Book Review : Yevtushenko: Rhetoric and Performance

Almost at the End of the World by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated by Antonina W. Bouis, Albert C. Todd and Yevgeny Yevtushenko (Holt: $15.95)

Yevgeny Yevtushenko is growing older. Can he be growing better? Here and there, in this very mixed collection, there are signs that he may be.

From the time he caught the world’s eye as the Nureyev of Russian poetry--handsome, romantic, newsworthy and well paid--Yevtushenko has been followed by controversy and not a little suspicion.

For one thing, he was a Soviet paradox: not only licensed to bark, but rewarded for it. He was on a short leash sometimes, at other times was pulled in altogether when the interior political climate grew especially strained. But he always reappeared. His dissidence never went to the point of rupture or exile. His political clock ran fast, but by 15 or 20 minutes.

Politics aside, how much of a poet is he? Rhetorical, emotional, declamatory and often vapid, his work is related to that of the domesticated Andrei Voznesensky or the exiled Josef Brodsky, in a far-fetched way, as that of a Bob Dylan lyric is to a life study by Robert Lowell. He has been more performer than poet, in a sense; more acrobat than dancer. It is fashionable to take him with a grain of salt.

“Almost at the End of the World” is not for those on low-salt diets. There is a great deal of windy stuff. Here is Yevtushenko’s requiem for the explosion of the Challenger. Its forced sentiment is strictly laureate material:

Gagarin’s brotherly shadow/shuddered,

immortally crucified on the stars,

and his widow

began to walk over the ocean/to her American sister-widows.

The translations, apparently collaborative, range from indifferent to wretched, particularly where the effort has been made to salvage a rhyme:

He who breaks up a family,

another one will never earn,

and friendship trampled underfoot

will not return.

Traveling about the world, Yevtushenko denounces oppression and misery in Latin America and Asia and identifies himself with the victims. Afghanistan gets a miss, at least apparently. But Yevtushenko is an old hand at being allusive where he cannot be direct, and there is no mistaking the ecumenical inclusiveness of the following: “What kind of courage is it/to turn all the blank spots on the map of the world/into bloodstains?”

And if his explicit denunciations of conditions in his own country are generally limited to Stalin’s time, he has a curious interpolation in a passage that evokes the long line of present-day humanity clamoring for justice:

This line stretches along the Amazon River

like a whispering Siberian blizzard.

This line snakes through Dallas/through African deserts.

The tail of this line lies in the ruins of Lebanon .

The Siberian simile, ostensibly no more than a bit of imagery, is so misplaced as to be quite clearly an intended reference.

Still, it is rhetoric. Irony suits it better than anger, as in this passage in “Fuku.” This is the longest of the pieces and a mixture of prose and verse. Here, Yevtushenko is denouncing the barrier of armed frontiers:

I suppose

that at first, it was people who invented borders,

and then borders

started to invent people.

It was borders who invented police,

armies, and border guards.

In a piece denouncing the neutron bomb, irony and anger join to fashion a mordant imagery around the notion of a weapon that destroys people but leaves things alone. Yevtushenko imagines the desperation of objects when their makers are no longer there.

Pillows will start looting

Neanderthal skulls from museums.

Shirts

all alone

will pull themselves on statues and skeletons.

Children’s strollers will rock

babies bottled in alcohol from medical labs.

With a people shortage, he writes, things will begin to fight over them:

And, probably, some eager-beaver refrigerator

will devise a new neutron bomb,

which destroys

only things

and leaves people

safe and sound .

I find that brilliant, but too often, Yevtushenko’s brilliance is simply flash. The better poems are quieter and more inward. Middle-aged, the poet tries to come to terms with himself, his flamboyance, his hunger for attention. A poseur who berates himself as a poseur may be suspected of posing. But there is more than that in Yevtushenko’s regret that he has diluted art with action, poetry with celebrity.

“I am coming late/to my own self,” he writes of his frequently, if unevenly, festive career. “I made an appointment with Faulkner/but they made me go to a banquet.” He adds:

Worse than barbed wire

were birthday parties, mine and others,

and roast suckling pigs

hold me

like a sprig of parsley

in their teeth.

The most moving passage in the long “Fuku” poem is the tribute this successfully vociferous man pays to his uncommunicative son, who gets into trouble for long hair, punk attitudes and withdrawal.

“At 16 he is/a yet-unfound answer,” he writes of this “silently boldest son.” He goes with him to a parent-teacher meeting.

They forced him to shave his head

and like a shaved porcupine

he looks at his teachers

with the last of the needles

in his eyes.

And he writes wistfully:

I’m a Silent One, like him

despite my skill with words,

a Silent One

dressing my naked silence in noisy nonsense.