Word: evtushenkos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...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...
...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...