THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW YEVTUS FEELS A FRESH WIND BLOWING
Heuvel, Katrina Vanden
THE PROGRESSIVE Interview YEVTUS FEELS A FRESH WIND BLOWING BY KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL Yevgeny Yevtushenko is the Soviet Union's most famous and controversial poet. Born in Siberia in 1933,...
...They absorbed our spirits...
...Nobody is God—not even God himself...
...Where did the first anger, the first urgency come from...
...We worked for it...
...And I don't like it when some dogmatic people in our country try to show America as the whole center of world evil...
...They could make anti-American propaganda in the Soviet Union with no problem...
...They didn't want to be killed by the bull...
...It's very easy to be progressive and rebellious when you're young, when you have no responsibility for others and you're responsible only for yourself...
...I mean the economic situation...
...They are working as firemen...
...They don't feel guilty, and they are not guilty...
...YEVTUSHENKO: I'm not telling you that he's specially anti-Stalinist...
...This is wonderful, because it means people are taking on personal responsibility, showing personal points of view...
...That's why I don't like so-called pleasant art...
...I don't like it...
...They are all of them in the firemen's service now...
...I did everything that was possible...
...At the age of fifteen, he joined his father, a geologist, in the southern republic of Kazakhstan, where he worked as a digger with a geological expedition...
...He did wonderful things—he opened the borders of our country to foreigners, and he organized the first youth festival in 1956...
...Yet he remained faithful in important ways to his own personal convictions...
...To accuse governments is too easy a way out...
...Any kind of honesty is rebellion...
...They are former engineers, they are former agriculturalists...
...It's very visible in the arts...
...YEVTUSHENKO: There is a beautiful South Americajhiexpres-sion: "Where are the former incendiaries now...
...That's reality...
...But I am a poetician, not a politician...
...And he said, you know, Don Quixote was old, but he wasn't old...
...Q: Wait a minute...
...Such a writer's life is sometimes interpreted in your country as a kind of dishonesty...
...But I have been working for this future, and I am working for this future, with my speeches, with my poetry...
...I will never say that America is the focus of evil...
...Q: How would you compare American cinema to Soviet cinema...
...It's not really a matter of age...
...I mean the psychology of a people...
...Absolutely...
...Both systems have some good features, some bad features...
...When they aren't curious, and lose their childish curiosity, and kill the child inside of them, they can't write poems...
...They could say the same words...
...A majority wants openness...
...Sometimes some of them don't know our own history, which is very dangerous...
...There isn't one movie in the United States where you can find even one good Russian who is not defecting from the Soviet Union...
...They will fight for them...
...And I never glorified it...
...Q: What about the artists who have left the Soviet Union...
...There is a fence between them, a fence made of mugs...
...Nobody had written about these graves...
...They are people who were listeners of our poetry readings in the late 1950s and early 1960s...
...YEVTUSHENKO: He has changed the air over the soil...
...In "Fuku" there are very important lines: "Someone who forgets yesterday's victims will be a victim tomorrow...
...We've produced a new kind of person, a new-minded person...
...And so we have big hopes now...
...They would like to have a good job, a comfortable life, a good family, to have children, and not to be frightened by the threat of nuclear war...
...I defended him many times, many times, until the last moment when he was arrested before he was sent abroad...
...YEVTUSHENKO: We now have what I think is an open discussion about our current problems...
...This interview took place in two parts and in two cities...
...But in Cancer Ward, there are some very primitive pages, too...
...he is trying to make a bridge...
...Times are changing...
...Reagan could sit down on the shores of Lake Baikal near a hunter's fire and drink vodka and speak with our fishermen, with workers, with others, he would be a different man, as would many other Americans...
...They do exist...
...My personal point of view, which is shared by the majority of our writers, is that to put sugar on the open wounds is even more dangerous...
...yvtusheenko: For the first time in many years, we have incredible openness in our press—sometimes dealing with very painful questions, openly criticizing very high-ranking officials, including ministers, members of the government...
...I see so many different faces, it's very difficult to generalize...
