Word: zhenya
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...group of British students who toured Moscow in 1964 remember their interpreter, Zhenya Belov, as a dedicated Communist who lambasted them for "political ignorance." Last summer Belov showed his own political ignorance by writing Comrades Brezhnev and Kosygin, suggesting they democratize their regime. He was adjudged insane, put in an asylum and-the Soviet bosses hoped-forgotten forever...
...Russian history. The result has been a remarkable poetic revival. In theaters and student hostels from White Russia to Central Asia, overflow crowds listen to poets with almost religious fervor. On Sunday nights in summer, city squares echo to the liquid, incantatory cadences of Pushkin. Lermontov and. often. Zhenya Evtushenko. One good reason for poetry's popularity: scraps of "noiseless verse," as Russian writers call work that is too avant-garde or radical for publication, can easily be mimeographed and surreptitiously distributed from one group of youths to another. Though several underground poetry sheets have drawn official condemnation...
...Left. Says an anti-Stalinist Soviet official: "Evtushenko & Co. are not a cancer, just a head cold." Pancake Poet. And so. in a way. Evtushenko's courage has not been put to the severest test, as Pasternak's was. But if a change came in his fortune, Zhenya would not be the first Evtushenko to suffer for his views. In the wave of repression that followed Czar Alexander II's assassination in 1881, Great-Grandfather Joseph Evtushenko was banished from the Ukraine as a suspected subversive, died on the grueling 3,500-mile trek to eastern Siberia...
...says he. "From then on I was poetry-struck." After wartime evacuation to Zima, he made goalkeeper on an all-Moscow schoolboy team and signed up for professional soccer. Day before he was to report for training, Soviet Sport published his first poem to see print, and Zhenya turned his sights on literature's big league. He started turning out poems "like pancakes." mostly flat odes to stock Stalinist subjects. ("Very bad." he admits.) They opened the door to Gorky Literary Institute, where he studied desultorily for years without graduating...
Creative Schizophrenia. Zhenya was 19 when Stalin died. In revulsion from political themes, he sought refuge in love lyrics. The conservative critics who had effusively praised his first, insipid book of verse savaged his second, making the book an overnight hit and Zhenya a national name. Ever since, says Evtushenko. he has suffered from creative schizophrenia ; when he writes love poetry he is attacked for escapism ; when he returns to social themes he is faulted for wasting his lyric talent. The same ambivalence, he grins, marks Pushkin, his idol. His other heroes: Boris Pasternak; Hemingway, "my favorite prose writer...