[In the following review, Ulyashov extols the universal theme and important message of the poem “Fukú!”]

Yevgeni Yevtushenko's poetry has long been part of the Soviet reader's consciousness: we use his more aphoristic lines as headings for articles, quote his verse in speeches from public rostra, and use some of his catch-phrases in our arguments and conversations (“Civic-mindedness is a rare talent”, “In Russia a poet is more than just a poet”). All this testifies at once to Yevtushenko's immense reputation and to the fact that he actively responds to the problems of his time and accurately takes the pulse of society.

Yevtushenko is not drawn to the life of quiet introspection. He has visited Cuba, Vietnam, Chile and Nicaragua, where the flames of revolution have been lit and whence the spirit of freedom and justice is spreading far and wide. It is no wonder therefore that in his new poem “Fukú!”¹ Yevtushenko appears as a poet with the ability to think in universal and at the same time discrete and concrete terms, because what he looks for before anything else is people, and above all people fighting for a better life, happiness and the affirmation of their dignity. He understands it as his mission to glorify such people. “In our age the poet is the age itself. In him all countries are like wounds. A poet is an ocean-wide cemetery for all, both for those to whom monuments have been erected in bronze and those who remain anonymous … The poet is the ambassador plenipotentiary for all who are oppressed; he does not yield to mediaevalism. Those who have won fame by shedding blood do not deserve eternal glory, but eternal scorn.”

The last lines convey an approach to the central theme of the poem, already roughly expressed in its title. The idea—though not new, it is original enough—of looking at Christopher Columbus not only as a great discoverer, but also as a cruel conquistador, a pioneer of genocide and a destroyer of the original and unique culture of the American Indians enables Yevtushenko to pose this question: Do those “great men” who—for the sake of ambition—spilled oceans of blood and sowed on the earth “the famine of body and spirit” have the right to gratitude and commemoration from their descendants? And he answers this question uncompromisingly: Their names should be anathematized, forgotten and despised (“Fukú—a taboo against the name that brought misfortune”).

The reader must understand that Yevtushenko looks at a personality—that, say, of Columbus—not as a historian, but from, so to speak, a moral and poetic position, first of all affirming good and justice in the world.

Yevtushenko is easily recognised in his new poem. However, his latest poems “Mummy and the Neutron Bomb” and “Fukú!” seem to me also to reveal a new Yevtushenko; in any case they show us some hitherto unrealised aspects of his many-faceted talent (I think this is partly a result of his work in the cinema). The power and novelty of Fukú! lie in its fusion of past and present, the universal and the personal, the social and the specifically individual. And the reason here does not lie in the connection between the different epochs, but in the fact that the poet feels equally at home in the past and the present. For him time is indivisible: “I am a coeval of every age.”

Such an approach to the material—universal-historical and at the same time topical—called for a special form. And Yevtushenko was lucky enough to find it. Today a poem, perhaps also a novel, contains everything. In this epoch, when all genres have become confused, nobody will be surprised at a poem in which verse is interspersed with prose. However, while Yevtushenko's attempts at prose writing have not yet been entirely successful, in “Fukú!” the prose and verse passages follow each other organically, the expressiveness of the prose fabric sometimes almost exceeding that of the poetry. For, as everyone appreciates, the poetic is not the exclusive property of verse. Some of the verse passages in the poem are too wordy, whereas the prose text is full and expressive. It may be for this reason that occasionally the verse seems merely to be a commentary on the prose, as, for example, in the sections dealing with Somoza, Pinochet and Hitler. In such cases the rhymed lines are often less impressive than the prose “data providing food for thought”, i.e. those facts, shocking our reason and our conscience, which Yevtushenko has come across abroad.

“And suddenly I remembered …” is a phrase typical of the inner movement and development of the poem. The year 1941, the evacuation of the civil population, and all that Yevtushenko lived through along with his people during the terrible years of the war, provides him with his moral starting-point.

At the end of the poem are mentioned the names of cities, towns and villages in every part of the world—places the poet has visited, and the dates: 1963-1985. They are the landmarks and years of Yevtushenko's formation and creative development. In the short concluding chapter—“Almost the Last Word”—he himself speaks about the overall trend of his work and its place in Time's forward march.

Yevtushenko is not afraid to tell the reader about the most private and innermost things—about his children, for instance. While calling on the reader to love both his own and other people's children, he thereby warns him against both confining himself to family life and developing global irresponsibility. And then everything intermingles in the poem: thoughts about Yevtushenko's own childhood and the disturbing thoughts about how and why children grow into Duces and Führers. The inner development of his thought and of the underlying idea unites the separate sections of the poem into a single whole, and levels out and organises its composition.

“Courage is frankness, when one speaks openly of both other people's shortcomings and one's own …” It is no fortuity that these words of Alexander Fadeyev are quoted in the poem. Yevtushenko himself does not give anyone a chance to accuse him of duplicity or of concealing the truth. Moreover, he himself often takes the offensive, as, for example, when he ridicules in sarcastic terms the liberal verbal “tight-rope walking” of the resolution of the “world's most progressive jury”, which did not dare condemn a pro-Nazi film at the Venice Film Festival. His monologue on “rattism” as an epitome of the basest and most misanthropic qualities is full of ironic taunts, and the portraits of its exponents are very expressive indeed.

Yevtushenko has the ability either to turn every fact that has attracted his attention or struck his imagination into an image, or to lend it aphoristic colouring. Thus, in what was formerly Somoza's bunker, he came across a plastic plant, and immediately he gave rein to his imagination, turning a specific fact into a generalised, unmasking image, “An anti-popular dictatorship is a plastic garden.”

I admit that in such cases Yevtushenko invents things, suiting some of the pictures of the past to his artistic fantasy and correcting them from the vantage-point of his present knowledge. For it is not enough just to describe an event: it should be seen as a link in a chain with other facts of life, and be felt precisely as a link and not as a ring that has been accidentally dropped. Thus, it is natural that the descendants of members of the Bandera gang, who attacked Yevtushenko during his tour of the United States, should have continued in the tradition of their fathers—those accomplices of the Nazis who in 1941 failed to lay hands on the boy from Zima. (Yevtushenko was born at the railway siding of Zima—Ed.) And the press photographer who went out of her way to photograph the scene of the beating of the poet becomes an unequivocal symbol of a certain artistic stand: “Her professional instinct proved stronger than the human instinct to help.”

However, to be objective, it must be said that some images did not find their proper place in the complex composition of the poem.

To put it briefly, a critic who does not accept Yevtushenko's manner will find a lot to criticise there. However, I believe that the poem can be denied neither topicality nor emotional “infectiousness”. It deals with things that are very important for all of us. And this alone makes it a significant event not only in our literary life, but in our social life as well. The words of Pushkin come to mind, “… In this respect moral observations are more important than literary ones”.

One cannot fail to accept Yevtushenko's universal response: “When I see this all-devouring universal rattism and frustrated dreams, I feel like a man dying of starvation in Ethiopia.” One cannot remain indifferent to the sight of the queue made of starving people, which he likens to Siqueiros's March of Mankind. It is a genuinely fantastic picture, and it is no fortuity that in Yevtushenko's subconscious there appear both the mediaeval Rat-catcher and Dante with his circles in Hell, from whence stretch out the amputated hands of Comandante Che Guevara.

Yevtushenko calls for mankind to unite in its striving for peace. One cannot help responding to his appeal to join the queue of brotherhood, solidarity and sympathy in which he himself stands, bearing the number “four billion”. And we all will stand in this “queue for hope”.