Word: evtushenko
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...potentates. Among them-from Pushkin, who died "invoking freedom in an age of fear," to Pasternak, who, at the cost of much personal bravery, was almost the only writer of his generation to deride Stalin's shibboleths-have been Russia's most impassioned foes of injustice. Evgeny Evtushenko, the most famed and gifted young poet in Russia today, follows in their footsteps...
...Zhenya," as handsome, 28-year-old Evtushenko is invariably called, started out where many another Russan poet has ended-in Siberia. The blond, beanpole-tall (6 ft. 3 in.) poet comes of Ukrainian, Tartar and Latvian stock that has never, he grins, "been collectivized." Though he likes to be taken for a country boy, he is a Muscovite by upbringing and accent, and his background rubs off on his sophisticated, often colloquial poetic style. His deep appeal lies in a rare faculty for sensing-and transmitting-the doubts and yearnings of a generation that has lost its illusions...
Noiseless Verse. Poets of protest such as Evgeny Evtushenko (pronounced Yevgainy Yeftooshenko) have, in the past, been isolated from the vast, unlettered mass of Russian society. Today, through far-ranging recital tours and huge editions of their verse, they are reaching the widest, best-educated public in Russian history. The result has been a remarkable poetic revival. In theaters and student hostels from White Russia to Central Asia, overflow crowds listen to poets with almost religious fervor. On Sunday nights in summer, city squares echo to the liquid, incantatory cadences of Pushkin. Lermontov and. often. Zhenya Evtushenko. One good reason...
Simply put, Russia's writers are seeking truth. Evtushenko's verse and his contemporaries' conversation come back to the word time and again. Their generation has seen truth ripped from maps and histories; their search for facts is an obsession. After Stalin's death, Evtushenko went back to see. he said, if any kind of truth had survived in his native Siberia; even there he was disappointed. In a poem named for his home town, Zima (literally, Winter), he quoted the adage: "Truth is good but happiness is better," adding forlornly: "But without truth there...
...what the journalists write about. But look around: what everyone's worrying about is how to grab off more for himself." The young idolize Fidel Castro, whose revolution in their eyes embodies the authentic ideological fervor that has gone from their own. This vision was heightened by Poet Evtushenko, who visited Cuba last year and in Pravda proclaimed: "Revolution may be grim but not, goddamit, dull...