for an interview, and she could ask for protection from the world community. Deciding to destroy Meyerhold, Stalin dealt with his wife.

Zinaida Reich was buried at the Vagankovsky cemetery, not far from Yesenin's grave. The place where Meyerhold is buried is still unknown. Subsequently, an inscription was added to her monument: "Vsevolod Emilievich Meyerhold." So even after death they were together. Bright life, terrible death, great love...

Zinaida Nikolaevna Reich

She was called a demonic woman who playfully ruined the lives of two brilliant men. Who was she? The poet's muse? The leading actress of the Meyerhold Theater? Or just a woman who loved and was loved?

The fantastic plot of the life of Zinaida Nikolaevna Reich obscures for posterity her unique path as an actress, short, but full of both strength and the uniqueness of an exceptional talent. Only fifteen years of stage activity, a dozen and a half roles in the Meyerhold Theater.

Actress Zinaida Reich is well known to those who are connected with the history of the Soviet theater, her stage path can be traced month after month. But until 1924, such an actress did not exist (she played her first role at the age of 30). The image of the young Zinaida Nikolaevna Yesenina, the poet's wife, is difficult to document. Her small personal archive was lost during the war years. Until the age when they willingly share their memories, Zinaida Nikolaevna did not live.

From the memoirs of the daughter of S. Yesenin and Z. Reich Tatyana:

“Mother was a southerner, but by the time she met Yesenin, she had lived in St. Petersburg for several years, she herself earned a living, attended the Higher Women's Courses. bohemia and aspired above all to independence.

The daughter of an active participant in the labor movement, she thought about social activities, among her friends were those who had been in prison and exile. But there was also something restless in her, there was a gift to be shaken by the phenomena of art and poetry. For a time she took sculpture lessons. I read the abyss. One of her favorite writers was then Hamsun, something close to her in the strange alternation of restraint and impulses characteristic of his heroes.

All her life later, despite her busyness, she read a lot and voraciously, and rereading "War and Peace", she repeated to someone: "Well, how did he know how to turn everyday life into a continuous holiday?"

In the spring of 1917, Zinaida Nikolaevna lived in Petrograd alone, without parents, worked as a secretary-typist in the editorial office of the newspaper Delo Naroda. Yesenin was published here. The acquaintance took place on the day when the poet, not finding anyone, got into a conversation with an employee of the editorial office.

There is a version that Zinaida Nikolaevna was introduced to Yesenin by his friend and then colleague in the "peasant merchant" poet Alexei Ganin (1893-1925). Perhaps it was he, being a native of the Vologda province, who gave the poet and Reich the idea of a joint trip to the most beautiful places in the Russian North. It so happened that the trip turned out to be a honeymoon trip, and Genin turned out to be a witness from the side of the bride at the wedding of Reich with Yesenin in Vologda. Reich and Yesenin were married on August 4, 1917 in the Kiriko-Ulitovskaya church near Vologda. It is possible to explain why the poet, who created one after another atheistic poem, married Zinaida Nikolaevna, if we recall that the decree on civil marriage was adopted five months later, on December 29, 1917.

In the picture donated to Zinaida Nikolaevna, the poet, cheerful and thoughtful at the same time, with a mop of curly hair, is depicted on it next to Mikhail Murashov, Yesenin made an inscription full of tender gratitude: "For the fact that you appeared to me as an awkward girl on my way. Sergey." Looking at Reich's photograph taken in Petrograd at the beginning of 1917 (where she stood with her father), shortly before meeting Yesenin, one can appreciate the poetic accuracy of these lines: a young girl with regular features looks from her, charming, but not yet fully aware of her own charm. Zinaida Reich, transformed by love and motherhood, was captured by the lens in 1918: she holds her newborn daughter in her arms and glows with happiness; in her mature, spiritualized beauty, in her very pose there is something that makes one recall the Madonnas of the brush of Italian masters.

From the day they met to the day of the wedding, about three months passed. All this time, the relationship was restrained, the future spouses remained on "you", met in public. Random episodes that Zinaida Reich recalled did not say anything about rapprochement.

Returning to Petrograd, they lived apart for some time, and this did not happen by itself, but was something like a tribute to prudence. Still, they became husband and wife, not having time to come to their senses and imagine, even for a minute, how their life together will turn out. We therefore agreed not to interfere with each other. But all this did not last long, they soon settled together, moreover, Yesenin wished Zinaida Nikolaevna to leave her job, came with her to the editorial office and said: "She won't work for you anymore."

Zinaida obeyed everything. She wanted to have a family, a husband, children. She was efficient and energetic.

The soul of Zinaida Nikolaevna was open towards people. Her attentive, all-seeing and all-understanding eyes, her constant readiness to do or say something pleasant, to find some of her own, special words for encouragement, and if they were not found - a smile, voice, her whole being said what she wanted to express. But in her lay dormant temper and sharp directness, inherited from her father.

The first quarrels were inspired by poetry. Once Yesenin and Reich threw wedding rings out of a dark window and immediately rushed off to look for them (of course, with the addition: "What fools we were!"). But as they got to know each other better, they sometimes experienced real shocks. Perhaps the word "recognized" does not exhaust everything - in each time it unwound its own spiral. You can remember that time itself exacerbated everything.

With the move to Moscow, the best months of their lives ended. However, they soon separated for a while. Yesenin went to Konstantinovo, Zinaida Nikolaevna was expecting a child and went to her parents in Orel ...

Daughter Tatyana continues her memories:

“I was born in Orel, but soon my mother left with me for Moscow and until one year I lived with both parents. Then there was a gap between them, and Zinaida Nikolaevna again left with me to her relatives. Mariengof, whom his mother did not digest at all.How Mariengof treated her, and indeed to most of those around him, can be judged from his book "A Novel Without Lies."

After some time, Zinaida Nikolaevna, leaving me in Orel, returned to her father, but soon they parted again ...

In the autumn of 1921, she became a student at the Higher Theater Workshops. She studied not at the acting department, but at the directing department, together with S.M. Eisenstein, S.I. Yutkevich.

She met the head of these workshops, Meyerhold, while working at the People's Commissariat for Education. In the press of those days, he was called the leader of the Theater October. A former director of the St. Petersburg imperial theatres, a communist, he also experienced, as it were, a second birth. Shortly before that, he visited Novorossiysk in the White Guard dungeons, was sentenced to death and spent a month on death row.

In the summer of 1922, two people completely unknown to me - my mother and stepfather - came to Orel and took my brother and me away from my grandfather and grandmother. In the theater, before Vsevolod Emilievich, many trembled. At home, he was often delighted by any trifle - a funny children's phrase, a delicious dish. He treated everyone at home - he put compresses, took out splinters, prescribed medicines, made dressings and even injections, while he praised himself and liked to call himself "Doctor Meyerhold".

It would seem that with the return of Zinaida Nikolaevna to Moscow, better times should have come for the Yesenin family, but the circumstances were such that 1919 was the last year in their life together.

On March 20, 1920, Reich gave birth to a son. They named him Constantine. The godfather, according to a still unexpired tradition, was the old friend of the Yesenins, Andrey Bely. For some time, Zinaida Nikolaevna was forced to stay with her son in the House of Mother and Child, on Ostozhenka, 36, and this speaks more eloquently than any words about the sad changes in her relationship with Yesenin.

It is difficult to say why and when exactly the breakup occurred. It would be indelicate to invade the secret world of two people dear to each other. One can only guess what were the reasons that prompted them to disperse. To a certain extent, the turbulent time, devastation, deprivation, disorder of life, frequent separations are to blame, Yesenin's entourage, which took shape shortly after moving from St. Petersburg to Moscow, at the time of his passion for Imagism, is to blame.

One thing is beyond doubt: two solid strong human characters collided, and an "emotional explosion" of such force struck that its echoes were heard for a long time both in the fate of Yesenin and in the fate of Reich. "No one regretted and did not turn back," the poet once said in "Marfa Posadnitsa". No, perhaps they regretted and complained about themselves, but they could not return to the former.

For Zinaida Nikolaevna, the drama was aggravated by the dangerous illness of her son, who was barely able to defend. The nervous shock Reich suffered due to her son's serious illness did not pass without a trace and for a long time reminded of herself in the years when her life could seem happy and serene.

