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Poet as Witness

Russian novelist and literary legend Yevgeny Yevtushenko reads at San Jose State

By Richard von Busack

Yevgeny Yevtushenko is perhaps Russia's best-known living poet. As such, and as a figure of dissent, he is to Russia what Bob Dylan once was to America. Like Dylan, Yevtushenko was a star. At least once, Yevtushenko filled a stadium to hear him read; at a time of national crisis, he could be seen declaiming on the barricades.

He was well-known enough in left and intellectual circles here to be parodied in Doonesbury. He will be 63 this year, however, and in his new novel, Don't Die Before You're Dead (Random House), he looks at himself with an irony and skepticism that Dylan has never mustered. He will read from the novel this Friday at San Jose State University as a guest of the Center for Literary Arts.

Yevtushenko witnessed the crucial historical moment in August 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, which is the subject of Don't Die Before You're Dead. Through both fictional and real-life characters (including himself), Yevtushenko is present to watch the failure of the military coup, to watch the army tanks rolling on grounds littered with torn-up Communist Party cards--and to watch the soldiers refuse to turn their guns on their own people. In recalling the tension of that moment, Yevtushenko reminds the reader that the coup's hard-line Communist planners had ordered up a quarter of a million pairs of handcuffs for the aftermath of their takeover.

In the sweep of events, Yevtushenko says something embarrassing to President Mikhail Gorbachev, when he has the president's ear for a moment: "Thank you, from the Russian people." Worse, later that day, he reads what he calls "his best bad poem" to the crowd standing off the tanks. It is indeed a bad poem, in which he compares the Russian White House to a "wounded marble swan."

He comes to regret it, just as, a few years later, he regrets the freely elected government's decision to turn those same tanks on the citizens of Chechnya.

In the novel, Yevtushenko notes ruefully, "It's dangerous to mention live politicians in poetry. ... Who knows what they'll do in the next minute?" And indeed, he has ignored his own advice. In his immature youth, he lauded Stalin; in his somewhat older days, he celebrated Castro and Khrushchev.

All of Yevtushenko's work begins and ends in a cycle of hope and disillusionment. As a character in Don't Die Before You Are Dead says, "The people know what they are running from, the Gulag, the purges, the slave-owning State ... but the trouble is that people don't know where to run. That's why they could end up where they started."

Yevtushenko was born in Siberia, in the railroad town of Zima Junction, near Lake Baikal, the greatest freshwater lake in the world. When he writes of nature and his home town, I believe he is at his best. In "Zima Junction: A Poem," after a sentimental visit home, the young poet hears the town of his childhood telling him, "Love people/and discriminate among them/remember:/I've got my eye on you/But if there's trouble--/come back to me./Go!"

Among the reminiscences of his poetic journey are moments of failed connection with his family and friends and the pressure of the unsaid, the return of a promising young man to an unpromising place.

During a family conversation, they ask him if he was at the Hall of Columns, where Stalin, the Soviet Union's feared dictator of more than 20 years, was lying in state. Yes, Yevtushenko was there, and he saw the disaster that took place when 150 people were trampled trying to mob the coffin. It occurred to him then that Stalin was still killing people from beyond the grave.

Seven years later, Yevtushenko wrote about the dictator again in "The Heirs of Stalin," one of the poems that made his reputation:

He watched through a crack inside
just pretending to be dead
he wanted to fix each pallbearer<
in his memory ... it seems to me
a telephone was installed in the coffin
to someone yet again
Stalin is sending his instructions.

The history of the Soviet Union from the death of Stalin until glasnost was a series of thaws and freezes: Khrushchev, who denounced "those who quake before Stalin's soiled underwear," was put out of office by Brezhnev, the doctrinaire Stalinist, "the lisping, gasping turtle." Brezhnev sent tanks into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to curb liberal tendencies, just as the ostensibly more liberal Khrushchev had to Hungary in 1956.

