Yevgeny Yevtushenko

...Last May, he wrote an article for the London Observer, in which he described his views in greater detail: "The very fact that in my poems I attack bureaucracy, dogmatism and chauvinism means precisely that I am a Communist in my convictions...

...Soon other newspapers began to publish the teenage poet...

...They" are probably satisfied now...

...He has a reputation as a ladies' man which he does nothing to discourage...

...The attack on Yevtushenko is as significant as it is dramatic...

...Alexei," he once boasted, referring to Alexei Adzhubei, Khrushchev's son-in-law and the editor of Izvestia, "is one of my closest friends...

...In from the pouring dark, from the pitch night without stopping to bang the taxi door she'll run upstairs through the decaying porch burning with love and love's happiness, she'll run dripping upstairs, she won't knock, will take my head in her hands, and when she drops her overcoat on a chair, it will slide to the floor in a blue heap...

...Can it be that you lost all feeling of pride and patriotism, without which I cannot imagine poetic inspiration, the minute you crossed the borders of your country...

...His second book of poetry, almost entirely devoted to love poems, appeared in 1955 and quickly established his reputation as a leader of his generation...

...Thus Gagarin, who is as popular among Soviet youth as Yevtushenko, joined the mushrooming official attack against youthful unorthodoxy in the arts...

...On Poetry Day in the fall of 1961, more than 5,000 young Russians jammed Mayakovsky Square in downtown Moscow to hear Yevtushenko recite his controversial poem "Babi Yar," which condemned anti-Semitism in Russia...

...I'm not...

...his father, a geologist, deserted the family in 1938 under a Stalinist cloud of political suspicion...

...Yevtushenko's fate will probably be decided at next month's meeting of the Party's Central Committee...

...With heroic stubbornness, rarely found in history, they built power station after power station, factory after factory...

...Indeed, in a peculiar way, a close bond developed between Khrushchev and Yevtushenko: the politician recognizing the poet's value in humanizing Soviet society and conveying an impression of its "liberalism," and the poet coming to depend upon the politician's support and to trust in his power and instincts...

...My voice no more than laughed at pompous falsity...

...Yet he has no doubts about the Party's importance...

...No foundations trembled...

...his motives are being called into question...

...And while the Party, somewhat baffled by his tactics, has pondered its next step, he has produced several strait-laced sonnets glorifying Cuba, collectives or Communism, hoping these would neutralize official antagonism...

...How sharply our children will be ashamed taking at last their vengeance for these horrors remembering how in so strange a time common integrity could look like courage...

...At any moment, he might have slipped...

...his poetry is under attack...

...Yevtushenko is the object of harsh official censure these days not because he has suddenly begun to outdistance his society in the race toward normalcy, but rather because the society, in a sudden change of Kremlin tactics, has stopped running, leaving Yevtushenko dangerously ahead of the crowd, alone and vulnerable...

...Yevtushenko believes in the theory of Communism...

...In 1954, at the age of 21, he married Bella Akhmadulina, a brilliant poetess, but they were quickly divorced...

...In an early poem he stated his political creed: I am a Communist by nature...

...It focuses not so much on Yevtushenko the poet as on Yevtushenko the symbol of cautious defiance of established authority...

...He believes in its indispensable role in leading the country toward its messianic destiny...

...His second wife, Galina Semyonovna, has translated Somerset Maugham and J. D. Salinger into Russian...

...Yevtushenko's career is checkered with instances when the romantic poet has been realistic enough to avoid a head-on collision with the Party by confessing his "mistakes...

...In 1953, when Stalin died, Yevtushenko abandoned politics (only temporarily, as it turned out) and turned to lyrical poetry...

...Before the Party began its attack, one of his old friends described him as a "talented but opportunistic writer...

...He is of Ukrainian, Latvian, Tartar, and Russian peasant stock...

...the idol of a generation searching for differentness in a society of sameness...

...Until the officials, led by Khrushchev, launched their nation-wide attack against him last month, Yevtushenko had often been dubbed an "official rebel...

...The fact is, Yevtushenko is not a rebel, though he obviously enjoys playing the role...

...and one tired and frustrated policeman was heard to say, "Better a revolution than a poet...

