151

p Poetry undoubtedly has less influence on the minds of men than do the teachings of philosophers or religious thinkers who find millions of followers. Among the ten books which have exerted the strongest influence on mankind William Durant (the author of a many-volume history of civilisation) named Marx’s Capital  [151•1  along with Confucius, Rousseau and Darwin. Durant did not include a single work of fiction in the ten books.

p Be that as it may, the Russian poetry of the last fifty years certainly ranks among the world’s best and most original. It is, of course, rather difficult for a foreigner who does not know Russian to judge, because poetry always stands to lose in translation. If I were asked what distinguishes modern Russian poetry, I would say: a wealth of talents, and the boldness and keenness of their quests.

p Poetry attains great heights when it flies on wings of music and politics. The word politics will sound shockingly straight-forward to some people. But it is after all the poet’s political attitude that does and should express with the greatest philosophical accuracy how harmoniously his awareness of the times is blended in his soul with music.

p In any case, the aim which Soviet poets have pursued during the last four or five decades has been to embrace politics so that the poetry of words should express the poetry of life.

p In this chapter I propose to examine the present state of poetry in the U.S.S.R. We shall of necessity have to confine ourselves to the major trends and poets. But before we go any further, let us go back a little way and, if only very briefly, review the past. 152 Where and how did those trends which we witness today originate?

p Soviet literature took shape under the impact of revolutionary ideas and images. Mayakovsky wrote in 1917:

p Today we re-examine what the worlds are based on.
Today we make life over to . the smallest button on its
                              clothes. . . .

p In the period immediately preceding the Revolution of 1917 the predominant position in Russian poetry was held by the symbolists, headed by Bryusov and Blok, and the acmeists, led by Gumilev.

p Blok is a poet of unrest. His refined lyricism which finds a way to the innermost recesses of the human soul and subtly grasps its passing moods, is at the same time imbued with a sense of history. Blok’s poetry speaks of the frustration of thraldom—inhuman, ugly and brutal. He longs for romantic beauty in art. He called the old world a frightening world. There were some who thought it a paradox that Blok of all people should welcome the Bolsheviks as a purifying force. But in fact there was nothing paradoxical about it. Withdrawing from the frightening world of the past, Blok bravely stepped into the purifying fire of the Revolution. The Twelve, in which he rendered with amazing genius the “revolutionary music" of the epoch, was translated into many European languages as early as 1918-19.

p Valery Bryusov, the recognised head of Russian symbolism, was a poet of an entirely different order. A scholar and erudite, with an expert knowledge of thoughts and feelings, who devoted his poems to all sorts of human emotions, to all ages and nations, he too accepted the socialist revolution. His poem about Lenin is infused with a patriot’s pride in his country’s revolutionary boldness.

p However, the poets of the older generation could not reflect that new quality which came into Russian life or become the spokesmen for the people who rallied to the colours of the Leninist Party. Unlike the symbolists, Nikolai Gumilev—head of the acmeists, an advocate of Russian expansion which made one think of Rudyard Kipling, and a master of chiselled verse in which life sparkles with the heady excitement of wine—turned sharply away from the people in those stormy revolutionary years. More than that, this excellent poet took part in a counter-revolutionary plot and, like Chenier, paid for it with his life.

p Of the older generation only one, a former futurist, was destined to become a poet of the new, revolutionary Russia. This was Vladimir Mayakovsky who was born to address crowds of people in the city squares with his thunderous voice. All that went before the 153 Revolution was mere experimenting. But now Mayakovsky was able to exclaim:

p Higher,
          hold higher,
                    those rows of heads!
A new Great Flood we are going to spread And wash all the world and the cities clean. . . .

p There are people who never cease to grow in stature and importance. Mayakovsky was one of them. Poets like him are born in a nation only once in perhaps a hundred years. Personally, I consider him the most important Russian poet since Pushkin. Certainly, he is the most original. In my opinion no poet since Mayakovsky has been able to express the spirit of revolutionary renovation with anything like his wealth of intonations and his profound human understanding. The remarkable thing is that this spirit is apparent not just from the content of his poetry but from his very choice of words, his rhythms and the pace of his verses.

p Reading Mayakovsky will enable people in the years to come to inwardly experience what was experienced by the men who accomplished the October Revolution, and to appreciate the emotions of their revolutionary ancestors who laid the foundation stones of the edifice of the new world. Mayakovsky died in 1930, and it was precisely in the 19305 that he was so badly needed.

p Civic poetry, that is poetry which expresses people’s social interests, has existed for thousands of years. It can be traced back to the grain carriers’ songs that have been preserved on papyrus found in the tombs of the Pharaohs. The existence of civic poetry is only natural, for as Aristotle said “man is a social animal”. In different social formations and in different eras, civic poetry, of course, had its own specific themes and content. Mayakovsky did not simply fill his poetry with the new content of our time—the struggle for communism. He produced a new type of poetry in which politics, being the main sphere of the people’s interests, was the loudest motif of all. The reason is obvious: in a formerly backward country political slogans were a most effective means of revolutionary propaganda.