The memoirs of the son of Yesenin and Reich Konstantin also tell us about the difficulties between loving people:

“I remember several scenes when my father came to see Tanya and me. Like all young fathers, he was especially tender to his daughter. Tanya was his favorite. He retired with her on the landing and, sitting on the windowsill, talked to her, listened to her recite poetry.

Households, mostly relatives on the mother's side, perceived Yesenin's appearance as a disaster. All these old men and women were terribly afraid of him - young, energetic, especially since, as the sister claimed, a rumor was spread around the house that Yesenin was going to steal us.

Tanya was released on a "date" with trepidation. I enjoyed much less attention from my father. As a child, I was very similar to my mother - facial features, hair color. Tatyana is a blonde, and Yesenin saw more of his own in her than in me.

The last visit of my father, as I have already said, took place a few days before the fateful December 28th. This day has been described by many. Father went to Anna Romanovna Izryadnova, somewhere else. He left for Leningrad in earnest. Probably went to live and work, not to die. Why else would he bother with a huge, heavy chest stuffed with all his belongings. This detail, in my opinion, is essential.

I distinctly remember his face, his gestures, his behavior that evening. There was no anguish, sadness in them. There was some kind of efficiency in them ... He came to say goodbye to the children. I then had children's diathesis. When he came in, I was sitting with my hands under the blue light bulb Nanny was holding.

Father did not stay long in the room and, as always, retired with Tatyana.

I remember well the days after the announcement of my father's death. Mother was lying in the bedroom, almost losing the ability of real perception. Meyerhold walked with a measured step between the bedroom and the bathroom, carried water in jugs, wet towels. Mother once or twice ran out to us, impulsively hugged us and said that we were now orphans.

The unsettledness of the apartment, the birth of a son who is not like his father, or maybe just the envy of heaven for unearthly harmony returned these momentarily crossed destinies to a traditional reality: "parallels do not intersect" - this is how Zinaida Reich wrote, outlining the plan of memories of "Sergunka". Disorder nervous system, when she broke up with the one whom she called "my life, my fairy tale", threatened with loss of reason. Only her passion for theater and the care of the Master - Vsevolod Meyerhold - brought her back to life. The repertoire of the Meyerhold Theater was staged only for Zinochka. The Master did not allow himself any actions and words in the theater and at home that would give her even the slightest excitement. Konstantin Yesenin later recalled how one day, having missed the train to Bolshevo, they got off at the station seven kilometers from the dacha and all the way, the already middle-aged Meyerhold ran, not paying attention to his fatigue and Kostya, afraid to be late in time, so that "Zinaida Nikolaevna would not worried."

In the Meyerhold Theater there were plays by classics and contemporaries, Yesenin's "Pugachev" and Mariengof's "Conspiracy of Fools" were scheduled for production, the reading of which took place in the theater at the same time. With his characteristic frankness, Anatoly Mariengof wrote: “At one of the theatrical disputes, Mayakovsky said from a podium covered with red calico: “We are hissing about Zinaida Reich: she is, they say, Meyerhold’s wife and therefore plays the main roles with him. This is not that conversation. Reich does not play the main roles because she is Meyerhold's wife, and Meyerhold married her because she is a good actress. "Desperate nonsense! Reich was not an actress - neither bad nor good ... Not loving Zinaida Reich (which must be taken into account) , I used to say about her: "This stout Jewish lady" ... Zinaida Reich, of course, did not become a good actress, but she is undeniably famous. And just as sincerely as he thought, Mariengof spoke about personal relationships: “Who did Yesenin love? He hated Zinaida Reich most of all. in life, her - the only one - and loved.

... It seems to me that she had no other love either. If Esenin had beckoned her with her finger, she would have run away from Meyerhold without a cloak and without an umbrella in the rain and hail. " Vadim Shershenevich, who also did not consider Zinaida Reich a talented artist, could not help but admit that she "managed to develop into a major actress in the capital": "Of course , here in the first place was the influence of Master Meyerhold, but not a single Master can mold something significant out of nothing. " Mikhail Chekhov wrote to Zinaida Reich: "I am still under the impression I received from the Inspector General. Vsevolod Emilievich can be a genius, and this is the difficulty joint work with him. If the executor of Vsevolod Emilievich only understands him, he will ruin his plan. Something more is needed, and I saw this more in you, Zinaida Nikolaevna. What is more about you - I don't know, maybe it's co-creation with Vsevolod Emilievich in this production, maybe your natural talent - I don't know, but the result is amazing. Your ease in performing difficult tasks amazes me. Lightness is the first sign of true creativity. You, Zinaida Nikolaevna, were magnificent." Boris Pasternak confessed to worship in letters: "Today I've been naughty all day, and I can't take on anything. This is a longing for last night ... I bow to both of you, and envy you that you are working with the person you love, "and wrote a poem.

Yesenin does not have poems with a dedication to Zinaida Reich, but there are lines in which her relationship with Sergei Yesenin is easily recognizable. All these poems were written during his trip to the Caucasus. Here he suddenly declared that he "does not have poems about love", and "Persian motives" appeared about the invented Persia and the real Shagane, poems about Russia and about Zinaida Reich:

Darling, joke, smile

Do not wake up only the memory in me

About wavy rye in the moonlight.

Shagane you are mine, Shagane!

There, in the north, the girl too,

She looks a lot like you

Maybe he's thinking about me...

Shagane you are mine, Shagane!

Drown in your soul the anguish of talyanka,

Drink the breath of fresh spells,

So that I'm talking about a far northerner

I didn’t sigh, I didn’t think, I didn’t get bored ...

Tatyana Yesenina, the daughter of the poet, many years later laid out, like a solitaire, profile photos of Zinaida Reich and Shagane Talyan, whom Yesenin met in Batum in 1924 - the images were, indeed, "terribly similar."

On April 8, 1925, the poem "Blue and cheerful country ..." appeared with a dedication to "Geliya Nikolaevna" (this is how she called herself by this name of "some actress", invented, it seems to me, by Sergei Yesenin, the six-year-old daughter of Pyotr Ivanovich Chagin Roza) and with postscript: "Geliya Nikolaevna! It's too expensive. When you see my daughter, tell her. S.E."

In March 1925, having arrived in Moscow from Baku for a month, Sergei Yesenin wrote a poem "Kachalov's Dog", where there are lines that can be attributed to Zinaida Reich, who also visited the famous artist:

My dear Jim, among your guests

There were so many different and different ones.

But the one that is all silent and sadder,

Did you come here by any chance?

She will come, I give you a guarantee,

And without me, in her staring gaze,

You gently lick her hand for me

For everything in which he was and was not guilty.

In the same period, the “Letter to a Woman” was also written, after reading which a few years later, Konstantin Yesenin recalled one of the moments in the relationship between Zinaida Reich and Sergei Yesenin and asked: “What, is this written about that case?”:

Do you remember,

Of course, you remember everything

How I stood

Approaching the wall

Walked excitedly

you around the room

And something sharp

They threw me in the face...

You didn't love me...

Zinaida Reich read all these poems as her own and as someone else's: they were not dedicated to her, and, although they were easily projected onto the circumstances of her life, they did not fall in time with her attitude towards Sergei Yesenin:

It doesn't matter, another one will come,

The sadness of the departed will not swallow,

abandoned and dear

The one who comes will compose a better song.

And, listening to the song in silence,

Beloved with another beloved

Maybe he will remember me

How about a unique flower.

The lines of the poem "Letter from Mother" very truthfully describe the situation of the relationship between Yesenin and Reich:

But you are children

Lost in the world

his wife

Easily given to another

And without family, without friendship,

No berth

you with your head

He went to the tavern pool.

The realization of this comes to Yesenin over time, perhaps late, but it comes, although he was not taken seriously:

“Meyerhold has been eyeing Zinaida Reich for a long time. Once, at one of the parties, he asked Yesenin:

You know, Seryozha, I'm in love with your wife... If we get married, won't you be angry with me? The poet jokingly bowed at the director's feet:

Take her, do me a favor... I will be grateful to you in the grave."[6]

She did not remember, but loved and remembered him always - all her life and him, and death, and long after his death, until her very last hour, when she calmed down from knife wounds. In December 1935, on the tenth anniversary of the death of Sergei Yesenin, Zinaida Reich presented her photograph - Zinaida Geiman - with a dedicatory inscription: "On the eve of the sad anniversary, my sad eyes - to you, Zinusha, as a memory of the most important and most terrible thing in my life - about Sergey" .

