Sergei Yesenin was found hanged in the Hotel Angleterre in 1925, his heirs went to court for three years, and his secretary died at his grave

Sergei Yesenin, 30, was found hanged in his room at the Hotel Angleterre in Leningrad on 28 December 1925. He had married Zinaida Raikh in 1917 and had two children with her; married the dancer Isadora Duncan on 2 May 1922 and left her in 1923; and married Sophia Tolstaya, Leo Tolstoy's granddaughter, in 1925. He had sons by Anna Izryadnova and by the poet Nadezhda Volpina. The official verdict was suicide. A theory that OGPU agents killed him and staged the scene has no proof, and historians Oleg Lekmanov and Mikhail Sverdlov reject it. His death set off copycat suicides that peaked in 1926. On 3 December 1926 his literary secretary, Galina Benislavskaya, killed herself at his grave in Vagankovo Cemetery; most accounts say she shot herself. Suits over his estate were heard in Moscow courts from 1926 to 1928^†. Duncan, then in Paris, asked that his money go to his mother and sisters^†. Tolstaya spent her life collecting and preparing his works. Some were banned under Stalin and Khrushchev, and most were republished in 1966.