p In the West the word “propaganda” is not infrequently used with a derogatory connotation. As if propaganda is not the truth, or is anyway only a part-truth posing as the whole truth. But if we analyse the meaning of the word etymologically, we shall find that propaganda (that is, an organised and deliberate propagation of particular ideas) is an inherent feature of any work of art, as I have already said earlier. Some works are more objective and 154 many-sided and the propaganda in them is less overt. But a writer of stature is always a ruler of men’s minds. He teaches men how to live, and propagates his ideas.

p This striving to teach and propagate a particular range of ideas is more typical for Soviet literature than any other. Mayakovsky was a propagandist of communism, and he did not hesitate to declare with a polemic challenge that he was prepared to place his pen in the service of the present hour, of the present reality, and, consequently, the Soviet Government and the Communist Party who championed it. “In the service”, mind you.

p I could name many, many other poets who in their various styles extolled the proletarian revolution and contributed to the political struggle for communism. One of them was Demyan Bedny who was especially popular in the Civil War years. His fables and satirical feuilletons were always topical and enjoyed enormous success with the Red Army.

p A contrast to this oVertly political type of poetry was offered by the pre-revolutionary poets to whom all these new moods were strange. I have already mentioned their names, with Boris Pasternak topping the list.

p I suppose some people will ask: “So history is a macro-world, and the human Self is a micro-world?" But let us not play a game of words. For all its seeming cleverness, it is pointless to counterpose all the possible extremes. It was Hegel who showed how the conflict of metaphysical theses is solved dialectically. In life, the transformation of one category into another is as natural as the transformation of rain into rivers and lakes, and the transformation of rivers and lakes into clouds. The beginning of Soviet poetry, we see, was marked by splits, extremes and more divergency of opinion.

p I do not intend to dwell on everything that happened in Russian poetry in the course of fifty years. I am not writing a history of Soviet poetry. All I want to do is throw a bit of light on the picture it presents today. We find that the two trends—purely civic poetry and pure lyricism, remain. But the quarrel between them has long since lost the edge it had for Mayakovsky and Anna Akhmatova forty years ago. Critics gave up their dogmatic counter-posing of these two extreme varieties of poetry way back in the nineteen-thirties. They no longer treat “pure lyricism" with scathing irony for lagging behind life. Nor do they extoll civic poetry as the one and only type, excluding all others. True, the two types are still counterposed every now and again. Once in Pravda I read a poem by Yaroslav Smelyakov (one of the poets who entered the scene in the nineteenthirties) called Speaking of Poetry. Imitating Mayakovsky’s In Full Voice, Smelyakov also speaks of his poetry as “coarse”, proudly comparing his “coarseness” to the “rubbish” of “intimate verses".

155

p In general, the tendencies and preferences have, naturally, remained. But the extremes have disappeared. Why, you will ask? For the very simple reason that the Soviet people themselves, the country and the way of life have changed beyond recognition. The very look of the towns has changed after the cultural revolution and as a result of what has been achieved in the different spheres of activity. Today, millions of people in the Soviet Union are able to understand the structure of Shostakovich’s symphonies, and have their own enlightened opinion on the different trends in art, while the intellectuals look upon differential calculus as a matter of routine.

p In my own (I stress, my own) opinion, it is the young people who set the pattern in Soviet poetry today. They have brought into it a breadth of interests and the boldness of experiment just as Mayakovsky did in his time.

p Far be it from me to imply that the poets of the older generation —Nikolai Tikhonov, Alexei Surkov, Ilya Selvinsky, Alexander Prokofyev, Nikolai Aseyev, Mikhail Isakovsky and Semyon Kirsanov—have already had their say. Readers by no means expect them to leave the stage as actors who have said their piece and still linger on. All these poets are unique talents. In a text book on Soviet literature their work would make whole chapters. They are read today, and their songs (for instance, Mikhail Isakovsky’s) are lasting favourites. Some of Isakovsky’s poetic formulas have become popular sayings.

p Alexei Surkov is perhaps the most consistent and militant champion of civic poetry. But it must be admitted that the civic poems of this outstanding public figure lack, what I would call, purely artistic energy. A singer of revolutionary struggle, Surkov uses a conventional approach to problems of form. But for all that, he has a certain originality as a soldier-poet who can never get away from the smell of smoke and the taste of iron when assessing people and events.

p The romantic militancy of the epoch also coloured the early poetry of Nikolai Tikhonov, but it was interpreted in the manner of the acmeist school. He then went through a phase of formalistic experimentation. Still, even now it is the romance of the times which lends power to his poetry, although it is regrettably inhibited by a certain inner chilliness.

p Of the poets who have been writing for almost half a century now and who are past sixty, the most striking figure is Ilya Selvinsky, whose talent is amazing in range and sheer force. He is a sort of Gargantua of Soviet poetry. In his vast output he proves himself a virtuoso of form. He is the author of several books of verse, a number of large epic canvases (Ulalayevsbchina, Pushtorg, The Arctic 156 and others), and many tragedies in verse. Once, in 1930, Selvinsky wrote and published the Elektrozavodskaya Gazeta. In the ninetecntwentics he headed the school of constructivism and challenged Mayakovsky’s thesis:

