Until now, S. A. Yesenin’s work has been analyzed according to the standard scheme: the writer’s creative laboratory, features of the author’s poetics, the search for character prototypes, primary sources of plots, original textual criticism. This monograph presents for the first time a completely new approach: the figure of the poet itself is examined in its life and creative manifestations. The image of the poet is considered as a plot-forming factor, as the founder and “legislator” of the character system. It turns out that Yesenin turned out to be a “cult figure” and became subject to the process of folklorization, and many of his works served as source material for folklore alterations and stylizations. For the first time, a point of view is proposed: Yesenin and his writings in the light of anthropological theory in relation to literary criticism. Innovative issues are examined in detail and in detail: the phenomenon of man as the basis of literary design and the main postulate of the philosophy of creativity. The task is solved using not only a variety of published and archival data, but also numerous folklore, ethnographic and historical and cultural texts personally collected by the researcher during many years of field expeditions to the Ryazan region, including to the “small homeland” of S.A. Yesenin.