BOO KS
439
to see him as a man who has accepted the gravest risks in the name
of his cause.
The myth of the people's virtue complements the myth of the
public poet. Evtushenko tells us that the people are kind, patient,
devoted to the truth and to the R evolution. They were misled and
mistreated by Stalin and his followers, and they fell into confusion after
Stalin's death.
It
was the poet's obligation to articulate the masses'
doubts and point the way back to the truth. This traditional radical
belief in the
narod
is docwnented repeatedly in Evtushenko's narrative :
while he waits for the editor's decision to publish
Babi Yar,
the old
printer who has set the poem (provisionally, in the event it was ac–
cepted) comes out of the composing room with words of encourage–
ment and a bottle of vodka; an ex-convict takes responsibility in a crisis,
and shames a Stalinist bureaucrat; Evtushenko's immense, responsive
audiences of ordinary people validate his poetic role as truthseeker
and illuminator of the people's spirituality. This is time-honored myth–
ology from the Russian radical past which has been sanctified in Soviet
rhetoric for decades. With these respectable credentials he draws up
his inventory of Stalinist evil, which includes every variety of dehumani–
zation; and speaks impressively for his vision of a more humane world,
better attuned to the needs and capacities of simple men.
There is very little about poetry itself, no detailed talk of the
craft, only a few swift references to the work of his contemporaries.
At one point he associates himself with the wider world of poetry:
"I was intoxicated by Walt Whitman's immense reach, the turbulence
of Rimbaud, the luxuriance of Verhaeren, Baudelaire's naked sense of
the tragic, Verlaine's witchcraft, Rilke's sublety,
T.
S. Eliot's hallucinat–
ing visions, and the healthy, peasant wisdom of Robert Frost." But
future students of poetry will look in vain for the living influence of
these men on Evtushenko's own work. H e has chosen a much smaller,
more topical and more urgent use of his talent, as he has told us.
And it must be pointed out that his brief invocation of the European
tradition has its strategic purposes, too. The battle for access to the
world's art is a central part of the assau lt on Stalinist bigotry and
chauvinism. The pages are peppered with names- Hamsun, Freud,
St. Exupery, Mann, Nietzche, Hemingway. Let the Western reader
understand that the new Soviet generation is not barbarian; let the
Soviet eavesdropper understand that these names are indispensable to
any participant in modem culture. The same urgent message is con–
veyed in his passionate defense of the modem sculptor Neizvestnyi and
the modem painter Vassiliev.