...Q: How is Mikhail Gorbachev changing Soviet society...
...Don't take growing old too seriously, he said...
...q: Could you give an example of how the society is becoming more tolerant...
...I'm not a mystical man, but I remember that moment...
...I'm just trying to analyze it...
...YEVTUSHENKO: Sometimes...
...But at the same time, they're a minority...
...But in my opinion, to accuse bureaucracy alone is too easy...
...Pasternak, when he was sixty-six years old, wrote beautiful, youthful poetry...
...And we must be very careful in our expressions, because we have now a war of words...
...He will still be a hawk...
...But it's my character...
...I just want to be in my own place...
...That's true...
...The creation of the image of the enemy is self-destructive...
...YEVTUSHENKO: The so-called hard-liners are making their own business when they are trying not to notice these changes...
...yevtushenko: Khrushchev was a child of a certain epoch, of Stalin's era...
...Their main ideology is their armchairology...
...I am absolutely sure they will not give up very quickly because they know what they will lose—their privileges...
...But at the same time he belonged to Stalin's day...
...He put himself into a cage of his own design, a procrustean bed of his own schemes...
...Q: Is it too early to say...
...If someone doesn't give to others the possibility of engaging him in their hypocrisy, he is a rebel...
...As a poet, I don't like any kind of borders, prisons, any kind of police, army, missiles, anything which is connected with repression...
...they are practically sawing off the branch on which they are sitting...
...But even for them, for your hard-liners, because they are also human beings, it is a very dangerous game that they're playing...
...I am not God...
...He was a man who destroyed, as much as he could, the Iron Curtain, and he released so many people from our concentration camps...
...First of all, I think shame must begin in yourself...
...I am a child of lines, endless lines, for bread...
...In Stalin's time, Party professionals were ordered to lead heavy industry, or to be responsible for vegetables, for agriculture, or roadways, or metro, or something...
...Yevtushenko's position in Soviet culture and politics—that of rebel and envoy—has engaged and enraged readers and critics Katrina vanden Heuvel is assistant editor of The Nation...
...That's their point of view...
...Rebels are not only very famous people who make public statements...
...They have a lack of knowledge about history...
...YEVTUSHENKO: Because bureaucracy is based on indifference, and indifference is a kind of aggression...
...I think it's a very exact impression because he was a Stalinist, and at the same time an anti-Stalinist...
...Q: Are you saying that writers and poets prepared the way for Gorbachev...
...The incendiaries of all the revolutionary fires...
...YEVTUSHENKO: First of all, I think he is not trying to jump...
...But the rest of humanity is far from perfection, too...
...In my opinion, everyone can write a book...
...But now they get so specialized...
...They are sharper, not as conformist as American cinema...
...Of course, we didn't think that we would produce new kinds of people...
...But such wars, unfortunately, can very easily be transformed into missiles and other terrible, terrible stuff...
...But when we accuse bureaucrats, sometimes we absolve ourselves...
...Q: So you think he's part of the new anti-Stalinist movement...
...As I said in my Writers Congress speech of December 1985, we must rewrite our books about history, because if you don't know your own history, you can repeat mistakes...
...I felt them accusing me for having forgotten them...
...I want to be everything, everybody, in every place, at the same time...
...that's different...
...And many Russians would be different if they would come to America and sit near a hunter's fire in the Rocky Mountains and speak with Americans...
...Q: Why do you think people like Haig are misreading Gorbachev...
...I don't think Mr...
...They helped me...
...YEVTUSHENKO: Some of the American press accuse some Russian writers of being conformist, not rebellious enough, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera...
...There is a special power when you can openly recognize your own weaknesses...
...Sylvester Stallone's future, depends on Russian-American relations...
...Q: How hopeful are you that Soviet-American relations will improve...
...I think all gov'I am a poetician, not a politician...
...YEVTUSHENKO: Mr...
...Q: Do you fear, as you grow old, that you will lose the rebel inside of you...
...But I think they are more informed about what is happening in the world...
...We didn't work in gloves...
