The Icon and the Axe

The appeal of Evtushenko was, however, based on more than youthful exuberance and a general spirit of protest. For Evtushenko played-even if crudely and perhaps unconsciously-some chords with sympathetic resonance in earlier Russian tradition. For the decade after Stalin he represented a reincarnation-however pale-of Belinsky, the "furious" moral hero of the original "remarkable decade." Evtushenko seems close to Belinsky not only in his effect on contemporaries, but in his refusal to accept rationalizations for human suffering. In "Babi-Yar," particularly when recited by Evtushenko, the emotional climax comes with the mention of Anne Frank and the image of innocent suffering childhood, after which he moves on to naturalistic imagery and a moralistic conclusion. His sense of outrage began-according to his officially criticized autobiography-when he saw a helpless ten-year-old girl crushed to death at the funeral of Stalin simply because no one had the proper authorization to prevent the thoughtless mob from surging forth.35 At this point Evtushenko returned the ticket of admission to the Stalinist establishment, which a man of his talents could so easily have gained. The motivation is that of Belinsky in rejecting Hegel's ideal world order, and of Belinsky's echo, Ivan Karamazov, in rejecting his ticket of admission to heaven because of the innocent suffering of children. It may be that the most enduring legacy of the Old Russian intelligentsia lies not in any of its Utopian dreams, but in this passionate desire "that no

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.