Scribbling love songs for you
                    would suit me as well,
Even better—
                    for pleasure and purse.
But I,
          I’d trample,
                    my voice to quell On the throat of my own verse

with his own thesis of a man “in full flower" (in the spirit of Feuerbach). However, Selvinsky eventually admitted that in the epoch of acute class struggle it was premature of him to promote the idea of a man in full flower, thus recognising that Mayakovsky had been right after all.

p A person who lives a life of many and varied interests, and enjoys an encyclopaedic abundance of thoughts and feelings and infinite freedom, cannot be considered an abstraction. Such an ideal cannot be opposed to the historical man whose behaviour is not guided simply by anarchic self-indulgence but also by historical responsibility.

p It has become a commonplace to say that we live in a changing world. People in all countries say this because the development of history is increasing its pace in a truly geometric progression. But in no other country, perhaps, are these changes as visible and tangible as in the U.S.S.R. At least to people who took part in or simply witnessed the Socialist Revolution of 1917 in Russia, the world they live in now seems entirely new. And not just because there are cars instead of horses in the streets of Moscow, or because gaslight has been replaced with electricity, but because the very rhythm of life has changed. For poets who belong to Selvinsky’s generation, like Pavel Antokolsky or Vera Inber, all this necessitated an ideological and artistic re-adjustment. The poets of their generation, therefore, had to catch up with the times and not simply portray them; they had to re-adjust themselves and create at the same time.

p Of this middle generation emerging in the nineteen-thirties, I would name Konstantin Simonov as the most striking figure; certainly, the most widely popular. His creative energy as a poet, playwright, novelist, war correspondent and social leader, is extraordinary. Everything about his talent has an enormous appeal: his 157 devotion to communist ideas, his industriousness, the range of his impressions, his keen powers of observation, his steadiness and his speed (although the last does him more harm than good). He has the wholesomeness, the energy and the self-reliance which make the very essence of the new generation of Soviet intellectuals, of Soviet people whose character has been shaped wholly in our epoch.

p All this in itself might have provided material for poetry. But Simonov’s lyric poetry does not reflect even a tenth part of his personality with its wide and varied range of emotions and impulses. It’s a strange thing, but there is no romance in his lyric poetry, no communication with the great wide world, no call.

p I wonder why. Certainly it is not due to lack of talent. I think, it is probably because he takes a one-sided view of lyric poetry and does not feel the need for this sort of complete lyrical selfrevelation. As I see it, it is a case of journalism inhibiting lyricism.

p The impact of Simonov’s poetry comes from the vividness of his descriptions and his tenacious grip on concrete details. He has travelled a lot and seen a lot, and so the range of his themes and observations is naturally very wide. (Visiting Bernard Shaw is, perhaps, one of his best poems). Simonov is keenly sensitive to the social or political pulse of life. This ability to feel the throbbing nerve of life is another reason for his popularity. The success of some of his poems written in the first years of war, for instance Wait For Me, was truly sensational. Like Alexei Surkov, though in a different manner, Simonov also revealed himself most fully, both as a novelist and as a poet, in the war theme. Each of these writers has contributed his heroic chapter to Soviet poetry.

p The influence which the war against nazi Germany had on the spiritual development of people in general made itself felt in the poetry of practically every country in Europe, especially England, France and Italy. Soviet poetry, like literature as a whole, was affected too. The course of the war showed that Soviet people were fighting in defence of humanity, for the welfare of man. Alexei Tolstoi expressed this well when he said that the war against Hitler’s Germany was not so much a war of machines as a war of moral categories. The war did not restrict Russian literature to the propaganda of war feats and war aims, but on the contrary stimulated the revelation of human, moral categories.

p Pride of place among that middle generation of poets who emerged from the trials of war as ideologically mature artists with a great store of human experience, undoubtedly goes to Alexander Tvardovsky. There is a seed of rationalism in his poetry too. Perhaps, it would be more correct to say that he likes to reason things out, 158 and in his poetry thought has the upper hand over emotion, leading it along, so to speak. This is why the composition of his verses and poems is so clear and logically consistent. Hence, too, his predilection for classical forms and folk traditions. Tvardovsky is amazingly sensitive to the life of the ordinary people, the Russian peasants, the collective farmers, the stove makers, the soldiers: in short, the

p Russian Ivan. He portrays all these different people with epic breadth against the background of the Revolution and the war. The rural sources which fed his poetry are evident in everything: in his idiom, and his liking for popular sayings, proverbs and aphorisms which all belong to the speech of country folk. Two Russian poetic traditions seem to have converged in Tvardovsky. One stemming 159 from Nekrasov, the sorrowful folk bard, and the other from Pushkin, the sanguine lover of life.

p The great dramatic power and epic sweep with which Sholokhov portrayed the Russian people at the most crucial moments in their history (the years of the Civil War and the collectivisation of farming) is fully matched by Alexander Tvardovsky. His poems The Land of Muravia (about collectivisation), Vastly Terkin (a Russian soldier in the war against fascism) and A House by the Roadside can be ranked with the classics of Russian literature.