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Women sung for centuries. Zinaida Reich.

They are the same age as Yesenin. It’s even scary to imagine that in the fateful 1917 both were 23 years old. What does an aspiring poet from a peasant family have in common with the daughter of a Lutheran who converted to Orthodoxy, who had graduated by that time higher courses Raevsky, who speaks French, German and Latin? Common - mind, beauty, charm, spiritual subtlety.

Yesenin met Zinaida Reich at a newspaper where she worked as a secretary. Then, in 1917, he gives her his photograph with the inscription: "For the fact that you appeared as an awkward girl on my way. Sergey." And then he offers her a trip on a steamboat in the Russian North. "For what?" Reich asks, surprised. "To hide from mobilization into the army," the poet replied. The journey through the North culminated in a telegram from Zinaida to her father: "One hundred came out. I'm getting married." Father sent.

They got married in a small church near Vologda, in August, in that unforgettable 1917, on the threshold of the most fatal events in Russian history, sincerely believing that they would live happily ever after and die on the same day.

Reich's friend, Zinaida Geiman, recalled: “Sergey Yesenin and Zinaida lived in a poor hotel room. They were uncomfortable, gloomy, bohemian. There are crumbs on the table, water, scattered. We have a luxurious, two-room suite and a bath, your own phone, a velvet tablecloth on round table, which was covered with a crisp white linen thin tablecloth when the waiter brought a shiny metal tea set. In a word, it was cozy, and Yesenin and Zinaida often came to us in the evenings. She is pregnant with Tanya. In a black dress with a high collar. He was in a gray suit with a bow tie, brought a balalaika, sang and recited poetry. Then we lived hand to mouth, but we received rations - we had plenty of brown bread and sugar, and we treated them!

Meanwhile, the family was falling apart. Yesenin was kept, not allowed to see Zinaida by friends and foes, poems and publishing houses, fallen glory and. drunk scandals. They say that once Yesenin did not let Zinaida, who came to him from Orel, with her daughter in her arms, put them out in the dark, in bad weather.

There was also an insight. Once Sergei threw an insulting, obscene word to Zinaida, and she, in the heat of anger, returned this word to him. Clutching his head, he groaned: “Zinochka, my Turgenev girl! What have I done to you!”

Zinaida knew how to understand and forgive Sergei.

But soon a family hell began: a small child, whimpering and disturbing sleep, a nursing woman ceases to be desirable. And outside the walls of the apartment a great action was unfolding - the revolution was fascinating, and what met the poet at home looked especially disgusting.

Yesenin first restrains himself, then stops. She feels that everything is over, but she tries to keep him - he does not need the first child, but she wants the second. He toils, she cannot leave and torments him with constant visits to Moscow. March 20, 1920 Zinaida gave birth to a son. Whether she wanted to save her family, Sergei, is hard to say. Yesenin gave his son a name - Konstantin, there was no question of not recognizing his son as his own. The whole twentieth year, Yesenin was on wheels. In July 1920, from Rostov, on his way to the Caucasus, he wrote to his publisher Sakharov in Moscow: “. I also have a special request for you. If my wife Zinaida Nikolaevna appears on the horizon, somehow arrange for her 30 or 40 thousand through yourself or Kozhebatkin. She is probably in great need, but I don’t know her address. It seems that she has already left the Caucasus, and I will no longer be able to meet her.

And finally, there comes a moment when he decides that the time has come to cut him alive. Mariengof, Yesenin's friend, lied to Reich that Sergei had another. And Yesenin, meanwhile, wandered along the embankment of the Moscow River and bit his lips. But the deed was done: Reich packed up and left. Contemporaries remember little about how she lived after the break - she returned to Orel, served in the People's Commissariat for Education, and studied sculpture.

Lost in the world

Easily given to another

And without family, without friendship,

He went to the tavern pool.

On the way to Rostov, the boy fell ill - Reich took him out, but she herself contracted typhus. Due to poisoning with typhus poisons, she lost her mind, got into crazy house and came out a different person. The puppy curiosity and childish laughter that fascinated the twenty-two-year-old Yesenin disappeared forever - a very adult and very sober person returned to life, knowing perfectly well that fate does not give anything for nothing. And Zinaida Reich entered the director's courses. They were led by the famous Vsevolod Meyerhold. They soon got married.

Relations between Sergei Alexandrovich and Vsevolod Emilievich were friendly and correct. This fact is known. Yesenin was offered to read poetry, and pay the fee with flour. Yesenin replied: “Zinaida complained: she wants to bake pies for children, but flour is difficult to get. Would you invite Vsevolod!”

Sometimes Zinaida invited Yesenin "for pies." They saw each other in public - in theaters, with mutual friends.

My dear Jim, among your guests

There were so many different and different ones.

But the one that is all silent and sadder,

Did you come here by any chance?

She will come, I promise you.

And without me, in her staring gaze,

You gently lick her hand for me

For everything in which he was and was not guilty.

At the same time, the poem "Letter to a Woman" was written. Which of the relatives would not recognize Zinaida Reich in the “woman”? In this poem there is an explanation, and repentance, and guilt before a long-beloved woman. Here is the resolution of the classical triangle (Yesenin - Reich - Meyerhold) in best traditions Russian intelligentsia, Russian literature.

Of course, you remember everything

Approaching the wall

You excitedly walked around the room

They threw it in my face.

It's time for us to part

What tormented you

My crazy life

That it's time for you to get down to business,

You didn't love me.

You did not know that in the host of people

I was like a horse driven in soap

Spurred by a brave rider.

That I'm in solid smoke

In a life torn apart by a storm

That's why I suffer that I do not understand -

Where the rock of events takes us.

Can't see faces.

Big is seen from a distance.

When the sea surface boils -

The ship is in a sorry state.

Behind new life, new glory

In the midst of storms and blizzards

He directed it majestically.

Well, which of us is big on deck

Didn't fall, vomit, or swear?

They are few, with an experienced soul,

Who remained strong in pitching.

But maturely knowing the work,

Went down into the ship's hold,

To avoid watching human vomit.

And I bent over the glass

So that, without suffering for anyone,

you had longing

In the eyes of the weary

What am I showing to you

He wasted himself in scandals.

What's in the smoke

In a life torn apart by a storm

That's why I suffer

Where the rock of events takes us.

Now the years have passed.

I'm at a different age.

I feel and think differently.

And I say over the festive wine:

Praise and glory to the helmsman!

In the midst of tender feelings.

I remembered your sad tiredness.

I'm rushing to let you know

And what happened to me!

Nice to say to me:

I avoided falling off the cliff.

Now in the Soviet side

I am the most furious fellow traveler.

I wouldn't torment you

As it was before.

For the banner of liberty

And bright work

Ready to go even to the English Channel.

I know you are not the one

With a serious, intelligent husband;

That you do not need our maeta,

Not a bit needed.

How the star guides you

Under the tabernacle of the renewed canopy.

always remembering you

So, the Yesenins had a family in 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920. There were long separations, quarrels, misunderstandings, but there was also love, the joy of meeting, children. There was a family.

"Did he love anyone? - wrote G. Ustinov. “I think he only loved his first wife.” Even Anatoly Mariengof admitted: “Who did Yesenin love? Most of all he hated 3. N. Reich. Here it is, this woman. whom he hated more than anyone in his life, she - the only one - he loved.

4 years before her tragic death, Zinaida Reich signed a photo to her friend: "To you, as a memory of the most important and most terrible thing in my life - about Sergey."

The love triangle, as you know, is the most common basis for the plot of novels, plays, films ... But, alas, life sometimes presents something that even the most inventive playwright cannot come up with.

