[In the following essay, Schaer reports his impressions of Yevtushenko's public reading of his poetry during a visit to Long Island, New York, providing an overview of the poet's career.]

Yevgeny Yevtushenko sat in the library director's office fidgeting with a pile of his poems, and the words he was murmuring were anything but lyrical: "too much, too much … I have to cut it down."

Russia's most famous living poet had come to the Connetquot Public Library in Bohemia, and minutes before he was to appear in the library's community room, he was hastily winnowing out poems from his program and concluding his rehearsal with his translator. "Is there a crowd out there?" he asked.

At 63, Yevtushenko is a poet with a long history, who in his own country could fill a Moscow soccer stadium with poetry lovers. But on Wednesday, he was wondering how he would play in a medium-sized community library that draws on 40,000 residents who live in Ronkonkoma, Oakdale and Bohemia, an area of diverse population but not crammed with people who could be expected to understand a poet reading his words in Russian.

But when he strode onto the tiny stage, accompanied by his former student John O'Donnell, who would provide English translations, Yevtushenko found a filled room.

"You never know where you are going to find good readers," he said. He is widely regarded as Russia's most popular post-Stalinist poet, with an international reputation earned more than 30 years ago with the publication of his 1961 "Babii Yar," an angry condemnation of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union that recalled the horrors of thousands of Jews being slaughtered in a ravine near Kiev.

Born in Siberia at a small lumber station made famous in his early poem "Zima Junction," Yevtushenko spent his youth mostly in Moscow. His first book of poetry was published in 1952, but eventually his poetry would begin questioning the Stalinist era and challenging socialist doctrine. He was an early dissident, attacking the Soviet Union's invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and helping promote former President Mikhail Gorbachev's effort to promote openness known as glasnost. He is, along with being a poet, a novelist and filmmaker, but while sitting and sipping tea in the library's small kitchen, he attacked intellectual snobbery.

"You will find sophisticated readers in unexpected places, such as the cowboy who came with his family to one of my readings in Elko. Nevada, and brought all eighteen editions of my poetry," he said.

Yevtushenko, a tenured professor on leave from Queens College, is dividing his time between Russia and the United States. He spends summers in Moscow and the rest of the year in Oklahoma, where he is a visiting professor at the University of Tulsa, teaching classes in poetry and cinema.

Yevtushenko, fairly fluent in English, seemed much more comfortable reciting in Russian.

And when the library's adult-program director, Inez Horwitz, saw one of his performances last year at an East End synagogue, she immediately thought he might be a candidate to recite his poems at her library.

"He didn't think it was a strange idea," she said, after having tracked him down in Tulsa. When they agreed on a fee, he happily came east for a long weekend with his wife, Maria.

"I was amazed he would appear at a little library in Suffolk," said Maria Beitch, a student teacher at Sayville High School who grew up in Moscow.

Wednesday would turn out to be a long day. He arrived at LaGuardia [airport] a little past 1 p.m., and before coming to the library, he fulfilled a lifelong dream of visiting the birthplace of Walt Whitman, one of his poet heroes.

"We are both children of great spaces," he told a small gathering at the poet's birthplace in West Hills, "and we are all from Whitman's womb." He ended up buying a first-edition facsimile of Leaves of Grass, while trying to find out how many books Whitman sold in his lifetime.

Eventually, he got to Connetquot, and by 7:30 p.m., all 250 seats were filled in a room decorated with wall-sized murals of children's fairy tales such as Snow White and the Wizard of Oz. In the audience were teachers, lawyers, the curious, and a dozen members of the Sayville High School Russian club, who came en masse and afterward waited for him to personalize their volumes of his poetry, including a new edition the library allowed him to sell that evening.

Yevtushenko, for his part, may have decided what poems would play in Bohemia, but when he scanned the audience, he discovered an old friend, Vera S. Dunham, of Port Jefferson, one of his translators.

And so halfway through, he added a poem she has translated into English, the 1966 "Dwarf Birches," which metaphorically talks about the courage of dissident poetry and the struggle to stay alive in such in an inhospitable world "like splinters, under the nails of frosts."

Yevtushenko recited his poetry with a flamboyance of an actor given a fabulous part to play, and when it was over, he had danced across the stage and into the audience for nearly 90 minutes.

Describing himself as a "old poet, but a young novelist," he opened the program reading from a work-in-progress novella about his childhood in war-torn Russia in 1941, followed by 10 poems, old and new, including the classic "Babii Yar," with the lines: "… Here all things scream silently, and baring my head, slowly I feel myself turning gray. And I myself am one massive, soundless scream above the thousand thousand buried here."

But it was his presentation of a new poem, "New York Taxis," that seemed to resonate with the audience.

"What is astounding about Zhenia [a diminutive for Yevgeny] is his ability to communicate," Dunham said. "He is a great performer, but he seems capable of crossing all cultures, and with all that, he also has depth and courage, and people feel that."