Russian Poets and the October Revolution: Alexander Blok, Sergey Yesenin, Mikhail Kuzmin and Others

The article considers the question of the ideological and creative evolution of famous Russian poets at a turning point in the history of the twentieth century - during the years of the active formation of a totalitarian state system and its aesthetic socialist-realist doctrine. Revolutionary maximalism, the idea of a complete renewal of all being, came not only from Marxism and the Bolsheviks, but was also prepared by literature, long before the revolution, it had already “artistically matured” in the poetry of Alexander Blok, Sergey Yesenin, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky and many others. There is every reason to assert that the sources of Soviet literature as a cultural phenomenon were not only party leaders, not only so called proletarian culture and commissaries, but also honest artists who were ready to see in the cruelty of the revolution the right path to the cardinal renewal of life that their soul, which was full of angry denial of the world. The authors of the article argue that, having survived “belated insight”, Russian poetry in the person of Alexander Blok, Sergey Yesenin, Andrey Bely, Mickhail Kuzmin and others began a dramatic struggle for humanistic ideals and creative freedom.