Yevgeni Yevtushenko's Solo: On His 50th Birthday
Yevgeni Yevtushenko was born in Siberia at Zima Junction near Irkutsk. The poet's father was a geologist and wrote verse all his life. I knew him and heard him recite his poems. They had something to them, no doubt about that, a kind of romanticism à la Siberian Kipling. It was the father who taught the son to love poetry.
Before the war Yevgeni lived for a while with his mother in Moscow. When war broke out he was evacuated back to Zima to his grandmother's.
Yevtushenko's poems about childhood in wartime Siberia were his first serious literary efforts. He wrote these poems after returning to Moscow, while studying in a poetry circle at the local Young Pioneers' House and at the Gorky Literary Institute.
Yevtushenko had good luck in his friends and mentors. Later he would recall many of them with deep gratitude:
“All my life I have been grateful to the poet Andrei Dostal. For over three years he worked with me almost daily as literary consultant at the Molodaya Gvardia Publishing House … I had great luck again in 1949, when I met journalist and poet Nikolai Tarasov in the offices of the newspaper Sovietski Sport. Not only did he publish my first poems—he also spent many hours with me, patiently explaining which lines were good, which were bad and why … My friendship with Vladimir Sokolov proved invaluable; Sokolov, by the way, helped me enroll at the Literary Institute, although I did not have a school-leaving certificate.”
Close contacts with Mikhail Lukonin, Yevgeni Vinokurov and Alexander Mezhirov also proved very instructive for the poet at the start of his career. They set the standard for him, these men who had come back from the war front and knew not only the art of poetry but first and foremost the difficult art of living.
He learned a little from everyone and wrote a great deal, a very great deal. He began publishing his verse regularly at sixteen. His first printed poems showed undoubted talent. He was keenly interested in intensely expressive poetic form. There was individuality in his choice of striking detail, turn of phrase, and rhymes.
At that time a galaxy of future major writers were studying at the Literary Institute—you would meet Robert Rozhdestvensky, Bella Akhmadulina, Mikhail Roshchin or Yuri Kazakov in the corridors and lecture-halls of the Institute. This was a new wave in Soviet literature, whose youth coincided with great changes in the life of society.
The stirrings of spring were particularly keenly felt by young people, by students who avidly read the poems of Leonid Martynov, a poet of an older generation:
The world is astir
With something new.
Songs are what people are thirsting for.
(Translated by Peter Tempest)
Yevgeni Yevtushenko was one of the first to sense the possibilities that the times opened before him. As a poet, he was in point of fact the product of the social scene of the mid -'50s. Ever since most topical social and political themes have been part and parcel of his writing. They have been the most powerful stimulus of his poetry.
Yevtushenko entered the literary scene at a fortunate moment when public interest in poetry was growing immensely. The editions of books of poetry published were growing. Poems were being recited in concert halls and in public squares. Thanks to his civic spirit and ability to cut to the quick, Yevtushenko gradually found himself the focus of readers' attention.
He created a generalised image of the urban youth of that time who saw their purpose in life as service to their country:
Oh, madcap parties of our youth,
oh, endless wrangles and disputes,
the get-togethers of those times!
Here songs are sung to crazy tunes,
the plates are cracked, the dancing wild,
and openly are ridiculed
the clothes of naked kings.
Millions of views and questions are asked
about the paths of Russia's past
and Russia as it is.
Nothing was beyond the young people's power and everything lay ahead. All-powerful youth, optimism and unbounded self-confidence—that was the prologue of his poetic destiny.
The best early poem of Yevtushenko's is Weddings. The drama of a people at war is seen through the eyes of a Siberian boy and expressed through his feelings. Each detail of his sad and reckless dance is truthful and expressive. It is hard to say who feels more desperate—the bridegroom going to the front or the boy called in to dance at one wedding after another, weddings which are also farewell parties. Before our very eyes the boy ceases to be a child becoming the equal of any participant in the people's destiny.
