Yesenin State Museum-Reserve (Konstantinovo)

The village of Konstantinovo, about 40 kilometres southeast of Ryazan, is where Sergei Yesenin — one of Russia's greatest lyric poets — was born in 1895. The state museum-reserve preserves the family home, the village church where he was baptised, and the surrounding meadows and Oka riverbanks that inspired much of his poetry. The views from the high bank above the river are remarkable.

The estate includes the poet's ancestral home with period furnishings, the church with an attached small museum, and the home of the landowner's family where Yesenin's mother worked as a servant. There is a regular tour circuit operating in summer. Getting there from Ryazan by bus is possible but slow — a taxi or hired car makes the excursion far more convenient.

things to do museum sight
A story
Sergei Yesenin wrote some of his most beloved poems about the village of Konstantinovo, the Oka meadows, and the birch forests of central Russia. He died in 1925 in Leningrad under circumstances that have never been fully explained — officially a suicide, but long suspected by some to have been murder. He was only thirty years old, and already Russia's most widely read living poet.