... The fate of everyone who made up this star triangle turned out to be truly monstrous. Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin was the first to die. The bloodied corpse of the poet with cut veins on his arms and a noose from a suitcase belt around his neck was discovered in Leningrad in the Angleterre Hotel room on December 28, 1925 at 10:30 am.
On July 15, 1939, in his apartment in the "House of Artists" - in the very center of Moscow, near the Central Telegraph - his ex-wife Zinaida Nikolaevna Reich was bleeding. On the body of the actress, deep knife wounds gaped. On the way to the hospital, the woman died.
A few weeks before the murder of Zinaida Reich, her second husband, the great reformist director Vsevolod Emilievich Meyerhold, was arrested. Who, as "an active Trotskyist and an agent of British and Japanese intelligence", was shot on February 2, 1940 in Butyrka prison ...
In early August 1917, exactly in the days of preparations for the elections to the Constituent Assembly, on the Solovetsky Islands in the Kiriko-Ulitovskaya Church, a young (in a month he will be 22 years old), but already well-known poet Sergei Yesenin and a typist of the editorial office of the Left SR newspaper "Voice of the People" got married 23-year-old Zinaida Reich ...
The young people met in Petrograd, at the Society for the Distribution of Socialist-Revolutionary Literature and Newspapers. Zinaida was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Sergei was a sympathizer. Neither he nor she, of course, arranged any terrorist acts, but only carried out propaganda work. At first, Yesenin, a young man with blond, curly, neatly combed hair, courted another editorial typist, Mina Svirskaya. And Zinochka Reich was given all sorts of signs of attention by his then friend Alexei Ganin ...

At first, Yesenin invited Mina Svirskaya on a trip to Solovki, but she could not go: the Remington tied her tightly to the editorial table. Zinaida agreed and even laid out all the money accumulated by hard work for the trip. After returning, she, as if by chance, told her friend, who until recently seemed to everyone named Yesenin: “You know, the priest married Sergei and me on Solovki.” And she showed an official paper with her signature "Reich-Yesenin".

... The poet proposed to her on the ship. He declared that he loved her for a long time, he could not live without her. And they should get married immediately.
Forty days after the wedding, Zinaida Nikolaevna placed in Pravda, at that time a Socialist-Revolutionary newspaper, a notice of her withdrawal from the party. She left revolutionary and political activity forever. And she began to build a family nest - she wanted normal female happiness. The happy newlywed rented and, as best she could, furnished an apartment on Liteiny Prospekt. Homeless until then, Yesenin liked all her worries at first. He kept repeating with pride: “I have a wife!”
On his birthday, Zinaida Nikolaevna, having obtained some snacks and several bottles of wine, gathered her friends. A month before the October Revolution in hungry Petrograd, the table laid by her looked festive. Yesenin was very animated and insisted that Mina Svirskaya drink with him and Alexei Ganin for brotherhood. Then he went to see off his former passion and did not return home soon. Zinaida was offended. Thus, the first crack arose in their relationship, which very soon turned out to be completely destroyed, although two children appeared in the family: on May 29, 1918, daughter Tatyana was born, on February 3, 1920, son Konstantin.

The father will see the boy only after the collapse of the family - at the station in Rostov. Returning with his bosom friend Anatoly Mariengof from Tashkent, Yesenin accidentally met ex-wife on the platform. And she, offering to look at her son, invited the poet to her car.
"Fu! .. Yesenins are not black!" He recoiled from the child as from a leper. And quickly came out...
Zinaida Reich is often called the first wife of Sergei Yesenin. This will be true if only church marriages or those sealed with official signatures are recognized. But back in 1913, having just appeared in Moscow, a 17-year-old native of the Ryazan hinterland became friends with Anna Izryadnova, who worked next to him in the printing house of Sytin's book publishing partnership.
Anna was four years older than Sergei, to whom marriage with her - as Mariengof testifies - "... from the first days of family life seemed like a mistake." In 1914, Yesenin left Moscow for Yalta, but continuously demanded money from his wife. Six months later, he left Anna with a baby in his arms, intending to try his luck in Petrograd. Before the literary elite of the capital, the aspiring poet appeared in the form of a simple-hearted village boy, but there was neither naivety nor innocence in him, according to Mariengof. He longed for literary success and, gaining fame and recognition, played a subtle game. “It is not harmful to pretend to be a fool,” the poet used to say then. - Very much we love a fool. Everyone should be pleased - let them think: it was I who introduced him into Russian literature. They are happy, but I don’t care ... "
... Anna Romanovna Izryadnova lived until 1946, and her and Yesenin's son Georgy Sergeevich, born at the very end of 1914, died tragically in 1938. In fairness, it should be said that Yesenin maintained relations with the first family until the end of his days. He also came to say goodbye before the last trip to Leningrad: “I'm washing off, I'm leaving. I feel bad, I'm probably going to die."
The Ryazan nugget poet inherited a painful craving for alcohol from his ancestors, who suffered from alcoholism for many generations. Zinaida Reich, like the next Yesenin wives Isadora Duncan and Sophia Tolstaya, unsuccessfully tried to keep her husband from spree, noisy scandals and brawls.
Quiet family life disgusted the poet who was becoming fashionable. In hops, he "untied his hands." “... I myself am afraid, I don’t want to,” Yesenin later admitted to one of his faithful admirers Galina Benislavskaya, “but I know that I will beat ... I beat two women, Zinaida and Isadora, and could not do otherwise ... For me, love is a terrible torment , it's so painful. I don't remember anything back then...
The poet's entourage also contributed in every possible way to the collapse of the Yesenin family. The poet's friends (both Imagists and the so-called "muzhikovstvuyuschie") frankly set him on the hated by them Zinaida Reich. Even more than her non-Russian surname (Jewish, as many of these pseudo-patriots - the guardians of the “Russian national idea” viciously claimed), they were infuriated by the desire of Zinaida Nikolaevna to get her husband out of their pernicious influence. If she won in an unequal struggle, she would not only save her family, but also save a brilliant poet for Russian literature.
But Reich suffered a crushing defeat. Shortly before the birth of her son, she had to go to her parents in Orel, and a divorce process took place there. Then Zinaida Nikolaevna, having settled with young children in Moscow on Ostozhenka in the house of mother and child, became seriously ill - first with typhoid fever, and then with typhus. She survived miraculously, having landed for some time - due to poisoning with typhoid toxins - in a madhouse ...
The mind that had been lost for a while returned to her. And the puppyish curiosity and childish laughter that had so recently fascinated Yesenin disappeared forever. Zinaida has turned into a sober, rational person, who knows perfectly well that fate does not present anything for nothing.
In the autumn of 1921 this beautiful woman, outwardly similar to the then film star Vera Kholodnaya, entered the theater courses at the State Experimental Workshops, which were led by Vsevolod Meyerhold himself.

And Sergei Yesenin in those days met and became close to the American dancer Isadora Duncan, who came to Moscow at the personal invitation of the People's Commissar of Education Lunacharsky to organize a dance school ... The poet's third wife suffered even more humiliation and beatings than Zinaida Reich.
Isadora Duncan, having survived Yesenin by two years, died a strange and terrible death in Nice. She got into her racing car and wrapped a long red scarf around her neck, the end of which she tossed back. The scarf wound around the rear wheel axle and broke the dancer's cervical vertebrae in the very first meters of the way. The car, carrying a lifeless body, rushed and rushed forward ...
On the eve of the first anniversary of Yesenin's death, at the head of his grave, the selfless Galina Benislavskaya shot herself in the heart with a pistol ...
By the time Zinaida Reich Meyerhold appeared in his life, he had already broken up with his first wife, Olga Munt.
“No matter how many adorations I have seen in my lifetime,” the famous screenwriter Yevgeny Gabrilovich later recalled, “there was something incomprehensible in Meyerhold’s love for Reich. Furious. Unthinkable. Defenseless and angry-jealous ... Something forgetful. Love, which everyone writes about, but which you rarely encounter in life.
Vsevolod Emilievich was completely absorbed in his feeling and did not control it at all. During one of the rehearsals, a cast-iron beam collapsed onto the stage with a roar, almost crushing the theater's leading actress Maria Babanova. The actors and stagehands were shocked when Reich entered. Meyerhold rushed to her in fright: “Zinochka! I'm glad you weren't here."

In the theatre, the chief director, who after his marriage bore the double surname Meyerhold-Reich, was demanding and even formidable, and never ceded the reins of power to anyone. At home, Zinaida Nikolaevna completely reigned, and Vsevolod Emilievich became infinitely soft and compliant.
He not only adopted the children of Yesenin, but also sincerely became attached to them. And they trusted their stepfather in everything, who was invariably pleased when peers came to the children from the yard (for example, the very young Zinovy Gerdt visited his house).
Tanya and Kostya's own father, having returned to Russia sick and exhausted in 1923 (he began to develop epilepsy), suddenly inflamed with fatherly feelings for his son and daughter; it no longer seemed to him that "Yesenins are not black."
He was jealous of his ex-wife and addressed her new husband with offended semi-ironic lines:

“Drink, have a bite!
Here's pepper for bream!
Meyerhold, ah, Meyerhold,
Save a friend!"

