people and their supporters. (Pamyat has done
him a great favor: its opposition has been
adduced as proof of his credentials as a humanist
and a fighter for freedom.) Much less publicized
is the fact that democratic and dissident Soviet
critics exposed Yevtushenko’s literary weak-
nesses and moral vacillations long ago and mer-
cilessly. Today hardly anyone in that literary
community considers his work worthy of serious
study.
He started out, in 1949, at the age of 16, as
an average if precocious maker of Soviet-style
poems. His first book appeared at the very nadir
of Stalinism, in 1952, and suited the time rather
nicely: it was optimistic, full of cliche ́s, and bor-
ing. But after coming from his native Siberia to
the Moscow Literary Institute, Yevtushenko felt
the first timid stirrings of the post-Stalin mood
and expressed them, too, in his verses. This stage
of his poetry is amply represented in the new
English collection. In the era of glasnost, it
looks antediluvian. Still, there is something
attractive in it: youthful sentimentality, straight-
forward intonation, impetuous imagery.
Yevtushenko was among the first writers of
the period to introduce into his work a slice of
real Soviet life—of the so-calledbyt, the daily
grind of tedium, hardship, and deprivation. Here
and there he mentioned queues, dirty staircases,
bedbugs, fences with obscene inscriptions, and
so on. (Later even such taboo subjects as con-
doms and drinking eau de cologne appeared in
his lyrics.) He also wrote about love and its
betrayals; and though they are essentially Vic-
torian, those poems provoked attacks on Yev-
tushenko as an advocate of promiscuity.
His early verses can be read as an anthology
of modes and fads of the bygone days. Some of
his heroes (including the narrator) werestilya-
gas, the scornful name for a member of the
Soviet ‘‘golden youth’’ who were fond of West-
ern clothes, dances, and so on—a sort of mixture
of hippie and yuppie; and the message of Yev-
tushenko’s poetry was that they were good
Soviet people who would bravely fight for their
socialist fatherland. Yevtushenko played up his
Siberian heritage, moreover, and employed all
the trivial mythology of Siberia—not the land of
the Gulag, but the magnificent wilderness inhab-
ited by rough and honest men. And he empha-
sized his manifestly difficult childhood (‘‘I
started out as a lonely wolf cub’’). All these traits
were at their most obvious in the long poem
‘‘Zima Junction,’’ which appeared in 1955. It
made Yevtushenko’s reputation.
‘‘Zima Junction,’’ a narrative poem about
Yevtushenko’s visit to his native Siberia, very
cautiously touched the political sensitivities of
its era: the so-called Doctors’ Plot, Stalin’s
death, the fall of Beria. On the whole, it was
full of the usual stuff—decent Chekists, naive
but nice Red cavalrymen, upright but flawed
Russian peasants, and the author himself, a
young lad in search of a way to serve his country.
It was attacked by literary conservatives, but it
was also instrumental in generating strong sup-
port for Yevtushenko in some circles of the
Party, among people whose background and
experience were similar to his own. There is a
persistent rumor that Mikhail Gorbachev was
one of them.
Today Yevtushenko states that ‘‘in 1953 it
seemed I was all the dissidents rolled up into
one.’’ And ‘‘the early poetry of my generation is
the cradle of glasnost.’’ Such revelations are less
than modest. In addition, they are untrue. There
were many thousands of dissidents in 1953. Most
of them were in prison camps or in internal exile.
Some of them, like Pasternak, Akhmatova, and
Nadezhda Mandelshtam, were still at large, but
they were totally cut off from their readers and
from the general public. Glasnost—to be more
precise, the revolution taking place in the Soviet
Union today—was the fruit of their untold suf-
fering, and their incredibly stubborn efforts to
maintain moral and cultural standards during
that era of contempt. Yevtushenko and his ilk,
in other words, took the place that rightfully
belonged to others. They promoted literature
and ideology that was adapted to their totalitar-
ian milieu, into which they introduced a measure
of half truth and half decency.
Many Western critics are fond of uncover-
ing the influences of Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Pas-
ternak, and Blok in Yevtushenko’s poetry,
thereby suggesting that he is a rightful heir to
the giants. The poet himself never tires of invok-
ing their shades, although he does not transcend
the level of schoolboyish cliche ́s when he talks
about their heritage. His real mentors, however,
were second-rate, incurably Soviet, and largely
obscure poets such as Stepan Shchipachev,
Mikhail Svetlov, Aleksandr Mezhirov, and
Konstantin Vanshenkin. (Numerous dedica-
tions to them can be found throughoutThe Col-
lected Poems.)Babii Yar