A very timely poet. Poet on contract

Illustration copyright Aleksander Scherbak/TASS

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who died on April 1 at the age of 85, is the most prolific and widely read Russian poet of the second half of the last century, the author of twenty long poems and approximately 200 poems and songs.

Art historians say that masterpieces are born from a struggle against something, and that the best environment for culture to flourish is one where creators are “pressed” but not strangled.

The post-Stalin era gave rise to a special category of talented poets, writers and directors who did not hide their liberal inclinations and critical attitude towards Soviet reality, and at the same time showered with fame and benefits.

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Vysotsky, Voznesensky, Ryazanov, Gaidai, Lyubimov, the Strugatsky brothers and, of course, Yevtushenko balanced on the edge of what was permitted. They did not become deputies or Lenin Prize laureates, but they were given work, and rumors of dissatisfaction with the top management and butting heads with censorship delighted the public.

Illustration copyright Nikolai Malyshev/TASS

“Yevtushenko is a classic sixties man. Good man, although very vain, he did a lot of good in the most terrible years. Seeing injustice and cruelty, he rushed into battle (Czechoslovakia, the trial of Daniel and Sinyavsky, the massacre of Brodsky, the fate of Solzhenitsyn). But he did not cross the fatal boundary line. I went through the verses, but they didn’t understand the verses. They couldn't read between the lines. Or were you afraid to read it? Pursuing such a famous poet is more expensive for yourself. Even Andropov understood this. Solzhenitsyn, Vladimov, Aksenov, Voinovich, Galich are strangers. It’s a stretch for Yevtushenko to pass for one of his own,” wrote Valeria Novodvorskaya.

From Siberia to Moscow

The future classic was born on July 18, 1932 in the village of Nizhneudinsk, Irkutsk region, into the family of Alexander Gangnus, a Baltic German, hydrogeologist, whose research was later used in the construction of the Bratsk hydroelectric station, and a lover of poetry.

“...I will be a Siberian poet, and those who don’t believe me in this, well, don’t understand anything!” - Yevtushenko wrote, although he left Siberia as a child.

The attitude towards the Germans during the war was known, and the mother, moving to Moscow, changed Zhenya’s surname to her maiden name.

Soon after the construction of the Berlin Wall, Ulbricht complained to Khrushchev: your Yevtushenko, while in the GDR, said that Germany would someday become united.

“Well, what should I do with him?” answered the Soviet leader. “Send him to Siberia? So he was born there!”

Early glory

Yevtushenko published his first poem in 1949 in the newspaper "Soviet Sport". Three years later, for the poetry collection “Scouts of the Future,” with the indispensable at that time expressions of love for Stalin, he became the youngest member of the USSR Writers’ Union.

Illustration copyright Getty Images Image caption Yevtushenko during a trip to the Amazon, 1968

“I was accepted into the Literary Institute without a matriculation certificate and almost simultaneously into the Writers’ Union, in both cases considering my book a sufficient basis. But I knew its value. And I wanted to write differently,” Yevtushenko said in his memoirs.

Soon came deafening fame. “Children of the 20th Congress” - young Yevtushenko, Rozhdestvensky, Voznesensky, Okudzhava, Akhmadulina, who embodied the spirit and mood of the “Thaw”, gathered audiences of thousands for poetry readings and entered the history of literature under the name of “stadium poets”.

Particularly famous were the evenings in the Great Auditorium of the Moscow Polytechnic Museum, where Yevtushenko attended every year until the end of his life.

In a country without real politics and entrepreneurship, people had more time and desire to be interested in culture. Literature and poetry replaced parliamentary debates and journalism.

Although Yevtushenko was good at writing love lyrics, he was the most politicized of his colleagues. “A poet in Russia is more than a poet,” he proclaimed his life credo a little later.

He did not hide the fact that he was following the example of Mayakovsky, not in terms of poetic form, but in his claim to the role of tribune.

According to critics, Yevtushenko adopted a penchant for narcissism from Mayakovsky, who shared familiarity with the Sun in poetry. “Zhenya wants too much to be loved by both Brezhnev and the girls,” wrote director Andrei Tarkovsky.

By hints and directly

Yevtushenko masterfully used Aesopian language: he castigated stupid unlimited power, police, denunciations, censorship, loyalty, pretending that it was exclusively about tsarism or the overseas “Tauntons of Duvalier.” He condemned the war in Vietnam and the neutron bomb, but not from class, but from general humanistic positions. In the poem “Kazan University”, next to the eulogies to Lenin, he inserted the words: “Only those who think are the people. All the rest are the population.”

And sometimes he spoke out directly.

Illustration copyright Getty Images Image caption Speech by Yevgeny Yevtushenko in Moscow, 1970s

In 1961, he wrote the poem "Babi Yar", translated into 72 languages ​​and ending with the words: " Jewish blood not in my blood. But with callous malice I am hated by all anti-Semites, as a Jew, and therefore I am a real Russian!”

Created in the same year, the cult song “Do the Russians Want War?” some high-ranking military officials demanded a ban as pacifist.

In 1962, Pravda published the poem “Stalin’s Heirs”: “We took him out of the Mausoleum. But how can we take Stalin out of Stalin’s heirs?”

On the brink

Some episodes of Yevtushenko’s biography could have ended badly for him with a slightly different turn of events.

At a meeting between Khrushchev and the intelligentsia on December 11, 1961, Yevtushenko stood up for the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, who was publicly advised by the first secretary of the Central Committee to “get out if you don’t like our country.”

“The grave will correct the hunchback,” Khrushchev said, slamming his fist on the table. “The time has passed - and, I hope, forever! - when people were corrected with graves,” answered Yevtushenko. Those present froze, waiting for the leader’s reaction, but he clapped his hands.

In March 1963, while in Paris, the poet submitted an autobiography in verse to the Express weekly magazine.

Illustration copyright Getty Images Image caption Evgeny Yevtushenko, 1963

The top leaders were especially displeased by Yevtushenko’s words that he understood long before the 20th Congress that something was wrong with what was happening in the country.

For several months, newspapers published scathing articles about “Khlestakovism,” “political foolishness,” and “Dunka in Europe.” Pravda published Sergei Mikhalkov’s fable “A Tit Abroad,” ending with the words: “Perhaps it’s not worth sending such a tit abroad.”

Yevtushenko was indeed made “restricted from traveling abroad” for some time, and they practically stopped publishing - until he wrote an ideologically consistent poem “Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station”.

The poem “Tanks are moving through Prague,” born in one breath on August 23, 1968, was distributed in samizdat and was published only during the years of perestroika.

Yevtushenko traveled abroad perhaps more often than any of his colleagues, and visited more than a hundred countries. Of course, his things were not inspected at customs.

However, in May 1972, upon returning from the United States, where he met with Nixon himself, the poet was subjected to a humiliating four-hour search at Sheremetyevo and 124 copies of banned books and magazines were confiscated.

Image caption Yevtushenko loved bright shirts (in the studio of the BBC Russian Service on May 12, 2006)

Formally, according to Soviet laws, Yevtushenko faced prison. In an explanatory note, he wrote that he was studying the enemy’s ideology in order to know how to fight it.

The next day, Yevtushenko was invited to the KGB reception room on Kuznetsky Most. The high-ranking security officer spoke with the poet quite peacefully, hinted that someone from his entourage had “snitched” on him and advised him to choose his friends more carefully in the future.

Most of the books were returned after three months.

Joseph Brodsky assessed the liberalism shown by state security in his own way, decided that his colleague was an informant for Lubyanka and uttered the phrase: “If Yevtushenko says that he is against collective farms, then I will be for collective farms!” - despite the fact that when Brodsky was imprisoned for “parasitism,” Yevtushenko worked for him through the Italian communists.

Going into politics

In 1989, the cream of the creative intelligentsia gathered at the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR. Yevtushenko won the alternative elections in one of the Kharkov districts by a huge margin. He participated in the creation of the Memorial society and the writer's movement in support of perestroika "April".

When the time came for businessmen and political strategists in Russia, he left to teach in the USA, but continued to speak and publish in his homeland. In 2010, he presented his collection of paintings to the state, including paintings once given to him by Picasso and Chagall.

Illustration copyright Vyacheslav Prokofiev/TASS

Over time, the word “sixties” became the subject of ridicule and vilification from left and right, but Yevtushenko said until the end of his days that he was proud of this title.

The past week was marked by two anniversaries: Vladimir Mayakovsky turned 120 on July 19, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko turned 80 on July 18. Both poets are among the most significant poets for Russians. In addition to the proximity of anniversaries and getting to the top, these creators have something else in common...

I understand that for some people the figure of Yevtushenko causes an ambiguous reaction. And fans of Sovietism have a fierce butthurt. But if he had written laudatory poems in honor of Stalin, as in his younger years, then his fellow Stalinists would have praised him. But it is stupid to judge a poet by his political views.
Yes, many things are ambiguous - both shocking and the often used “I” in creativity. One can recall laudatory youthful poems about Stalin, Lenin, Soviet power... And Brodsky’s famous words about Yevtushenko (as retold by Dovlatov), ​​and Gaft’s poisonous epigram (?). Can. But... often the poet himself sincerely believed in what he wrote, because Pushkin also said that poetry should be a little naive and stupid... There were many successful poems in Yevtushenko’s work, many works became songs, but not everyone succeeds. And the words “A poet in Russia is more than a poet” - a manifesto of the work of Evgeniy Aleksandrovich himself - is already a catchphrase that has steadily come into use. And create catchphrase not everyone succeeds. And you shouldn’t judge a poet by his political leanings.
A lucky guy, a seeker of glory, favored by various authorities? Not so simple...

Yevtushenko belongs to the generation of “sixties” - people who breathed a little freedom after the death of Stalin and believed that “socialism with human face"One of the symbols of the "thaw" were the evenings in the Grand Auditorium of the Polytechnic Museum, in which Yevtushenko also took part, together with Robert Rozhdestvensky, Bella Akhmadulina, Bulat Okudzhava and other poets of the wave of the 1960s. Loud fame and abuse of Khrushchev, chanting of Soviet power and condemnation of the intervention in Czechoslovakia, intercession for dissidents and state awards...

In the course "Russian History" by Georgy Vernadsky, there is no mention of Lomonosov, but there is a mention of Yevgeny Yevtushenko: he (along with A. Voznesensky) is a symbol of the young poetry of the 1960s, awakened to life by the thaw.
By 1970, in the minds of the Soviet reading public, the image of Yevtushenko had developed as that of a “Great Poet”: this is a special social role, implying not only fame, but also “civilism” - sharp responses to everything significant in current history, which become major events not only literary, but also public life. The history of the post-Stalin USSR, marked by Yevtushenko’s poems of the 1960s, is the history of the struggle against the ideological and moral postulates of Stalinism.
"My poetry is like Cinderella,
Forgetting about your own self,
He washes every day, little dawn,
The era's dirty laundry."

