Word: evtushenkos
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...clear and warm; Tell me-it's true that Spring is here?" THIS old Russian poem, remembered in rough translation through the years since his childhood in Moscow, inspired Cover Artist Boris Chaliapin to create the background for this week's cover portrait of Soviet Poet Evgeny Evtushenko. And it was, in another sense, a search for the answer to the question "Is spring really there?" that prompted TIME to set out on a cover story about Russia's new generation...
...personal story of Poet Evtushenko and his family was gathered by Moscow Bureau Chief Edmund Stevens, a native of Colorado who has worked for many years in Russia, is fluent in Russian, and ranks as the senior U.S. correspondent on the Moscow scene. When Reporter Stevens appeared at Poet Evtushenko's apartment for the first interview, the poet greeted him with a cool and quizzical hello. But that first interview lasted until 4 o'clock in the morning, beginning in the living room-study of the poet's two-room flat, and going on in the kitchen...
...last year, Zhenya discovered dry martinis at Harvard, Greenwich Village jazz dives, and decided that of all the cities he has visited, "New York, in all honesty, is the best." Evtushenko has had two wives. The first was beautiful Bella Akhmadulina, who is also one of the generation's most gifted poets. After two years in cramped quarters (one room)-young Russians' commonest cause for divorce-they parted in 1959. Since 1960, Zhenya has been married to a poised, handsome brunette named Galya, who is two years his senior and an able translator (Maugham, Salinger...
Last week Evtushenko was finishing his movie script, which will be filmed in Cuba this spring. Two new volumes of his verse are to be published soon, and he is working on his first novel since childhood. He calls it The Law of Big Numbers, a ten-year project that will "attempt to apply mathematical equations to the new generation of Russian intellectuals." Strange Days. No simple equation can tell how Russia's youth will mature, or what kind of society it will inherit...
...With Evtushenko, it looks forward to a time when "Posterity will remember/And will burn with shame/ Remembering these strange days/ When common honesty was called courage." The crowds who turn out to hear the poets' work are a hopeful portent. When citizens are allowed to judge literature for themselves, when the highest officials wrangle publicly over the fundamental rights and aims of creative artists, they are engaged in the closest thing to a democratic debate that Soviet history has seen. The depth of public response to the new "literature of truth" is itself the strongest deterrent to the party...