I'm faint with fright,
my feet like lead,
but I shall dance
till I drop dead.
That boy would be forever peeping from behind his verse, dancing, no matter what roads Yevtushenko travelled at home and abroad, what impressions of life nourished his work and what poetic roles he took on.
How densely and diversely populated the young Yevtushenko's poems are! The whole of Russia is here and, though it may not speak out directly, it is at least named here: city dwellers and country folk, geologists, gold-diggers, Gypsies, barmaids, students, lift operators, shop assistants, ploughmen, drivers, heads of motor depots, jazzmen, film and theatre actors, vagabonds, alcoholics, cashiers, TV announcers, hunters, artists, critics, yard-keepers, accountants, soldiers, housewives, trackmen, fishermen, trappers, excavator operators, old men and women from villages in Siberia and the Far North. Not many of our poets give voice to such vast crowds and such a variety of professions and trades in their poems. With his poems about foreign countries this human mass grew immeasurably, encompassing the full diversity of the world's population—from beatniks to Presidents.
Nearly every chance encounter leaves a trace in the poet's work. The impressions are not controlled by strict artistic selectivity, they are hurriedly poured into stanzas while they are still fresh and vivid, and not yet pushed into the background by new ones. This is not a conscious principle, as the poet would later insist. It is just his temperament, drawing into the creative process everything that lives, everything that surrounds the man, transforming reflected life into a gushing stream of faces and details.
Side by side with this is poetic musing. Poems about his own generation. About human depth. About talent and mediocrity in art. About kindness and malice. About tenderness. About animosity and friendship. About poetry. About popularity. Civic spirit. Simplicity. Humour. Perfection. And so on.
The whole of Yevtushenko's poetry lies in these two co-ordinates. Its two principal stylistic features are detail and formula. It does not matter much that a great deal was wellknown before. What does matter is that you got at the truth yourself and expressed it in your own words:
Try to equate the talent, not the age.
Being young, but lagging behind—that's the trouble!
Fighting all falsehood fiercely—that is kindness.
There's more harm in taking friend for foe
in haste, than taking foe for friend.
The evil that's strong must first opposed be
and only after that—the evil that's lesser.
And when we cease to be exacting to others,
we are ceasing to be young.
What matters if someone
badgers us?
It matters more to have true followers.
And so on.
Didacticism and rhetoric are Yevtushenko's constant companions. Often they are impediments, but more often they aid him, helping him to swim to safety. That, by the way, is one of the reasons for his popularity with readers. A feeling for the mass of readers, a prompt didactic response to their needs is the very core of his poetic character. His poems frankly await a public response, his poetry is simply inconceivable without it. He is infinitely dependent on the opinions of his readers and listeners and he endlessly seeks their approval. He does not believe anyone but them.
Once he pointed out quite correctly: “The assonance rhyme, which is for some reason referred to as the Yevtushenko rhyme, was first brilliantly used on the basis of Russian folklore by Kirsanov.” His enthusiasm for Kirsanov passed, like whooping cough in childhood, but for a long time, if not forever, Yevtushenko retained a firm interest in root rhymes. The young poet was so carried away by his search for such combination of sounds that some of his poems are entirely built on it.
From the very start Yevtushenko's oratorical plastic verse, sensitive to all poetic influences, needed fresh rhymes because it was consciously guided by the living intonations of colloquial or declamatory speech. The search for originality in style proceeded in various directions, but it was most intensive in the field of rhyme.
It was exactly Yevtushenko who grafted root rhyme onto contemporary Russian poetry. From here it spread to numerous collections of verse of his colleagues and imitators. However, no one used it with such natural mastery and virtuosity as the poet himself. It is often so organically fused with the meaning and verbal texture of the verse that you do not seem even to hear it.
Yevtushenko's imprecise rhyme often has the poetic precision of intonational and semantic marksmanship.
