Word: evtushenkos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Since Nikita Khrushchev put a chill on the "thaw" in Russian letters last year, Soviet artists and writers have slowly, gradually been working back toward the level of relatively free ex pression that reached its high point with Poet Evgeny Evtushenko's mass readings in Mayakovsky Square. Recently, however, intellectuals have once again felt the cold wind of literary conservatism. This time it blew not on a politically outspoken, widely published writer, but rather on one of Russia's many literary "abstainers" - ostensible amateurs whose works are circulated by hand, thus precluding their being drafted into the government...
...often appeared on TIME'S cover, many of their names-Budenny, Rokossovsky, Timoshenko, Voronov-now half-forgotten echoes of an era when the U.S. desperately tried to believe in the good faith of its Russian allies. There also were the artists, from Prokofiev and Shostakovich to Evgeny Evtushenko, always on the brink of political disgrace...
Western critics have already begun to cool their original ardor for new Soviet verse and lately have begun to grumble that Evtushenko and Voznesensky have neither read T.S. Eliot nor profited by exposure to the likes of William Carlos Williams. The complaint is true, but beside the point. Voznesensky and Evtushenko invite useful comparison not with the sophisticated Western poets of today but with Carl Sandburg singing of the Western plains or the chest-thumping celebrations of Walt Whitman. Like Sandburg, and like the U.S. folk singers who make up rhymes for the freedom riders, the new Soviet poets tend...
...prose comments of such writers on the role they play-seen most notably in Evtushenko's Precocious Autobiography-are fascinating for Western readers in general and highly recommended to Americans who still think that any sensible, freedom-loving Russian would like nothing better than to migrate for keeps to, say, Jersey City. The young poets exude a refreshing sense of purpose that comes with a mature consciousness of power. In the West, where writers have always been free to say what they please, composing a poem is neither an act of rebellion nor an act of courage. However daring...
...Evtushenko and Voznesensky read their poems to tens of thousands, and their books are bestsellers. They know that just by tweaking the nose of authority-attacking Soviet antiSemitism, for example, or just praising the crazy doings of the young-they are helping a whole land full of people come to life again. Like any number of Russian writers, they hope to fashion the challenging conception of a new destiny for Russia to replace the great dream of the Revolution, which drowned in blood and bureaucracy...