The future symbol was born in 1933 at the Zima station in the Irkutsk region (sung by him in a large number of poems and poems) in the family of geologist Alexander Rudolfovich Gangnus. Mother - Yevtushenko Zinaida Ermolaevna (1910-2002), geologist, actress, Honored Cultural Worker of the RSFSR. Yevtushenko with early childhood considered and felt himself to be a Poet. This is evident from his early poems, first published in the first volume of his Collected Works in 8 volumes. They are dated 1937, 1938, 1939. His writing and experiments are supported by his parents, and then by school teachers, who actively participate in the development of his abilities...

He grew up, studied in Moscow, and was expelled from the Literary Institute in 1957 for speaking out in defense of V. Dudintsev’s novel “Not by Bread Alone.”

I call fire on myself
The first publication of poems appeared in 1949 in the newspaper "Soviet Sport". The poems were anti-American - there was a Cold War. In 1952 he was already a member of the USSR Writers' Union. His first collection is exactly what is needed for admission to the Union: cheerful, slogan-based.
However, in the second half of the 1950s, Yevtushenko managed to overcome this beginning, balance his oratorical pathos with lyrics, and most importantly, recognize himself as a poet of a new generation, called upon to be an “echo of the Russian people.” The duty of the “Great Poet” is not to miss all the most acute things that the topic of the day gives. This is how “Babi Yar” (1961) arose, to which Yevtushenko owed instant world fame, and “Stalin’s Heirs” (1962), which researchers eventually attributed to the pinnacle of Yevtushenko’s civic poetry. They revealed what became the basis of his poetic method: a combination of journalistic acuity with the accessibility of language. Great poet cannot be complex and sophisticated.
We can say that both poems are a conscious provocation, and this is also part of the method. In the sense that the poet anticipated in advance a violent reaction - primarily to the centuries-old history of anti-Semitism, presented in a brief poetic form. From this presentation it emerged that Babi Yar was not the product of Nazism alone. It is now written that it was not the Nazis, but the Ukrainians who drove the Jews into Babi Yar for extermination, that Babi Yar was a symbol of Russian and Soviet anti-Semitism. But then it was impossible to write about it directly.

Especially, as it turned out later, the ending angered many:
“There is no Jewish blood in my blood.
But hated with calloused malice
I am like a Jew to all anti-Semites,
And that’s why I’m a real Russian!”

The method of causing fire on oneself worked. On the pages of the newspaper “Literature and Life,” which was abbreviated as “LiZhi,” Alexey Markov answered him: “What kind of a real Russian are you, / When did you forget your people? / Your soul, like trousers, has become narrow, / Empty like a flight of stairs.” . He, in turn, was answered by Yevtushenko himself (“It seems that our past has been hammered into you, / It still stinks and messes with you. / Yes, Yevtushenko beat an anti-Semite, / And wounded a member of the SSP in the heart”).
This answer was circulated in the lists, and then two literary whales, K. Simonov and S. Marshak, also responded, also in poetry and also with an unequivocal condemnation of Markov. The result is something from the 20s. forgotten: a sharp poetic polemic. Then it circulated in the form of a typescript, all four poems together, Yevtushenko’s fame grew, samizdat meant recognition. Then he performed, as they say, 250 times a year, and once 14 thousand people came to listen to him.

"Stalin's Heirs" was caused by a specific reason - the removal of the leader's body from the mausoleum. Yevtushenko transforms the form of the “Danish” (by date) poem and at the same time plays with the concept of the “eternally living Stalin” - commonplace old duty toasts. Now this “eternal life” has an ominous meaning: “The breath flowed from the coffin, / when they carried him out of the doors of the mausoleum. / He wanted to remember all those who carried him out - / the young Ryazan and Kursk recruits, / so that somehow later he could gain for a sortie of forces, / and to rise from the ground, and to reach them, the foolish ones.”

The image of the “living Stalin” develops further. A formula arises that is still relevant today: “It seems to me that there is a telephone in a coffin./ Stalin is again communicating his instructions to someone./ Where else does the wire from that coffin go?..” The poem was published in Pravda on the personal instructions of Khrushchev .

You're shit and I'm shit
On his thirtieth birthday, Yevtushenko published a prosaic “Autobiography” (1963) in the French weekly Espresso, in which he slightly exposed the hypocrisy of the Stalinists lurking in the USSR. He was lucky again: the targets he was aiming at began to shout in unison, accusing him of renegadeism and slander of the Soviet system and Soviet literature.
And this, in turn, made him even more famous. He gathers stadiums of fans. His colleagues envy him and hate him. An epigram allegedly written by Yevtushenko on Dolmatovsky is being spread orally: “You are Evgeniy, I am Evgeniy, you are not a genius, I am not a genius, you are shit and I am shit, I am new, you are long ago.”
During these same years, Yevtushenko also formed a method of relations with party ideological bodies - the method of “vacillation”. He is brave and courageous, especially in the export version, but at the moment when it becomes dangerous, he is ready to repent and admit his mistakes - so that he is not made travel abroad and unpublished. Khrushchev's remarks in a speech on March 8, 1963 at a meeting with literary and artistic figures are characteristic. First, he recorded Yevtushenko’s incorrect position. "But,- Khrushchev further noted, - his speech at the meeting of the Ideological Commission inspires confidence that he will be able to overcome his hesitations. I would like to advise Comrade. Yevtushenko<…>do not look for cheap sensation, do not adapt to the moods and tastes of ordinary people. Don't be ashamed, comrade. Yevtushenko, admit your mistakes.<…>If opponents of our cause begin to praise you for works that please them, then the people will rightly criticize you. So choose what suits you best."

The long quotation is given because it describes with utmost clarity Yevtushenko’s behavior, his signature tactics of maneuvering and “vacillating.” Khrushchev suggests choosing one of two, but Yevtushenko chose “both at once.” First, make a “mistake” for which “opponents” will praise you, and then repent of it. “I’m like a train that has been rushing for so many years / between the city of Yes and the city of No”("Two Cities", 1964). At the heart of everything is defending creative independence through compromise: “You have narrowed the meshes in your nets. Your nets are illegal!/ And if it is impossible to live without nets in the world,/ then let them at least be legal nets./ The old fish are entangled - they cannot get out, / but the young fish are also entangled - why? are you destroying the young?”(“The Ballad of Poaching”, 1964).

Tanks march in truth
Cautious anti-Stalinism, in some places growing to a protest against the totalitarian regime, but in combination with Soviet ideologemes, gave birth to the poem “Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station” (1963-1965), published in “Youth”. And all this time Yevtushenko writes lyrical poetry.
In the late 1960s - early 1970s. the method of "loitering" in "legitimate networks" continues to be used. Having gained fame and power, Yevtushenko fearlessly opposes the persecution of Sinyavsky and Daniel, the persecution of Solzhenitsyn, stands up for the repressed P. Grigorenko, A. Marchenko, N. Gorbanevskaya, and does not remain silent when Soviet tanks entered Prague:
"Tanks are moving through Prague
In the sunset blood of dawn.
Tanks are walking in truth
Which is not a newspaper"

E. Yevtushenko and R. Nixon

At the same time, he returns to the themes of the Cold War: he boldly denounces American imperialism. For the 100th anniversary of Lenin, he writes a conjunctural poem “Kazan University”.
In the 1970s, the poet was no longer dangerous for the regime; he chose topics that were far from political acuteness on the verge of “anti-Soviet behavior” (which Andropov signaled to the Politburo at the time). The poem "Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty" poignantly compares the murder of Tsarevich Dmitry in Uglich and President Kennedy in Dallas. The time has changed, when it was no longer possible to “stagger”, as under Khrushchev, on the one hand, and the achieved prosperity, countless positions, publications “here” and “there” (translations into 72 languages!), free trips abroad - with the other, they made Yevtushenko empty and official.
He is aware of the stagnation, stuffiness, fatigue of the soul and expresses this in boring poetry. Completely hopeless were “The Dove in Santiago” (1978), which mentioned Allende, as well as the poems “Mother and the Neutron Bomb” (1982) and “Fuku!” (1985), dedicated to the struggle for peace and filled with rhetoric, pathos, and slogans.

During perestroika, Yevtushenko revived, became co-chairman of Memorial, people's deputy, secretary of the Writers' Union, briefly intensified his appearances in the press, rhyming several political theorems, and quickly left for the USA (where he lives to this day). For some time, the postmodernists-octogenarians still recalled him. Timur Kibirov pronounced a cheerful verdict on the Soviet regime, and Yevtushenko with his immortal anapests about “white snows”: “As if nothing had happened, / But it happened in shit, / we live at random. / I can’t wash myself off either.”
Yevtushenko responded to “shit” immediately, anger revived the verse: “And suddenly I found myself in the past / with my entire era. / I was abandoned to the young jackals, / like a Jew to the Black Hundreds... The era was vomited up by black stuff, / and vomiting is a fashionable style. / You Smell this kind of postmodernism and it’s like vomited dust.”
The old guard doesn't give up...

And another point of view:

Today, perhaps, there is no second poet capable, like Yevgeny Yevtushenko, of assembling and single-handedly holding the five-thousand-strong Kremlin Palace in suspense. Nobody reads poetry like this anymore: powerfully, passionately! His furious voice is mesmerizing, his prophetic words burn, but it is difficult for today’s 20-year-olds who have looked into the legend “for a glimpse” to imagine that this is just a pale shadow of the deafening glory that Yevtushenko had half a century ago.
Then “Eugene - the passing era of genius” was listened to in admiration not by halls but by stadiums. While Soviet pop singers stood at attention at the microphone, as if on a guard of honor, Yevtushenko went on stage in a shirt of cheerful parrot colors and signed autographs with jokes. He didn’t care that they didn’t print it, they kept him and didn’t let him go - he arrogated to himself the privilege of reading what was unpublished.

Once in Luzhniki, an enthusiastic crowd picked him up and carried him - and so, in his arms, he was elevated to the poetic Olympus. For several hours in a row, Evgeniy Aleksandrovich read poetry in Russian and Spanish at the Arena de Mexico - and 28 thousand Mexicans listened to him with bated breath. In Sanyago de Chile he performed from the balcony of La Moneda Palace, from which last time President Allende addressed the people, and 30 thousand not very educated, ordinary Chileans did not leave the square.