...He was a rebel against those epochs...
...I disagree with the expression that every people has the government it deserves...
...They were students—some of them were students squeezing without tickets on the balcony of our poetry readings...
...One bureaucrat, for instance, who sits in his office and has the Picasso drawing with the dove of peace on the wall, he may be a pacifist, but at the same time he is in a permanent war with his people...
...Because as I said in one of my early poems, "Conversations with an American Writer," unfortunately in all centuries simple honesty looks like courage...
...Born in Siberia in 1933, Zhenya, as he is more familiarly called, spent his childhood shuttling between Moscow and his Siberian birthplace ofZima Junction...
...We're divided by this fence made of mugs, faces...
...That's why they don't have an inferiority complex...
...YEVTUSHENKO: I get angry because these people are full of ignorance and hatred...
...yevtushenko: Now in the Soviet Union, the people who are taking charge in all fields—including newspapers, factories, and regional party committees—are people who are not guilty of Stalin's crimes...
...That is different...
...He told me, "I'm sorry, Yevgeny, when you are an emigre, sometimes you artificially force yourself to find someone to blame...
...Not being courageous enough...
...There are so many unknown rebels in the world, just simple, honest people...
...Yevtushenko insists that he has never abandoned his unpubli-cized efforts in behalf of victimized Soviet writers and dissidents...
...But a third kind of people are in between them...
...They want what most Americans, all human beings, want...
...But it's happened...
...If we see some danger, we must prophylactically write about it...
...I hope I am honest, but I don't think I am a courageous man...
...I once wrote, when I was forty, a very sad poem about getting older...
...The focus of world evil could never be concentrated only in one country...
...I think this is a man of anti-bureaucratization...
...A writer must have open eyes to see life...
...I don't like people who are not thirsty for life...
...But our literature, our art, didn't come as a gift from the so-called upstairs...
...It was the only way for them...
...Even if it's very painful...
...He later asked for my forgiveness...
...Then he came to the United States and began to say—not in the newspapers, but he began to say in so-called private circles—that I was one of the people who was guilty...
...Yevtushenko developed an international reputation as a daring anti-establishment figure—a rebellious young man who assaulted Soviet dogma and conformity, who debated the merits of abstract art with Khrushchev, and who fervently protested, in poems such as "The Heirs of Stalin " and "Babi Yar," the legacy of Stalinism and official anti-Semitism...
...But happily, there is also an international nation of good people...
...YEVTUSHENKO: Two thousand...
...We mustn't be afraid to put needles into the most painful points of the conscience...
...Yes, we must not only put salt on open wounds, we must dig into them as deep as possible, because there is still some infection which doesn't give us the possibility to be absolutely healthy...
...So this was a man full of contradictions, but he made one heroic step which I think not only Russia but all humanity will never forget—when he made his speech at the Twentieth Party Congress, and he organized a commission which released so many innocent people...
...q: To what extent is Gorbachev in the tradition of Nikita Khrushchev...
...I don't know...
...He spoke in English during both interviews...
...Your critics ask why the Soviet state, which will not tolerate others, tolerates you...
...There are just two dates in everyone's life: the date of birth and the date of death...
...What I write is a way of paying them back...
...I wrote many poems against bureaucracy...
...at home and abroad...
...They could have been rebels in different ways...
...Unfortunately, these films remind me of how Japanese people were shown during the war...
...When you ask me about them, I try to generalize...
...And they were educated in another time...
...Dangerous...
...You must not demand that all poets write political poetry, political declarations...
...What we're trying to do is to move these rock-minded people, stone-minded people, and make our society more flexible, more vital and ready for innovations, for reforms...
...I'm not speaking about independent American cinema...
...Our society is still very young, and I hope we are now entering the beginning of our maturity...
...It was George Orwell's point, if you remember...
...But your mainstream commercial cinema is more conformist, even more Stalinist, than in Russia at this moment...
...Yevtushenko is fifty-three...
...And probably when he made this film for commercial reasons, he forgot something very important: that the future of all humanity, including Mr...