Many of those who knew our heroes emphasize that Yesenin loved Zinaida to the grave. No wonder he punished himself:

“But you lost your children around the world,
He easily gave his wife to another,
And without a family, without friendship, without a berth
You have gone headlong into the tavern whirlpool ... "

And he addressed to his ex-wife a lot of late remorse:

"Do you remember,
Of course, you remember everything
As I stood close to the wall.
You excitedly walked around the room,
And they threw something sharp in my face ... "

Although the poet was now rarely sober and sank lower and lower every day, Zinaida Reich began to meet with him again at the apartment of her friend Zinaida Geiman. To which Meyerhold, having learned about this, turned with the following words: “I know that you are helping Zinaida meet with Yesenin. Please stop this, they will get back together and she will be miserable.”

... The spouses learned about the suicide of the poet on the same day, but late in the evening. Vsevolod Emilievich rubbed his hysterical wife with wet towels until morning. Her son Konstantin recalled that night in this way: “Mother was lying in the bedroom, almost losing the ability of real perception ... She ran out to us twice, hugged impetuously and said that we were now orphans.”
The next morning, Zinaida Nikolaevna sent her friend, confidante Zinaida Geiman, an autographed photograph: "... As a memory of the most important and most terrible thing in my life - about Sergei."
"My story, where are you going?" - the fainting woman whispered at the coffin, next to which stood Anna Izryadnova, Galina Benislavskaya, and the last wife of the poet Sophia Tolstaya ...
Yesenin's mother threw an insulting face to Zinaida: "It's your fault!"
And she raised her hands to the sky: “Seryozha, because no one knows anything! ..”
She called the deceased to witness her boundless love for him. But unscrupulous, cynical and cruel people now interpret her words as evidence of the participation of Zinaida Reich in the mythical anti-Russian conspiracy of the Zionists and Freemasons ...
The writer Ilya Erenburg considered Zinaida Nikolaevna an actress of rare talent. And he was not alone in his assessment. The same, for example, was claimed by the great actor Mikhail Chekhov.

The already mentioned Anatoly Mariengof, who outlived both Sergei Yesenin and Zinaida Reich for a long time, on the contrary, completely denied her any acting abilities ... The well-known critic Viktor Shklovsky, who unsuccessfully sought the inclination of the future actress during her life on Ostozhenka, repeated the same.
The stage debut of Zinaida Nikolaevna took place on January 19, 1924 in the role of Aksyusha in the play "Forest" based on the play by A.N. Ostrovsky. Her partners were famous and beloved by the public artists Erast Garin, Igor Ilyinsky, Nikolai Okhlopkov, Maria Babanova ...
Before the arrival of Zinaida Reich at the Meyerhold Theater, Maria Ivanovna was the prima donna there. Moreover, she was secretly in love with the main director. The appearance of a happy rival forced Babanova to leave the troupe - shortly after the aforementioned fall on the stage of a cast-iron beam.

The main female roles were transferred to Zinaida Nikolaevna, which, of course, did not suit everyone. But she never tried to capture everything and in 13 years of work in the theater she played no more than a dozen roles ... Moscow gossips were gossiping with might and main about her luxurious toilets, but in fact this woman, who never resorted to the services of fashionable dressmakers, just knew her own style well.

The streak of light for Reich and Meyerhold ended in the second half of the 1930s. Theatrical innovations were now publicly called "Meyerholdism". In December 1937, after the premiere of Nikolai Ostrovsky's novel How the Steel Was Tempered, Pravda published a furious article entitled Alien Theatre. The persecution of the great director was supported by ... the then famous pilot Valery Chkalov. In early 1938, Meyerhold was fired, and the theater that bore his name was closed.
Eight years ago, Mikhail Chekhov warned about the likelihood of such a turn in the affairs of Vsevolod Emilievich in Berlin: “You should not return to Moscow: you will be killed there.” Then Meyerhold was offered to stay in Prague. Undoubtedly, he saw all the danger inexorably approaching him at home, but Europe, too, was then rolling into a brown abyss. In addition, he was firmly attached to his “travel restricted” wife, whom he could not part with even under pain of death.

Zinaida Nikolaevna answered her husband in full reciprocity, but she was sometimes careless and clumsy. She, for example, not only pushed the “all-Union headman” Kalinin, who had encroached on her, (a goat-bearded old man, carnivorously grinning, showed up to her make-up room), but also shouted in anger: “Everyone knows what a womanizer you are!” ... Almost She did not tell everyone she met that her husbands were being poisoned - Yesenin was brought to the noose, now they got to Meyerhold. And she repeated publicly: "Stalin does not understand art, so let him turn to Meyerhold!"
At night, hysterical seizures occurred with her, and Vsevolod Emilievich tied his wife to the bed with wet towels.

Soon they came for Meyerhold. A search was carried out in the apartment, and the hostess entered into the protocol slipped to her a complaint about the rudeness and rudeness of the Chekists. And in the evening she sent an angry letter to Stalin - she did not believe that the persecutors were acting with the sanction of the leader.
The killers who entered the apartment at night through the balcony, Zinaida Nikolaevna resisted desperately - she was not strong like a woman. The housekeeper Lidia Anisimovna, who, as Meyerhold’s granddaughter from her first marriage, Maria Vallentey, recalled, was found in the morning with a broken head on the floor at the front door, did not tell anyone anything, was arrested a few days later, and after her release she disappeared somewhere ...
The neighbors heard the screams of Zinaida Nikolaevna, but they were afraid to come to the rescue. Almost no one was at her funeral...

Yuri Pimenov, 1934 Zinaida Reich in the play "The Lady of the Camellias".

Tatyana and Konstantin, children of Zinaida Reich and Sergei Yesenin, were evicted from the apartment at 48 o'clock. Beria's personal driver and a young employee of the NKVD apparatus began to live there.

The wife of Sergei Yesenin, 3inaida Reich, was called a fatal woman who lived two different lives: in one - poverty and personal drama, in the other - prosperity, devoted love, professional success. And - a heartbreaking cry under the curtain ...

Zinaida was born in 1894 in the family of a Russified German, Nikolai Reich, and a poor noblewoman, Anna Viktorova. The daughter shared the convictions of her father, one of the first Social Democrats, for which she paid with the expulsion from the gymnasium. In 1917, the year of her meeting with Yesenin, she lived in Petrograd and served as a typist in the editorial office of the Left SR newspaper Delo Naroda, and was chairman of the Society for the Distribution of Propaganda Literature. There was also an art library, where Sergei Yesenin often looked in - the Socialist-Revolutionary Mina Svirskaya gave out books, and everyone thought that Sergei sympathized with her. And Zina was already going to marry his friend, the aspiring poet Alexei Ganin. Before the engagement, they decided to go together to the Solovki and further north. A friend could not, but Zinaida went. ................................. UNDER THE WINNER AS A FIRE

(Alexey Ganin) ...The black-haired beauty looks great on the deck of a white ship. Ganin stepped aside, admiring the bride, he does not hear what Zinaida and Sergey are talking about: - Zina, this is very serious. Understand, I love you... at first sight. Let's get married! Immediately! If you refuse, I will commit suicide... Soon the beach... the church... Make up your mind! Yes or no?! - Yes... On the way Sergey picked wild flowers. Not remembering himself, forgetting about Ganin, the young people got married in a small church near Vologda.

(Yesenin and Reich) ...Now there was no question of further travel. They returned to Petrograd, settled in an apartment on Liteiny and lived quite a normal life. family life- Yesenin even dissuaded himself from bachelor drinking parties, saying that I love my wife, we, brother, are adults. And when the struggle for survival began - the time was vague and hungry - he began to mope ... Closer to the birth, Zina went to her parents in Orel, and Sergey went to Moscow to join the Imagist poets.

(Yesenin and Duncan.) In family strife, the very fad that haunted Yesenin surfaced - after all, like a peasant, he could not forgive the fact that he was not the first on the matrimonial doge. When he cried to his friend Anatoly Mariengof, his face cramped, his eyes turned purple, his hands clenched into fists: "Why did you lie, you bastard ?!" However, this did not stop him from boasting about the "Don Juan victories" of those years: "Not 400, but 40, probably already."

