Poet Under Fire

It is difficult to be a prophet with honor in one's own country, particularly if that country is the Soviet Union. Yet Poet Evgeny Evtushenko seemed born to the role when first he burst upon the Russian scene a decade ago. He was young, handsome and engaging. His luminous love lyrics signaled the new kind of poetry that was possible after the death of Stalin. Babi Yar was a courageous, impassioned protest against Russian antiSemitism. In The Heirs of Stalin, he made a frontal attack on Stalinists still active among the Soviet leadership. Soon Evtushenko commanded a vast following in Russia among people long weary of the dreary cant and moralizing themes of earlier Soviet literature.

He carried that reputation abroad on a series of spectacular world tours. Everywhere he went, he was acclaimed as the embodiment of a new Russia dispelling the miasma of its Stalinist past. Enjoying it all, Evtushenko took to offering political pronouncements at press conferences. Since many of his audiences assumed him to be as critical as they were of Communism, he more and more found himself driven to the defense of his country and--dismayingly to many of his admirers--its system and some of its injustices as well.

Third for the Chair. But the champagne (which the poet drinks exclusively) flowed on, and pretty girls flocked to him, like so many pigeons around the statue in Moscow's Pushkin Square. His poetry began to show the strain of his public posturings. Increasingly facile and bombastic, his work declined in quality in proportion to his rise as a political personality. It gave him some moments of self-doubt, as when he wrote:

You live highly praised and opulent.

You live, flashingly ephemeral, an example that the end of talent comes when rebellion's impossible.

Today Evtushenko is the focus of a controversy set off by the most inconsequential of events: his nomination last month for the Chair of Poetry at Oxford. Long-smoldering antagonisms to Evtushenko flamed into print during the balloting, and it was no matter that he finished third behind the winner, an English solicitor and minor poet, Roy Fuller. The attacks on him continued.

"Hack propagandist of the Soviet regime," "squalid pseudo-liberal," "defender of Soviet atrocities" were some of the epithets hurled at the poet by British intellectuals in the London press. The bill of indictment drawn up against Evtushenko included charges that he publicly denounced Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuli Daniel and other imprisoned writers during his trips abroad. The telegram he was reported to have sent Brezhnev and, Kosygin condemning the Czechoslovak invasion was dismissed by some as "mythical."

Charges in Question. His advocates countered that he is "a just, humble and good man," and "a voice of conscience among his colleagues." Some defenders have maintained that the charges against him were wrong. Novelist William Styron and others who recently met with the poet in Russia say that they are certain he sent the wire to the Soviet leaders. Evtushenko was so sickened by the invasion, Styron reports, that he told him in a dubious comparison: "Now we Russians are just like you Americans; we are part of the international power Mafia."

There is, however, considerable evidence that Evtushenko has denounced fellow Russians who have been imprisoned after political show trials. At a poetry reading in London in 1962, he contemptuously called Olga Ivinskaya, Boris Pasternak's great love and the model for Dr. Zhivago's Lara, a "currency smuggler." Mrs. Ivinskaya was then serving an eight-year sentence in a Soviet labor camp on a trumped-up charge of "speculation." In 1966, when hundreds of distinguished Soviet intellectuals were publicly protesting the sentencing of Sinyavsky and Daniel to eight and five years' hard labor for having allegedly written anti-Soviet works, Evtushenko turned up at an arts festival in Dakar, Senegal. Sipping champagne with newsmen, Evtushenko said of the two writers' conviction: "I agree with what was done to them, but not with how it was done. I agree they should have been punished. Should they be allowed to wash their dirty linen outside their own country?"

Dead Rat on a Plate. Seven months later, at a poetry reading at Queens College in New York, the poet replied to a student who asked him what he thought of the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial: "Your question is like inviting someone to dinner and then putting a dead rat on his plate." In 1968, while a number of Russian intellectuals were being tried on patently fabricated charges, Evtushenko was on a three-month tour of Latin America. At a Mexico City press conference, he repeated his attacks on Sinyavsky and Daniel, now adding that other imprisoned writers were involved in terrorism and foreign exchange frauds.

In spite of these statements--which no other liberal Russian writer has made --some specialists feel that the present assault on Evtushenko is an exercise in overkill. "Why pick on Evtushenko?" asks Wayne State University's Vera Dunham, a leading specialist in Russian poetry. "He has never done anyone any real harm. It would make more sense to denounce the men actually responsible for putting Russian writers on trial, and examine the society that made Evtushenko what he is--a brash conformist and rather uncultured Soviet young man." Professor Dunham believes that his critics have no right to expect Evtushenko to act like a genuine member of the dissenting intelligentsia in Russia. "He has always been a part of the political establishment, and as such was able to do a lot of good in his time," she says. Oxford's Russian specialist, Max Hay ward, is also dismayed by the severity of the attacks on Evtushenko, and points out that the poet, who is now 35, has long been treading a perilous double course between compliance and resistance, in a sincere struggle for the liberalization of Russia. "But you get tired, you get old, you want comfort," Hayward says. "Evtushenko is a decent person who has succumbed to pressures that are almost inhuman."

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