...I don't blame him for saying this...
...It seemed to me that I heard through the mountains of rubbish secret whispers of those who died, those murdered people who were asking me to write about what had happened...
...We have a Russian proverb that says, "Under the lying rock water can't flow...
...Q: In one of your poems, you ask a sixteen-year-old, "How many people did Stalin kill...
...I think my generation of poets did a lot of things to break the Iron Curtain...
...In 1968, for example, he sent a letter to the government protesting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and in 1974 he sent a telegram to Brezhnev expressing concern for the safety of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had just been arrested...
...Q: What are some of the areas where you would like to see the policy of openness extended...
...But if you will remember how long the history of humanity is, it's a very short time...
...YEVTUSHENKO: Of course...
...There is a struggle against facelessness...
...What about what those people say...
...YEVTUSHENKO: I hope so...
...There are more possibilities for talented, gifted people and happily fewer possibilities for mediocre ones, for one-sided minds, one-dimensional people, the knights of inertia...
...In April, Almost at the End, a collection of his poems written during the Gorbachev period, including his controversial work 'Euku," will be published by Henry Holt and Company...
...You must not demand that...
...It's painful, it's unpleasant, but you might be saved...
...Are you angry at them for not staying and fighting to change your country...
...I am a child of the flea markets...
...A human being can be a rebel only if he is concerned about others more than about himself...
...If he were neo-Stalinist, he could never support the sharpest anti-Stalinist creations, like some of the poems now being published...
...Some retreats were preparatory, and sometimes we sat under the ground after a hail of insults...
...Nobody is God— not even God himself.' ernments are far from perfection...
...You must first find the focus of evil inside yourself...
...First of all, I think he wrote this expression in a rush, because if he had thought more carefully about this phrase, he would have realized that it is an anti-Christian definition...
...I am a child of Siberian platforms...
...Your hard-liners explain their position by saying there are hard-liners in the Soviet Union...
...I accuse myself of being criminally lazy...
...They just live in different countries...
...We were many times not tolerant, and I hope what's now happening, with the release of Sakharov and some other people, is a symbol of the maturity of a society that could permit human tolerance...
...I feel shame for many things...
...But in my opinion, we don't have enough openness when we speak about our past...
...When I use this word "rebel," I don't use it only in a political sense...
...His poetry soon began to be published in the official journals and newspapers...
...He is an aggressor because he is indifferent...
...I wrote a poem against Stalin and his era...
...Q: You mentioned Brodsky's remark about you being one of the guilty...
...And the mother of gigantomania is always an inferiority complex...
...Q: Americans view the Soviet Union partially through Hollywood...
...There are some people who don't want to have open conversations about the tragedies of our past...
...Reagan has never been to Russia...
...Such people are part of the focus of evil...
...Americans will soon be able to sample Yevtushenko's most recent poems for themselves...
...Sometimes there were victories, sometimes there were defeats...
...That's why I wrote a poem like "Fuku...
...Over the last two years, in speeches, articles, and poems, he has campaigned for glasnost,/b/' openness in Soviet cultural and political life...
...If I say this, it sounds immodest, but I hope so...
...I am absolutely convinced that all poets, all real poets, are rebels...
...YEVTUSHENKO: It's difficult to give such a kind of definition for one politician...
...Q: We get our image of the Soviet Union largely from people who have left...
...In my opinion, they have no ideologies...
...YEVTUSHENKO: Look, Solzhenitsyn, in my opinion, wrote some good books, some very good books: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, "An Incident at Krechetovka Station," his short stories, and there are some very beautiful pages in Cancer Ward...
...Not famous, but a rebel...
...Because otherwise their image of the Red Bear with long teeth wanting to cut the throat of innocent and peaceful Americans will collapse...
...It's been seventy years since the Soviet Revolution, and seventy years from one point of view is a long time...
...They know industry and agriculture very well, and they know the daily needs of people much better...
...Q: But don't you get angry...
...All Christianity is based on Dostoevsky's formula, "Everybody is guilty in everything...
