Antic Yevtushenko

"I need crowds, vast crowds, enormous crowds," explained Soviet Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko as he made plans for his tour of the U.S. this month. He once read to an audience of 14,000 in a Moscow sports stadium; Doubleday, his American publisher, was happy to help re-create his experience in the U.S. and simultaneously promote his new book Stolen Apples. Advertising and producing his American appearances will cost nearly $100,000. So far the suave, sallow Siberian has performed for tens of thousands at the University of South Carolina, the Felt Forum in Madison Square Garden and arenas in Pittsburgh, Princeton and Chapel Hill. Yevtushenko asks triumphantly: "Who says Americans don't love poetry?"

Although he has publicly denounced U.S. policy in Indochina, Yevtushenko has had no qualms about meeting its makers. After talking with him at a dinner party, Henry Kissinger arranged for Yevtushenko to see Richard Nixon. Last week poet and President conferred for 70 minutes at the White House; according to Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, Nixon informed Yevtushenko that poetry and music are "an international language."

Relieving Tedium. Few remain indifferent to Yevtushenko's personal language. His 6-ft. frame writhing, Yevtushenko shouts, wails and purrs in dramatic Russian. English translations are usually read by a British actor named Barry Boys, or by fellow poets. Between poems, Yevtushenko often banters with the audience in adequate English and with natural charm. The overall reaction is either passionate enthusiasm or cold rage. Says Poet Stanley Kunitz: "To reach out to so large an audience has an element of adventure. Extravaganzas relieve the tedium of an age." Poet Allen Ginsberg was inspired to dithyrambics: "He is trying his best to unify Russian-American Soul under the banner of poesy; in heaven, great golden thrones of credit are given for good intentions." In Pittsburgh last week, Yevtushenko's dirge for Allison Krause, one of the victims of the Kent State tragedy ("Give no flowers to a state that outlaws truth"), was fervently applauded by an audience that included the dead girl's parents.

Some listeners, however, have been markedly cool--for example, to Yevtushenko's repeated attempt to equate the American bombing of North Viet Nam and the assassination of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King with the Nazi massacres at Auschwitz, Dachau and Babi Yar. "Children's huts/ Bombed at night/ Burn in your fire/ Just like your Bill of Rights," he declaims, pointing an accusing finger across the footlights. At the Felt Forum many in the audience booed or left the hall. Eugene McCarthy, who had agreed to participate in the recital, flatly refused Yevtushenko's request that he read one of the Russian's poems which ends, "Oh, Statue of Liberty, raise up/ Your green, drowned woman's face/ Against this death of freedom." McCarthy asked Yevtushenko's translators: "Are we going to be associated with this crap, or shall we leave now?" He compromised by reading one of his own antiwar poems. Allen Tate dismissed Yevtushenko as "a ham actor," whose performances are a "vulgarizing of poetry."

Yevtushenko was conveniently routed by the Soviet authorities to the U.S. via Hanoi, and he lectures his American audiences on his experiences there. On receiving an honorary degree at the New School for Social Research, he told of having seen the body of a North Vietnamese teenager, clutching a copy of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Later he told the same story at the Felt Forum, where he produced the book, which turned out to be The Old Man and the Sea. Observed Poet William Jay Smith: "Next time it will be Across the River and Into the Trees." Said Hemingway's widow Mary: "Can you imagine what would happen in Russia if someone got up in a public place and began to talk about how they put writers in insane asylums?"

Yevtushenko dismisses critics who complain that he refuses to give equal time to inequities in the U.S.S.R. He says, "They find it morally questionable to speak of the corruption of the Western world when in the Soviet Union the price of cognac is on the rise, the meat supply uncertain and the stores, in general, unjust."

Once Yevtushenko wrote splendid, intimate love lyrics. Now many Russian intellectuals regard him as a creature of the Soviet Establishment. Though he bravely protested the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, his appointment to the governing board of the Soviet Union of Writers last year was a sign of renewed official favor. He still radiates what seems like a sincere passion and remains a writer who tries to maintain himself in a state where survival is an art. When Americans ask why he is not in jail, he replies with a smile, "Because I am too cunning." Yet no one knows better than Yevtushenko the price he has paid. In a confessional poem he recites at his U.S. appearances, he says:

The curse upon me, the waste of

my soul

in rage, is the stage. ..

Stage, you gave me the light in

which to scintillate

but took away the soft shadow and

the subtle gleam.

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