(Yesenin and Mariengof) IS THIS LIFE? He did not visit his wife, did not call and did not wait. Then she took the one-year-old Tanya and herself came to him in a room on Bogoslovsky, where he lived with Mariengof. Sergei did not express much joy, but reached out to his daughter with all his heart. But the childish darling felt something was wrong ... the "zhivulechka" did not sit still, climbed on her knees to her mother, nanny and other men, but she bypassed her father. "And they resorted to trickery," Mariengof wrote in his memoirs, "both flattery, and bribery, and severity - all in vain." Zinaida bit her lips so as not to cry, and Yesenin became very angry, deciding that these were her "intrigues". Soon he told her to leave, saying that all feelings had passed, that he was quite satisfied with the life he was leading. Zinaida did not want to believe: “You love me, Sergun, I know this and I don’t want to know anything else ...”

(Zinaida Reich with children) And then Yesenin... connected Mariengof. He led me out into the corridor, gently hugged my shoulders, looked into my eyes: - Do you love me, Anatoly? Are you really my friend or not? - What are you talking about! - But why ... I can’t live with Zinaida ... Tell her, Tolya (I’m asking you how you can’t ask anymore!), That I have another woman. - What are you, Seryozha ... How can you? “Are you a friend or not a friend of mine?.. Her love is a noose for me. .. they say, I'm confused and deeply in love ... Let me kiss you ...

(Zinaida Reich with children) DIDN'T RECOGNIZE MY SON... The next day, Zinaida left. After a while I realized that I was expecting a child, I thought maybe it was for the best, the children would be tied ... I discussed the name with my husband on the phone - we agreed that if there is a boy, then call him Konstantin. And again, no news ... A little over a year later, on her way to Kislovodsk with her son, she met Mariengof on the platform of the Rostov railway station. Upon learning that Yesenin was walking somewhere nearby, she asked: “Tell Serezha that I’m going to Kostya. He didn’t see him. Let him come in and take a look ... If he doesn’t want to meet with me, I can leave the compartment.” The poet, reluctantly, but went in, looked at his son and said: “Fu ... Black ... Yesenins are not black.” The poor woman turned to the window, her shoulders trembled, and Yesenin turned on his heels and went out ... with a light, dancing gait.

(Isadora Duncan) Very soon, the popular American dancer Isadora Duncan will replace the unknown Oryol's wife. But the time is not so far away when Sergei Yesenin will be on duty near someone else's house, dying of longing for his children, knocking on the door and plaintively asking to be let in for one minute, just to look ... Fall asleep? Let them be carried out... sleeping... he wants to see them. And Zina... his wife... a famous actress, the wife of Vsevolod Meyerhold. How will Zinaida behave? More on this later. In the meantime, back to Yesenin and Mariengof. Tatyana Yesenina will write in her memoirs that her father left her mother because of her growing closeness with Mariengof.

(Sergey Yesenin and Anatoly Mariengof) SERGEY+ANATOLY=? Indeed, a question mark. Both traveled with lectures throughout Russia, believing that they were creating a new poetry - hence their partnership and a certain fanaticism. But the fact that they were a lot of weirdos was noticeable. In winter, the temperature in their room was sub-zero, so they put a mattress in the bath and slept together, throwing old books into the column to warm the water. It was their "promised bath". Until the tenants of the communal apartment expelled them from there, everyone liked the idea, and everyone wanted to warm up. In the room they also slept together on the same bed, covered with several blankets and fur coats.

Sergei Yesenin, Anatoly Mariengof, Velemir Khlebnikov) Then they came up with a game: on even days, Mariengof, and on odd days, Yesenin writhed on a cold sheet to warm it with his body. When one poetess asked Yesenin to help her get a job, he offered her a typist's salary only for her to come to them at one in the morning for 15 minutes. The condition was this - they turn away, do not look, and she undresses, warms the bed, then dresses and leaves. Three days later, the poetess could not stand it: - I do not intend to continue my service! - What's the matter? .. We sacredly observed the conditions. - Exactly! .. But I was not hired to warm the sheets of the saints. -Ah!.. Friends had common money, ate and drank together, dressed alike, usually in white jackets, blue trousers and white canvas shoes, wore the same hats. But Yesenin could not stand loneliness.

(Marienhof, Shostakovich and Nikritina) When A. Mariengof became seriously interested in the actress Nikritina and somehow came at 10 in the morning, Sergei lifted his heavy red eyelids: - Yes. Drank. And every day I will ... if you start wandering around at night ... With whomever you want, dance around there, but to spend the night at home. Did they sleep "tightly embracing"?. Who admits this? Mariengof in "A Novel Without Lies" boasts that Sergei called him a "berry", that he was so attached to him that he was jealous of women, or rather, suffered from a lack of attention to himself.

(Yesenin and Mariengof) Nikritina, Mariengof's wife, was subsequently outraged by the assumptions of the writers about the bisexuality of her friends, completely rejected these speculations. And Nabokov ... wrote in his later memoirs about Yesenin's homosexuality that arises from time to time and a sudden disgust for it, thus explaining the reason for his drunkenness and ill-treatment of women.

(Vladimir Nabokov) Many contemporaries knew about Yesenin's habit of sharing a bed with men of his inner circle, but no one has unequivocally stated whether this hides something more than spending the night due to late gatherings. Perhaps the fact itself is also an image ... But the "dear friends" laughed at Zinaida in an unmanly way. Mariengoff called her "a stout Jewish lady" with crooked legs, with "sensual lips on her face as round as a plate." Shershenevich joked: "Oh, how tired I am of looking at ra (th) cunning legs!" But Vsevolod Meyerhold believed that there is no woman more beautiful and slimmer than Zinaida Reich.

(Anatoly Mariengof, Sergei Yesenin, Alexander Kusikov, Vadim Shershenevich. 1919.) SHE WILL FORCE HIMSELF TO RESPECT Meyerhold, by the way, has long been eyeing Zinaida Reich. Once, at one of the parties, he asked Yesenin: - You know, Seryozha, I'm in love with your wife ... If we get married, won't you be angry with me? The poet jokingly bowed at the director's feet: - Take her, do me a favor ... I will be grateful to you for the coffin.

(Reich and Meyerhold) How long, how short, but life, terrible with its uncertainty and suffering, the loss of ideals, both revolutionary and family, filled with humiliation and hardships of life, a complete lack of love and mercy, has reached the point beyond which either complete oblivion and collapse, or ... something must happen, otherwise ... it is simply unbearable. And yet, Sergei did not appreciate his wife, she will prove to him what she is capable of ... she will become an actress. And Zinaida entered the director's courses.

(Yesenin, Reich, Meyerhold) "... AND I WILL ADOPTION CHILDREN" In the autumn of 1921, she came to the studio to the 48-year-old Vsevolod Meyerhold, and he immediately offered her a hand and a heart. Zinaida could not make up her mind for a long time, they say, she is divorced, she has two children, I don’t trust anyone ... to which the famous director simply and clearly replied: “I love you, Zinochka. And I will adopt children.” Prior to this, Vsevolod had lived for a quarter of a century with his first wife, Olga, whom he had known since childhood, and had three daughters with her.

(Olga Mikhailovna Munt, the first wife of Vsevolod Meyerhold) The lawful wife almost lost her mind when she returned from the trip and saw Zinaida - what did he find in this gloomy woman, how dare he bring her to their house? And then she took and cursed them both before the image: "Lord, punish them!" She did it out of desperation, but she took upon herself a terrible sin - she herself was left with nothing, and years later the death of Vsevolod and Zinaida was brutal, monstrous ... But that was later, but now Meyerhold is happy, he did not know that it was possible to love like that ... However, Yesenin was hurt by this: "He got into my family, portrayed an unrecognized genius ... He took his wife away ..."

