a glimpse of a faraway galaxy

Yevtushenko: before...

George Szirtes posts today from a poetry conference in Romania. How interesting is that! And it turns out that the star turn at this conference is Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose name itself has an almost physical effect on me - so potent was the charm, for good and indeed for ill, back in the day. In its electricity charge it's almost like hearing someone say "Voldemort."

I read Yevtushenko at maybe 14 or 15, having found a copy of his Precocious Autobiography lying around the house. It blew me away; next I read the long poem Zima Junction, about the village where he grew up (in the Penguin Modern European Poets series). It made me wish I too had something to write about, and started me (as well it should) on a lifelong fascination with Russian poetry.

Not long after that I heard my Estonian uncle spit something derisive at the mention of Yevtushenko's name. It wasn't in relation to my reading matter; I was impressed for precisely that reason. I think the word he used was "collaborator." I jumped; my uncle wouldn't say any more. "I hear things," he said, muttered a few things I didn't understand, and changed the subject.

Now, Yevtushenko was a boy wonder of the USSR. He was a good-looking guy. He was smooth, and who knows how smooth: this was still the height of the Cold War, a period even people in their twenties now can't remember. The significance of what my uncle whispered was huge. Yevtushenko was a signatory (along with people like Sartre) of a petition against the internal exile of Joseph Brodsky, who (it should be noted) did not allow gratitude to keep him from criticising Yevtushenko, once he was living in the USA. Yevtushenko was always allowed to write and flourish in the USSR, and - I believe - to travel, and to be this international golden boy. I'm not sure if anybody really knows how he managed it.

He'll be 70 next month, and until I started thinking about this today I don't think I'd have been able to tell you whether he was alive or dead. So this glimpse comes to me from far away, but also far back in time - like the light from the stars.

Here's what George Szirtes has to say - starting a day or two ago with the revelation that Yevtushenko now resembles "Danny Kaye, in a Jimmy Savile suit doing a Bowie concert."

"...charming, may, I think, be the word, somewhere down the line between Ol' Blue Eyes Sinatra and Billy Graham at an evangelist meeting. OK, so not charming. He is a wicked old ham with a twinkle in his shamanistic eye. Maybe that is poetry to him. I felt sorry for him for just one moment last night when about twenty of us were sitting round the table drinking and laughing. He peeked round the corner and we instinctively - absolutely instinctively, and utterly without hostility - fell quiet. He looked sad then disappeared. The expectation of venerating someone we do not venerate was too much for us. He couldn't quite come in in a matey way and join in. It's hard to mix in with the planets if you think you might be the sun."

Here is the rather poignant opening stanza of Zima Junction (of course I still have my copy):

As we get older we get honester,
that's something.
And these objective changes correspond
like a language to me and my mutations.
If the way I see you now is not the way
in which we saw you once, if in you
what I see now is new
it was by self-discovery I found it.
I realise that my twenty years might be
less than mature: but for a reassessment:
what I said and ought not to have said,
and ought to have said and was silent.














...and after! Thank you Google. The mind boggles.