Galina’s suicide note
Galina Benislavskaya did not come to Sergei’s funeral. For the conspiracy theorists, it was proof of her guilt. That and the fact that Wolf Ehrlich had wired her from Leningrad so suspiciously quickly after Yesenin’s death.
In fact, she had been ill. The breakdown she suffered at the time of Sergei’s marriage to Sofya Tolstaya had left her gripped by debilitating depression.
She wrote in her diary.
So, he is dead. Dead of that unbearable, fatal longing. That longing that I myself suffered for so many years. And now that he is gone, I feel once again the longing for him, the same yearning for his presence that fills my every thought. I am the faithful dog that lays down her head and waits forever for her master’s return.
Her obsession with Yesenin in death was equal to her obsession with him in life. For the next twelve months, she devoted herself to assembling his manuscripts, overseeing their publication, correcting things that were written about him and writing endlessly about her own memories and feelings for him.
In December 1926, a year after his death, she went to Yesenin’s grave in Moscow’s Vagankovskoe Cemetery. She had with her a revolver, a stiletto and a pack of twenty Mozaika cigarettes.
She sat by the graveside, thinking, smoking, waiting for dusk. By the time she had smoked all twenty, she had made up her mind. She scribbled a note on a piece of card.
I have killed myself. I have done it here, though I know it will bring even more criticism down on Sergei. By then, I won’t care and he won’t care. For me, everything that means anything is in this grave. Because in the end, who cares about those who betrayed him and slandered him and persecuted him? Who cares what people think?
She sat a while longer. On the cardboard from the cigarette packet, she wrote.
If I have stuck the knife into his grave after shooting myself, it means that I did not regret it. If I regret it, I will fling the knife away.
When the notes were found, by the cemetery keeper who came running at the sound of shots, Galina was lying on Yesenin’s grave with a bullet in her heart. She was still alive and faintly groaning. Underneath the paragraph about the knife, she had written, ‘One blank.’ In the end, she had pulled the trigger five times before putting the live bullet in her chest. The knife had fallen from her hand. She lived another three hours.
Galina’s suicide note