Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933–2017)

Yevgeny Yevtushenko is the fearless spokesman of his generation in Russia. In verse that is young, fresh and outspoken he frets at restraint and injustice, as in his now famous protest over the Jewish pogrom at Kiev.

While sublime on its own accord, it should be perhaps pursued in tandem w/ Remnick's Lenin's Tomb for purposes of context. One couldn't imagine a better example of poet's journalism. This shouldn't be confused with poetic journalism, of which Robert Musil was a licensed practitioner. No this a poet parsing reality as history hemorrhages. The eloquence of the event becomes an image: Rostapovich with a Kalashnikov and a girl named Boat lost to the whimsy of Time.

From my guts I learned the hunger of war
My ribs taught me the geography of Russia

Yevtushenko has always impressed me as a novelist and essayist. This first venture into his verse did not reflect those earlier joyful successes. The opening poem I Would Like is a cry for a nuanced appreciation of everything, a plea that all should have the experiences of those separated by land, class or tongue. The next poem is Fuku, a 70 page exploration of the legacy of hatred and destruction. Fuku itself show more is an African word meaning agent of misfortune and through the poem we touch base with the Gulag, Harlem, Paula Hitler and a depressing host of road-side attractions of atrocity: name dropping napalm and Pinochet all along its merry way. From there matters just appeared to unravel, singing the praises of the hungry children and Louis Armstrong's sweat. It was appropriate that while reading this volume I listened to the Dylan Bootleg series Volumes 1-3. Despite so much beauty, so many things have not aged well. show less

Page 200 of Yevtushenko's Wild Berries was reached last night before the soft tumble into dreamseas. The novel has been quite vivid both to location and to character. as to the latter, it reminds me of Turgenev's Sketches, tiny knots of human sensibility brushing one another in fornt of the hearth. The scenery of the tiaga must be amazing, breeding a not-necessarly nietzchean sense of the eternal return. It becmae quite clear that my travels northwward in upper Michigan and southern Sweden show more were not of this stripe.

The book reminded me initially of Bitov, especially given his tendency to lyricize the habit of fauna in place of recognizing the human government around him. This changes around p. 70 with a series of characters reminiscing on the Civil War and the famines which stripped the Ukraine in the 30s. Stalin himself is not named, at least so far in the novel but the entire spectrum of human endeavor is displayed, most notably amongst the geologists sent to the tiagra to locate a strata of mineral (a subtle contrast, perhaps, between urban/intellectual and rural). show less