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“YOU’RE a brave man they tell me./ I’m not./ Courage has never been my quality./ Only I thought it disproportionate/ so to degrade myself as others did…” That’s how ‘Talk’ begins, a poem that struck a powerful chord when I first encountered it some 38 years ago. Its conclusion struck even deeper: “How sharply our children will be ashamed/ taking at last their vengeance for these horrors/ remembering how in so strange a time/ common integrity could look like courage.”
‘Talk’ was the third-last inclusion in a slim volume of verse I had picked up, the inscription suggests, less than two months after Pakistan’s first elected prime minister had been sent to the gallows by a thoroughly despicable military dictator whose dystopian obscurantist fantasies — at least that’s what they seemed at the time — had cast a callous pall over the nation.
At the time, it was hard to accept that the pall would (at least partially) endure for decades to come, that what was being done would never completely be undone, that the horrors would never be adequately avenged. And perhaps that is why integrity can still look like courage.
The book in question is titled Yevtushenko: Selected Poems, published by Penguin in 1962, and it remains in print to this day — a testimony to the early promise of a remarkable poet whose appeal transcended all manner of boundaries.
Like Dylan, Yevtushenko was a voice of his generation.
On April 1, at the age of 83, Yevgeny Yevtushenko died in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he had been a university teacher for many years — the same day that Bob Dylan finally decided to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature he was awarded last year. In the latter instance, one is inclined to wonder whether the choice of date was entirely coincidental.
There are parallels between the two of them. Both were cast as angry young men in their respective milieus and as spokesmen for their generation. Dylan rejected the mantle. Yevtushenko was more ambivalent. The latter did not sing his verses — although others did — but he was also a dramatic performance poet, and frequently able to fill auditoriums and stadiums with awed audiences.
The Russian poet published his first collection at 19, but truly made his mark in the so-called thaw that followed Josef Stalin’s demise in 1953. Stalin’s funeral, in fact, was a turning point for the 20-year-old Yevtushenko, who recounted in A Precocious Autobiography — published uncensored in France in 1962 — how witnessing the dozens trampled to death on the occasion restructured his attitude towards the tyrant.
Several years later, his poem ‘Stalin’s Heirs’ — “I turn to our government with a plea:/ To double,/ And triple the guard at the grave site/ So Stalin does not rise again,/ And with Stalin, the past.” — reputedly appeared in the Pravda newspaper only after Nikita Khrushchev’s direct intervention. “We removed/ Him/ From the mausoleum,” the poem concludes. “But how do we remove Stalin/ From Stalin’s heirs?” The question resonated a decade after the dictator’s death, not long before Khrushchev was cast out by men who could indeed be described as Stalin’s slipshod heirs. The tragedy is that it hasn’t quite gone away.
As Yevtushenko subsequently put it, “... Stalin’s greatest crime was not the arrests and the shootings he ordered. His greatest crime was the corruption of the human spirit.” Which is perhaps why his warning never entirely lost its topicality.
The penultimate entry in Selected Poems is ‘Babi Yar’, Yevtushenko’s best-known poem, an extended cri de coeur against Russian anti-Semitism, which begins with a description of the then unmarked site in Kiev where Nazi occupation forces slaughtered tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews in what is said to be one of the worst incidents of mass murder in the Holocaust. The composer Dmitri Shostakovich incorporated it as the centrepiece of his Symphony No. 13. “No Jewish blood runs among my blood,” it concludes. “But I am as bitterly and hardly hated/ by every anti-Semite/ as if I were a Jew. By this/ I am a Russian.”
In his day, Yevtushenko was both hailed and decried as a dissident, but never ostracised or criminalised by the Soviet authorities. Allowed to travel freely across the world, he was also condemned as a Kremlin propagandist. There is no good reason to suspect he ever seriously compromised his beliefs. He denounced the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, and enthusiastically welcomed the perestroika/glasnost promise of change ushered in by Mikhail Gorbachev.
The quality of his verse may have varied, but there can be little doubt Yevtushenko loved not just Russia but also the Soviet Union, without being blind to its flaws. He mourned its end with: “I didn’t take the Tsar’s Winter Palace/ I didn’t storm Hitler’s Reichstag./ I am not what you call a ‘Commie’./ But I caress the Red Flag/ and cry.”
Published in Dawn, April 5th, 2017