...We wounded our hands breaking this Iron Curtain with our naked hands...
...YEVTUSHENKO: Our new films are more rebellious than yours...
...I think we have some streets of No in America and some streets of No in the Soviet Union...
...He is a gifted writer, a very strong character as a man, and he wrote some books condemning the tragedy of the Stalin past, and I am very grateful to him...
...In many countries, many kinds of systems, you could find a mortal struggle between mediocre people and talented people...
...I am doing everything to make life in my own country much better, freer in many ways...
...You know, America, like Russia, is a big village...
...That's why shame is the real and main engine of humanity...
...You defended him in the Soviet Union...
...Q: In how many jumps does Gorbachev want to cross the abyss...
...In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the years ofNikita Khrushchev's "thaw," Yevtushenko, along with such other young poets as Andrei Vosnesensky, articulated the discontents and aspirations of the first post-Stalin generation...
...We created a new generation with our poetry...
...For him, the Russians are like extraterrestrials, but frightening extraterrestrials...
...For instance, Joseph Brodsky I think is a good poet, the best Russian poet who lives abroad...
...And afterwords, you can accuse others, but only by accusing yourself first...
...Their point is, "Okay, that's our past...
...They will always understand each other...
...No people deserve their government...
...It would be the worst punishment to spend the rest of my life abroad...
...And I feel a responsibility to them...
...For the first time, we are publishing in many of our newspapers editorials that are signed by people...
...YEVTUSHENKO: They're very different...
...Salt, honest salt, could be more helpful than dishonest sugar...
...Once I described myself in one of my poems as a writer for those who don't write...
...We don't want to repeat it...
...The main change is a change of atmosphere...
...There are so many beautiful people whom I know...
...I've seen the public get unhappy when the toreador professionally and skillfully sneaks away from the tow's horns...
...Most of them study foreign languages, unlike our generation...
...About Khrushchev someone said many years ago, "He wanted to cross the abyss in two jumps...
...Where are they...
...I'm absolutely sure that would change their minds...
...Probably if you find common mutual understanding, both societies, both structures could absorb the best features of each and we'll get an absolutely new structure in the future...
...he was slightly a rebel against himself...
...Q: You mean you think that the poetry of your generation is the political soul of the new leadership...
...We never create, in our cinema, an image of an enemy country or an enemy people, like your Rocky IV or Rambo...
...And my shame helped me to write "Babi Yar...
...Because if they don't want mutual understanding between such two great peoples, they are working for their own death, with all their screams, their cries, and always their declarations...
...They are morally not ready for mutual understanding...
...And by soil, I mean objective reality...
...To be a really great specialist, you must read so much technical literature...
...We just rehabilitated the wound so it could heal...
...In 1964, Khrushchev was ousted and Leonid Brezhnev's conservative reign soon led to cultural stagnation and political repression...
...His movie Kindergarten was shown in the United States last spring, and he is working on a new film about the Three Musketeers...
...So they both need each other...
...I couldn't imagine myself in exile...
...He will still be a hawk.' YEVTUSHENKO: No, no, no...
...They're just the same people, but in reverse...
...And they always will...
...And some American bureaucrats and right-wing journalists who take very anti-Soviet positions, I could imagine them living in the Soviet Union...
...I'm almost sure...
...When I say "air," I mean first of all a fresh wind which penetrates or tries to penetrate to all levels of our society...
...Summing up all of the positive and negative lessons of our experience in the first years of socialism...
...I don't want to be a false prophet and idealize the future...
...Such films create mistrust, mistrust creates missiles, and missiles create the danger of war, which will abolish everyone, including Mr...
...I asked him why he said such things...
...YEVTUSHENKO: Yes, and the year before I saw Red Dawn and other great stuff...
...The hawk is everywhere a hawk...
...YEVTUSHENKO: Any kind of society, any state, needs an enemy...
...I don't want to argue with President Reagan, but he has argued many times with our government...
...I wrote a poem against anti-Semitism...
...Yevtushenko and I talked in March 1986 in New York City, and we continued the conversation at his home outside Moscow last December...