Yevtushenko was himself sometimes barely tolerated by the regime, sometimes used as an example of the USSR's willingness to face its weaknesses. At times, he was officially published; sometimes, he was circulated underground. During the early '60s, Yevtushenko wrote his best-known and most controversial poem, "Babi Yar," about the refusal of Jew-haters in the Ukraine to place a monument on the spot of a Nazi massacre of Jews.

For such works, Yevtushenko was denounced as "the head of the intellectual juvenile delinquents" and his poetry whimsically critiqued as "pygmy spittle." And yet Yevtushenko toured the world, gave many readings and ended up on the cover of Time in 1962.

This fame resulted in an easy-to-anticipate backlash. Rightist critics overseas like William Buckley and Kingsley Amis accused Yevtushenko of collaboration with the Soviets, as did dissidents within the USSR. In more recent years, he turned his energies from filmmaking--in the '60s, he wrote the sometimes perceptive, sometimes fulsome narration to I Am Cuba--and to the distractions of a personal life that has included four marriages.

Here are, courtesy of Yevtushenko in his 1991 book of essays and prose poems, Fatal Half Measures, the five things you need to be a poet:

1. You must have conscience, but that is not enough
2. You must have a mind, but that is not enough
3. You must have courage, but that is not enough
4. You must love not only your poetry, but other poetry and that is not enough
5. You must write poetry well, but if you don't have the other four qualities, that is not enough.

Yevtushenko said that "70 percent of my poetry is garbage" in an interview with the British newspaper the Manchester Guardian in 1975, during the low ebb of the popularity. The willingness to critique oneself is, I think, the sixth thing you need, and it's always there, even in Yevtushenko's most bombastic work. (During the peak of his fame, he showed guilt about his success in a time when "simple honesty/looks like courage." Also during the 1975 interview, he commented that he felt himself too immature to write prose.)

He seems to have gained the necessary maturity, from the evidence of Don't Die Before You Are Dead. It is a poet's novel; that is to say, it makes up in beautiful language what it loses in thrust and characterization.

The man puts himself, as Norman Mailer would (Mailer has a lot of Yevtushenko in him, or the other way around), at the center of momentous events, and yet there are still detours and anecdotes that make the book pleasing: a python's memoirs, the story of how a hatcheck clerk planted the Red Flag on the Reichstag and Yevtushenko's rhapsodies about soccer.

The game means exactly to him what baseball does to the intelligentsia here. A major character is a once-famed soccer player surrendered to drink. Recalling the championship season, Zalyzia, the alcoholic star of former days, says, "The ball ... how can I put it ... it's like the globe, I guess ... when kids kick a ball, they're trying to send the earth in the right direction." (One spiritual side of soccer little known to us who love baseball is how often the game, despite the heroic efforts of both teams, can end in a tied score.)

Zalyzia's faithful-to-the-point-of-madness lover, nicknamed "Boat" (it must be a prettier word in Russian), comes for him, coaxing him back to life, toward the happy ending that Russian novelist Aleksandr Grin always used in his folk tales: "They lived long and happy lives and died on the same day." That's Yevtushenko for you--grating sentiment, perhaps, yet who wouldn't want such an epitaph?

The incredible plight of Russia is somewhat hopeful, in that even though the country is in an incredible plight, it has always been in an incredible plight and is always going to be in an incredible plight. For those on the Left who hoped that there was a lesson to be learned from the Communist East and found none, Don't Die Before You're Dead supplies some real measure of optimism.

The optimism is more wintery than Yevtushenko evinced in his exuberant past, but it is still present. As a character warns about not letting hope die before its time, "Don't instill in history a fear of itself, the fear of being doomed to blood and crime."

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Yevgeny Yevtushenko reads from his poetry and new novel Friday (Feb. 23) at 7:30pm at the Morris Dailey Auditorium, San Jose State University, Fourth and San Carlos streets, San Jose. He will take part in a public panel with his translator, James Ragan, Friday at 12:30pm in Room 109, Washington Square Hall, SJSU. Both events are sponsored by the SJSU Center for Literary Arts and are free. (408/924-1378)


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