In the end, he was released as partially insane, for it was noted that he considered himself an incarnation of the Buddha and believed that he desperately needed money to propagate his teachings and found an Estonian colony in Latin America. Narodny also told the American public that his wife and two sons were killed by Cossacks. In an interview that took place two days later, he related how his wife had lost her mind, while he had secretly gone to Russia to save his sister, who was being molested by imperial forces. (Interestingly, the woman in the photograph of the “sister” he saved looks exactly like his new wife, who accompanied him from Finland in place of Sibul’s previous wife, whom he left behind.)

On October 9th, 1927, already after the tragic death of Duncan herself, and again in the Sunday supplement to Hearst’s newspapers, there appeared yet another article, undoubtedly from the same author, entitled “Isadora Duncan Haunted by Her Crazy Husband’s Dying Command. How Death Beckoned to the Noted Dancer Ever Since the Inscription, ‘Isadora, I Wait for Thee!’ Was Set Upon the Urn That Holds Poet Essenin’s Ashes in Russia.”

In this article, I’d like to turn away from heated debates over Esenin’s alleged “killers,” or unprofessional falsifiers of literary history, toward an apparently calmer place. I will focus on one of the most extravagant (if not the most extravagant and absurd) versions of the poet’s death, and the posthumous fate of his deathbed poem.

In the motivic structure of “War and Peace,” the “mythical” French “grippe” of Anna Petrovna Scherer occupies a unique position. It is a simultaneously socio-linguistic, satirical, historical, moral, and providential detail that, beneath the mask of fashionable high-society argot, foreshadows a glorious and terrible epoch, in which Tolstoy’s heroes must live, perish, act, endure, and overcome.

Immediately after Gorky’s death, rumors began to spread that he had been poisoned by chocolate candies sent to him from the Kremlin. Whether this is true or not, nobody knows. One thing is certain, however: even had he been poisoned, the efforts of this great warrior against vulgarity would have ensured that the chocolate was at least free of Pushkin’s name. To be fair, however, the box of assorted desserts produced by the Bolshevik Baked Goods Factory in 1936 still included a biscuit called “Pushkin.”

The hysterical reaction by the Soviet establishment to an apparently innocent incident — a reaction that struck at least one Western observer as symptomatic, but still curious — was deeply significant in the ideological context of the early Soviet period. It was inscribed into a campaign against vulgarity (or rather petty-bourgeois ideology) in all its antisocial manifestations that has long been associated with Gorky.

“The dignity of Russia’s most famous poet, Alexander Pushkin, has been saved, but as a result Moscow’s most pretentious café is now nameless. It all started a few weeks ago when a new café, elaborately equipped with modernistic furniture and a jazz orchestra – a really unique spot in this rather drab city – was established on Pushkin Square.”