Literary critic Vladimir Lakshin recalls how Alexander Tvardovsky instructed young Yevtushenko in a fatherly manner: “You have an improvisator's talent but you lack the ability, so precious in art, to go back to what you once began. You can occupy the enemy's territory but you cannot consolidate your success, strengthening your rear, digging in and so on.” But Yevtushenko will never change, profundity and concentration are not for him. He would have very much liked to follow the advice of the older poet, for whom he had a boundless respect, taking his poems to him and listening without a murmur to the harsh, and as a rule quite justified, dressing-down he got. Yet he could do nothing with himself.
Tvardovsky grew indignant: “He's so complacent. The spotlight runs away from him and he chases it, to get back in the limelight.” And at the same time he never lost sight of Yevtushenko, because he had faith and hope in him.
There are poets whose stature grows from book to book. This would not be true of Yevtushenko. Instead of growing he seems to be spreading, extending into space, occupying ever new territory. Let others “consolidate their success”. His element is pin-pointing, naming, being the first.
Yevtushenko's Babi Yar belongs to poems written in response to an event.
This poem will remain in literature thanks to another propitious circumstance. Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his Thirteenth Symphony to Yevtushenko's verse. The poet himself admits being stunned by the fact that the composer, “in this symphony strung together poems that seemingly could not be so combined. The requiem-like Babi Yar with the publicist culmination and the touchingly simple intonation of verses about women in a queue, retrospective poems and the bold intonations of ‘Humour’ and ‘Career’. At the first performance of the symphony something very rare happened to the listeners during those fifty minutes: they cried and laughed and smiled and fell into a reverie.”
And that's the truth. I myself sat in the Big Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire, enraptured by the music, and the words which helped the music to reach the hearts of its listeners.
In 1963 Yevtushenko went on a long trip down the Pechora and lived for a while in the North.
That trip left a strong mark on his poetry. He wrote a big cycle of poems, displaying the best qualities of his talent and in the first place his passionate civic spirit and maturity.
The poet became utterly absorbed in the world of the hunters' and fishermen's hard toil, constantly aware of brotherly feeling among the people around him and towards himself. Probably for the first time he understood so clearly that the reader believed him and expected Yevtushenko to speak the truth.
The boundless northern landscapes, team work and the life of people bound together by that work came to life in Yevtushenko's poems with rare plasticity. His work at that time brought him closest to the core of his own personality. Expressive verse permeated with a civic spirit and the indissoluble organic unity of the individual and the people were manifested with genuine poetic fervour. Not long afterwards he wrote the poem The Bratsk Power Station, where Russia's history and present-day life are brought together in a fullscale epic.
From the very first pages of the poem two states of mind are contrasted. The Prayer Before the Poem with its proud finely chiselled lines (“A poet in Russia is more than just a poet”) undoubtedly containing an element of self-appraisal, is followed by a prologue which opens with this confession:
I am past thirty. Fear engulfs me at night.
My face sunk in the pillow, I weep
ashamed that I have wasted all my life,
but in the morning I go on wasting it.
As he continues to ponder over his creative work Yevtushenko sometimes comes upon poetic programmes that precisely suit his own nature and his gift:
Escaping any masks' tyranny,
obey just yourself in your art,
your naturalness uniquely
and quietly to it impart!
But Yevtushenko's “naturalness” is such that it does not let him rest or carefully weigh up his thoughts. He overtakes himself at every turn of his life and the striking thing is that this quality does not disappear with the years … Eternal, swift-footed and light-hearted youth seethes inside him …
It would be a mistake, however, to regard this kind of life in art lacking in morality or devoid of a firm spiritual basis. Yevtushenko is often engaged in vain pursuits but, unlike most, he does not try to conceal them and that alone clearly differentiates his standpoint in poetry. He offers, as it were, the rough drafts of his feverish literary activity for the public to judge and for time to select the most worthy among them and find a permanent place for them in poetry. His self-criticism is not intended only for himself, but for all to hear. What is as a rule divided into private life and life in art is inseparable in Yevtushenko, because he has never learned to separate these two aspects of human existence. The poet feels injustice acutely, unfailingly, whatever form it may take, and he immediately reacts to it with anger and compassion. Here are the sources of his civic spirit and the fountainhead of his poetic publicist writings.
