Belligerent Young Bard

ANTIWORLDS by Andrei Voznesensky; translated by W. H. Auden, Richard Wilbur, Stanley Kunitz and others. 120 pages. Basic Books. $4.95.

Poetry, like steam, is made under pressure. In Russia the pressure of totalitarian control on a rapidly enlarging spirit of freedom keeps poetry hissing-hot. Evgeny Evtushenko first blew his stack back in 1957, and since then vigorous young poets have come geysering out of the masses with a frequency alarming to the Soviet regime.

One of these belligerent young bards, 33-year-old Andrei Voznesensky, now rivals Evtushenko in popularity. His latest volume of verse ran up an advance sale of 100,000 in Russia, and his public readings have packed a Moscow sports palace with 14,000 bellowing poetry buffs. What is more, in these always adequate and sometimes redoubtable translations, Voznesensky (pronounced Voz-nes-yen-ski) considerably surpasses Evtushenko in poetic capacity. He is indisputably the most powerful lyric poet to appear in Russia since Pasternak.

A Foot on Broadway? Pasternak, says Voznesensky, made him what he is today. At eleven he became the great man's protege, and at 20 he published the first of his five books of verse. By 1959 he was famous. By 1963 he was in serious trouble. Khrushchev went after him hammer and sickle as a "bourgeois formalist," and Russia's jackal journals bayed that he had "one foot in Gorky Street and the other on Broadway." Then the tone changed, and in April of this year Voznesensky was permitted to tour the U.S., reading his poems.

The readings were a smash,. and so was the reader. A stocky little fellow with mouse-brown hair and the eyes of a day-old calf, Voznesensky stumbled onstage like a lost delivery boy. Yet as he stood before the microphone, he swelled as though a mighty wind had rushed into him. His eyes blazed, his arms flung wide, and out of his small body rolled a big dark golden tremolo that thundered in the theater like a Kyrie of medieval Kiev.

Like the voice, the verse is direct, fervent, fresh, almost childishly naive. Some of it is tenderly lyrical; much of it is vehemently public poetry, poetry for the microphone. The imagery and language are startling, precise, modern. "Behind an airplane," he writes, "the sound trailed/ Rectangular, like a barge behind a tug." And again: "Radio-like, my cat lies curled/ With his green eye tuned to the world."

A Foot on the Gas. Strong images refract strong emotions. Voznesensky is wildly excited by "godless/ baseball-crazy/ gasoline-hazy/ America!" A passionate patriot, he is also a ferocious critic of Communism. In a horrendous poem printed in 1963, he likens the relation between the Russians and their rulers to that between Peter the Great and one of his mistresses. Having cut off the poor wench's head, the czar snatched it up again by the hair and then, according to eyewitnesses, kissed the bloody carrion passionately on the lips. Unlike Evtushenko, however, Voznesensky is not primarily a political poet. He is concerned with politics because he is concerned with the suffering it causes, but he clearly comprehends that not all suffering is politically produced. In one of his most dreadful and beautiful poems he describes how

Someone is beating a woman.

Century on century, no end to this.

That's life, you say. Are you telling me?

There are no religions,

no revelations,

There are women.

And the stars? Rattling in the sky

Like raindrops against black glass,

Plunging down,

they cool

Her grief-fevered forehead.

Is there nothing beyond the stars, above the self? Voznesensky is not sure. He often writes like a Western existentialist: "We were not born to survive, alas,/ But to step on the gas." And again: "If you live, you burn." But in some of his finest poems he leaps spectacularly into transcendence and, in lines that are metaphysical if not directly religious, gropes toward a God he cannot quite experience.

The bullet that punctuated Pushkin . . .

Zinged on a whistling trajectory to posterity!

There was no full stop. It was all a beginning . . .

No death. No final dot.

Our sentence in nature has no period.

We shall be deathless.

And that's my point!

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