...My hope is that now is a time for summing up in Russia...
...I haven't written many books, and they're probably dead in me now...
...Sometimes we are responsible for the bureaucracy, the bureaucrats...
...It's a very comfortable position, you know, but the hawk is everywhere a hawk...
...Some people absorbed my message that bureaucracy is stifling them...
...they have the same danger in Russia that you have in America...
...In a way it's true...
...We Russians are not—happily not—at war with America, but it's a frightening sign when even before a potential war, the American cinema is already portaying all Russian people as if they were enemies...
...There are people who don't want open speech, openness in our textbooks, or anything like that...
...Mediocre people have comfortable, soft armchairs under their asses...
...They don't have spots of blood on their conscience...
...Let me make myself clear...
...Q: What role did you and your fellow artists play in bringing about the changes that are under way in the Soviet Union...
...YEVTUSHENKO: I am...
...I'm sure...
...Whatever the full story, thirty years after he first burst onto the scene Yevtushenko is again a leading activist in the conflict-filled effort to reform and liberalize the Soviet system...
...YEVTUSHENKO: I don't think I have any kind of moral right to be their judge...
...I'll explain why...
...There is some primitivization of Americans in Russian cinema, but in our films about international problems, we never show Americans like wild beasts, like animals...
...You have the police and the public, those so-called observers...
...YEVTUSHENKO: That's absolutely shit...
...If you are a conformist in the United States, it means you are more or less a hawk...
...That was when I invented a word, "war-nography...
...For instance, there is a new openness in the Soviet Union...
...And I did everything that was possible...
...You said you are an anti-Stalinist...
...YEVTUSHENKO: I am a child of the barracks...
...Absolutely shit...
...they're all very different...
...Q: You are called the rebel poet...
...Sylvester Stallone himself is anti-Russian, or that he would like to eat live Russian children, or anything like that...
...I think this man will go down in history in a positive way...
...Q: What about Alexander Solzhenitsyn...
...I am a victim of this accusation, because I am not in prison, I am not in a mental hospital, nothing like that...
...But if you are married, you have a first child, and then, as in so many former rebels' lives, the diapers of the child are like the white flag of capitulation...
...I understand only one thing: that it is a tragedy for a writer to be abroad, out of his own range...
...It's very easy...
...Some of them, your right-wing people, by their characters, if they could live inside the Soviet Union, they would behave like the old guard of Stalin, like dogmatic Communists...
...And I try, and I tried, and I will try, to help many people...
...No one has the right to accuse an epoch, a century, a period in history, if he has no courage to accuse himself...
...And they were not cowards...
...We didn't get this as a gift...
...It's always connected with a kind of self-megalomania, self-exaggeration, gigantomania...
...As Pushkin said once, "Only dead people can laugh...
...So there are two points of view...
...Indifference is a kind of war against your own people and against other people...
...Q: Why have you devoted so much of your writing to opposing the bureacracy...
...I'm absolutely sure if, for instance, Mr...
...The old guard is getting very old...
...One of the signs of the maturity of a person or the maturity of a society is being tolerant of difference...
...To be fearless builders of the future is only possible if we are fearless social archaeologists of our past...
...Unfortunately, there is an international nation of conformists...
...Because I am too thirsty for life...
...That's probably my point of view on all of history, not only on Russian history...
...But his blue-gray eyes and unflagging enthusiasm still recall the brash voung poet of the 1960s...
...When I wrote my famous poem, "Between the City of Yes and the City of No," I didn't mean that the City of No was American society or Russian society...
...Unfortunately, inside many audiences is hidden the thirst to see real human blood...
...But generally I like our young people...
...These people had no professional knowledge of such things...
...This literature must be like acupuncture...
...They don't want mutual understanding...
...But there are some people who just observe your fight from a distance, and they are unhappy with it...
...We forged this gift for ourselves and for future generations...
...Poetry plays a great role in the Soviet Union, and so I am very happy that we worked for it not in vain...
...And they helped me, these poor suffering people on lines, who can't write...
