child shall weep." The page containing these lines, which Dostoevsky underlined heavily in his notebook, was long kept on public exhibition in the Dostoevsky museum in Moscow; and it comes close to stating Evtushenko's inner ideal.
But Evtushenko is also, of course, a poet-self-consciously so. His pose as the patriotic voice of liberation in his generation is somewhat reminiscent of the nineteenth-century Eastern European tradition whereby Mickiewicz in Poland, Petofi in Hungary, and Runeberg in Finland were able to crystallize in verse the inarticulate aspirations of their people. But his true poetic ancestors are Russian, the four poets of the early twentieth century whom he has acknowledged as his models: Maiakovsky, Blok, Esenin, and Pasternak.36
Evtushenko described the goal of his poetry as poeticizing the Russian language: continuing the work of Blok and Pasternak in turning language into a thing of beauty and even a means of redemption in human life.87
For a time his work seemed in the Maiakovsky tradition of driving and didactic "slaps in the face of public taste." However, he is probably closer in spirit to Esenin, the peasant poet, the least intellectual of the four. Evtushenko's first poem was on the subject of sport, and he was in fact a professional soccer player before turning to verse. He comes from the Siberian hinterland: a simple, almost childlike extrovert, exuberantly self-confident. Perhaps for that reason his vanity and "court poems" for the regime do not seem so reprehensible, and the possibility of a tragic end always seems close at hand. The message that he has to convey is the old contrast between the perversions of power in Moscow and the purity still lying in the deep interior of Russia, personified for him by "Winter Station," the small Siberian town where he was raised and the title of his first important poem. His approach is that of a country boy, a would-be poet of life in all its exuberance, but his final lines, the farewell "advice" of the town to its departing son, seem more like the message of the Old Russian intelligentsia distilled to its inner essence:
Do not grieve that you have not yet answered
The question put to you by life. Abandon not the search, seek night and day;
And if you do not find, still go on seeking; Truth is good, but happiness is better-so they say,
but without truth there is no happiness!38
Andrew Voznesensky, the second of the "fiery chargers" on the poetic front, filled in the color and detail for Evtushenko's bold sketches. Voznesensky soon proved to be the better poet. Although born in the same year as
Evtushenko, he began serious publishing five years later. The suddenness with which his name came to be paired with that of Evtushenko in the early sixties is a tribute both to the growing sophistication of the younger generation and to its increasing responsiveness to traditional themes and emphases of the Russian intellectual tradition.
There is something strangely fitting about the fact that his first collection of verse, published in i960, bore the title Mosaic, and was published in Vladimir, the original center of Orthodoxy in Great Russia. Voznesensky's poetry combines a mosaic of visual images with a flow of musical sound. He recaptures something of the genius of old Orthodox culture with his use of sensual suggestion for super-sensual ideas. He is the truest renewal of the poetic tradition of the silver age: a confessed disciple of Pasternak, who has succeeded in incorporating many contemporary ideas into his poetic idiom.
His favorite poem, "Parabolic Ballad," is also one of the favorite subjects of official attack. It is a defense of the "Aesopian language" that the true poet must use to make his point. He must speak not in direct statement but symbolically and indirectly. Gauguin reached the Louvre not by moving down from Montmartre but by going to the south seas.
… he sped away like a roaring rocket
.. . and he entered the Louvre, not through stately
portals, But like a wrathful parabola
piercing the roof . . .39
Voznesensky's own poetic "Parabola" (the title of his second collection of poetry, published in Moscow in 1961) was more than much of the Soviet bureaucracy could tolerate. Accused of "formalism" by official critics, he uses the magic of language to damn them for smelling of formalin and incense (formalizm . . . formalin . . . fimiam). There is the hint of fiery apocalypse in his clipped poetic judgment on Stalinist architecture:
Farewell architecture! Blaze freely on, Cow sheds with cupids, Rococo savings banks … To live is to burn.40
To Voznesensky, the function of the poet is prophetic, and the reaction of audiences is "an almost sensual expression of feeling" which leaves their souls "wide open like a woman who has just been kissed."41
Nothing could be more different from the puritanical didacticism of
official Soviet culture. The personalized poetry readings of the early sixties were the scene for original thoughts punctuated by spontaneous applause and boisterous commentary. The rhetorical rallies of the state were, by contrast, characterized by ritual rhythmic applause in response to lengthening stretches of increasingly unoriginal prose. There could be little doubt as to where authentic vitality lay, even though the latter forces retained the power periodically to silence the former, as they did by severe denunciations during the first half of 1963. The work of Evtushenko and Voznesensky seemed to decline during the following two years. But whether these particular figures flourished or faded, the younger generation had built up an oral folklore of its own42 to preserve the memory of good words and courageous action just as an older oral folklore had kept alive the memory of heroic deeds during the long literary silence of the Mongol occupation.
Hardly less striking is the contrast between the new theater that has arisen since Stalin's death and the stereotyped staging of Soviet success stories in the Stalin era. It was, indeed, on the stage that the first sweeping break with Stalinist literary forms took place late in 1953 with the staging of Leonid Zorin's play Guests. If Ehrenburg's novel The Thaw provided the key metaphor for the post-Stalin literary revival, and Pomerantsev's "On Sincerity in Literature" provided its combat slogan, Zorin's play dramatized what the conflict was all about. Based on the infamous "doctors' plot," Guests portrays the villainy of the secret police in a manner suggesting that it was a natural outgrowth of the entire Soviet system. The drama was severely criticized by the official press and forced to close down after two performances.43 Criticism of secret police excesses gained official approval only after Alexander Korneichuk's Wings rendered the dragon of Beria into almost a caricature in order to render the slaying by Khrushchev even more heroic and melodramatic. Khrushchev put the official stamp of approval on this formula with his attendance and ostentatious applauding at a performance of Wings early in 1955; but the question raised by Zorin's more realistic portrayal had not been forgotten merely because it could no longer be directly posed in public.