The power of his emotional impact, in other words, his charisma was so great that Paolo Pasolini got the idea to film the poet in the role of Jesus Christ. In vain did the famous film director, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Italy, beg the die-hard Soviet officials to give consent, in vain promised to create the image of a rebel revolutionary - they flatly refused him...

However, Yevtushenko was never distinguished by holiness. Already at the age of 10, he was forced to do cross-stitch and satin stitch, trying to distract him from eroticism (then the novels of Guy de Maupassant were considered that), and at 15, teachers were racking their brains about how to react to indiscreet lines:

I have no one to compare with in greed,
And again and again and again
I want all girls to dream about
I want to kiss all women...

Well, after the famous “The bed was spread out, and you were confused...” the guardians of Soviet morality completely branded the author as a “singer of dirty sheets.” Even the poet Vladimir Sokolov, who agreed that, as an exception, Yevtushenko would be admitted to the Literary Institute without a matriculation certificate, asked in a friendly way: “Zhenya, I don’t understand why you need women, you have such a rich imagination.”

This is some kind of primitive, unbridled masculinity manifested itself not only in contempt for sanctimonious morality, but also in defiant fearlessness. In a country living in an atmosphere of total fear, some considered Yevtushenko’s behavior a harbinger of future changes and imminent freedom, while others, on the contrary, considered it a strangeness, an anomaly. Someone even, trying to justify their own slavish obedience, started a rumor that Yevtushenko is a KGB colonel: they say, it’s easy for him to be brave... They had no idea that fear can also be different: you can shit your pants when you meet hooligans in a dark gateway or being summoned to the boss’s office, or you may be afraid of offending a child... The last feeling is familiar to Evgeny Alexandrovich, like no one else.

His biography, like “Russian roulette,” is exciting and unpredictable. He defiantly did not show up for Pasternak’s expulsion from the Writers’ Union and wrote a letter in defense of the expelled Solzhenitsyn, drank champagne with Robert Kennedy (with a disarming smile asking him: “Do you really want to become president?”) and auditioned for the role of Cyrano de Bergerac in the never-ending Ryazanov’s film was made because of this... Gambling, life-affirming and shocking, he annoyed the red-browns so much that in 1992 the “patriots” burned his effigy in the yard of the Rostovs’ house. I think this is no less eloquent an assessment of the poetic contribution than the USSR State Prize and the recent nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

“No years!” - summed up Evgeniy Aleksandrovich, having reached his eighties. In my opinion, he hasn’t changed a bit over the years (except that now he writes not with a pen, but on a laptop), but we have become different. The era of developed Russian poetry and poet-preachers has been replaced by the time market relations, in which there was no place for poetry. Writers have found themselves pushed to the margins of the social movement; television is now the ruler of minds. Thank God, living in two houses: in Russia and the States allows Yevtushenko to reduce the unpleasant consequences of such a situation to a minimum, and to those who try to reproach him with this, even accuse him of duplicity, the poet responds with the words of his friend Pablo Neruda: “My enemies call me two-faced.” ? Fools - I have a thousand faces!

Which of Yevtushenko's faces is real? Was he sincere when he wrote laudatory verses about Stalin and Lenin?
The first collection of poems included the following heartfelt lines about Stalin:
...In the sleepless silence of the night
He thinks about the country, about the world,
He thinks about me.
Goes to the window. Admiring the sun,
He smiles warmly.
And I fall asleep and I dream
The best dream.

One chapter of the poem “Kazan University” is dedicated to V.I. Lenin and was written just in time for Lenin’s 100th anniversary. - According to the poet himself, all this (as well as his other sincerely propaganda poems of the Soviet era: “Party Cards”, “Communards will not be slaves”, etc.) is a consequence of the influence of propaganda. Andrei Tarkovsky, having read “Kazan University” by Yevtushenko, wrote in his diaries: “I read it by accident... What mediocrity! Takes aback. Bourgeois Avangard... What a pathetic Zhenya. Yoke. In his apartment all the walls are covered with bad paintings. Bourgeois. And he really wants to be loved. And Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, and the girls...”
And what poet doesn’t want to be loved? Poets are like children...

However, in 1962, the Pravda newspaper published the widely known poem “Stalin’s Heirs,” timed to coincide with the removal of Stalin’s body from the mausoleum. His other works “Babi Yar” (1961), “Letter to Yesenin” (1965), “Tanks are moving through Prague” (1968) also caused great resonance. Despite such an open challenge to the then authorities, the poet continued to publish and travel throughout the country and abroad. In 1969 he was awarded the Order of the Badge of Honor.
His speeches in support of Soviet dissidents Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn, and Daniel became famous. Despite this, Joseph Brodsky did not like Yevtushenko and sharply criticized Yevtushenko’s election honorary member American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1987.
Dovlatov describes the following case:
Brodsky underwent serious heart surgery. I visited him in the hospital. I must say that Brodsky suppresses me even in normal circumstances. And then I was completely at a loss.
Joseph is lying there, pale and barely alive. There are equipment, wires and dials all around.
And then I said something completely inappropriate:
- You are sick here, and in vain. Meanwhile, Yevtushenko opposes collective farms...
Indeed, something similar happened. Yevtushenko’s speech at the Moscow Writers’ Congress was quite decisive.
So I said:
- Yevtushenko spoke out against collective farms...
Brodsky answered in a barely audible voice:
- If he is against it, I am for it.

Maybe it was like that. But Yevtushenko stood up for Brodsky, pulled him out of exile. The Soviet government "wrote a biography of Brodsky." But Yevtushenko wrote his own, he had his ups and downs. Along with the conjuncture, there was also “Babi Yar”, beautiful lyrics. But we have a lot of poets who have written only 1-2 successful poems, and a lot of nonsense. So Yevtushenko deserved his place on the poetic Olympus.

The history of the creation of the song “Do Russians Want War”
I remember how once GLAVPUR (the Main Political Directorate of the Army) categorically prohibited the performance of my song “Do the Russians Want War” as a pacifist song “demobilizing our soldiers.” And then, when the Minister of Culture Furtseva nevertheless insisted on this, the Song and Dance Ensemble of the Soviet Army named after. Alexandrova performed the song on all foreign tours. Khrushchev sang along at a banquet in the Kremlin with tears in his eyes, and those ideological generals who once banned the same song, not without pleasure, threw bay leaves of success into their soup.

E. Yevtushenko:
- The refrain “Do the Russians want war” belonged to Mark Bernes. He said: “You know, we should write a song about whether the Russians want war?” I replied: “What can I write here? You already gave me the refrain.”
When we recorded the song, the Political Directorate of the Army (PUR) stood up against this song. They said that it would demoralize our Soviet soldiers, and we need to educate the combat readiness of the soldier who will have to fight against imperialism. And the song was not played on the radio, did not get into the repertoire. Despite this, Mark began singing it in his concerts, which got him into trouble.
Then I went to the Minister of Culture Ekaterina Furtseva. She was a unique woman, very emotional. And I understood that if I started speaking abstractly, then desired result I won't achieve it. I said: “Ekaterina Alekseevna, I beg you very much - listen to one song.” She didn't know what was going on around this song, didn't know about PUR's reaction to it, etc.
I put the tape recorder on the table and played the recording of Mark Bernes and me. Tears appeared in Furtseva’s eyes, she hugged me and said that this was an amazing song. Then I told her the story with PUR. We must give her credit: of course, Furtseva could have been afraid of a fight with such a powerful enemy as the PUR. She was already in disgrace then, she was taken out of the Politburo, she even cut her wrists, as far as I know. But still she was a strong woman. In front of me, she picked up the phone and called the chairman of the radio committee. She was told that since PUR was against it, I couldn’t do anything with the song. Then Furtseva said that she took full responsibility for this. The chairman asked: “Can you give us a written order?” Furtseva immediately wrote a note. Someone went to the radio - and the song was played the next day. Then it went around the whole world. Paradoxically, it was performed with great success by the Soviet Army Choir under the direction of Alexandrov. By the way, the then young Muslim Magomayev performed it with this began his ascent.

- And yours, to a large extent.
- No, everything was different for me. My first ascent began when my poems began to be copied by hand into notebooks. It all started with the poem “This is what’s happening to me.” This is like a simple lyrical poem dedicated to Bella Akhmadulina. She was then eighteen years old, I was twenty-three, if I’m not mistaken. I did not attach much importance to this poem, but the poem still lives, several melodies have been written on it, it lives, passing from one generation to another.
...
What do you mean I live in America? I also live in Russia, and in America I teach Russian poetry and Russian cinema. And I am happy that my American students are completely different Americans. An American who loves Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak. Coming to Russia, he will see it with completely different eyes. He will never again have a colonialist approach to our country. I am happy that my American students are now working with Russia.

- What university do you teach at?
- I teach at two universities, which is quite a rare case for America. I teach in Oklahoma and New York at Queens College. At the request of the students, I give a lecture “Yevtushenko about himself,” which is recorded on tape by local television. I hope to edit it so that a variety of people will watch it.
...
By the way, Karaulov asked a question in one of Bulat Okudzhava’s programs: “How do you feel about Yevtushenko teaching in America?” Okudzhava went to the shelf, took down my thousand-sheet anthology “Strophes of the Century,” which I had been working on for 23 years, and said: “This is what Yevtushenko is doing in America. And we should be grateful to him. And the fact that he teaches there is "I envy him: it's good if you know English. If I knew English, I would also go to teach."

Critics wrote about Yevtushenko:
Yevtushenko’s extreme success was facilitated by the simplicity and accessibility of his poems, as well as by the scandals that often arose from criticism around his name. Counting on the journalistic effect, Yevtushenko either chose topics of current party politics for his poems (for example, “Stalin’s Heirs”, “Pravda”, 1962, 10/21 or “Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station”, 1965), or addressed them to a critically minded public (for example. , “Babi Yar”, 1961, or “The Ballad of Poaching”, 1965).<…>His poems are mostly narrative and rich in figurative details. Many are long-winded, declamatory and superficial. His poetic talent rarely manifests itself in deep and meaningful statements. He writes easily, loves the play of words and sounds, which often, however, reaches the point of pretentiousness. Yevtushenko’s ambitious desire to become, continuing the tradition of V. Mayakovsky, a tribune of the post-Stalin period led to the fact that his talent, as clearly manifested, for example, in the poem “For the Berries,” seemed to be weakening.

Critics accuse Yevtushenko of hidden imitation of Mayakovsky, who undoubtedly had a profound influence on the poet’s work.

And Yevtushenko himself said at one of the concerts:
- As a poet, I always wanted to combine something from Mayakovsky and Yesenin. And I learned a lot from Pasternak. I learned historical morality from him. And I want all people, including myself, to be happy at my concert.