...Q: Why has this image of the enemy been created...
...I can't accuse myself of betraying anyone— not in friendship, not in love, not in personal relationships...
...yevtushenko: There are always comrades—the "but-what-ifs"—who try to halt change...
...It was very destructive...
...Q: Do you think Gorbachev is an anti-Stalinist...
...A hawk couldn't be a nightingale in another country...
...Yevtushenko adapted to the more conservative times, and his poems became more conformist in content and style...
...Because of these hard-line games, even their lives are at stake, as well as the lives of the whole world...
...A hawk couldn't be a nightingale in another country...
...For instance, he once said Russia is a focus of world evil...
...I wrote a letter defending him...
...It's terrible...
...Without having more open conversations about the problems of our past, we can't decide the problems of our present...
...We created people who now are recreating our country...
...q: But won't these knights of inertia fight back...
...Even during the relatively liberal Khrushchev years, Yevtushenko was frequently and savagely criticized in the Soviet press for his outspoken views...
...But in fighting against fanaticism, unfortunately, he became a fanatic...
...Do you understand...
...But nobody knows...
...Yevtushenko returned to Moscow in the early 1950s and studied literature at the prestigious Gorky Institute...
...So I accuse myself of not concentrating enough...
...I'm not saying that...
...His blond, tousled hair is thinner, his face more lined, and his frame lankier...
...This is an echo of our poetry...
...It was good advice...
...Q: Some commentators in America, including Alexander Haig, have said that Gorbachev is a neo-Stalinist...
...q: What makes the new generation of leadership so different from the old...
...And somebody says twenty or twenty-five, and then the highest estimate that you got was what...
...Meanwhile, Yevtushenko has launched a new career as a filmmaker...
...In the arena, I've seen some wonderful toreadors accused of being cowards...
...But if you fall down, with some horns on your head, it's only human nature...
...You have a fighter, the toreador...
...They barricade from their wooden minds any show of progress...
...And we have one danger with this younger generation that they will be locked in the knowledge of their specialization...
...Great literature is always a great warning...
...And he said, don't lose the Don Quixote inside yourself, and you will always be young...
...And I helped him, and he knows it, when he was in exile...
...Stallone and all those teenagers who are applauding these films...
...YEVTUSHENKO: You can't generalize about all emigres...
...During your tour of America last year, you did something most Americans haven't done: You saw Rocky and Rambo on the same day...
...He is defensive about suggestions that he has adapted to whatever political climate prevails in Moscow, and that he has vacillated between defiance and conformity...
...Ever since ancient times, professional seamen have cured their wounds with salty water...
...YEVTUSHENKO: Who are these people who lead our country...
...I am not God...
...He was one of his Party leaders...
...Our new generation of leaders, they are not involved in such tragic mistakes, or even crimes...
...Q: What is your impression of young people in the Soviet Union...
...That's a very important nuance...
...That's why I felt ashamed when I was at Babi Yar, standing and staring at mountains of rubbish over these nameless graves where many dead bodies were thrown like wood into this valley...
...Q: Do you sometimes feel you're not courageous enough...
...I am a child of the crowd...
...That made me ashamed...
...They would like to idolize you...
...A friend of mine, a poet, reproached me...
...We are living in a very promising time...
...And our hard-liners are trying to close our openness, our democratization, because they are waving this image of American hard-liners...
...Because when a writer hates something too much, he ceases being a great writer, because hatred is a kind of blindness...
...that's what the main fight is now...
...That was a sincere answer...
...We waste too much time in mutual accusations...
...My hope is that they know what needs to be changed now...
...But why must they put salt on the open wounds...
...So the focus of world evil is inside all of us, that's human psychology...
...In a country where popular poets sometimes achieve the celebrity of American rock stars and where culture is often an intense form ofpolitical expression, Yevtushenko's verse was read by millions of people, and his poetry readings electrified audiences across the broad expanse of the Soviet Union...
...But their ignorance is dangerous for themselves...
...And his writing was a great example for us...
Vol. 51 • April 1987 • No. 4