p That, at any rate, is how Soviet readers look upon these poems. Vasily Terkin has become a living person loved by everybody. His prototypes are discovered everywhere, in all the services, and among the collective farmers where prototypes of Davidov (the hero of Sholokhov’s Virgin Soil Upturned) are also frequently to be found.

p Tvardovsky’s poem Space Beyond Space gives a panoramic view of life in the Soviet Union today. There are descriptions of Siberia and the construction of the giant hydroelectric power station on the Angara, there are encounters with people released from concentration camp, and reflections on Stalin, his place in history and the attitude to him today. Travel impressions link the separate episodes into a whole, and running through the poem—through the encounters with people, recollections, lyrical digressions, bitter memories, and descriptions of the modern scene—are the author’s thoughts on the destinies of the people advancing towards their historical goal, undaunted by the hardships encountered along the roads they have to travel.

p His partiality to village imagery and themes is less in evidence here than in his other poems. The horizons are much broader. But the texture of the poetry is not evenly woven throughout, and to my mind the composition is somewhat prolix.

p Tvardovsky’s poetry is very democratic. He is a poet of the masses, of the “vast human ocean”. But he does not simply sail about this ocean in a little fishing boat, singing a song and thrilling to the lashing winds and storms. He reflects on fairways, ships and captains. You are aware of his intellect all the time, and you do not always know what you were more captivated by: his intellect and the keenness of his observations, or that inexpressible impulse of his poetic soul which moves you so in Yesenin.

p Critics have a way of linking together the names of Isakovsky, Surkov, Tvardovsky and sometimes even Alexander Prokofyev (the song-like pattern of whose poetry has roots in folklore) as poets belonging to the same trend. I do not think this is really justified. They may have something in common—indeed they all come of peasant stock and have the same political affiliations: but there the 160 likeness ends. They arc quite different as poets. Mikhail Isakovsky writes lyric songs, Surkov writes political verses, and Tvardovsky has established himself as an epic poet.

p This somehow brings us to Stepan Shchipachev who really belongs to the older generation of writers. He also comes of peasant stock, but he is the exact opposite of Tvardovsky in the very nature of his talent and, consequently, in his choice of genre. There is no global philosophy or propaganda in Shchipachev’s poetry. His field is “pure lyricism”. And he must be given his due for cultivating a style of his own and giving his work the stamp of individuality. Even at the time when political themes predominated in Soviet literature he had the boldness to take up the “eternal themes" to try and find his new hero in them. And find him he did. His lyrical hero is a man of impeccable honour, dignified and reserved, and with a strong sense of responsibility to society and history.

p His best poetry is dedicated to the “eternal theme" of love. The history of poetry from Catullus and Horace to Shakespeare and Ronsard (to say nothing of the twentieth-century decadent poets) has long since sanctified love’s madness and frenzy. All the world’s witches and poets have brewed their bit of love potion. But Shchipachev offers us a sobering drink. There must be restraint and fidelity in love. He does not mean faithfulness to marriage vows, but rather an emotional integrity.

p Shchipachev is popular with Soviet readers. His love poems, whatever one may think of their artistic merits, will be found to play a role of fundamental importance in shaping the new socialist ethics, a process from which the development of Soviet lyric poetry is inseparable.

p Shchipachev’s hero is more inclined to observe than to experience, to reflect rather than to succumb to emotion. In his love poems he portrays the signs of love, its spiritual anatomy, so to speak, and only in a smaller measure the feeling of love. His favourite form is therefore contemplative, reflective poetry divided into stanzas.

p It is a curious thing that Shchipachev assumes the role of mentor or judge when he describes the world of emotions; he is more apt to analyse and evaluate these emotions than fall under their spell like Verlaine or Yesenin. Apparently rationalism, which we find in the work of many Soviet poets, is something of a disease of the age. The correct way of thinking becomes more important than genuine feeling. I wonder if this is why Shchipachev’s poetry has a steadying rather than a stirring effect. It keeps the reader to a single straight and narrow path instead of leading him into the great wide world. And in spite of what the author says about it being ill-suited to a poet to moralise, very many of his poems 161 have “the moral-to-this-story" ending just the same. It is this that lends a fable-like tone to his stanzas and elegies, and this also explains his penchant for Oriental, especially classic Persian, lyricism which is mainly based on parables.

p Leonid Martynov is quite another matter. He, too, belongs to the older generation. It does happen to some poets that for one reason or another they do not become widely known until quite late in their career. This was the case with Martynov. He first appeared on the literary scene as an author of lengthy poems written in the colourful style of Russian fairy tales (for instance, his Poem About Uvenkai). Later, the fairy-tale idea became the prism through which he viewed the surrounding world. Such is Martynov today.

