Show Business: Antic Yevtushenko

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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 and Into the Trees." Said Hemingway's widow Mary: "Can you imagine what would happen in Russia if someone got up in a public place and began to talk about how they put writers in insane asylums?"

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 better than Yevtushenko the price he has paid. In a confessional poem he recites at his U.S. appearances, he says:

The curse upon me, the waste of

my soul

in rage, is the stage. ..

Stage, you gave me the light in

which to scintillate

but took away the soft shadow and

the subtle gleam.