SOURCE: "Russian Poet Still Pleases, Provokes," in The San Diego Union-Tribune, May 6, 1993, p. F1.

If it is hard for a poet to become a legend in his time, surely remaining a legend is still harder.

Yet for the last three decades, through shifting regimes and ideologies, Yevgeny Yevtushenko has managed to remain the most famous of Russia's living poets.

From "Babi Yar," the 1961 poem that forced the Soviet Union to confront its anti-Semitism, to a forthcoming novel about the August 1991 coup that eventually launched Boris Yeltsin to the Russian presidency, Yevtushenko has somehow managed to have a hand in most of the political upheavals that have wracked his motherland in the last 30 years.

Many praise his courage to probe the social and political wounds of Soviet history, from anti-Semitism to neo-fascism.

"Mr. Yevtushenko told the truth in the Soviet Union when it was a dangerous thing to do, and he is still telling the truth," said Watson Branch, chairman of the English department at the Bishop's School in La Jolla, who introduced the poet's first reading at SDSU's Don Powell Theater Tuesday night.

But others, especially émigrés, deride this same ability, seeing Yevtushenko as more political opportunist than artist.

"He has a consummate grasp of the obvious," one Russian literature professor scoffed privately by phone this week.

At readings and receptions during a three-day visit here, his first to San Diego, it is clear that even as he approaches 60, for whatever reason, Yevtushenko's power to please and provoke is far from ebbing. In fact, the poet retains a beguiling charm, even when admitting his own vanity.

"Modesty," Yevtushenko says candidly, "has never been one of my biggest flaws."

As he takes the stage, Yevtushenko looks less a poet than a schoolteacher, gazing over lowered bifocals at his audience, eyebrows deeply furrowed.

But when he recites verse, Yevtushenko springs around the stage, hopping and skipping like he did as a boy, performing folk dances at war weddings in Siberia. His dramatic gestures, too, have a confidence that is equally youthful, even naive.

At the reading, a translator reads his poems in English, and Yevtushenko follows with a reading in Russian.

"I would like to be born in every country, have passports for them all," he bellows, stretching his arms out wing-like. "I would like to dive into the water of Siberian Lake Baikal and surface, snorting, somewhere. Why not …," he whispers, "the Mississippi?" The audience laughs.

"He pulls you in, even if you don't understand Russian," said spectator Peggy Caetano, leaving the theater after the two-hour reading. "He has incredible charisma."

By any analysis—including his own—Yevtushenko's fame has always had as much to do with politics as poetry. Indeed, it is his very talent for ducking and riding political waves that has earned him both praise and derision, at different times, from many of the same people.

But Quincy Troupe, the award-winning poet and UCSD literature professor, sees Yevtushenko's politics as a strength, not a weakness. The fact that Yevtushenko writes about topical issues makes his poetry more accessible to ordinary people, both Russian and Western, Troupe says.

"The academics have looked on him with a certain amount of disdain, but no one comes to hear them read," Troupe says. In fact, Troupe credits Yevtushenko with helping revive the oral tradition in poetry, comparing him to American poets like Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka. Yevtushenko's stage power comes from both the accessibility of his verse and his energetic antics in delivering it.

In The City of Yes and the City of No, the 6-foot-tall Yevtushenko plunges brazenly into the audience, kissing hands and peering intently into faces as he recites the litany of da's and nyet's that lace the poem. His blue eyes flash with pleasure as his targets blush and giggle.

Yevtushenko became a sensation in 1952 at 19 when he published his first volume of poetry and was inducted into the Soviet Writer's Union as its youngest member. He drew international attention in 1961 with "Babi Yar," which, for the first time, described the World War II massacre of 40,000 Jews near Kiev and the Soviet anti-Semitism that left the mass grave unmarked for two decades. A few years later he began to tour the West, packing concert halls, including New York's Carnegie Hall.

Under Brezhnev, many Russian were disappointed that Yevtushenko failed to adequately defend dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, and too readily accepted Kremlin medals and praise. But in December 1985, Yevtushenko resurrected his flagging stature by delivering a speech to the Soviet Writer's Union, signaling that Gorbachev would extend his new policy of glasnost to the arts.

In August 1991, he wound up behind the barricades with Yeltsin during the hard-line coup.

"Many Russian writers are stuck in the past right now, writing about concentration camps, the gulag," Yevtushenko says as an ocean breeze dishevels the thin, gray hair on his forehead. "But I have written a truly contemporary novel. It is called Don't Die Before your Death." The book, published last month in Russian in Jerusalem, is due out in English this summer.

For Yevtushenko, staying contemporary may be the key to longevity. "It is a novel I wrote for everybody, of course, but is also a gift to myself, a gift for my 60th birthday," he says.

As for his critics, Yevtushenko is happy, at least, for the attention.

"I'm now full of beans," he insists, giving a little skip to prove the point.