Word: yevtushenko
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Asked during a question period what the dualism symbolized, Yevtushenko replied, "That is our Russian national secret...
...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...
...Yevtushenko has been applauded in the West as a free anarchic spirit against Stalinism. But sometimes, when he dreams of "Hindus in machine-gun wagons/ And Peruvians in helmets and sheepskin jerkins," or when he visualizes Marshal Budenny "galloping all over Africa,/ And I, of course, galloping right after him," the effect is quite other than intended. The image of the dynamic poetic dramaturge fades, to be replaced by that of another poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, inflamed with patriotic ardor over the breakfast table and dashing off Form! Form! Riflemen Form!-to be published in the Times, please...
...Secret. In his public readings, Yevtushenko comes to much truer poetic life when he sings of The City of Yes and the City of No, which contrasts suffocating authoritarianism with total permissiveness...