Word: yevtushenko
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...With such guests, and with less imposing ones from movie starlets to oddball hobbyists, Barbara is alternately breathy and brittle, cool and aggressive. Her technique is a model, to some observers, of what makes an interview great; to others, of what makes an interview grate. Recently Russian Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko was so nonplussed by her political probing ("Why are you allowed to travel while many other Russian writers cannot?") that he later de scribed her off the air as "a hyena in syrup...
Some listeners, however, have been markedly cool-for example, to Yevtushenko's repeated attempt to equate the American bombing of North Viet Nam and the assassination of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King with the Nazi massacres at Auschwitz, Dachau and Babi Yar. "Children's huts/ Bombed at night/ Burn in your fire/ Just like your Bill of Rights," he declaims, pointing an accusing finger across the footlights. At the Felt Forum many in the audience booed or left the hall. Eugene McCarthy, who had agreed to participate in the recital, flatly refused Yevtushenko's request that...
...Yevtushenko was conveniently routed by the Soviet authorities to the U.S. via Hanoi, and he lectures his American audiences on his experiences there. On receiving an honorary degree at the New School for Social Research, he told of having seen the body of a North Vietnamese teenager, clutching a copy of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Later he told the same story at the Felt Forum, where he produced the book, which turned out to be The Old Man and the Sea. Observed Poet William Jay Smith: "Next time it will be Across the River...
...Yevtushenko dismisses critics who complain that he refuses to give equal time to inequities in the U.S.S.R. He says, "They find it morally questionable to speak of the corruption of the Western world when in the Soviet Union the price of cognac is on the rise, the meat supply uncertain and the stores, in general, unjust...
...Once Yevtushenko wrote splendid, intimate love lyrics. Now many Russian intellectuals regard him as a creature of the Soviet Establishment. Though he bravely protested the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, his appointment to the governing board of the Soviet Union of Writers last year was a sign of renewed official favor. He still radiates what seems like a sincere passion and remains a writer who tries to maintain himself in a state where survival is an art. When Americans ask why he is not in jail, he replies with a smile, "Because I am too cunning." Yet no one knows...