(Meyerhold and Reich) However, Yesenin himself accused his wife of divorce, arguing that it was she who insisted on breaking off relations. According to the poet's friends, he never forgave Zinaida, because she lied to him, said that before the wedding she had no ties with men. Because of this lie, I didn’t manage to gain confidence in her. But anyway, in 1924 Yesenin visits repentance, and he asks for forgiveness from his ex-wife in poetic lines ... And in 1924 he writes a famous poem in which he asks for forgiveness at the ex-wife. You remember, you all, of course, remember How I stood, Approaching the wall, You excitedly walked around the room And threw something sharp In my face. You said: It's time for us to part, That my crazy life has tormented you, That it's time for you to get down to business, And my destiny is to roll on, down. Darling! You didn't love me. You did not know that in the crowd of people I was like a horse driven in soap, Spurred by a brave rider. You didn't know That I'm in a continuous smoke, In a life torn apart by a storm That's why I suffer that I don't understand - Where the fate of events is taking us. Face to face You can't see the face. Big is seen from a distance. When the sea surface boils - The ship is in a deplorable state. Earth is a ship! But someone suddenly Behind a new life, new glory Into the direct thick of storms and a blizzard She was directed majestically. Well, who among us is big on the deck Didn't fall, didn't vomit and didn't swear? There are few of them, with an experienced soul, Who remained strong in pitching. Then I, To the wild noise, But knowing the work maturely, Went down into the ship's hold, So as not to watch human vomit. That hold was a Russian tavern. And I bent over the glass, So that, without suffering for anyone, I would destroy myself In a drunken frenzy. Darling! I tormented you, You had longing In the eyes of the tired: That I showed off before you I wasted myself in scandals. But you didn't know, What's in solid smoke, In a life torn apart by a storm That's why I'm suffering, What I don't understand Where the fate of events is taking us... Now the years have passed. I'm at a different age. I feel and think differently. And I say over the festive wine: Praise and glory to the helmsman! Today I'm in shock of tender feelings. I remembered your sad tiredness. And now I am rushing to tell you, What I was, And what happened to me! Darling! It's nice to say to me: I avoided falling from the steep. Now in the Soviet side I am the most furious fellow traveler. I became not who I was then. I wouldn't torment you, As it was before. For the banner of liberty And bright labor Ready to go even to the English Channel. Forgive me... I know you're not the one - You live With a serious, intelligent husband; That you don't need our maeta, And you don't need me at all. Live as the star guides you, Under the shelter of the renewed canopy. Greetings, always remembering you Your acquaintance Sergei Yesenin. ...................... ALL ROLES - ZINOCHKA Reich seemed to the director a living embodiment of the elements, a destroyer and creator, you can make a revolutionary theater with her. It doesn't matter that many considered her a mediocre actress, but her husband - idolized and was ready to give her all the roles - both female and male. When the conversation turned to the production of "Hamlet" and Meyerhold was asked who would play the main character, he replied: "Of course, Zinochka." Then Okhlopkov said that he would play Ophelia, and even wrote a written application for this role, after which he flew out of the theater. They said about Zina that she moves around the stage like a "cow".

(Maria Babanova) Having heard the gossip, Vsevolod Emilievich fires the public's favorite Maria Babanova from the theater - thin, flexible, with a crystal voice (she gets more applause). Beloved student Erast Garin leaves the theater - Zinochka quarreled with him.

(A scene from The Inspector General. Khlestakov - Erast Garin, Anna Andreevna - Zinaida Reich) Meyerhold specially for her comes up with such mise-en-scenes that there is no need to move - the action unfolds around the heroine. The light falls on her beautiful face and white shoulders, the audience is watching sudden outbursts of furious anger - this is what the actress owned to perfection.

Meyerhold with a portrait of Reich) Next to Meyerhold, Zina really blossomed. She felt love and care. The husband even took her last name as a second one, and signed it - Meyerhold-Reich. Parents moved from Orel to Moscow, the children have everything they need: the best doctors, teachers, expensive toys, separate rooms. Soon the family moved into a hundred-meter apartment. Zinaida is one of the first ladies of Moscow, she attends diplomatic and government receptions, receives the most eminent guests in her house. PROFESSIONAL SUCCESS

Immediately after the wedding, Vsevolod Emilievich asked Mariengof whether Zinaida would be a great actress, to which the "evil genius" replied, not without malice: "Why not the inventor of the electric light bulb !?" That is, no one believed in her success on stage, the actors hated it, critics wrote that "Zinaida Reich played the worst", the Imagists from Yesenin's entourage gloated ...

(Zinaida Reich) But the love and talent of the great director created a miracle - Zinaida Reich became a great actress. She perfectly played Aksyusha ("Forest" by Ostrovsky), Varka ("Mandate" by Erdman), Anna Andreevna ("Inspector General" by Gogol), Phosphoric Woman ("Bath" by Mayakovsky), Margarita ("Lady with Camellias" by A. Dumas - ¬son), etc.

(Portrait of Zinaida Reich in the role of Marguerite Gauthier) Just the play "The Lady with the Camellias" was the last one played by Zinaida Reich on the stage of the Theater. Meyerhold on January 7, 1938. Having played the final scene - the death of Marguerite Gauthier - the actress lost consciousness, she was carried backstage in her arms. This was facilitated by the fact that the Committee for the Arts adopted a resolution on the liquidation of the theater ... Just one day there was a spectator in the hall who not only appreciated the beauty of the French aristocratic court, but also "understood" the idea of the performance - the desire for a prosperous life, free from ideology and class prejudice. It was Stalin. Meyerhold was accused of switching to petit-bourgeoisism - in Soviet life there is no place for what Dumas the son talks about. And people poured into the performance in a crowd, yearning for true human feelings. We went to Zinaida Reich. From the silence of the hall came sobs and blowing noses. Critics noted that "there was an unusually elegant, sophisticated French beauty on stage."

(Zinaida Reich) She was torn between feeling and morality, between passion and morality. And even the beautiful Armand (actor Mikhail Tsarev) "was a little rustic" next to this "absolute femininity." He lacked the natural looseness of a true aristocrat. And only Meyerhold knew that he was right. Despite the harsh time, he had to put Dumas in order to enable Zinaida to survive and let go of her former passion for Yesenin ...

(Zinaida Reich and Mikhail Tsarev) SECRET DATES After America, after breaking up with Isadora Duncan, after Zinaida became an actress of the most avant-garde theater, the beautiful and prosperous wife of a popular director, Yesenin fell in love with his ex-wife again ... Zinaida Reich secretly I met him in the room of my friend Zinaida Geiman. But Geiman did not tell her that Meyerhold knew everything, that one evening he looked disgustedly into the eyes of the procuress: “I know that you are helping Zinaida meet with Yesenin. Please stop this: if they get back together, then she will be unhappy ... "The friend hid her eyes, shrugged her shoulders, they say, this is jealousy ... fantasies of an inflamed imagination ...

(Yesenin and Duncan) And Sergei Yesenin suffered without children, was jealous and wished for Zinaida, whose success in Moscow and St. Petersburg overshadowed the success of Isadora Duncan. But ... on one of the dates, Reich told her ex-husband that "parallels do not intersect", that's enough, she will not leave Vsevolod. Although some people slandered about her pathological dependence on Yesenin, that if she calls, she will run barefoot in winter. It was difficult to fight this addiction... After the death of the poet, Reich gave Geiman a photograph with the inscription: "To you, Zinushka, as a memory of the most important and terrible thing in my life - about Sergei ..."

(Sergey Yesenin) THE SOUL SUFFERED IN ITS OWN WAY Meyerhold had reason to worry. Zinaida, even on stage, did not control herself. Playing the mayor, she pinched her daughter so that she screamed for real. At a reception in the Kremlin, she furiously attacked Kalinin himself: "Everyone knows that you are a womanizer!" She took any mocking glance in her direction with hostility, she could immediately throw a tantrum ... Therefore, Meyerhold's health worried Meyerhold more than his connection with Yesenin - after all, after America, he is also not himself, they say, his epileptic attacks became more frequent ... ... The Meyerholds were informed of Yesenin's death by telephone. Zinaida with a distorted face rushed into the hallway: - I'm going to him! - Zinochka, think... - I'm going to him! - I'm going with you...

(Reich and Meyerhold at Yesenin's coffin) Vsevolod Emilievich supported Zina near Yesenin's coffin when she shouted: "My fairy tale, where are you going?" Accompanied everywhere, did not take his eyes off - if only there was no breakdown, if only everything worked out ...

