“Country of Scoundrels” Yesenin in brief summary
The action takes place in the Urals in 1919. The protagonist of the poem is the bandit Nomah, a romantic character, an anarchist rebel who hates “all those who grow fat on Marx.” He went once behind the revolution, hoping that it would bring liberation to the whole human race, and this anarchistic, peasant dream is close and understandable to Yesenin. Nomah expresses in his poem his cherished thoughts: about the love of the storm and hatred for that routine, absolutely non-Russian, artificial life that the commissars imposed on Russia. Therefore, the image of the “positive” Commissar Rassvetov in Esenin is pale.
Dawn is opposed to Nomah, but in the main is one with him. Nomakh, in which Makhno clearly guessed, Nomakh, who says that gangs of the same deceived as he is growing all over Russia, is ready to kill and seize power. He has no moral brakes. But it is completely immoral and Breaking Dawn, who in his youth visited the Klondike, turned the stock-market
Nomakh arranges raids on trains running along the Ural line. Former worker, and now a volunteer Zamarashkin stands on guard. Here he has a dialogue with Chekistov, the commissar, who is shameless for Russia – for hunger, for savagery and brutality of the people, for the darkness of the Russian soul and Russian life… Nomakh appears as soon as Zamarashkin remains alone in his post. First he tries to lure him into a gang, then binds, steals a lantern and stops the train with this lantern. On the train of Dawn with two other commissars, Charin and Lobk. – Tells about the future of Americanized Russia, about the “steel enema” that must be supplied to its population… After Nomah rakes the train, takes all the gold and blows up the locomotive, Dawn personally heads it Search. In the stash where the former White Guards drink and the opium smokers smoke, Nomaha is hunted down by the Chinese detective Litza-hun. The author tries to show in the
Yesenin does not give an answer to the question of who is needed now in Russia: an absolutely immoral but strong-willed and resolute Dawn or the same strong but spontaneously free Nomah that does not recognize any power and no statehood. One thing is clear: neither Chekistov, nor the faceless Charin and Lobka, nor the Chinese Litza Khun with Russia have done anything. And the moral victory remains for Nomakh, who in the finale accidentally hides behind the portrait of Peter the Great and watches the Chekists through his eye sockets.