...They suffered for Russia...

...He had little difficulty shifting roles from poet to propagandist, and in 1961 he was dispatched to Cuba as a special correspondent for Pravda...

...In 1943, when he was 10 years old, he wrote his first novel...

...They think he is spoiled and should be made to suffer too...

...Within the context of the early post-Stalin period, this comparatively daring choice of subject matter seemed courageous: My love will come Will fling open her arms and fold me in them, Will understand my fears, observe my changes...

...They don't like young men getting their face on the cover of Time magazine and traveling around the world speaking for Russia...

...Zhenya and Galina now live in a small two-room Moscow apartment, equipped with Scandinavian furniture and decorated with the abstract paintings and sculptures of his friends, who regard Yevtushenko as their spiritual leader...

...Marvin L. Kalb recently returned to this country after three years as the CBS correspondent in Moscow...

...Most Russians hope "Talk" will have only fleeting relevance to the Russia of 1963...

...he loves to drink and backslap, to wink and hoodwink...

...He is a member of the Komsomol, the Young Communist League...

...And Communism orders me To be angrier and angrier Toward all that stands in its way...

...This is a period of political turmoil and ideological confusion in the Soviet Union, caused in part by the humiliation of the rocket withdrawal from Cuba, the war of words with Peking, and Khrushchev's battle with the Red Army over the military's share of the budget...

...His mother, Zinaida, was a concert singer...

...Yevtushenko was born 30 years ago, during the savage days of collectivization, in Zima ("winter"), a railroad stop on the Trans-Siberian Railroad about 150 miles west of Irkutsk...

...Two years later, he was writing lyrics for Russian popular songs, which were highly successful...

...the beacon for the timidly bold, who summon up the courage to praise abstract art, to talk to foreign newsmen, and to dress in a Western style...

...He is a ham, one of the best in the poetry business...

...He is a lucid poet who has used his talent in an effort to better Soviet society...

...But even as he glorified Castro, satisfying the Party stalwarts who had always felt uneasy about his facile opportunism, Yevtushenko was writing other poems attacking "Stalin's heirs" and vilifying their opportunism and hypocrisy...

...His readings have consistently drawn overflow crowds of wildly enthusiastic young fans, literary bobby-soxers who would light the police just to touch their beloved "Zhenya...

...The speaker was Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet Union's docile cosmonaut, talking about Russia's formerly rebellious and now sulking poet at the recent Moscow meeting of young writers, an ideological warmup for the Communist party Central Committee plenum, scheduled to open on June 18...

...Traffic was hopelessly blocked...

...Like Adzhubei, Yevtushenko enjoys a good anecdote, the racier the better...

...Courage has never been my quality...

...In his book, Yevtushenko wrote: "Russian people would rather work than analyze...

...He has told friends privately that his generation could never oppose the Party but could hope to reform it from within...

...He entered Moscow's famed Gorki Literary Institute but lacked the discipline to remain there...

...Evidence of the continuing battle between those "neoStalinists" who would like to pull back on the reins of Russia's recent groping toward normalcy and those "infant liberals" who would like to give Russia its head appears almost daily in the Soviet press...

...The young boy lived with his mother in Moscow until the outbreak of World War II, when he was evacuated to Siberia...

...and his one-time "backer," Premier Khrushchev, has joined the ranks of the Party's hatchet-men...

...he is neither fuzzy-headed, nor is he an anti-Communist...

...They worked with bitterness so that the roar of machines, tractors and bulldozers muffled their cries and sighs that tore through the barbed wire of the Siberian concentration camps...

...In the 19th century Russian tradition of the writer who devotes himself to the social good, Yevtushenko is a reformer who believes that Communism means economic abundance and political freedom and employs his poems as soldiers in the fight to achieve it...

...In 1948, he returned to Moscow, and within a year he had a poem published in the newspaper Sovetskii Sport...

...He always seemed to be testing the outer frontiers of permissible criticism consistent with Khrushchev's running attack against Stalinism...

...In the past, they always have...

...The "heirs" of Stalin, vigorously criticized by the young poet last fall, leaped on the Khrushchev bandwagon...

