Yevgeny Yevtushenko has been particularly blessed by the glasnost era in Soviet politics. Now he is able to shed every vestige of compromise and live his own legend. He has become a truly uncompromising man, and he has decided to use his fame as a poet and his powers of persuasion for political effect. This is a switch, to be sure. Soviet poets have long attempted, albeit futilely, to remain apart from politics. However, Yevtushenko was elected to the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies in 1989, and he has by now clearly become one of the leaders of the Soviet democratic movement. During the attempted coup of August 1991, he was among those who opposed a return to totalitarian methods. He was, in fact, in the Russian Parliament Building while it was still surrounded by tanks, composing a poem to honor Boris Yeltsin's leadership. Who can forget him reading his own English translation of it to Western reporters as the coup's demise became apparent?

In Fatal Half Measures, a collection of speeches, essays, and reminiscences, Yevtushenko seems to be urging Soviet society on toward democracy as one would goad a stalled mule. "On the brink of precipices," he writes, "we can't jump halfway across." In powerful speeches he reminds his countrymen of past woe, the Stalinist terror: "Half memory leads to half conscience…. Children on the banks of the Kolyma River to this day will bring you blueberries in human skulls they find and smile in innocent absence of memory." He ridicules those who resist trying the new freedoms: "Instead of Vasilii Belov's vigilant thesis that can be reduced to 'Every Xerox under surveillance,' I propose the thesis: 'A personal Xerox for every Soviet citizen.' Perhaps a Xerox would help him with his writing." As ever, he compares the different lots of Soviet and Western counterparts who remain as oblivious of each other as "Gina Lollobrigida and Red Square."

Although the issue of Soviet democracy is paramount. Yevtushenko provides a wide range of recollections from his long history of international travels and from his knowledge of Russian literary figures. In the section called "Beyond Borders" we visit France. Brazil, China, and a host of other countries. We read of Doris Day and Pablo Picasso and meet the Eskimo poet Zoya Nenlyumkina. In the section titled "Russian Geniuses" Yevtushenko comments on Russian poets from Pushkin, Baratynsky, and Tiutchev to Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak. He examines the character of prose writers like Leo Tolstoy (starting with an anecdote about Jacqueline Kennedy). Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gorky, Alexei Tolstoy (a "pen of genius," lacking only "pangs of conscience"), and Andrei Platonov (a comparison of one of his characters with the late Armand Hammer concludes with the title notion "The Proletariat Does Not Need Psychosis"). He includes here as well the composer Dmitri Shostakovich (a talent "Pushkinesque in scope" whom he talked out of signing an official letter against the Prague Spring in 1968).

Yevtushenko has been almost everywhere. He knows almost everybody. He remembers it all and he writes wonderfully. This is what makes Fatal Half Measures such a feast. For anyone interested in Soviet society and especially those of a literary bent, it is truly a delight. Antonina Bouis deserves much credit too, not only for her able selection and translation but also for her explanatory notes and her inclusion of a useful index.