Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...generation's doughtiest champions have been authors and poets, the very types who were the most closely indentured servants of Stalinism. Perhaps no other tyrant in history has ever imposed so rigorous a system of thought control as that of Joseph Stalin; his most powerful and systematic weapon was the doctrine called "socialist realism,'' by which artists became "engineers of souls." whose only function was to mass-produce Communist propaganda. Literature started up again soon after Stalin's death. In the six years since Nikita Khrushchev demolished Stalin's godhead at the 20th Party Congress...
...illiterate peasants listened spellbound to wandering "reciters," the intellectual Russians have always revered poets above 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...
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...
...life abuses, he and ex my plains, his aim is to improve, not destroy, the Soviet society. Says he: "The banner is undefiled. even though some of its bearers stumbled in the mire." Evtu shenko and other literary gadflies resemble a loyal opposition, whose foe is the Stalin ist rearguard in Moscow and Peking ; they have been called the New Left. Says an anti-Stalinist Soviet official: "Evtushenko & Co. are not a cancer, just a head cold." Pancake Poet. And so. in a way. Evtushenko's courage has not been put to the severest test, as Pasternak...
Creative Schizophrenia. Zhenya was 19 when Stalin died. In revulsion from political themes, he sought refuge in love lyrics. The conservative critics who had effusively praised his first, insipid book of verse savaged his second, making the book an overnight hit and Zhenya a national name. Ever since, says Evtushenko. he has suffered from creative schizophrenia ; when he writes love poetry he is attacked for escapism ; when he returns to social themes he is faulted for wasting his lyric talent. The same ambivalence, he grins, marks Pushkin, his idol. His other heroes: Boris Pasternak; Hemingway, "my favorite prose writer...