The next story deals with the presentation of
a State Prize to Yevtushenko in 1984 for his long
poem ‘‘Momma and the Neutron Bomb.’’ ‘‘The
censorship office attempted to ban the poem,’’ he
writes, ‘‘but it did not succeed.’’ Yevtushenko
took his medal and his certificate (and his
money). According to the requirements of Soviet
protocol, he was expected to express his grati-
tude to the Party at the ceremony. His wrath was
so impossible to contain, however, that he
neglected etiquette and returned to his seat with-
out breaking his proud silence. His bravery, he
tells us, inspired several other recipients of the
prize, who also refused to say thanks.
Now, there is something fundamentally
wrong about this picture. You are pampered by
a totalitarian government, or you are persecuted
by it. You are given honors and awards by party
functionaries, or you are not. You are invited to
their hunting parties, or you are their open
enemy. But both cannot happen to you at the
same time. Andrei Sakharov received perks sim-
ilar to Yevtushenko’s while he was busy with the
Soviet nuclear program; but later his moral rec-
titude led him to the camp of the dissidents, and
the world knows what followed. You see, you
cannot fence with a pile of dung. You either sink
into it or you leave it. To pretend otherwise
requires extraordinary cynicism, extraordinary
naı ̈vete ́, or both. When Yevtushenko implicitly
compares the pain caused by that pricking pin to
the sufferings of Sakharov, Pasternak, and
many, many others, he goes beyond the limits
of naı ̈vete ́, and even of cynicism. He approaches
the obscene.
The case of Yevtushenko is one of the most
unusual cases of our times. (Stanislaw Baranczak
recently listed it, inNewsday, among the top ten
hoaxes of the twentieth century.) Two large
books by Yevtushenko, which just appeared in
English, provide an opportunity to study it more
closely. The first is a volume of verse [The Col-
lected Poems] put into English by many trans-
lators, including some of the masters of the
language. The second is a collection of political
speeches, essays, travelogues, and divagations on
Russian writers [Fatal Half Measures]. Both
books are provided with rapturous introductions
and blurbs: the author is ‘‘the legendary Russian
literary leader,’’ ‘‘a people’s poet in the tradition
of Walt Whitman,’’ ‘‘a seeker of Truth like all
great writers,’’ and so on. It seems that many
members in good standing of the American
literary establishment consider these descriptions
to be true, or at least partly true. Unfortunately,
they are false.
One thing has to be admitted: Yevtushenko
is an incredibly prolific writer who is endowed
with a buoyant personality. He is not only a
versifier and an essayist, but also a scriptwriter,
a film director, an actor, a photographer, a nov-
elist, a political figure, and a world traveler—a
Soviet cultural emissary in virtually all parts of
the globe, which is a function that he inherited
from Vladimir Mayakovsky and Ilya Erenburg,
who played the same role on a less extensive
scale. In his tender years, Yevtushenko was
also a goalkeeper and a folk dancer of repute.
The amount of energy, the sheer labor,
devoted to all these enterprises cannot fail to
impress. Yevtushenko says about himself, with-
out false modesty but not without reason: ‘‘my
fate is supernatural, / my destiny astonishing.’’
Sixty-four countries visited by 1976 (by now the
number is larger) and forty-six books of original
poetry so far—this certainly is supernatural, if
we recall that permission to travel abroad once
or twice was the sweetest dream of almost any
Soviet writer before the Gorbachev era, and that
many good poets of the USSR considered them-
selves lucky if they managed to publish a slim
and heavily blue-penciled volume once in a dec-
ade. On top of all that, we learn (from his editor
Antonina W. Bouis) that Yevtushenko ‘‘has
been banned, threatened, censored, and pun-
ished,’’ though he has not been imprisoned.
The tales of Yevtushenko’s tribulations are
not totally unfounded. In the beginning, he did
not fit snugly into the Procrustean bed of Stalin-
ist literature, and he was attacked by some of the
worst hacks of the period, not least by the anti-
Semites. (Yevtushenko has no Jewish back-
ground, but his Latvian father’s last name,
Gangnus, looked suspicious.) Yet the contro-
versy about Yevtushenko was always a quarrel
withinthe Soviet literary framework. Yevtush-
enko never displayed the slightest inclination to
work outside it.
A fight within the Soviet establishment, even
if it is conducted for a liberal cause, is bound to
degenerate into a fight for the benevolence of the
authorities. In this regard, Yevtushenko hap-
pened to be more skillful, and incomparably
more successful, than his dull opponents. And
so they never forgave him. Yevtushenko is still
denounced by the lunatic fringe, by the PamyatBabii Yar