In his poem dedicated to Yesenin, Yevtushenko wrote:
Russian poets,
we scold each other -
Russian Parnassus is sowed with squabbles.
but we are all connected by one thing:
any of us is at least a little Yesenin.
...

And it’s a pity that you’re not here yet
And your opponent is a loudmouth.
Of course, I’m not a judge for you two,
but still you left too early.
When the ruddy Komsomol leader
On us
poets,
fist rattles
and wants to crush our souls like wax,
and wants to sculpt his likeness,
his words, Yesenin, are not scary,
but it’s hard to be cheerful because of it,
and I don't want to
believe me,
lifting up my pants
run after this Komsomol.
Sometimes I feel bitter, and it all hurts,
and there is no strength to resist nonsense,
and drags death under the wheel,
How a scarf once drew Isadora in.
But you have to live.
Neither vodka
no loop
no woman -
All this is not salvation.
You are the salvation
Russian land,
salvation -
your sincerity, Yesenin.
And Russian poetry goes
forward through suspicion and attacks
and with Yesenin’s grip he lays
Europe,
like Poddubny,
on the shoulder blades.

Bella Akhmadulina said about Yevtushenko in the poem “Dream”: “I will sing him, and you judge, you have different dreams at night.” Well, she probably knew better...
In Yevtushenko, along with the momentary, something from eternity broke through, although of course he often responded to the topic of the day, but behind this the poet’s pain was felt:

Am I an enemy of Russia?
Am I not happy
into other tanks, dear ones,
poked your snotty nose?

How can I live as before?
if, as if planes,
tanks move on hope,
What are these - native tanks?

Before I die
what - it doesn’t matter to me - he’s nicknamed,
I am addressing a descendant
with just one request.

Let it be over me - without sobbing
they will simply write, in truth:
"Russian writer. Crushed
Russian tanks in Prague."

And Yevtushenko aptly described the era of stagnation:

I drove and drove to Ivanovo
and couldn't sleep all night,
like a half-invited guest
and a little bit uninvited.

I was traveling on a slow train,
where they squeezed, like in a vice,
microporous oranges -
Mother Moscow fruits.

Along with snoring and wheezing
sailed through the forests
imported washing powder
and, of course, sausage.

People slept like the dead
in the blue reflections of the moon,
and obtained with such difficulty
they were rocked by dreams.

And what dreams nursed them
along the singing wires,
only pillowcases know
our Russian trains.

And, priceless in value,
like carriages of silence,
were hooked up to the train
dreams all over Russia at once.

Our train was moving through the drizzle,
burned the night with rays,
and to your chest, snoring,
everyone was holding something.

Granny pressed it to her heart
valuable package, where was it?
jar with instant coffee.
Grandmother slept lightly.

The businessman pressed
having tormented my bed,
important rubbish walled up
into a mangled briefcase.

And a busty worsted woman,
whistling thinly with his nose,
pressed by the state
your personal child.

And so all my dear,
even if you fall at her feet,
I am middle Russia
pressed him to his chest.

With revolutions, wars,
with the ashes of villages and cities,
with endless howls
Russian blizzards and Russian widows.

I asked myself
under beeps and wires:
"We learned so many terrible things -
Maybe it'll last forever?"

And I was also asked:
"For so many bitter years we
deserve a good life?
Do you deserve it or not?"

And, to all Russians, our experience
distorted, exhausted,
typed, whispered,
the carriage creaked:

"What is imagined will not come true
behind the first bridge.
What doesn't come true will be forgotten
under the birch cross."

Yes, there was such a thing - electric trains from Moscow, from where they brought food...
And then there was the Afghan war - the agony of the godless “evil empire”, which finally claimed lives: its own soldiers and foreign citizens. But in the name of what?

A Muslim ant crawls along the cheekbone.
It's very difficult to crawl... The dead man is too unshaven,
and the ant quietly says to him:
“You don’t know exactly where the wound died.
You only know one thing - Iran is somewhere nearby.
Why did you come to us with weapons,
here for the first time hearing the word “Islam”?
What do you give to our homeland -
beggar, barefoot,
if in your own -
queue for sausage?
Are there not enough people killed for you?
to add more to the twenty million again?”
A Russian guy lies on Afghan soil.
A Muslim ant crawls along the cheekbone,
and about how to raise, resurrect,
He wants to ask the Orthodox ants,
but in the northern homeland of orphans and widows
There aren't many of these ants left.

But besides poems on the topic of the day, there were also about the eternal:

White snows are falling
like sliding on a thread...
To live and live in the world,
but probably not.

Someone's souls without a trace,
dissolving into the distance
like white snow,
go to heaven from earth.

And there was also this that I want to remember for the anniversary.

(view from the outside)

Russia has gone through troubled times more than once. This is how it happened historically. The most difficult thing was usually to decide who would become the main one, who to choose, who to follow. When this was decided, everyone calmed down, life got better, the present became clear, the future was seen in rosy colors. True, not for long.

Troubled times tend to arise unexpectedly and in different situations. So now it is impossible to decide on who should be appointed as the main Russian poet of our time. Poetry admirers are being intensively processed. Gradually, two opposing camps, two “retinues” formed. Each plays its own king. Other names, other poets seemed to have disappeared. Only two remained in the news: Evgeny Yevtushenko and Joseph Brodsky. Fans generously distribute compliments and titles to their chosen ones. Here is a brilliant, national, great, and famous Russian poet, the pride of the country. Go figure out who is really more important. Of course, only Time will put everything in its place, and descendants will appreciate the gift and true greatness of everyone. But for us, their contemporaries, Pushkin’s view is very important: “and for a long time I will be so kind to the people...”. So how will they be kind to the people?

Of course, both Yevtushenko and Brodsky are extraordinary personalities. Talented. Reflecting the world and time in their own way.

Evgeniy Yevtushenko

On July 18, 2013, Evgeniy Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko turned 80 years old. The date was marked by a number of events. On May 21 in Moscow, at the Polytechnic Museum, he was honored as the laureate of the national Poet Prize in 2013. It was shown on the Russian channel "Culture" New film director Nina Zaretskaya “Will the clover field make a noise?” This name is taken from the romance of the same name based on the words of the poet. The film is a documentary, in the frame Yevtushenko behaves naturally and answers questions. He represents his museum in Peredelkino, which he created with his own money and housed in it an interesting collection of paintings, books and much more that is dear to him and which he donates to his homeland. The poet denies suspicions of “Americanization.” No, he is a citizen of Russia, and only Russia.

And this despite the fact that there were compatriots in his homeland who spared no time and effort to make a straw effigy, attach a sign to it with the name of the poet and burn it. The execution was carried out back in January 1992 under the leadership of two prose writers, Yu. Bondarev and A. Prokhanov, in Moscow, in the courtyard of the Writers' Union house. Something African is visible in this new action for Russian literature.

But 21 years later, other people decided to celebrate Yevtushenko’s 80th birthday in Moscow, warmly and solemnly, with the presence of the poet. It didn’t work out - Evgeniy Aleksandrovich had undergone a very difficult operation the day before: his leg was amputated. The pain in my leg had bothered me before, but I thought it would be okay, it would go away. Lately I have been walking, leaning on a stick. But apparently it’s not fate. Yevtushenko communicated with those gathered in the hall via Skype, and this meeting was broadcast on Russian television. A courageous man, he behaved cheerfully and did not complain. Who should I complain to?

I want to stop loving you, but I can’t,

just to let go completely

when I'm almost howling in pain,

and then I fall almost into muteness.

It’s better that I endure everything alone,

It’s better that I pay off alone,

I'll suffer

Why do you need this female fate - to remain Alyonushka in the dark forest?

Only rare woman who can resist

with the clanging of teeth surrounding

but the happiness of a great wife consists

from the misfortunes my husband shared with him.

Yevtushenko never held a stone in his bosom, he was open and trusting. It began to be published early, and its popularity gradually grew. This irritated some fellow writers. In his memoirs, Evgeniy Aleksandrovich speaks warmly of his friends from the sixties. But not all of them considered him their friend. As Anatoly Gladilin testifies, for example, the relationship between Zhenya and Vasya Aksenov was tense.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko was very charming in his youth: high growth, athletic figure, relaxed manner of communication, ability to conduct an interesting conversation, grasping the mood of the interlocutor on the fly. The eyes are bright and piercing. An excellent example to represent the Soviet Union abroad. He was liked, many famous people knew him. He met with US President Nixon, was friends with Robert Kennedy, and talked with Marlene Dietrich. At a time when Poland was an unattainable foreign country for Soviet people, and the height of their dreams was a holiday in Bulgaria, Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s foreign voyages and meetings seemed very suspicious. First of all - to envious people. This could not be forgiven. And a persistent rumor was born: Yevtushenko is a hidden KGB employee, or, more simply, an informant. Later, when the archives were opened and no documents confirming “sexism” were found, another wording was brought to light: he was an “agent of influence.”

Some people stubbornly do not want to recognize Yevgeny Yevtushenko as a decent person and a national Russian poet.

All these accusations do not stand up to scrutiny. Any person representing his country abroad is always an agent of influence. For example, Vladimir Mayakovsky was one (especially when in Paris he bought underwear and other women’s little things for Lily Brik from a list). And the famous violinist David Oistrakh, and the famous grandmaster Mikhail Botvinnik. And Solomon Mikhoels, who collected money for the Red Army during the war in the United States. Labeling them is, to say the least, dishonest. As for “influence,” those abroad knew about our realities better than we ourselves, who lived in this country.

One of the anniversary events was the film “Solomon Volkov. Dialogues with Yevtushenko”, held on the first channel of Central Television. It consists of three parts, each dedicated to a specific period of the poet’s life. The film turned out successful, smart, and tonally very warm. Solomon Volkov is an excellent interviewer and thoughtful listener. He completely devotes himself to the conversation, does not place pitfalls, which encourages his interlocutor to show deep sincerity without pretense or falsehood.

These dialogues are actually confessional. Evgeniy Aleksandrovich understands perfectly well that, basically, life has already been lived. And everything is as it is, nothing can be changed. This is about poetry, and about wives, and about beloved women, and about the sixties. But his main bewilderment and pain is his relationship with Joseph Brodsky. The relationship between the two is completely different people- both by age, and by place of residence - one is a Muscovite, the other is a Leningrader, and by family upbringing, and by life experience, and by life philosophy.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko was eight when the war began. By this time, his parents were already divorced, although little Zhenya himself did not understand or feel this. The mother came from an artistic background, the father wrote good poetry and later appreciated his son’s first experiments. When Hitler’s troops approached Moscow, the boy was sent to Siberia, to the Zima station, to his grandmother, his mother’s mother. I went to school there. Despite the difficulties of the wartime, he later fondly remembered this station as his homeland.