The strongest and most touching notes of Yevtushenko's love lyrics are those of leave-taking, parting, the waning of emotion.
Beginning with his famous Here's What Is Happening to Me …, it is precisely these notes that make the music of his best love poems.
He has written some remarkable love poems enchanting in their sincerity and genuine feeling. He becomes a truly great lyrical poet when he forgets himself, renounces himself, dissolving in his loved one. The drama of love is for the poet a supreme manifestation of spiritual freedom and selflessness.
“God!” with all my deep pain I cry.
“What good is Elysium's eternity?
Don't let me die
later than my beloved!
Do not mete out
this punishment to me!”
He cannot be undivided or precise or harmonious. All his life he has been fighting his awareness of the problematical nature of his own poetic phenomenon. His poems jar on professionals and amateurs alike. They cut one to the quick not because their form—metre, rhyme, rhythms—are irregular or classical. Independently of the sounds and letters they convey a hopeless and at the same time uplifting feeling of loss. The subject may be a woman (Here's What Is Happening to Me), nostalgia (verses about the idol of his youth, sportsman Vsevolod Bobrov), Soviet history (Izya Kramer, Inspector of Lights), or the corrida of Hemingway …
Not only has he travelled across all the continents in the world, except for the Antarctic, but he has also written poems about each country he visited.
In his “foreign” cycles Yevtushenko uses a reporting style on principle. Here he feels himself to be, first and foremost, a journalist, a special correspondent of Soviet poetry.
At the same time he has a feeling for the whole universe, a feeling of possessing everything that his eye or hand lights upon. Least of all is he a foreigner in this world and in no time at all settles down in any country …
The great brotherhood of men—that is what he sings of and that is his real religion, born of the ideals of our Revolution.
In poems about his travels Yevtushenko often uses the form of a monologue by real or imaginary characters. That is how the poems are titled: Doctor Spock's Monologue, Monologue of a Broadway Actress, Monologue of a Spanish Guide and even Monologue of a Silver Fox on a Fur Farm in Alaska. He creates real portraits, observing many psychological and other aspects of life abroad.
Yevtushenko's name is indeed known throughout the world, many of those who have not read his poems have heard of him.
Yevtushenko's popularity has undoubtedly been enhanced by the way he recites his poetry in public. He developed this style in his youth and it merits some attention. The verse of some young Soviet poets of the 1950's was intended to be recited, regardless of the literary tradition which each of them followed. In very general terms it may be said that that verse of a rhetorical or romantic quality truly fulfils itself, as a rule, during public recitation, being clearly at a disadvantage when read silently in solitude.
The flexibility of intonation, swinging rhythms, daring rhymes, abundant use of alliteration, combined with a topical and always extremely democratic content—all these features of Yevtushenko's style are manifest in the unity of the poet and the actor. His tall, lithe figure, his expressive hands stressing the highlights of each stanza, his well-trained and resounding voice, now rising to an angry shout, now fading to almost a whisper, emphasising the ends of the line when some phonetic echo or semantic detail has to stand out especially clearly, make him an excellent reciter and those who have seen him on a platform or television will know what I mean.
I admit that I love my hero. For me Yevtushenko is not just a close friend, a poet, publicist, prose writer, critic, film actor, photographer, and so on, he is also a literary character whose life unfolds like a thriller. He annoys many people and he is as counter-indicative to many as hot spices are to the plain dishes prescribed by dietetic norms.
But there must be a feeling of basic justice in any critic, just as in any author, and a feeling of gratitude to every individual who has done something worthy and useful for the art of the written word in his mother tongue.
And Yevgeni Yevtushenko has done much for Soviet poetry.
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