162

p He brings out the poetic quality of poetry as such, the contours of the world are slightly out of true in his poems, and there is in them that madness of first creation when everything begins anew and moves from its accustomed place.

p In a cycle of poems called The Shore he has trees wandering about the earth, and strange, homeless people walking down the street with the classically “wild” look in their eyes. There have to be ghouls and goblins, of course, like in all Russian fairy-tales, but ahead lies a radiant, colourful world, and good will naturally triumphs over evil, for this is Russia. There is something of Vasnctsov in Martynov’s word-painting of Russia, and the intonation of a folk storyteller achieved by doubling the lines, by repetitions and a play of rhymes. But while escaping rationalism Martynov often falls into the other extreme. It’s what the ancients called Pythic murmuring.

p Horace was quite right when he said in his Letter to the Pisos that an honest and knowing man would notice the weaknesses in poetry and would want an expression to be clarified if he thought it vague. I must admit that the image of an incomprehensible “mad” poet, described by Horace, evokes as little admiration in me as it did in him. Maybe Orpheus was able to hypnotise beasts and “wild men" with his music, but those who deserve the name of man want there to be some thought behind the poet’s words as well.

p Nikolai Zabolotsky died in October 1958, and so, strictly speaking, cannot be regarded as one of the poets of today. But for me he still remains the most gifted and profound of modern Russian poets. There is a classical balance of thought and emotion in his poetry. Whereas Martynov left the open epic plains to plunge deeper and deeper into the fairy-tale forest of his imagery, Zabolotsky began with poetic fancy and gradually achieved clarity. His poetry contains a philosophical thought which runs through the swarm of his romantic dreams, blending with them perfectly and therefore unobtrusively. Once Zabolotsky said to me that the most important thing for a poet to have is his own special angle of vision. And in the “chaste depths of poetry" he discovers what others would never have discerned.

p It is difficult to describe the range of Zabolotsky’s themes. Whatever he writes about—a plain little girl, an old actress, flying cranes, the taiga, cities, steppeland or the leaves of an eucalyptus tree—he reveals to us a beautiful new world which, however, is filled with hidden anxiety (unlike Shchipachev). Zabolotsky does not preach or teach, he simply tells us of his discoveries and makes us think. Here is an instance: when daylight fades into the grey of evening and the sunset sky begins to play “like a colossal moving atom" an 163 image of another man emerges: he stands at the other end of the Universe, in the garden, in the dark, and also gazes at the stars. “Why do I, at my journey’s end, trouble his spirit with my unsubstantial dream,” the poet says.

p Like Tyutchev, Nikolai Zabolotsky alarms your imagination. His language is rather old-fashioned. Unlike Kirsanov he does not strive to dazzle you with his verbal fireworks. There are people of whom one says: when you’re in their company it is best to say nothing and think. In a way this applies to Zabolotsky.

p I have named those poets who have left a strong impression on me. My choice may be called subjective, of course. But one can hardly avoid subjectivity in such matters. Literary criticism is not a pharmacy where substances are weighed on precision scales to within a fraction of a gram. People do not use the pharmacist’s method to weigh their likes or dislikes. You may like a poem or you may not. Some you like better, others less. And if I were to introduce a dozen more names, it would not make the general picture any clearer. In every country there are thousands of people writing poetry. In the U.S.S.R. at any rate two or three books of verse come out every day, and only counting Russian poetry at that.

p Poetry is the first step in the art of handling words. A youth’s first love brings him to Euterpe. But “poetry-making is audacious work,” wrote Goethe. Many are invited but few are chosen at the feast of Apollo. Every one of Euterpe’s suitors tries to stretch Odysseus’s bow, but it is not given to all. An Odysseus or a Telemachus is born in poetry but rarely. And then, not every poetic arrow is capable of piercing the heart of every reader. Some like involved poetry, others prefer clarity. Alexander Tvardovsky, that paladin of logical clarity, once said that in his opinion good poetry with a profound content could be re-told in prose just as well. That, he believes, is a sign of excellence which lies only in content. I, too, like clear, transparent verse, but this thesis of Tvardovsky’s does not appeal to me. In poetry, its logical content must always be rendered through the prism of music. Hence the fancifulness of its moves. Pushkin once said: “Poetry, bless it, must be a little silly.” Some poets took these words, said more in fun, quite seriously and began to imitate the chirping of birds or the muttering of a Pythian oracle in their poems. But poetry that is too, too clever, turns the tables on the poet himself: he simply loses his readers.

p Genuine poetry is always rooted in real life. Its arguments, demands and interests communicated through poetic images stir our hearts much more deeply than mere verbal abstractions, or the capricious movements of emotional clouds passing through a man’s soul.

p The importance played in modern Soviet poetry by the young 164 poets who entered the scene in the post-war period must be put down to their strong sense of personal involvement in all that is happening today. Poets of this generation suffered the hardships of war in childhood or adolescence. Their very psychology is deeply imprinted with the awareness of the changes which took place in the Soviet Union, especially after the war. By changes, I partly mean the tremendous leap made in economic development and the much improved conditions of life generally. But more than anything else, I mean the changes connected with the elimination of the consequences of the Stalin personality cult and the spiritual growth of the new young intelligentsia.

p What qualities are typical of the new generation of intellectuals, the young specialists in particular who arc engaged in developing Soviet science and technology? For one thing, their solid grounding in the most revolutionary spheres of modern culture: physics of elementary particles, physics of solid bodies, mathematics, polimers, electronics, cybernetics, and so forth. Moreover, the character of their work requires of this generation a better knowledge of foreign languages and foreign literature than their fathers had. There are more than a million of these thirty-year-old intellectuals. It is a generation mainly characterised by its uninhibited spiritual breadth and its creative energy in striving for the final goal of communism.

