This photograph was taken when Sergei Esenin attended the Spas-Klepiki Teachers’ School. The would-be poet stands the third on the right of the photograph. The picture is dated by 1911. Esenin’s first attempts at writing poetry date back to this period. The poet recalled: “My early verses were strongly affected by the influence of my grandfather. Since I was three, he dinned old antiquated religious culture into my head. in the period of my adolescence, my grandmother took me to all Russian monasteries”.

Later, while arranging his own biography, Esenin talked about his reading interests in his childhood: “Do you know, what book made an extraordinary impression on me? — “The Lay of Igor”s Campaign”. I got familiar with it very early and was absolutely overwhelmed with it; I was like a madman. What an imagery! Hence the origin of my imaginism’.

In the photograph Grigory Panfilov, his close friend, stands to the left of the poet. Upon graduation from the school the friends were in correspondence for a long time and shared with their projects of life. The first on the right in the second row is Yevgeny Khitrov, the literature teacher, who highly appreciated earlier poem ‘Stars’ and contributed to the making of the poet.

Khitrov described his impressions of this poem in the memoir: ‘I remember, I got bewildered somehow like being frightened by something. I read the poem together with him several times. I was ashamed of paying not enough attention to Esenin. I told him that I liked this poem very much and it even could be published. Soon eparchial overseer Rudinsky came to our school for his routine audit. I showed him the poem by Yesenin. In the classroom in front of everybody Rudinsky praised the poet to the skies and gave him some advice… Yesenin brought to me many of his poems, which I put into the pile of the students’ works. All poems were written on separate sheets. Before his graduation from the school I asked Esenin to re-write the poems into a special notebook. Esenin brought to me a single notebook with four poems. I said that it was not enough. Then he brought another notebook with five poems. I kept these two his notebooks. The ‘Stars’ poem once impressed me so much is also there’.

In May 1912 Esenin graduated from the school and moved to Moscow. Nikolai Sardanovsky, Konstantinovo friend of Esenin, noted: “It is my understanding that his moving to Moscow was the fateful landmark in the life of Sergei.

The poem “To I.D. Rudinsky” (1911) is characteristic of this period in the poet’s work:

Sun’s golden arc
Hot like a red coal,
Sent down its spark
And it warmed my soul;

Although, I am not sure
Now, I hope that I could
Expect from my future
To bring something good…