Yevtushenko.

YEVTUSHENKO

HE IS PROBABLY the last internationalpoet. Yevtushenko*, at 53, seems well past sixty now--hair thinning, face wrinkled from a life of tactfulness and old compromise. How much, I think, must he have seen. And, shrewdly, not seen. His frame is long and stiff and, in both senses, articulate: like a bent extension ladder thrown up against the barn wall. Later on, he will bitch about his "osteo-arrrrrthritis, goddam it.' Yevtushenko has always been more voice than poet. It is a peasant instrument, some r-rolling hurdy-gurdy thing: sonorous and insinuative, sweet, lewd, and absurd. The hands flail around it. He can caper and strut. He is an outrageous ham, a veteran Ingmar Bergman character. This man who, from youth, has played to full stadia, will perform for three hundred or so here at the New York Open Center. Still, that must be more than any American poet could draw--except maybe Donna Rice or Fawn Hall, if either were to write a couplet, oh, tomorrow.

* Quotations in this column are taken from mytape transcript. Naturally they do not reflect the page format used by Yevtushenko.

I don't wonder they drink so muchin Russia. Their language is intoxicated anyway. It all sounds like some drunken old man speaking to a little child at night. Ponderous, sensual, mellow: and bewitching, yes. With translation it must lose all but the most rudimentary sense. I prefer to hear Yevtushenko recite and comprehend nothing at all, rather than to hear his translator friend, Albert Todd, para-phrase in English and sound dull as Liquid Leather. It is, of course, performance material before it is poetry. All, just about, in the first person. And not read: these are dramatic monologues acted out from memory. For instance, his poem "The City of Yes and the City of No' was written, I'm positive, because even your least-Russian audience would notice da and nyet and respond with a laughter of recognition. It is like Italian opera: better enjoyed when you don't know a libretto well. Lines such as "I understand that man is unhappy because he is searching for that happiness sublime' have got to mean more in the original Siberian.

International humanist schmaltz, onemight call it. Somewhere in his oeuvre Yevtushenko has expressed comradeship with, moral support for, every mother's son of us and my cat. The poet as universal empathizer and second-string Christ--a late-Romantic notion, pretty ramshackle now. "I would like to be under the knives of all the surgeons in the world. . . . I would like to suffer all kinds of diseases, wounds, and scars.' Sure he would. This is vacant, riskless hyperbole: a cheap Whitman sampler. He can relish anything except, well, Coca-Cola and Rambo. To ingratiate himself with Western liberals, Yevtushenko has adopted the common Soviet propaganda mannerism. Compassion. Disdain for particularity. Humanness transcends nationalness. Gorbachev may be more bloody-headed and cynical about it, but the approach is similar. Da, I lose people in Gulag and I have a nuclear drop on you-- but these are ethnic differences, underneath we remain just men.

Never has an artist been so doggedby good fortune. Yevtushenko wrote his first notable anti-Stalinist verse just around the Khrushchev denunciation. Zhenya, as they call him, got so famous so fast that he was virtually untouchable through political thaw and freeze thereafter. He could travel, he could publish: in a state where repression is the one human right, Yevtushenko was disfranchised. And that very freedom has been what we Russian Orthodox term a podvig--a spiritual burden. There are Russian poets who, out of jealousy or some more substantial gripe, consider him opportunistic and shallow. He is certainly neither government flack nor heroic dissident. Over and over again in the poems he will refer to himself as a ghost. Hovering, presumably, between art and accommodation. Yevtushenko has tended to portray himself, maybe it is an affectation, as an unhappy man. The four marriages (and one child with cruel brain impairment) are his Gulag. "I was intuitively lucky. Thank God happiness didn't happen.' The poet, after all, is supposed to suffer. Persecution and misery have perquisites.

It is not my place to advise someoneelse on the etiquette of resistance in a totalitarian society. Motor-vehicle bureaus can break me. Since Diocletian first persecuted Christians this question --confrontation or pragmatic compromise --has been an awkward and bitter one. There is no correct answer. Russians, in general, avoid unnecessary heroism. They are patient, fatalistic, tenacious--like dwarf birches in the eponymous Yevtushenko poem. "Of course you command more freedom. But for all that, our roots are more strong . . . we have cleverly made up our poses . . . we sit firmly like splinters under the nail of the frosts.' Cowardice and resolution can mirror each other. Certainly Yevtushenko has had great moments: "Babi Yar' (his poem against Soviet anti-Semitism) was one, and that recent speech protesting state censorship and elitist privilege. So what if thirty years or so elapsed between those two? Martyrdom can be attractive and useful. But too much martyrdom will seriously deplete the gene pool of rebellion.

Yevtushenko, I suspect, knows hisartistic standing and significance. "Disbelief in yourself is more saintly. It takes real talent not to dread being terrified by your own agonizing lack of talent.' His real talent, his peculiar genius, was quite different. Yevtushenko, unlike any other Russian poet, could be read. That, Shostakovich has suggested in Testimony, was his most important contribution to Soviet culture. "Yevtushenko did a great deal for the people. . . . You could buy a book or a newspaper with Yevtushenko's poetry . . . you could do this peacefully, legally, without looking around, without fear.' He is, in other words, an accomplished survivor. And he must realize that. At one point in his recital I was nearly bushwhacked by tears. When he said, "I'm just the ragtag voice of all the voices. . . . I'm the half-scattered ashes on somebody's unknown novel.' How much broken hope has been left desolate in that madcap, brilliant, destructive nation? A nation that sends us Yevtushenko at his best, at his worst, to stand for all the rest.