Poet Under Fire

It is difficult to be a prophet with honor in one's own country, particularly if that country is the Soviet Union. Yet Poet Evgeny Evtushenko seemed born to the role when first he burst upon the Russian scene a decade ago. He was young, handsome and engaging. His luminous love lyrics signaled the new kind of poetry that was possible after the death of Stalin. Babi Yar was a courageous, impassioned protest against Russian antiSemitism. In The Heirs of Stalin, he made a frontal attack on Stalinists still active among the Soviet leadership. Soon Evtushenko commanded a vast following in Russia among people long weary of the dreary cant and moralizing themes of earlier Soviet literature.

He carried that reputation abroad on a series of spectacular world tours. Everywhere he went, he was acclaimed as the embodiment of a new Russia dispelling the miasma of its Stalinist past. Enjoying it all, Evtushenko took to offering political pronouncements at press conferences. Since many of his audiences assumed him to be as critical as they were of Communism, he more and more found himself driven to the defense of his country and—dismayingly to many of his admirers—its system and some of its injustices as well.

Third for the Chair. But the champagne (which the poet drinks exclusively) flowed on, and pretty girls flocked to him, like so many pigeons around the statue in Moscow's Pushkin Square. His poetry began to show the strain of his public posturings. Increasingly facile and bombastic, his work declined in quality in proportion to his rise as a political personality. It gave him some moments of self-doubt, as when he wrote:

You live highly praised and opulent.

You live, flashingly ephemeral, an example that the end of talent comes when rebellion's impossible.

Today Evtushenko is the focus of a controversy set off by the most inconsequential of events: his nomination last month for the Chair of Poetry at Oxford. Long-smoldering antagonisms to Evtushenko flamed into print during the balloting, and it was no matter that he finished third behind the winner, an English solicitor and minor poet, Roy Fuller. The attacks on him continued.

"Hack propagandist of the Soviet regime," "squalid pseudo-liberal," "defender of Soviet atrocities" were some of the epithets hurled at the poet by British intellectuals in the London press. The bill of indictment drawn up against Evtushenko included charges that he publicly denounced Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuli Daniel and other imprisoned writers during his trips abroad. The telegram he was reported to have sent Brezhnev and, Kosygin condemning the Czechoslovak invasion was dismissed by some as "mythical."

Charges in Question. His advocates countered that he is "a just, humble and good man," and "a voice of conscience among his colleagues." Some defenders have maintained that the charges against him were wrong. Novelist William Styron and others who recently met with the poet in Russia say that they are certain he sent the wire to the Soviet leaders. Evtushenko was so sickened by the invasion, Styron reports, that he told him in a dubious comparison: "Now we Russians are just like you Americans; we are part of the international power Mafia."