p Antagonistic observers in the West, in both Europe and the United States, are attempting to prove that Soviet writers, to their great joy, are renouncing propagandist literature and heading in the direction of “pure lyricism" and “art for art’s sake”. I’m afraid I shall have to disillusion these experts and observers (like George Gibian, author of Interval of Freedom published in the U.S.A.). The new generation is not turning away from Soviet reality. On the contrary, it is completely immersed with all its thoughts and interests in the present-day life of the country. There is no longer any conflict between politics and one’s inner world, between the private and the social, between civic poetry and “pure lyricism”. This generation is full of heroic communist militancy, there are no bogies to fetter its spirit, and like Mayakovsky it wants to clear the road to communism of all that has become petrified and obsolete.

p Those who want to understand the nature of events in the U.S.S.R. must ponder on the words: a great renovation. A renovation for the sake of what? For the sake of the “human man" (to use Marx’s expression). In other words, for the sake of harmoniously developed man, a man whose nature, shedding animal instincts, would unfold in all its human beauty. But there is a historical logic of its own in mankind’s advance towards these new forms of social existence. And before gaining boundless freedom some of freedom’s gifts have to be temporarily declined in the struggle for it. In a 165 socialist state, the enforced retreat to coercion is, however, accompanied by constant spurts into the future, into that realm of freedom. As Mayakovsky said:

p The barriers down
                    and the enemy routed,
The battle pain over,
                    and time to rejoice,
We’ll get them to bring all the ornaments out
And spread there before you—
                    just pick, your choice!

p The new and the old still exist side by side. And the struggle for the new is at the same time a struggle against the old.

p Revolutionary development by its very nature cannot go at an even pace, like traffic along an autostrada. In the nineteen-thirties, the element of criticism and satire was muted in Soviet poetry. Nowadays it is naturally more pronounced, and altogether it must be said that portraying life in all its aspects has become typical for all Soviet poetry. Therefore the attempts of some bourgeois critics (in the U.S.A. and England especially) to dig out, like raisins from a bun, those stories and poems which “have no politics" seem very naive to me. What they are looking for is evidence of the young Soviet writers’ withdrawal from the ideals of communism. Their efforts must be attributed to naivety or a very superficial knowledge of the subject. Wishful thinking, is more like it.

p In actual fact we see quite a different picture: a naturally extended range of literary themes, a deeper probing into the inner world of Soviet people, and a more pronounced element of criticism as a means of struggle for genuine communism. All these features are expressed obviously enough in the poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

p Yevtushenko is a prolific poet, and new books of verse come from his pen every year or two. He is popular with the young people who regard him, not without reason, as the spokesman for their moods and thoughts. He was only 12 when the war broke out, and by the time he was 22 his poetry had begun to appear in the literary magazines. In Yevtushenko I do not see any artistic discoveries, as we find in Mayakovsky, nor that startling depth of emotion and thought which makes you pause and ponder over Zabolotsky’s lines.

p Yevtushenko’s poetry is narrative in manner. His longer works (for instance, the poem Bratsk} leave an impression of being somewhat drawn out, and some of his verses actually show the untidiness suggestive of being written in a hurry.

p But what one cannot deny him is his creative energy and his 166 passionate responsiveness to all that happens around him: Yevtushenko strikes at many nerves at once, hitting the right keys of a huge keyboard. There is everything in his poetry: traits of the new in Soviet reality; intimate verses, risque to the point of bad taste; outline portraits of contemporaries; lyrical confessions, and so on. It is as though he is speaking in the voices of many different people, always in a hurry, excitedly plunging into polemics, or anxious to share his overwhelming impressions.

p Yevtushenko is the medium for the Soviet crowd. His wholesale address is his weakness because he is not always able to tell a hero from a Philistine. Yet it is also his strength. And, perhaps, the poems written in the first person singular are not his best. The story of Narcissus shows how harmful excessive self-interest can be. In my opinion, Yevtushenko is at his most powerful when he paints wordportraits of people. His portrait gallery of Soviet people includes a woman crane operator, a factory girl, a pensioner, a student, a bad character, an industrial worker, and many, many others, painted with great expressiveness. Not infrequently Yevtushenko presents his hero polemically: a lad whom everyone called a teddyboy, a nihilist and upon whom his own father frowned, dies rescuing a drowning friend. It turns out that he was a good, clean man, capable of rising to heroism. The moral of the story is: don’t judge by appearances.

p Yevtushenko’s poetry demonstrates a complete fusion of the lyrical and the civic. Writing civic poetry is a demanding task, he rightly says. He goes on:

p There’s no coercion to it,
It’s voluntary war.
A depth of understanding,
And honour, above all.

p Yevtushenko, like Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina, Svetlana Yevseyeva and others (but Yevtushenko, first and foremost) brought a new content into Soviet poetry, a new way of looking at the surrounding world. Yevtushenko and Voznesensky make everything that came before them look old-fashioned, just as life itself makes the forms which rightly belong to a past stage appear old-fashioned.

