Word: yevtushenko
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...YEVTUSHENKO POEMS by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Bilingual Edition. Translated by Herbert Marshall. 191 pages. Duffon...
...scenes recall the excitement that surrounded the incantatory recitals of Dylan Thomas. Crowds of youngsters usually scrounge for extra tickets, and in the auditoriums, rows of standees lean against the walls. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 33, Russia's principal poet, has been touring the U.S. for four weeks, with stops at New York, Buffalo and Pittsburgh, while the latest collection of his verse is in the bookstores...
...Handicap. "All nightingales understand each other," wrote Yevtushenko hopefully in 1960. "Everywhere they speak the same tongue." But unhappily, intelligible dialogue between American and Russian nightingales is severely inhibited, partly in the matter of language, chiefly by the nature of Yevtushenko's nonpoetical preoccupations. The handicap is not so much that his muse is a Marxist but that she is a public creature: poetic sensibility in the West is involved in more private, perhaps more eternal matters...
...poet is more than a poet in Russia," Yevtushenko has explained. "Here only he is destined to be a poet/ In whom civil sense ferments to passion." With deepest sympathy for Yevtushenko's position as de facto laureate of Russia, it must be objected that to be more than a poet is to be something less than a nightingale. Poetry obliged to make "civil sense" will sometimes make strange noises. In one passage, Yevtushenko remembers, "The ascetic-faced PartOrg said to me . . ." But how can a poet deal with a "PartOrg" (Party Organizer) in any language? The poet himself...
...Laureate. Remarkably, many of Yevtushenko's home-turned verses, so uncomplicated and naive, hypnotize his American intellectual audiences. Perhaps the enthusiasm for him reflects an unconscious dissatisfaction with the disappearance from modern Western poetry of simple values and popular appeal. It is not that Yevtushenko is a Communist poet, but that he is a sentimental Communist poet. Any American producing paeans to the Great Society, better dam construction or Old Glory would be sneered out of the intellectual establishment...