A Poet Takes to the Screen

By Richard Zoglin

Yevtushenko directs his first film, flouting Soviet taboos as usual

There were no searchlights, no gaudy limousines unloading celebrities. The crowd that packed the huge Moscow Moviemakers Club auditorium on Jan. 20 wore modest dresses and suits rather than gowns and tuxedos. And in another contrast to Hollywood custom, the film's director appeared onstage after the screening, not just to take a bow but to listen as members of the audience stood up one by one to comment on his film.

The man of the hour was Yevgeni Yevtushenko, the celebrated and some times controversial Soviet poet, and the occasion was the Moscow premiere of the first movie he has written and directed.

Titled Kindergarten, it recounts his child hood experiences during World War II, when he and thousands of other Moscow residents were evacuated to Siberia to escape advancing German troops. Although film portrayals of the U.S.S.R.'s World War II ordeal are encouraged by Soviet authorities, Yevtushenko's movie may run into difficulties nonetheless. One of two nude scenes, in which a newlywed wife is shown naked to the waist, drew gasps from the audience. Nudity is rare in Soviet films, usually being restricted by the censors. Kindergarten also includes a reverential portrayal of an aging rabbi that could draw official displeasure since Jews and Jewishness are a virtually taboo subject.

The poet-film maker is prepared for trouble. "I feel some invisible enemy is working against my movie," says Yevtushenko, who at 50 still has the youthful exuberance that helped make him a literary pop star in the will keep my film from being seen around the country." Although Kindergarten was given preliminary approval for showing, a government agency must now decide whether it can be distributed throughout the Soviet Union and overseas. Yevtushenko insists he will make no cuts. "I won't change anything now," he says. "I will not give in to censorship. If you give one finger to censorship, it will swallow your whole body and spit out bits of your flesh."

For veteran Yevtushenko watchers, such comments sound like the Angry Young Poet of old. During the Khrushchev era, Yevtushenko became a hero of liberal Soviet intellectuals for his bold poems condemning anti-Semitism (Babi Yar) and Stalin's reign of terror (The Heirs of Stalin), many of which he recited on poetry-reading tours of the West. Beginning in the late 1960s, Yevtushenko's dissident fire seemed to dim, as he churned out "official" verse celebrating Soviet workers and attacking the U.S.

Now his image as a rebel may be reviving. His first novel, Wild Berries, which has sold 4 million copies in the Soviet Union and will be published in the U.S. in June, was lambasted as dishonest and immoral by a prominent Soviet literary magazine in December. Still, Yevtushenko has not shaken the old charges of selling out. "The way American reporters see it, if an artist here is not in a mental hospital, that means he is a government slave," he says. "That's too simplistic."

Yevtushenko, who has also dabbled in photography and acting (he starred in the 1978 Soviet film Take-off), got the idea for his first movie during a poetry-reading tour of the U.S. in 1972. When right-wing demonstrators disrupted a reading in St. Paul, Yevtushenko broke a rib in the ensuing melee. After an American doctor determined that the bone had been broken before, Yevtushenko recalled being kicked in the ribs during a scuffle over food in World War II. The doctor told him that his wartime memo ries might make a good movie.

It took ten years for Yevtushenko to turn the suggestion into reality. He began filming his personal epic in September 1982, shooting in Moscow and the Siberian village of Zima. Inspired by the films of the Italian neorealists, Yevtushenko used mostly amateur actors. One exception is Klaus Maria Brandauer (Mephisto), who plays a sympathetic Nazi officer. Yevtushenko appears briefly as a loony chess player. The film's cost: a mere 700,000 rubles, or about $900,000.

Reaction to Kindergarten at its Moscow premiere was mixed. Despite the striking camera work and realistic scenes of Siberian life, some viewers found its patchwork of reality and fantasy awkward. (In one dreamlike scene, Russian soldiers are shown marching in slow motion, each carrying a rifle and a sloshing goldfish bowl.) "The film is similar to Yevtushenko's nature," said one audience member who spoke after the screening. "It goes in every different direction -- some well, some not so well."

Whatever happens with Kindergarten, Yevtushenko is already planning his next project, a movie about the old age of the Three Musketeers.

Says he: "I want to be a film director, and I feel I haven't really made it yet." He wants to shoot the picture in France for $30 million, and hopes to get Brandauer, Peter Ustinov and Jean-Paul Belmondo to star. If he brings that off, the premiere of Yevtushenko's second film just might call for a couple of limousines and a searchlight. -- By Richard Zoglin. Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof/ Moscow

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof/Moscow