p A great deal is written about Yevtushenko, and he is often criticised. He offends the hypocrites and the bigots (a breed that has naturally not become quite extinct yet). But actually he invites fair criticism as well. For one thing, he tackles acute political themes although he is not really up in politics.

p His Autobiography published in the French magazine l’Exprcss 167 in February-April 1963 contains (in the second part especially) the flavour of a false political sensation. Moreover, in this autobiography of an “early matured man" (as it was called in the magazine) Yevtushenko assumed the rather unattractive pose of a heroic champion of truth who is extremely pleased with himself.

p After the Twentieth Party Congress (in February 1956) much in the development of the Soviet Union in the economic, scientific and spiritual spheres acquired a truly revolutionary character, making headway at a greatly accelerated pace. One of the manifestations of this revolutionary growth is the craving for creative freedom, the desire to venture along unchartered roads. The idea of pioneering the virgin lands in Siberia appealed to some young people, others wanted to conquer outer space, and still others went into poetry, through the medium of which they strove to convey all this process and capture the rapid passage of time. Never mind that the result sometimes lacked maturity, accuracy and polish (as was the case with Yevtushenko). It was anyway a sign of the new times.

p Although the form is entirely different, the same pulse of blossoming creative energy beats in the poetry of Andrei Voznesensky (who studied for an architect), of the same generation of young poets. The reckless, uncontrollable boldness of his comparisons and emotions is amazing. Take his Goya. The poetry is difficult to translate because it is constructed on the phonetic repetition of the sounds “S” and “R” at the beginning of successive sentences and the effect they create of rolling one over the other.

p Unlike Yevtushenko who puts the accent on political content, Voznesensky is most concerned with form. But this by no means involves the simple jingling of sounds or formalistic experimentation which Selvinsky was so fond of in his youth, as indeed were many other poets besides: Marina Tsvetayeva, Semyon Kirsanov, the French dadaists, etc. I do not think it would be fair to call this formalism.

p All that I have written earlier about this generation—the coevals of the first spaceman—is there in Voznesensky’s poetry. As he himself has said:

p A spark of experiment, a spark of risk,
A spark of Olympian spirit.
A heart you can kindle, a stove just as well,
Or maybe the world, and burn it to hell.

p Who does he write about? A woman cashier, an artist, a student, a miner, a pilot, commuters, war invalids, architects. . . . But his statements are never point-blank. He believes in going the 168 round-about way: he prefers to draw a parabola rather than a safe circle. Every poet, if he is a genuine poet, wants first of all to break free of the conventional linguistic and rhythmical fetters and speak out in his own manner. Velimir Khlebnikov (his influence is also very evident in Voznesensky’s work) said about himself:

p I’m a star rider,
I’m Gul-Mullah’s trumpet. . . .

p Voznescnsky, too, is a star rider. But to leap as high as the stars a man needs more than strong muscles. We are delighted, and not just surprised, when a man with well-developed leg muscles jumps more than his own height. The bar is placed at the im 28cm mark. And the whole world is astonished, although actually there is nothing more to it than strong muscles and training. A person just happens to be born with strong legs. Anatolc France devoted a good half of his article about Stendhal to the man’s leg muscles. Andrei Voznescnsky is a Valery Brumel of Soviet poetry. Considering that Brumel’s jump acquired such political importance that the athlete was invited to speak at a peace congress, attended byprofessors and metropolitans, it is not surprising that Voznesensky’s leap had also evoked a world-wide response. He placed the bar of formal innovation higher than anyone else. In his imagination he leapt as high as the stars, and some of his verses (for instance, from the poem Triangular Pear, 1963) are astonishing for their unpredictable and impulsive flights of fancy.

p My sell-portrait. Neon retorts.
The Airoport.
Apostle guarding the heavenly fort.
Duralumin windows rumbling and grumbling,
Like an X-Ray of the soul.
How strange, when the sky is reflected in you,
In smouldering routes to fantastic towns. . . .

p However, in his experimenting with Russian poetry Voznesensky showed that he had a greater aptitude for playing with words, metaphors and rhythms, than for communicating thought. The strongest quality of his talent is the ability to record life’s fleeting impressions in verse form. More often than not his metaphors arc of a visual nature. Compared to the older generation—Zabolotsky, Tvardovsky and Selvinsky, with their atmosphere of tense meditation on life, and even to his coeval Yevgeny Vinokurov- Voznesensky’s lyricism seems like a sparkling fireworks display, and no more. I subscribe to what Vinokurov said at the international 169 meeting of poets in the summer of 1963. “In poetry, thought means most to me. Music in poetry is very important, but then how great, how infinite is meaning—word, logos, that is the beginning of all beginnings. Thought does not age. . . . And poetry is the supreme act of thought.” Further on he said: “It is a fallacy to treat poetry like some sport. The real quest is going on not in the sphere of poetry-making technique where progress is measured in milimetres, but in the sphere of meaning, of psychology, where a distance of hundreds of thousands of kilometres may be covered in one spurt. Genuine innovation goes along a vertical line, into the depths.”

