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RUFUS MATHEWSON
entirely Leninist. Once he had discovered the Stalinist fraud, it meant
going back to the true faith, and then forward to its realization
in the name of the Truth and the People. Thp. declaration of faith
is banal enough, but the point is for us to understand that is is one
of the rules of the game. This is not to accuse Evtushenko of insincerity.
It is part of our responsibility to realize that in a world without guar–
anteed rights of any kind, the human intelligence is engaged in a total
war the moment it asserts the right to exist. Not to be strategic would
be to surrender
,a
priori,
on purist grounds. That Evtushenko is involved
in this battle, we may not doubt.
Armed against the strategems, then, but never really certain what
Evtushenko's final commitments are, the reader may try to identify
the myths Evtushenko has invoked to justify himself in the East and
to explain himself in the West.
The poet as a public figure has a special history in Russia. He has
often been cast as culture-hero, or divine
literatus
speaking
to
multitudes,
or a martyr to the Philistines, or as some combination of the three.
Pushkin's fineness as a man, his gallantry, his wit, his style, the breadth
of his concerns constituted as much of a reproach to the thuggish regime
of Nicholas I as his "civic" verse. The man and his work were fused
in a special way. Lermontov's defiant Byronic pose contained implicit
criticism of the T sarist world, and invited a mood of non-political
dissent. Mayakovsky played the poet in a more complex way, affirming
revolutionary values with one harsh, declamatory voice, while he sup–
pressed another, more personal voice, at fatal cost to himself. Evtu–
shenko is not the poet any of these men were, but he deliberately
associates himself with this "tradition." That is why we are so much
aware of the poet
performing
his poetry.
The
Autobiography
then traces the development of the public
poet.
He was a fairly rough, tough kid, from a Siberian village, who chose
between poetry and soccer, learned the craft from the inevitable kindly
mentors. He abandoned thc early "private" work when the full horror
of the Stalinist dcvia tions-primarily ethical-from Leninism became
clear to him, adopted the harsh rhetoric of the early revolutionary
poets, and embarked finally on a militant campaign for the truth
and against the falsifiers. The briefest comparison will show that the
only quality he shares with his greater forebears is his vulnerability:
the career of the public poet in Russia is dangerous indeed. Arrest,
suicide, or death by violence, obloquy or exile, are all on the historical
record. Whatever kind of poet we decide he is, or however genuine
the new public personality he has made for himself, we must not fail