One day my mother came from the front with her friend Kostya Simonov. He impressed Zhenya strong impression And military uniform, and his sociability. And delicious canned food and other strange products turned out to be very useful. Just a few days of communication stuck in his memory.

Towards the end of the war, Evgeniy returned from evacuation, and was subsequently shaped by Moscow. Were there hard times, I had to endure hunger, slander, and slander. But it didn't break. He continued to write poetry, began to publish, and became famous. His multifaceted talent manifests itself in different directions.

As a poet, Yevtushenko is revered by lovers of Russian poetry. Its audience is huge, considering stadiums with thousands of seats. His speeches are interesting, meetings with him are a celebration of anticipation. He is highly respected by that part of the readers and listeners who deeply experience the tragedy of Babyn Yar.

The song based on the words of the poet “Do the Russians want war” was very popular. At one time, the army of Great Patriotic War veterans at their feasts, having taken one hundred grams of combat, performed it like an anthem-incantation. Defending their homeland, they went through absolute hell. They survived and sincerely did not want war.

There are poems dedicated to loved ones. This is light lyrics. No vulgarity, very masculine. The poem “White Snow is Falling” is piercingly lyrical, what is called “high calm.”

Talleyrand, the greatest cynic and expert on human weaknesses, instructing novice careerists, said: “Fear the first movement of the soul, because it is usually the noblest.” This advice is not for Yevgeny Yevtushenko. His character is dominated by the national Russian trait - reckless prowess. It manifests itself spontaneously both in life and in creativity. He is not afraid to open up, does not look around, looking for sympathy and support. He always, by his own admission, strives to quickly respond to a situation so that people hear some kind of answer. And he admits: “Well, I get it in full.” Prudence is alien to him, that’s why he’s a poet.

1961 Yevgeny Yevtushenko at the age of 28 writes “Babi Yar” and reads it in front of listeners. Soviet society is shocked by the theme, the emotional intensity, some are outraged by the “impudence” of the poet. The threats that the non-Jew Yevtushenko heard addressed to him did not affect the Jew Brodsky. True, Joseph was only 21 in 1961, so it’s too early to make any claims about the subject matter. But later, when he reached adulthood and rose to the pedestal, there were never such poems in his portfolio.

1968 In June, Robert Kennedy was shot and killed. Yevtushenko was shocked by the death of his good American friend. And the immediate reaction was a poem dedicated to his memory. Just at this time, a young poet from Leningrad was in Moscow. The life paths of Brodsky and Yevtushenko crossed. The Soviet government did not favor Joseph. Evgeny, due to his responsiveness, was friendly towards his persecuted colleague. In a fit of revelation, I read him newly written poems. He remembered them, especially the lines: “And the stars, like torn bullets, / America, are on your banner.” Indeed, a magnificent poetic image.

In the evening, Joseph called Evgeny and offered to go to the American embassy and sign the book of memory, expressing condolences over the death of R. Kennedy. He doubted whether they would let him in, and it was too late. Joseph declared: “They will let you in!” Indeed, they were allowed in. This book is actually for honored visitors, which Brodsky was not at that time, although a collection of his poems was published in the West. It is clear that Robert Kennedy was completely indifferent to him, but he used Eugene to confirm his importance. Yevtushenko, who sincerely experienced the loss, of course, had no idea about such self-interest.

1968 On August 21, Yevtushenko in Koktebel heard on the radio about the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia. He rushed to the post office with the text of a telegram of protest - to Moscow, to Brezhnev. The confused telegraph operator sent it. She was immediately fired. Yevgeny Aleksandrovich went to Feodosia, to the KGB headquarters, and demanded that the dismissed woman be reinstated. He threatened to hold a press conference in Moscow and start a scandal. The woman was reinstated at work.

The next day he wrote a poem that began:

Tanks are moving through Prague

in the sunset blood of dawn.

Tanks are walking in truth

which is not a newspaper.

In 1968, Brodsky was 28 years old, already a fully formed personality. But he didn’t write such poems either.

Joseph Brodsky knew how to calculate what and where he could use it. He did not recognize selfless friendship. He understood that he lacked education - he only had seven classes behind him. Possessing the gift of portraying himself as modest and in need of care, he endeared himself to the talented young poet Evgeniy Rein. Rein friendly edited each poem by the aspiring author Joseph Brodsky. Then he brought him to Anna Akhmatova. At that time she took care of gifted youth, the so-called “Akhmatov’s orphans” - E. Rein, A. Naiman, D. Bobyshev. Brodsky also entered this circle.

Clever Akhmatova not only appreciated the abilities, but also unraveled the essence of the nature of the young talent. A year before her death, in 1965, having learned that Brodsky’s first collection of poems had been published in the United States, she remarked: “Since Joseph is already in New York, I’m not worried about him. New York officials will already take care of him.” Anna Andreevna knew what she was saying.

John Glad, an American Slavist, professor at a number of universities, translator, fluent in Russian and who had been to the USSR and knew all the Russian emigrant writers, in a conversation with Russian historian Dmitry Sporov in May 2013, in particular, said: “... in 47- They created the CIA. And by the 60s, wild amounts of money were spent on propaganda of any dissidents and emigrants, which continues to this day, by the way. And there were many minor writers who became famous only because of this. But of course they don’t understand this.” Glad further noted that the Russian-language publishing house named after Chekhov in New York received more than half a million dollars from the CIA.

Solomon Volkov in his “History of Russian Culture of the 20th Century” indicates, with reference to American sources, that the release of the first collection of poems and poems by Joseph Brodsky in 1965 was sponsored by the CIA. And his second book, “Stopover,” was published in 1970 by the same publishing house mentioned above. Chekhov.

Joseph Brodsky

In connection with his publications abroad, Brodsky's situation became more complicated. He would like to go to the West, but he would prefer to get there in the aura of a martyr, persecuted by the authorities for his poetic gift. Biographers, according to Brodsky himself, claim that he did not want to leave the country. It is not true. Alexander Kushner writes that he was with Joseph when he received a call and was told that his application to leave had been granted. Brodsky was upset, and Kushner objected: it would be worse if they refused.

Why was the author of the two collections upset? He was not at all satisfied with leaving on an Israeli visa (he applied with a call from Israel). It would be better to expel him - it would immediately raise his authority. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who came to the KGB to retrieve a suitcase of books that had been detained from him at customs, accidentally witnessed a discussion there about the Brodsky case. There were different options, including bad ones. As usual, Evgeniy Aleksandrovich, with the best intentions, intervened and helped ensure that the poet, who already had permission to leave, was not bothered, but was given the opportunity to quickly leave. He subsequently told Joseph about this episode - and became his personal enemy for life. And then, in the USA, Brodsky told everyone that Yevtushenko was a KGB agent.

On June 4, 1972, the disgraced poet flew to Vienna, as all Soviet Jews usually left the USSR. He was met at the airport - the owner of the publishing house Ardis, Karl Proffer, flew in specially from the USA. He immediately offered Joseph a job. And a month later, Brodsky accepted the post of visiting poet at the University of Michigan. After which, for 24 years he was a professor, teaching there and at other universities the history of Russian literature, the theory of verse, Russian and world poetry. How did he do it? This is what Lev Losev wrote in the introduction to his book “Joseph Brodsky. Works and Days,” published in 1999:

“Taught” in his case needs clarification. For what he did was little similar to what his university colleagues, including poets, did. First of all, he simply did not know how to “teach”. Own experience he had no luck in this matter... Every year out of twenty-four, for at least twelve weeks in a row, he regularly appeared before a group of young Americans and talked to them about what he loved most in the world - about poetry... What was the name of the course, was not so important: all his lessons were lessons in slow reading of a poetic text ... "

Obviously, this teaching style helped to hide the tongue-tied speech. Many who knew Brodsky talk about this defect. His oral speech was not developed, lexicon was limited. This is understandable - they were expelled from the 8th grade, and the subsequent short-term work, either in a factory, or in a boiler room, or in a morgue, if it enriched the language, it was only with everyday vocabulary and obscenities. Whoever you hang out with, that's how you'll gain. And the basic basis of personality, according to psychologists, is formed by the age of 17.

In this regard, the role of the school is very important. She provides systematic education. School is not just lessons and homework. This is the main tool for child development, proven over centuries. Children learn to live in society, comprehend the science of survival, which determines their role and place in the team. They learn to write and, what is very important, - oral speech, acquire social communication skills. It is here that in the process of learning and role playing games personality is formed. Joseph Brodsky did not receive such systematic training, although he read the books.

Therefore, when it was necessary to quickly formulate a thought, but there were not enough words, he resorted to known method: applied the mat - all problems are solved. This remained with him until the end of his life. His good friend, Lyudmila Stern, recalls how already in America in telephone conversation Joseph, in response to her remark, sent her three letters.

Joseph Brodsky often inserted obscenities into his poems, although his written speech could easily do without profanity. He was even proud of his rough tongue. And from his heavy hand, dirt filled the poetic pages. And now when I open Russian magazines, I'm sure I'll come across something like this. I love poetry. But its combination with obscenities is unnatural. It’s like pouring a bucket of slop into a barrel of aged wine with a delicate aroma.

From the first moment of his stay in the USA, Brodsky did not have to worry about a piece of bread and a roof over his head; he was provided with permanent job. Naturally, he decided to take up serious study of English. From numerous articles we know that he coped with this brilliantly, even began to write excellent poetry in a new language. Do not believe these articles - the usual glorification of idols in such cases, to whom all possible and impossible feats are attributed. In fact, he learned the language quite well, but it was bookish knowledge. Yes, he wrote a number of poems in English, but they were very bad.

The British critic Reed called his review of his collection ToUrania (To Urania) (1988) “The Great American Catastrophe.” In addition to a host of grammatical errors, Reed notes Brodsky’s manner of “expressing controversial opinions in a stilted, indisputable tone.” The famous Swedish Slavist Bengt Youngfeldt writes about this in his new book about Brodsky, “Language is God” (2012). He notes that during Brodsky’s life they tried to remain silent about his failures, and after his death the assessment of his English-language poetry was clearly negative.

Thus, the poet Craig Raine (namesake of St. Petersburg) in the article “Reputation Subject to Inflation” in the Financial Times spoke about both Brodsky’s poetry and prose that they are characterized by “clumsiness,” “a chatty lack of clarity,” and “wateriness.” In his opinion, Brodsky is “arrogant and banal” (as a thinker) and “little competent” (as a critic). Youngfeldt cites the facts of tongue-tiedness that I have already mentioned. When the newly minted Nobel laureate gave his speech (in Russian!) it was very difficult to understand him. And when I spoke at conferences in English, no one understood the essence.