p Yevgeny Vinokurov, who published several books of verse after the war, attracted notice because his poetry is so humane and morally sound. In his last book The Human Face he wants to tell people to be human: if you will only be that you will be able to find your place in communist construction.

p Voznesensky is more artistic, more gifted than Vinokurov. But Vinokurov has more depth. Voznesensky’s dashing raids in poetry and his game of ideological bravado, both in his writings and in his public appearances (abroad especially), have evoked sharp criticism in the press. This criticism was not long in bearing fruit. Voznesensky decided to turn to serious themes. He wrote a poem about Lenin demonstrating the great wealth of his talent which he used to squander on trifles. His metaphors remained as fresh as ever and his poetic moves as unpredictable. But in this poem, where thought assumed the reins of power, his talent unfolded in all its vividness and fullness. A part of this poem entitled “Longjumcau” was printed in Pravda (October 13, 1963). It deals with the years Lenin spent in France, and the period of his work at the Party school at Longjumeau near Paris.

p Lenin’s as simple as matter. As complex too.
Our people aren’t saps to be fed from a spoon.
They’re not simply cogs, they’re thinkers.
He loved your meetings, Ivans and Dmitries,
He infected you with his philosophy’s pathos
And himself got charged by the masses.

p I cannot possibly make a full survey of the numerous works of our gifted young poets in this book, nor does space permit me to even name them all. What I must do is examine briefly the new phenomena in our poetry. The appearance of a book like Bella Akhmadullina’s Taut Wire simply cannot go unmentioned. It is a book of poetry by an intelligent, subtle, observant and very modern author. Or take the poetry of Svetlana Yevseyeva. This young poetess (like Rimma Kazakova) has fortitude and no sugariness.

170

p Svctlana Yevscyeva belongs to the generation which grew up in the war. She writes:

p In our tumbledown, ancient house,
Full of families without men. . . .

p And then: You will stand at the door and wonder.

p No, the master won’t answer your ring.
I remember no home with some menfolk
To be doing such everyday things.. . .

p She writes of fishermen’s wives who are always waiting for their men to come back, and their ears are like sea-shells filled with the sound of the sea. Svetlana says that spring is “when a sparrow swings on a still-bare branch”. She tells us about herself in her charming poem Summer: “I am the crowd in the street. ... In the metro I fancy I’m the marble, accustomed to light.” Her heroine dreams of lofty things, but at the same time she is thinking that the hostel superintendent must not forget to issue the camel wool blankets.

p In her Orina, a modern ballad, she says:

p I milked the cows and cleaned the shed,
And went to the village fair
To buy myself beads of a brilliant red,
And combs for my greasy hair. . . .

p Svetlana Yevseyeva draws an impressive picture of a woman construction worker who mixes concrete as though she were mixing dough in the great industrial kitchen of our age, and who, in her own kitchen at home, places the bread to bake in the oven as though she were performing an ancient rite.

p In conclusion I shall say a few words about the problem of the generations, as it is called. The first thing I would like to point out is that there is simply no such problem in the Soviet Union that needs solving either now or later. What started the talk about the supposed existence of this problem was the arrogant declaration made by some of the young poets and film directors that they and none other—not their elder brothers and fathers—were called upon to create an authentically communist culture, uninhibited by dogmatism and survivals of the past epoch. Comments like the following appeared in the foreign press: “Today, in October 1962, it can be stated that the young generation is making its famous break-through.” The author of this article in the Swedish bourgeois 171 newspaper Stockholm Tidningen went on to say that: “Looking through the cuttings from foreign newspapers about Yevtushenko’s recent visit to England, one discovers the frequently repeated headline: ‘Yevtushenko—the Soviet Union’s Angry Young Man.’ Actually, he is his generation’s official agent. ... I believe he was one of the pioneers in the ’angry’ movement in the Soviet Union, but he is no longer the only one. There are angrier and possibly even abler young men in the U.S.S.R.”

p This problem in Soviet literature gained a measure of acutcness when some of our young, immature poets began to lose their sense of the radical ideological distinction between socialist and bourgeois art. The Party and Soviet public opinion could not, of course, disregard these instances of forgetfulness on the part of our poets of the basic principles of Soviet literature—loyalty to the interests of the Party and the people. But speaking of the period following the Twentieth Congress of the C.P.S.U. which abounded in events, new names and literary works, I must say that the problem of fathers and sons which had engendered contradictory rumours in the foreign press was by no means the most important problem of the time. The central issue was still socialist realism. What then did those years add to the development of this artistic method? .

p I have already said that after 1956-57 our young writers revealed a craving for innovation and creative freedom. This self-assertion of the younger generation found the strongest reflection in the work of the poets. The new wave rose high and broke the dams here and there. These ideological mistakes are often attributable to haste and brimming energy seeking for an outlet.

Communist construction is in full sway everywhere in the country. New factories and buildings are springing up. Electric power is transmitted along endless humming wires to all the corners of the vast land. Blast furnaces send up a great red glow into the sky, and ripe wheat rustles in the steppelands. . . . And in the morning, when the sun rises in the east, we hear the sound of thousands of wings. They are the wings of poetry. They soar into the sky and fly towards what we Soviet people call our tomorrow—towards communism.