SOURCE: "Yevtushenko-Poet of Love and Politics," in Vancouver Sun, May 6, 1995, p. D2.

Nikita Khrushchev called him ungovernable—but left him alone (more or less) to write the scathing poetic outbursts of moral indignation against Communist oppression that made him the voice of his generation.

Envious writer colleagues, watching his rise to fame in Russia and (more importantly) abroad, called him a licensed dissenter—one who sold out to the authorities as a tame tiger in exchange for privilege and foreign travel.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko calls himself an independent-minded loyalist.

He stood on the Moscow barricades alongside the defenders of Russia's precarious democracy during the attempted White House coup by military hard-liners in 1991 and versified eloquently about it from the balcony.

Yet his moral anger at the slaughter in Chechnya was so great that when Yeltsin offered him a decoration last November for his part in defeating the coup, he turned it down.

He shrugs when you suggest this was a brave man's act.

"It wasn't political gesture for me," he says. "I didn't want to make any kind of political capital. But it was a moral impossibility for me—I couldn't imagine myself receiving this order when so many innocent people were dying. It was a moral impossibility. That's all."

He is in Vancouver on the second stop on a cross-Canada reading tour to publicize his new novel, Don't Die Before You're Dead, and to give a reading … as part of the Vancouver International Writers Festival's author series.

He's 62 now, and spends as much time in the West (he teaches film in Tulsa, Oklahoma) as Moscow. He has the successful Russian intellectual's waywardness of dress.

The color of his thin, expensive jacket is an electric magenta spattered with black. His open shirt exposes his hairless chest as far as his sternum, above which a cross-bearing pendant hangs from a gold chain. He has a jaunty flat cap in a pale orange tartan.

When Don't Die Before You're Dead was published in Russia last year, it sold out its 100,000 print run at the rate of 2,000 copies a day, and it's not hard to see why.

He calls the book a Russian fairy tale. In fact, it's a thinly disguised view of the state of the Russian nation at the time of the 1991 coup—ripely entertaining and richly satirical in the finest Russian classic tradition.

"Whether it is a good or bad book is not for me to decide," he writes in an introduction. "But in opening it, you open the soul of today's Russia."

He remains, still, a potent voice of that soul, though the range has changed. The poetry that made his name couched his personal protest in writing that was rhetorical, conversational, accessible—all the things that made it so popular he could fill soccer stadiums for readings.

The new novel, on the other hand, is a sprawling true fable covering a vivid tapestry of character (only one of them himself).

"I always wanted to be the writer of those who don't write," he says. "I didn't fulfil what I wanted, but I'm on the way. I haven't left poetry; I wrote 35 poems this year, but now I am concentrating on prose. When I began to publish poetry, when I was 15, my poetry was overtaking my knowledge of life. Now my knowledge of life is overtaking my writing."

He is currently juggling four novels ("like a crazy chessplayer") and he has five film scripts (he's also a film director) waiting for funding.

As we talk he gestures, slouches, pulls up a chair to rest his feet, leans back on his folded arms. As ideas animate him he squints and squeezes his ice-blue eyes, thumps the table, rubs his head. His thin, fair hair, so carefully casual at the start of our talk, becomes rumpled and disheveled.

For all the tales of diminished powers, his ability to captivate an audience seems undimmed. The night before our talk, he was in Calgary for a signing. The place was packed—one woman brought all 18 books he has published in English.

"There were 300 people … I signed probably 500 books. I never expected such a crowd." One woman asked him to sign a ticket she had saved since 1962 from his historic first reading in Kiev of his famous protest over the Jewish pogrom, "Babi Yar."

He was struck by the fact that many people at the Calgary gathering were from what he calls the technical intelligentsia—engineers, electricians, oil people. That's common in Russia, he says—"the technical intelligentsia is the backbone of our intelligentsia"—but not so in North America.

That reminds him of a cowboy poets' gathering ("real cowboys, not operetta cowboys") he recently attended in Colorado: 10 days, a 1,600-seat theatre, $12 a ticket—sold out from noon to night. He was the only non-cowboy.