Brodsky's arrogance manifested itself, of course, not only in poetry, it came from real life. When his former Leningrad friends, who had once helped and looked after him, emigrated to America, they met with a very cold reception. In the new position of the master, he did not need them.

He now has other useful acquaintances and connections. One of the most striking personalities to whom Joseph became very attached was Gennady Shmakov. A brilliant polymath, he spoke eight languages, had a deep knowledge of Russian and world poetry, brilliantly translated both ancient and modern poets, and was an expert on theater and cinema. Lyudmila Stern notes that Shmakov did not strive for fame and generously shared his unique intellectual baggage. And Brodsky needed just this.

Shmakov died in 1988. Alas, Joseph Brodsky never mentioned this name or its meaning in his life.

In the United States, the recent exile changed his emphasis: he began to say that in his homeland he was not oppressed, he was not persecuted. He simply left on his own, because there was no place for his extraordinary talent to develop there. That is, he is not a dissident, but a Poet. The Americans valued him at first precisely for his opposition to the totalitarian regime, since his poetry did not tell them anything. Raised his poetic prestige Nobel Prize. By the way, all my attempts to find out who nominated him for the Nobel Prize were unsuccessful. Secret.

It should be noted that Brodsky’s success in the West misled many gifted authors in the Soviet Union. Not understanding the role of the CIA in this takeoff, they rushed to fertile lands, where they bitterly discovered that no one needed their skills and talents. Disappointment sometimes led to tragedy.

Joseph Brodsky willingly responded to requests for help, wrote letters of recommendation, and gave money. But, on the other hand, he could not stand anyone’s intellectual superiority. And I had a special dislike for those who actively published in the USSR and were respected there.

An illustration of this trait is an episode from Vasily Aksenov’s novel “The Burn.” Aksenov submitted the manuscript to the publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Editor Roger, a friend of Brodsky, asked him to evaluate the novel (according to other sources, Joseph took the manuscript himself). I read it and returned it with the words: it’s no good. Aksenov was refused.

Voznesensky annoyed the Nobel laureate. And he couldn’t stand Yevtushenko at all. In a conversation with S. Volkov, the following story was told. After Brodsky’s death, Yevgeny Aleksandrovich was given a letter that he wrote to the leaders of Queens College with a warning: not to hire Yevtushenko because he is anti-American and is a KGB agent. As evidence, the lines taken out of context “... and the stars are like bullets” were cited there are torn bullets, America, on your banner” (pain and solidarity with America are expressed here, which I.B. understood very well).

It was the most ordinary denunciation. And they believed him.

The poet, who came to the USA with his wife and two children, found himself without a job. He was ostracized (KGB!), all meetings with him, speeches, etc. were cancelled. But he could not understand what was going on, what was happening. He rushed around the country until he found a place in the wilderness, at the University of Tulsa, where he still teaches the history of Russian literature. Moreover, he teaches creatively, with full dedication, as evidenced by student reviews.

Evgeny Yevtushenko is honest not only about work, but also in his personal life. Although it was not always possible to combine creativity, family and one’s temperament. He broke up with his first wife, Bella Akhmadulina, having fallen in love with another, but remained on friendly terms with her. Sokol lived with his second wife, Bella’s friend, Galina, for 17 years. He dedicated wonderful poems to her. But there were no children in the family. One day, while Evgeniy was once again abroad, Galya went with Bella to the orphanage to help her choose a girl for adoption. And in the end, she also chose a boy. When Yevtushenko returned home, his son Petya was waiting for him, who immediately took the name of his adoptive father. The artist Pyotr Yevtushenko lives in Moscow and has a good relationship with his father.

Irishwoman Jen Butler became the poet's third chosen one. Two boys were born, one seriously ill. He needed constant massage. Father, mother, visiting massage therapists replaced each other at the sick child’s bedside. There were no breaks allowed. Massage therapists had to be paid, and for this they had to work, write, leave, meet people. The wife hardly spoke Russian - as a result, there were insults, reproaches, and Jen went to her parents. But the father did not relieve himself of responsibility, helped financially and often visited his Irish sons.

Yevtushenko came to America with his young wife Masha and two small children. Masha became him reliable support. Fluent in English, she teaches at a college.

E. A. Yevtushenko’s life credo is “A poet in Russia is more than a poet.” He follows him relentlessly. And he remains a poet with a clear civic position. On the night of February 18-19, 2014, when the Maidan was burning in Kyiv, he wrote the poem “State, be human!” A person who is fixated only on his emotions and is not concerned about the fate of the Fatherland cannot be a Russian poet.

Joseph Brodsky considered himself a bachelor until he was 50 years old. Then he married his student – ​​half-Russian, half-Italian. A daughter was born. He has two more illegitimate children from Leningrad life. Daughter Anastasia from ballerina Maria Kuznetsova. He didn’t even remember her. His son Andrei was from the artist Marina Basmanova. Joseph loved her, despite the fact that she cheated on him, and their connection was broken. He dedicated many poems to M. B., often thematically abstract. I saw my son only at the age of 22, when he came to visit his father. Contact failed, so I sent my son back.

Joseph Brodsky’s attitude towards his homeland is approximately the same. He is cold towards her. Maybe this is the root of his hostility towards Yevtushenko? He felt in him a rival, a competitor who, acutely experiencing all the pains and misfortunes of the people, enjoyed such recognition that Brodsky would never deserve. He was kind to the people at critical moments in their history. His poetry is a reflection of the era. And the incredibly talented Joseph Brodsky, who wrote beautiful poetry in his youth, overestimated his gift, withdrew into himself - and lost. Despite all the laureate titles.

Says Solomon Volkov: “In Brodsky’s poetry, especially his later, there was an increasing... feeling of emotional prostration... In Brodsky’s last poems, an icy distance is felt between the author and the world.”

Anyone who tries to read Joseph Brodsky recent years, will be convinced of the correctness of these words. It is not for nothing that Evgeniy Rein, who knew this “Akhmatov boy” better than many, having lined up a number of great Russian poets in 1997, did not find a place in him for his friend:

“Russia is a special country in absolutely every respect, even from the angle of its poetic appearance. For two hundred years now, Russian poetry has been represented by one great poet at all times. This was the case in the eighteenth century, in the nineteenth and in our twentieth. Only this poet different names. And this is an unbreakable chain. Let's think about the sequence: Derzhavin - Pushkin - Lermontov - Nekrasov - Blok - Mayakovsky - Akhmatova - Yevtushenko. This is the one and only Great poet with by different persons. Such is the poetic fate of Russia.”

Liliya ZYBEL

San Francisco

About the reasons for Yevtushenko’s hasty flight
from Russia to fly-by-night Oklahoma,
Bella Akhmadulina told me,
and the tale from her lips is more like the “pure truth”.
Evgeniy Alexandrovich ran headlong,
because of the animal fear that overwhelmed him
before the KGB archives began to be opened then:
he was afraid that here, like in the GDR,
Pandora's hidden box will be opened,
and all his exploits as a "honey plant"
and his title character "Lubyanka man"
will open up to millions,
and then, God forbid,
after the Lubyanka idol,
subjected to national ostracism,
and they will really start burning his effigies...
Original taken from kalakazo in Blue cheese...

"Solomon Volkov. Dialogues with Yevgeny Yevtushenko."
Old tales of a poetic mythmaker,
thanks to leaving for another world
other witnesses of the era,
having shifted a little
in the mouth of Talskago Vykomur Vykomurovich
il Oklahoma grandfather Shchukar,
received their new historical incarnation.
This is how the inimitable noted about it dromos :
“Terrible, like a mummy. Just look he will begin to perform negative miracles of unfolding the sheets and destroying everyone with a deadening whirlwind. That is, ethically this is called “ huge eyes shine with the rays of spirituality." And he speaks clearly.
What needs to be formulated and formed. To my own benefit a little. What he shouldn’t do, he dodges. They say, “I don’t know, the devil intervened here; I do not know anything". Knowledgeable people, however, have already heard all these stories. But not on the first channel.
It seems to slightly rewrite what previously belonged to the diocese of Voznesensky. It turns out that it was Yevtushenko who decorated Taganka and banged his fist on the table at Khrushchev. And he kissed himself with Pasternak. Pasternak, a disgraced and exiled man, it turns out, not only issued a ticket to Voznesensky, but also to Yevtushenko.
We need to take a closer look at the culture. Something is wrong there. Isn't it all a lie?
And to the story... Probably, this is called a flexible worldview. Wandering.
He knows how to make what he feels true, and show the truth with a moral slant, so it turns out that he seems to be speaking directly on behalf of some kind of higher justice. Therefore, his works evoke a feeling of attractive disgust.
Like blue cheese. If you wash it down with jelly, it doesn’t seem to be the same. And if it’s red wine, it seems that..."
http://dromos.livejournal.com/159450.html
Personally I was amused a new version the reasons for the unexpected emigration in 1991,
more precisely, the flight of a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and secretary of the board of the Union of Writers of the USSR,
Evgeniy Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko, - it turns out that an effigy of Yevtushenko was burned in Moscow.
As far as I remember, in 1991 they burned an effigy of Dzerzhinsky in front of the Lubyanka, but not the “great national poet”.
In the yard of the Writers' Union? - Perhaps, but could it really frighten the pop loudmouth so much?!
...

http://seance.ru/blog/ginzburg/

And now a few words from the inimitable me, personally () :)

I watched with horror the third meeting between Volkov and Yevtushenka.
Judging by the broadcast, it turns out that Yevtushenko threw himself into the KGB embrasure, saving Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn, and Brodsky responded to him with black ingratitude, cursed in front of everyone wherever possible, and wrote a denunciation against him so that he would not be hired at an American university, at the same time, he additionally slandered him with lines from Yevtushenko’s poems about the Kennedy assassination, allegedly taken out of context.
Maybe, of course, this was partly the case; Brodsky was not an angel, but he is dead and can no longer answer. And even though Volkov inserted some quotes from Brodsky on this topic, all this still looks somehow dishonest to Brodsky’s friend. Especially considering the zombie-box audience...

At the same time, Yevtushenko acted in a very sophisticated way: he did not scold Brodsky after everything that was shown about him “kagbe objectively”; on the contrary, he not only did his best to pose as Brodsky’s best friend and even good angel. His ultimate goal was clearly to climb onto his pedestal and perch there before it was too late.

Well, the other most important goal of the meetings with Volkov was the desire to wash away from working for the KGB. For everything in life you have to pay. Then Yevtushenko’s payment for cooperation with authorities did not seem high in order to talk in the bathroom with Robert Kennedy, drink with Castro and admire the naked Marlene Dietrich. And now he sees that all this is already vanity, and the KGB stigma remains for life and goes with him into eternity. And he tries to wash himself off.
In the film it was said that Andropov’s deputy Filipp Bobkov tried to recruit him, but he allegedly failed. But for some reason, nevertheless, they often talked in Bobkov’s office.