(Reich and Meyerhold) BEFORE THE STORM In the 1930s, the Meyerhold house was considered one of the most prosperous and hospitable in Moscow. They said that Zinaida again fed all sorts of goodies, and how good she herself is: a famous actress, a beautiful woman, her husband simply idolizes her. True, his son Kostya made me a little worried - he organized the Justice League at school, wrote the Charter, the Program, published the Alliance newspaper - so that there were no favorites, so that teachers deservedly put marks, so that parents with their position did not affect grades children ... In general, Meyerhold with difficulty, but still defended his stepson, settled the "rebellion against the party ..." But the comrades from the Lubyanka decided not to risk it and took note of the director.

(Meyerhold with Yesenin's children Kostya and Tanya) They haven't touched him yet, but something else was depressing... In 1939, his wife's illness worsened. Zina shouted through the window to the security guard that she loved the Soviet government, that they closed the theater in vain, then wrote a furious letter to Stalin. She threw herself at the children and her husband, saying that she did not know them, let them go out. I had to tie her with ropes to the bed. But Meyerhold did not send his wife to an insane asylum: he spoon-fed, washed, talked to her, held her hand until he fell asleep. A few weeks later, she calmly woke up, looked at her hands and said in surprise: "What dirt, what dirt ..." Zinaida returned to normal life again - her husband saved her again ... But there were several weeks left before the tragic denouement ... Meyerhold taken in St. Petersburg. At the same time, a search was conducted in the Moscow apartment. Zinaida understands that the world has collapsed, that she will no longer see her husband - the only true and true friend of life - but she does not yet know that the night ahead will be fatal for her. From 14 to 15 July 1939. ... The body of the actress with numerous stab wounds was found in the office, and in the corridor with a broken head lay a housekeeper, hurrying to the cry of the hostess.

(Yesenin's grave at the Vagankovsky cemetery) Zinaida was buried at the Vagankovsky cemetery, not far from Yesenin's grave. After some time, another inscription appeared on the Reich monument - Vsevolod Emilievich Meyerhold.

(Grave of Zinaida Reich) The soul of Vsevolod found its Love, and the soul of Zinaida made her choice. Tamara Shamankova ADDITION. YESENIN'S CHILDREN: Tatyana and Konstantin, the children of Zinaida Reich and Sergei Yesenin, were evicted from the apartment at 48 o'clock. Beria's personal driver and a young employee of the NKVD apparatus began to live there. Konstantin Sergeevich Yesenin (February 3, 1920, Moscow - April 26, 1986, ibid) - an outstanding Soviet sports journalist and statistician, football specialist. Brief biography The son of the poet Sergei Yesenin and Zinaida Reich. One of the first mentions of the work of Konstantin Yesenin is in the book "Big Football" by Andrei Starostin (1957). Collaborated with many sports publications. In particular, he was a member of the editorial board of the Football-Hockey weekly. It was on his initiative that this weekly established the Grigory Fedotov Club. From an interview with Sicily Markovna Yesenina, wife of Konstantin Yesenin: - Konstantin Yesenin was fond of sports, football. You can't say the same about his father. Where did he get these hobbies? - Yes, because when his mother, Zinaida Reich, went abroad with Meyerhold, they brought him a lot of different football prospectuses, and even then, as a child, he became interested in sports. - He had three wounds. A lung was pierced, which left a 17 cm long suture on his back after the operation... He was awarded three Orders of the Red Star. Only the third order was received many years later, when I was already working in Hungary, somewhere in the early seventies ... - Konstantin had been married before, but had already divorced. He was treated badly in that family. His friend said: we all came from the army, we had nothing. But somehow our wives dressed us all up. And Kostya wore an overcoat with one button... - We registered in 1951. We bought a ticket for Raikin's concert, and that's it. It wasn't before the wedding. He had a ten-meter room on the ground floor. And I lived with my mother and son on Pravda Street. There was about 30 meters and a kitchenette with a stove. Then what was the time! - He was very modest at first, he did not turn up his nose. But then they began, you know, to wear it in their arms: both evenings and began to be published, they began to invite him to performances. And the actors are offended that he was there, but was not here. And he changed quite a bit, began to say: “You know, take a microphone and walk freely around the stage like that!” A horde of women and everything else... - And it so happened that I am, as they say, a domestic worker, and he goes there, and he goes here. And to my son, he does nothing at all. Although the son treated him very warmly and reached out. He wrote poetry and resorted to asking Konstantin to read it. But I told him when we decided to be together: just think! After all, I have a child, a son! .. ... - In 1980, we broke up with him. And I broke up with him as with my husband in 1965, when my mother died. Konstantin died in 1986... - Did you have children? - We didn't have children. Because, as I thought, you can’t have children from them. They all had a very bad heredity, all Yesenins are sick. And he? Who had such a biography! Father hanged himself, mother was killed, stepfather was shot. He himself has such injuries! .. Tatyana Yesenina - the poet's daughter The daughter of Sergei Yesenin and Zinaida Reich, adopted by Vsevolod Emilievich, lived a difficult and eventful life. After the arrest of Meyerhold and the brutal murder of her mother, left with her younger brother and a small child in her arms, evicted from her parents' apartment, she saved Meyerhold's archive by hiding it in a dacha in the suburbs, and at the beginning of the war handed it over to S. M. Eisenstein for safekeeping. Being evacuated in Tashkent, she stayed there for the rest of her life. The talented journalist, writer, editor T. S. Yesenina initiated the process of Meyerhold's rehabilitation. Published memoirs about Meyerhold and Reich. Her letters to the researcher of Meyerhold's work K. L. Rudnitsky still serve as the most important source for those who study the work of the great director of the twentieth century. Yesenin's son Alexander Sergeevich was born on May 12, 1924. His mother is Nadezhda Davydovna Volpina (1900-1998), an outstanding writer, translator (thousands of pages of translations from German, French, Greek, Turkmen, including Ovid, Goethe, Hugo, etc.), author of the memoirs "A Date with a Friend ". In her youth, she wrote and read poetry from the stage. In the 1920s, she joined the Imagists, and then she met Sergei Yesenin. In early 1924, after a break with Yesenin, she left Moscow for Leningrad, where she soon gave birth to a son. Mother and son moved to Moscow in 1933. Alexander Sergeevich graduated from the Mechanics and Mathematics Department of Moscow State University, defended his dissertation in mathematics and received a referral to teaching at Chernivtsi University (Ukraine). There he was arrested for the first time for reading his own poems in a circle of friends - the poems were recognized as anti-Soviet. Declared insane, placed in a Leningrad psychiatric hospital, soon sent into exile in Karaganda for five years, but three years later, in 1953, after Stalin's death, he was released under an amnesty and returned to the capital. And then - again science, its own direction - ultra-intuitionism, dozens of poems. In 1961, his collection "Spring Leaf" was published in New York - for lovers of poetry, and "Free Philosophical Treatise" - for those whose conscience cannot be silent. By the way, the publication of "Spring Leaf" in New York is the second case in the history of Soviet literature after "Doctor Zhivago" when a book was printed abroad without the sanction of the authorities and under the real name of the author. And then - a whole series of new "madness". He is the author of most of the slogans of the human rights movement. It was he who compiled the text of the "Civil Appeal" - a call for a demonstration on December 5, 1965, organized by Vladimir Bukovsky in connection with the arrest of the writers Sinyavsky and Daniel. Yesenin-Volpin was the author of the most famous document of the dissident movement at that time - "Instructions for those who are to be interrogated" (1968). It was passed to each other by the persecuted inside the country, and in 1973 it was printed in Paris. They took him to the Lubyanka - and let him go: there was nothing to grab onto. He reminded the authorities that dissent is not at odds with the law, and therefore should not be punished. Volpin's wife Victoria recalled: once, during a three-hour conversation with investigators, Alexander Sergeevich exhausted them so much that they gave up, called her and said: "Take it!". He actively worked in the Human Rights Committee, created by Dmitry Sakharov, Valery Chalidze, Andrey Tverdokhlebov. He wrote reports on the right to defense, on the rights of the mentally ill, on international human rights pacts, etc. As a result, in March 1972, the authorities made Alexander Sergeevich understand that it would be better for him to leave the country. And in May of the same year, he emigrated to the United States. #stories #Sergey Yesenin #ZinaidaReich #About love

The actress who introduced Meyerhold to Reich. "Muse - one for two ..." Zinaida Reich, Sergei Yesenin and Vsevolod Meyerhold