"I discovered so many great readers of literature: we'd sit round talking about Dostoyevsky … it was unbelievable. Sometimes we don't know who our readers are."

He's the son of a Siberian peasant mother and a Latvian intellectual father, and the duality shows in his writing—an internationalist of enduring Russian loyalties (a "sentimental internationalist," as he puts it in the new book), a simple sophisticate with a sharp intelligence, a keen sense of irony and an ability to pitch his work to a broad-based audience.

In terms of breadth and enthusiasm of readership, some observers have drawn parallels between Yevtushenko and Pushkin (1799–1838), perhaps the best loved (certainly in Russia) of all Russia's great writers.

In his first novel, Wild Berries, Yevtushenko wrote that if God would give him the right to resurrect one man, he would resurrect Pushkin, and while he is quick to disclaim any kind of equality—"there's great gap between us, I'm just a modest disciple"—he agrees that similarities exist.

According to Yevtushenko, a man who has been married four times, Pushkin, who died in a duel defending his wife's honor, "was a great lover, faithful friend, not an extremist. You could laugh and cry with his writing. He was a Renaissance man, and this I admire."

In particular, Pushkin "was a poet of love and politics. And I am a poet of love and politics." Some days, in fact, he writes poems on both these topics—because "it is very harmful to write only about politics. It dries you out.

"When you fight for months, as politicians do, your skin becomes your shield. But your shield that saves you from poisoned daggers becomes hard, and then you cannot feel the touch of someone who tries to caress you. It happens with professional politicians. All the wives of professional politicians are unhappy."

It is the responsibility of every poet to maintain that soft skin, that vulnerability. "If I didn't, I would cease to be a poet." That's why he turned down the suggestion that he should become Russia's minister of culture.

"I knew it would be my death as a writer—when I spent three years as a deputy [in the Russian Parliament] it was my worst three years as a writer. And then, how could I criticize government and be part of government? Impossible."

Certainly, he has always been willing to criticize government—though he will also give praise where he thinks praise is due. For instance, he admonished Gorbachev, in a poem, not to be half-hearted in what he had to do:

     Half measures can kill when on the brink of precipices,
     Chafing in terror at the bit,
     We strain and sweat and foam because we cannot
     Jump just halfway across.

Yet he defends Gorbachev still. "I think the Russian people were criminally ungrateful to him. Many people now mock him." In his last year, maybe he was less than the ideal leader—"but he abolished the danger of nuclear war between two superpowers: for that one thing we should be grateful. He stopped war in Afghanistan. He abolished censorship. They should be grateful to him for ever."

As we have been talking, some sheets of paper—background material, my notes for the interview—have strayed across the table, partially obscuring his new book. He brushes them gently, absently aside and contemplates its cover as he talks.

"One of Russia's most adventurous writers," the cover proclaims. It's a quote from Henry Miller. Probably no one would disagree. Except, perhaps, Yevtushenko himself.

For all the famous bombast, for all the noisy criticism, he balks at the suggestion that he remains the Russian incarnation of the angry young man.

"I just don't hide what I think. I don't want to lie and pretend to be a man of great courage. Each time I made some dangerous action I was scared.

"But to me it's sometimes a moral impossibility not to do it—or to do what the authorities suggest. I just would like to sleep calmly. And I have no insomnia."

So he is at ease with his conscience?

"Oh, I couldn't say that. No no no no no no no. I could say I didn't betray anyone except myself—but I am also part of humanity. If you betray yourself, you also betray humanity."

In what way did he betray himself?

"By being lazy, for instance … there are many things: loving my own wife and sometimes looking around, so many reasons not to have your conscience completely calm."

At the end of "Zima Junction," the poem that brought him his first taste of fame in the late 1950s, the little Siberian town in which he was born tells him to "hold out, meditate, listen. Explore. Travel the world over."

And "love people." After a lifetime of holding out, meditating, listening, exploring the world over, does he still love people?

"What's the reason to live if you don't love people?" he says. "You could hate, despise some bastards-but I've been in 94 countries, and I think the majority of humanity is wonderful."

He pauses.

"Unfortunately," he says, "the minority is much better organized."