True, the desire to get away from the KGB in the program was greatly hampered by Yevtushenko’s eternal vanity, the desire to present himself as a significant figure (he called Andropov from a telephone booth and tried to save Solzhenitsyn, and Andropov told him: “Zhenya, go to sleep”).

Yevtushenko is undoubtedly a very talented poet, he has a lot of wonderful lines. When crowds of clickers hit their favorite targets for a long time and point-blank (once these were, for example, academician Sakharov and the “pretender” Korchnoi, in recent years - Bush, Yushchenko, Saakashvili), I always remember Yevtushenko’s lines “... and if a hundred, howling frantically, beat one, even for a cause, I will never be the first hundred.”
But vanity always destroyed him. He always dressed up like a woman, in parrot jackets and ties, flirted, twirled his butt both in front of the public and in front of his superiors. Always focused on the broad masses and stadiums, on quantity at the expense of quality. So that people understand...
And these parrot jackets are not bad in themselves, they reflect Yevtushenko’s superficiality, his focus on external effects. This passion for acting, these clown jackets constantly pulled him into vulgarity, into foppishness and exhibitionism. You won’t find such jackets even at Baskov’s. But from a poet who, according to his own (and now common) statement, is even “more than a poet,” you expect something deeper. This is not poetry, but pop poetry. IMHO.

P.S. Enough interesting discussion

In issue No. 29 of the magazine "Capital" for 1992, my article “BEING FAMOUS IS NOT BEAUTIFUL” was published - about the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. It had a great resonance and quarreled me not only with the poet, but with practically an entire generation of writers. One of these days I'll try to find some of the harshest responses and, if I find them, I'll post them here. At that time, it was believed that I had dealt Evgeniy Alexandrovich a terrible insult. Nowadays, when there are no untouchables left in literature, it makes a completely different impression.

