The Thinking Reed

The crisis of ideology in the sixties is very well illustrated in the evolution of Yevtushenko, the poet who was at one time seen as the spokesman for the new ideas. A civic position of the old type (as shown in Bratsk Power Generating Station and Babi Yar) was no longer possible after 1968 — not so much because of the censorship as because the very notion of renewing the system and getting back to ‘true Leninism’ and so on had been discredited. In the new state of affairs one’s civic position had to be ‘extrasystemic’, and so the poetry came out in samizdat. It also appeared in the form of the ‘guitar songs’ so despised by Solzhenitsyn,42 which were disseminated about the country in millions of tape-recordings. This democratic poetry proved really popular because its authors openly challenged the system (like A. Galich) or else (like V. Vysotsky) simply turned their back on it. The latter type of poetry corresponded to the feeling of the broadest masses of the working people in the seventies. But it called for thinking — not only political but, above all, poetic — of a kind quite different from Yevtushenko’s. Finally some, especially B. Okudzhava, turned to history and the experience of the war, seeing in this the last refuge for civic poetry.

Yevtushenko did not try to carry on in his old way, and this was sometimes sad and sometimes funny. He got lost. Tactics degenerated into politicking. Yevtushenko’s misfortune was not that he hoped simply to reform the system but that he could not make up his mind to break the official rules of the game, which no longer gave him scope to continue as a civic poet. After 1968 intrasystemic reformism assumed extrasystemic form, being obliged to proclaim its ideas in samizdat, to lead an underground existence or to function within the dissident movement. At the beginning of the 1980s Roy Medvedev still defended the reformist ideas of the Khrushchev epoch, but he was able to do so successfully only as a dissident.

On the other hand reformist ideas are better expressed, after all, in articles than in verses. In 1960 the reformists were the extreme left wing of the official Party, but in the 1970s they became the moderate wing of the opposition. And while moderation is good and helpful in politics (especially when there is no revolutionary situation), it is out of place in poetry. Poetry is not at all the domain of moderation. The poet who is a revolutionary is a combination encountered quite frequently, but a poet who is a reformist is absolutely unthinkable. Of course, among poets, there have always been people who held reformist views. But can one recall even one good poem in praise of moderate reformism? ‘It is impossible to be oneself if one is not constantly in quest of oneself,’ wrote Yevtushenko.43 His misfortune was that he lost himself in the sixties, and did not manage to find a new ‘self’ in the seventies. And that was not his fate alone.

The political turn was sharp, and many were taken by surprise. Many lost their heads. Many others tried to save what could still be saved. At that time Solzhenitsyn and the writers who supported him waged such a struggle. Reformist ideas did not yet go further than abolition of the censorship restrictions on art. Essentially, this was a campaign of self-defence for literature. Its programme was formulated before the invasion of Czechoslovakia, in Solzhenitsyn’s letter to the Fourth Congress of the Writers’ Union, in May 1967. A number of writers expressed support for the letter: P. Antopolsky, G. Vladimov, V. Sosnora, V. Konetsky. The last-mentioned wrote that the questions raised by Solzhenitsyn were ‘the fundamental questions for our literature’.44 The oppositionist writers rallied round Solzhenitsyn at that time, ‘in battle order’, but already not for offence, only for defence.

Navy Mir