A Page of the Poetic Dialogue Between S.A. Yesenin and N.A. Klyuev: About the Dating of the Poem “Beloved Land! My Heart Dreams of...”

The article consistently examines the stages of the creative history of S.A. Yesenin’s poem “Beloved Land! My Heart Dreams of...”. For the first time, we reproduce a facsimile of the autograph of the first version of the work (from the album of the writer I.V. Repin), revealing discrepancies not taken into account in the Complete Works of S.A. Yesenin (1995–2001). The article puts forward a hypothesis about the dating of the poem from 1914 to 1915. The basis for the hypothesis is, first of all, the date with which the poet signed his poem in Repin’s album — October 1, 1915, as well as the fact of the first lifetime publication in December 1915 (Birzhevye Vedomosti newspaper). Using the method of comparative analysis of the currently known versions of the text of Yesenin’s poem with the works of N.A. Klyuev in the spring and summer of 1915, the article identifies specific textual comparisons, and concludes that these works served as sources of the poem “Beloved Land! My Heart Dreams of...”. The article argues that Yesenin elaborated the final version of the first two lines of the text in 1920 as a result of his desire to free himself from “religious symbols” in his work, which appeared in the 1910s, partly under the influence of Klyuev.