BEING FAMOUS IS NOT NICE

The people of the sixties began to celebrate their sixtieth anniversary. In June - Rozhdestvensky, in August - Vasily Aksenov. Between them, as between poles, is Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose sixtieth birthday is July 18.
The elderly “star boys” are celebrating their anniversaries in a low-key manner this time. Firstly, the approaching seventh decade is not a reason to rejoice for those who have spent their entire lives exploiting their youth and speculating on it. Yevtushenko tirelessly emphasized in his poems that he was not just a poet, but a poet “young and desperate,” “young and early,” “outrageously illogical, unforgivably young,” “direct, unapologetic, which means young.” But already at twenty-five he begins to sound the alarm: “... old age stubbornly sets in.” At twenty-six: “...we stop being young...” Scary.
The second reason why the anniversary is clearly not advertised: a sudden vacuum of public attention has formed, which for older boys is no less a blow than the discovery of the need to order false jaws. Tvardovsky also remarked about the young Yevtushenko: “The searchlight beam runs away from him, and he chases after it in order to get under it again.” This time the searchlight finally ran away. Until the anniversaries?
However, Yevgeny Yevtushenko has the opportunity to postpone his sixtieth birthday for another year. As the current Minister of Culture Yevgeny Sidorov noted with surprise in his book about him: “... the poet himself celebrated his fortieth birthday in July seventy-two, and his fiftieth birthday in July eighty-three.”
Evgeniy Aleksandrovich’s mother, Zinaida Ermolaevna, who to this day sells newspapers at a kiosk near the Rizhsky station, explained this paradox to me. It’s just that during the war, the boy Zhenya changed his last name: the suspicious (and dissonant) - Gangnus - to the neutral - Yevtushenko. During the rewriting of documents, the year of birth was accidentally changed. That is why in most encyclopedias and reference books it is written: 1933. Of course, if you wanted, you could correct the date both in your passport and in reference books. And if Yevtushenko didn’t do this, it means he needed it for some reason.
I remember an incident that happened with one middle-aged writer. When the Moscow Worker publishing house was preparing a directory of metropolitan writers, by some hook or by crook she managed to get the layout and change her date of birth in it. In her haste, she did not notice that there were other dates in the biographical information. When the reference book was published, amazed readers discovered that this writer was a child prodigy: she graduated from Moscow University at the age of 11.
Everyone has their little weaknesses. Yevtushenko’s immodesty, his “selfishness,” his manner of dressing brightly and tastelessly, leading a lordly lifestyle became the talk of the town... When Akhmatova saw young Yevtushenko in a shirt, from the pocket of which a whole dozen bright, multi-colored fountain pens were sticking out, she asked him: “And the dental Do you have a brush there too?”
But let's not talk about that. He himself stood in the center of the spotlight circle, no one fished him out of the darkness. He knew what he was getting into. Every day, every hour, every second, eyes crossed over him. He was assessed, examined, and gossiped about. He was the center of attention, he was the navel of the earth. We have never had a more famous poet, known to everyone and everything - from young to old. For the majority of the population of our poor country, Yevtushenko was not so much a symbol of the times (as he himself believes), but a symbol of poetry as such. “Name a poet you know.” - “Yevtushenko.” This is the most likely answer so far. Well, maybe they will name Pushkin just as often. Although unlikely.
I remember in the fall of 1984 we walked around Peredelkino. It was raining. The poet was in a bad mood. On that day, K.U. Chernenko spoke at the joint plenum of creative unions - the 50th anniversary of the Writers' Union was celebrated. Then the first secretary of the USSR SP Georgy Markov spoke. In his report, he spoke, in particular, about the achievements of modern Soviet poetry and named the names of poets. And this is what I heard from Evgeniy Alexandrovich: “I can still understand that Egor Isaev is in first place. After all, he is the only Lenin Prize laureate among living poets. But why next: Igor Shklyarevsky, Evgeny Yevtushenko? Why not the other way around?
We walked past the high fence of Rozhdestvensky’s dacha: “But here today the mirrors are hung with black.” - “Why, Evgeny Alexandrovich?” - “They didn’t mention him.”
Of course it was a joke. But I remember it made me shudder.
Yevtushenko learned from a young age that his poems are a political phenomenon. He always measured the strength of his “sharp” speeches with what was allowed at the moment. Moreover, what is noteworthy, it somewhat exceeded the level of what was permitted. The issue of printing the poem “Stalin’s Heirs” was resolved by the Secretariat of the Central Committee simultaneously with permission to print “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” There is a legend that, speaking at that discussion, Nikita Sergeevich said: “If this is anti-Soviet, then I am anti-Soviet.” In the future, reach the most high level for Yevtushenko it was no longer difficult. In the first months of the Brezhnev era, the proofs of his poem “Bratskaya Hydroelectric Power Station” prepared for publication in the magazine “Yunost” were posted according to the number of members of the Politburo, and Yevtushenko received his poem back riddled with hundreds of comments. I remember that the censorship did not allow the most innocent poem “Fuku” to pass through. Due, in particular, to the fact that there was an (unnamed!) Beria depicted there. And again - already in the first months of Gorbachev - the issue was resolved at the very top of the party and KGB.
The authorities have always taken Yevtushenko into account. They also counted when he asked not for himself, but for others. He helped (and maybe still helps) many. Every expulsion from the Writers' Union, every imprisonment of this or that dissident, every expulsion from the country of this or that character objectionable to the regime caused an indignant letter from Yevtushenko. Letters were sent to the prosecutor's office, to the Supreme Court, to the secretaries of the Writers' Union, to the KGB, to the Politburo. Sometimes - yes, yes! - they helped, people were freed, people left, and almost the first thing they began to do when free was to scold Yevtushenko in every possible way.
He perceived and perceives such “ungratefulness” very painfully. The constant motive of his conversations and even toasts in recent years is the motive of betrayal. Everyone, absolutely everyone - from Viktor Nekrasov to Joseph Brodsky, from Vladimir Voinovich to today's youth - everyone whom he helped, whom he rescued, everyone betrayed him, everyone threw mud at him, forgetting about elementary human gratitude. That's what he says.
Perhaps, after this article, I will have to hear similar reproaches from the master. But I sincerely try to be objective. But objectively, Soviet power and Yevgeny Yevtushenko are inseparable. How they helped each other, supported each other, I will say a little later, but for now I will only note that for many, the attitude towards Yevtushenko was determined by the attitude towards the authorities.
There is such an episode in Sergei Dovlatov’s book. He comes to a New York hospital to see Brodsky, who is seriously ill, and talks about the events in the USSR. “Imagine, a congress of writers was held, and there Yevtushenko spoke out against collective farms.” “If he is against collective farms,” Brodsky said in a weak voice, without lifting his head from the pillow, “then I am for it.” When in the late eighties Yevtushenko was accepted as an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts, Brodsky defiantly resigned from its membership as a sign of protest.
Brodsky claimed that Yevtushenko was a KGB consultant during his expulsion from the country. Yevtushenko, the fact of his conversations about Brodsky with senior officials The KGB (apparently, F.D. Bobkov) does not deny, but makes a significant amendment: he turned to the KGB on his own initiative - to rescue books detained at Sheremetyevo customs, and the conversation about Brodsky started by chance. Be that as it may, it was from Yevtushenko that Brodsky learned that he was allowed to leave, and it was Yevtushenko who conveyed to him the KGB’s wish to restrain himself in speeches abroad (which could be a condition for a possible return).
To the question whether Yevtushenko served in the KGB (and some people pose the question this way), I can confidently answer: no. This would be too inconsistent with his code of honor (which Yevtushenko still has). But most importantly, the authorities did not need this at all. They valued Yevtushenko, who was independent and non-partisan. For minor work, hundreds of writers were always at hand, ready to do anything. Yevtushenko solved a larger problem: he was a showcase of imaginary Soviet freethinking.
Yevtushenko once told me absolutely fantastic story about how he once received a salary from the KGB. At one time, his wife was, as you know, Bella Akhmadulina, and Bella’s mother worked in the KGB as a translator. And so Bella Akhatovna in ancient times had to receive either a salary or a pension at Lubyanka by proxy. One day Akhmadulina was away and Yevtushenko went with a power of attorney for himself. The case took place in one of the buildings on Dzerzhinsky Street. The cash register was equipped in a special way: you had to enter through one guarded door and exit through another, in order to prevent two employees from bumping into each other in the same room. Attached to the pay slip was a stencil with a slot for only one last name (so that the person signing would not see the neighbor’s last name). Having received the money and leaving the premises, Yevtushenko discovered that he had forgotten his cap there. Rushing back past the taken aback guard, he found a famous detective writer at the window, who later, when meeting him, shook his hand with special feeling. Like yours.
In pursuit of the spotlight, Yevtushenko rushed from poetry to prose, from prose to cinema. I remember how during the filming of the film “ Kindergarten“To reproduce 1941, Yevtushenko needed to cover up the Kremlin stars. The Kremlin commandant forbade doing this - Yevtushenko struck! He even let a herd of cows pass through Red Square - he was allowed!
Amazing energy, determination, and hitherto unspent life potential, of course, helped him. But in the end there was only one goal - to remain in the circle of light. Even when sending thunderous letters to the prosecutor’s office and the KGB, Yevtushenko did not forget to call foreign correspondents and inform them about this.
The same desire to be visible led him to parliament. Remember his speech at the first congress, when he proposed closing parliamentary halls at airports and train stations so as not to be separated from the people? It was strange for me to hear this, since I remembered very well that when he and I went to Irkutsk and further to the Zima station, he used the deputy halls. Without being, by the way, any deputy yet.
At home, by the way, he was greeted as a hero. In order for him and his retinue (which included me) to fly to Zima, all passengers were removed from the plane in Irkutsk (under the pretext of canceling the flight). When the plane door opened at the Ziminsky airfield, we saw that all the local nobility, having gathered in GAZ and Volga cars, were already saluting with champagne. On the way back to the regular train, a special, unusual carriage was attached, where in the center stood a huge round table, specially adapted for a feast. Probably only the Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee could have been greeted like this by the local authorities. I immediately realized that for them he was not only a famous fellow countryman (V. Rasputin was nearby, who was by no means awarded such honors), he was precisely a person close to the Moscow elite. Through him, on occasion, it was possible to submit a petition.
Surprisingly, Yevtushenko had enough strength and time to fulfill a variety of requests, although many, it seems to me, could have been avoided. His working day is endless, sometimes you sit with him in company until two o’clock in the morning, crawl home (I rented a dacha in Peredelkino), at seven in the morning you look out the window - a cheerful Yevtushenko in a ski cap is jogging, doing a morning jog. His house is constantly filled with people, the phone doesn’t stop ringing, a thousand things are being done at once. Doors slam, neighbors (Savva Kulish, Mezhirov), servants, some suspicious “childhood friends”, whom Yevtushenko, on a strange whim, brought closer and then pushed away from him, come in and out, stern-looking southern people sit, who turn out to be Caucasian writers.
Once during such a feast (on New Year’s Eve), Yevtushenko unexpectedly asked his then English father-in-law (I think the treasurer of the church parish) who was present at the table: “Tell me, we are the same age, but why do you have such good teeth, and I don’t?” ? My knowledge of the English language was enough to understand the answer: “And this is because, Zhenya, not a single bad word has ever come out of my mouth.”
When Yevtushenko finally received the State Prize of the USSR (for the poem “Mother and the Neutron Bomb”), he said everywhere that he regarded it as a cadet’s uniform. Which meant one thing: it was necessary to give earlier. But even before that, the Motherland had not forgotten him: on Yevtushenko’s fiftieth birthday, Andropov, going to his grave, awarded him the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.
Using the collected works of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, you can study the post-war history of our country (the first poem was published by him back in 1949). All the campaigns of the party and government were reflected in his work: from the debunking of the cult of personality to the construction of KamAZ, from celebrations of Lenin, space, revolutionary and other anniversaries to the implanted Gorbachev glasnost under the slogan “more socialism”, from the far-fetched propaganda campaign against “ neutron bomb"to the fight against the plunderers of socialist property. Should we call it a “sensitive barometer of time” or reproach it for opportunism? I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
After all, not everyone in 1990, when even Felix Kuznetsov had already become an anti-communist, not everyone would have risked publishing such lines: “Our revolution is October, born in the camp, daughter, Lenin’s will, a line not completed by a dropped feather.” Has your sense of reality changed? Or demonstrated tenacity of conviction?
Evgeny Sidorov, thinking that he was making a compliment, accurately remarked: “Rebellion” (remarkable quotation marks! - A.M.) Yevtushenko is always aimed not at destruction, but at strengthening the social and spiritual values ​​of the new world, of which he feels himself a singer and to which he is faithful serves. This is a poet engaged by socialism...” This is so: there was no poet in our country (at least in the 60-70s) who did so much to strengthen the socialist system as Yevtushenko. Of course, there were thousands upon thousands of more zealous defenders of “socialist values.” But in terms of actual impact, in terms of power of influence, there were no equals. They simply didn't believe them. And Yevtushenko, with his popularity and authority, with a constant “fig in his pocket,” was a propagandist no less effective than Pravda and Izvestia.
I remember how at one of our meetings at the editorial office of Literaturnaya Gazeta, A.B. Chakovsky once said: “I had Yevtushenko, he brought poetry. I told him: Zhenya, seventy percent of you are anti-Soviet, and thirty percent are pro-Soviet. When everything is the other way around, I will publish you. We will allow you thirty percent of anti-Sovietism.”
The most amazing thing is that Yevtushenko meekly followed Chakovsky’s comments - he changed the proportion. In general, his willingness to edit his texts based on comments even insignificant in his own way mental development people were strange. In four years at Litgazeta I saw all sorts of authors. “Flexibility” (as it was called by literary directors) Yevtushenko had no equal among famous writers.
One day he brought the poem “Fans” to the editorial office. It was 1984 - the first surge of football passions, when Spartak fans beat Dynamo fans (and vice versa), staged street riots, overturned trolleybuses, etc. Yu. Shchekhochikhin, and then Yevgeny Yevtushenko, saw nascent fascism in this spontaneous movement. Although this word was not called. Moreover, it was carefully crossed out by vigilant editors from the article of the first and the verses of the second.
I have preserved not only all the drafts of this poem given to me by the poet (one of them is on the back of the bill for accommodation at the Claridge Hotel in Buenos Aires), but also the manuscript with notes by A. Chakovsky and his deputy E. Krivitsky. In the very first quatrain, Yevtushenko drew a parallel between Stalinist fanatics (his favorite topic) and today’s fanatic fans: “they, in protective jackets, in gabardine, gave birth to blue-jean fans.” The management of Litgazeta did not like the parallel. Yevtushenko “softens”, encrypts: “they, in arrogant hats, in gabardine...” It is no longer clear who “they” are...
Next, all comparisons with the “Hitler Youth” are uprooted: “they come from football, forming into companies, false patriots - sports patriots.” Blotted out. It became: “How pitifully the false patriots, the sports patriots, settle scores with each other...” It became worse.
“The blue jeans fans are coming. There are invisible grenades in my hands.” Crossed out. Yevtushenko changes: “Football fans are coming in formation. The courage to be a false hero is false.” Unclear.
“Their screaming and clapping: “Spartak-Spartak!” Like a machine gun: “Well, well, well, well...” Doesn’t suit the bosses. Yevtushenko leaves one line: “The heroic roar: “Spartak!” Spartak!”, and then, relying on the unsightly rhyme “Spartak - Pasternak”, he draws the ears to the football theme of Boris Leonidovich, whom, he believes, the fans do not care about (as well as Baratynsky and Beethoven - a strange choice).
Finally, the key point: “The colors on the hats and scarves are different, but they smell brown.” Blotted out. New option: “The hats and scarves have team colors, but this brotherhood is deceptive.”
So, what the poem was written for leaves it. Why then publish it at all? I'm afraid Evgeniy Alexandrovich could not answer this question. Or maybe he would answer with his own line: “I’m throwing words to the wind. Don’t mind, let them disappear.”
Yevgeny Yevtushenko had plenty of words thrown to the wind, vain, empty, momentary words. But if you put them on one side of the scale, and on the other you place verses that have become events political life, which have found a wide public response, the second cup, of course, will outweigh.
One could name many such event-poems. “Stalin’s Heirs”, “Babi Yar”, “Do the Russians Want War” - this, as they say, is the very best.
My friend, a literary historian, desperately needed to determine the exact date the first public performance of the poem "Babi Yar". Nobody remembered this, not even Yevtushenko himself (generally speaking, who had phenomenal memory, “almost electronic,” as A. Mezhirov noted). But I heard somewhere that when this happened, the poem made such an impression on the audience of the Polytechnic Museum that many cried, and Galina Volchek (Sovremennik Theater), who was present in the hall, began to have labor pains, and she was taken to the maternity hospital. All that remained was to find out the date of birth of her son Denis Evstigneev - and on the bright page of the history of our literature it was possible to put the date.
Yevtushenko was especially overwhelmed people's love during the period of persecution - after March 8, 1963, when N.S. Khrushchev made his famous speech at a meeting with the artistic intelligentsia. A terrible daily (without exaggeration) persecution began in newspapers and everywhere possible. Yevtushenko locked himself in his apartment on Ambulatorny Lane and was afraid to go outside. Zinaida Ermolaevna brought him food. She told me that when she came for the first time, she discovered that the entire staircase, from the first floor to the sixth, was occupied by people who, as it turned out, had come to guard the poet. Moreover, many even came from other cities. They believed that after the poet was called a traitor in newspapers every day and on various pages, he certainly had to be arrested. When the Voice of America reported that he had committed suicide, such a crowd gathered below that, at the request of the local police officer, the thirty-year-old celebrity had to repeatedly go out onto the balcony so that people could make sure that he was alive and well. The newspapers published collections of indignant letters from workers, and at that time the poet was literally drowning in popular love.
Then, by the way, the foundations of Yevtushenko’s fame abroad were laid. And although the persecution turned out to be short-lived (Yevtushenko and his wife Galina were invited to the Kremlin to celebrate the coming New Year, after which they went on a long foreign business trip to the USA), the foreign public for decades was firmly convinced that they were dealing with an oppositionist, if not a dissident. The ease with which Yevtushenko traveled abroad, the conditions in which his life took place, the luxurious apartments in which he lived, inaccessible to mere mortals, the state dacha immediately provided to him in Peredelkino - all this for some reason did not bother Yevtushenko’s many foreign friends . And most importantly, it didn’t bother him.
Now that Evgeny Yevtushenko and his family have practically moved overseas and are teaching at American universities, I am in no hurry to blame either the hospitable hosts or him. Of course, children need to be put on their feet. Of course, it is more difficult for a poet to earn anything in Russia today than it was yesterday. Of course, living in Oklahoma is safer in all respects than in Moscow. Of course, there are grievances here that are difficult to overcome. All this is so. But what about this: “There is no poet outside the people”?
The spotlight ran away from him. But here’s what should console our hero: there is no other poet in this ray. And it won't.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko was and remains the most famous poet of the post-war decades, no matter how we treated him. No matter what the cost is to achieve this.
This is already a fact.