...You're a brave man they tell me...

...For me, Communism and bureaucracy by no means go together but are simply incompatible...

...With the pent-up anger and bitterness once reserved for Boris Pasternak, they have struck out at the shrewd and magnetic poet-politician, accusing him of "political infantilism," and barring him from further travel abroad, presumably until he recants...

...Only I thought it disproportionate so to degrade myself as others did...

...Obviously, both Khrushchev and Yevtushenko want to play it safe too...

...During such a period, so critical as to have forced the Central Committee to call a meeting next month on "ideological questions," it is the Soviet instinct to play it safe: to fall back upon the unquestioned a-b-c's of dialectical orthodoxy, to look suspiciously upon the unusual or the foreign, to retreat from the expanding horizons of the post-1953 "thaw" to the narrow world of Stalin...

...They try to portray Yevtushenko as a fuzzyheaded anti-Communist...

...They feel he expresses their own hopes and aspirations...

...many, especially among the young, worship him...

...He enjoys nothing more than a worshipping audience hanging on his every rhyme...

...I did no more than write, never denounced, I left out nothing I had thought about, defended who deserved it, put a brand on the untalented, the ersatz writers (doing what had anyhow to be done...

...In the middle of the battle stands Nikita Khrushchev, as vulnerable as Yevtushenko, since both belong to the latter school...

...He is a cautious non-conformist, a talented operator, whose once-dazzling success was due as much to his keen sense of public relations as to his acknowledged literary ability...

...A few years ago, Yevtushenko wrote a poem ridiculing the idea that he was brave for denouncing Stalinism...

...The campaign opened late last fall but received its greatest impetus from Nikita Khrushchev, who, in early March, singled out Yevtushenko for special abuse...

...He knows the right people...

...Most Russians admire Yevtushenko...

...If love launched Yevtushenko's early career, it also brought him unhappiness...

...Although he is a Communist "by nature" and "in my convictions," Yevtushenko has never been a member of the Communist party...

...The poet's love for Russia and its people has never been questioned, even by the hacks who now castigate him...

...and, in 1952, during the darkest days of Stalinism, his first book of propagandistic poems was published and was immediately praised by the official critics...

...He did so well, praising Castro's revolution in rhapsodic language while ignoring its failures, that he was sent back later in the year for a second tour...

...Another remarked, sadly, "One day, Zhenya will go too far, even for him...

...A smaller group among the intellectuals has been disappointed by his readiness to compromise on a principle one day in the hope of returning to the fight the next day, and they are critical of what they feel are his easy and too frequent transitions from poet to propagandist...

...For the past four years Yevtushenko has seemed to be walking a tightrope between the suspicious orthodoxy of the conservatives and the cautious advances of the liberals...

...For there can be little doubt that Zhenya is suffering...

...And now they press to tell me that I'm brave...

...His precarious position naturally attracted attention, and he used it to encourage other young artists, such as the poet Andrei Voznesensky (whom many Russians consider a more talented poet), to join him in fighting social evil and injustice with words and lyrics and sculpture, as well as to experiment with forms and subjects too daring for Yevtushenko himself...

...His tour of the United States—he was due here last month—has been cancelled...

...But just as he has won the admiration of a whole generation of Russians, so has he gained the displeasure of many tradition-bound bureaucrats and the envy of many untalented, but politically orthodox writers who are glad of the opportunity to add their voices to the official cry against him...

...The poem was entitled "Talk...

...The closest they come is their complaint that in his Precocious Autobiography he writes too much about the Russian people's sufferings and not enough about their joys, thus "distorting the true significance of the Bolshevik Revolution...

...In this context it is ironic, but not surprising, that it was Khrushchev himself who touched off the campaign against Yevtushenko, and that Yevtushenko quickly confessed his "mistake" in permitting his unauthorized Precocious Autobiography to be published in Paris, and later praised the criticisms directed at him as "aimed not at the destruction of my talent but rather at its development...

...The young poet knows that he is caught in a dangerous political and literary cross fire, involving some of the leading politicians and writers in the country...

...You are a writer, a poet, supposedly talented, and you have published in the foreign press such things about our country and our people that I started to feel ashamed for you...