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In the U.S. last year, Zhenya discovered dry martinis at Harvard, Greenwich Village jazz dives, and decided that of all the cities he has visited, "New York, in all honesty, is the best." Evtushenko has had two wives. The first was beautiful Bella Akhmadulina, who is also one of the generation's most gifted poets. After two years in cramped quarters (one room)—young Russians' commonest cause for divorce—they parted in 1959. Since 1960, Zhenya has been married to a poised, handsome brunette named Galya, who is two years his senior and an able translator (Maugham, Salinger).
Their marriage has a double chance of success: they have a two-room apartment of their own in a new apartment building on Moscow's outskirts. It is stylishly decorated with Scandinavian furniture; the walls are lined with abstract paintings by Zhenya's friends, and the books he has hauled back from his travels.
Last week Evtushenko was finishing his movie script, which will be filmed in Cuba this spring. Two new volumes of his verse are to be published soon, and he is working on his first novel since childhood. He calls it The Law of Big Numbers, a ten-year project that will "attempt to apply mathematical equations to the new generation of Russian intellectuals." Strange Days. No simple equation can tell how Russia's youth will mature, or what kind of society it will inherit.
With Evtushenko, it looks forward to a time when "Posterity will remember/And will burn with shame/ Remembering these strange days/ When common honesty was called courage." The crowds who turn out to hear the poets' work are a hopeful portent. When citizens are allowed to judge literature for themselves, when the highest officials wrangle publicly over the fundamental rights and aims of creative artists, they are engaged in the closest thing to a democratic debate that Soviet history has seen. The depth of public response to the new "literature of truth" is itself the strongest deterrent to the party diehards who would choke the debate. Most Russian special ists believe that the regime could not return to the rule of terror without a violent popular upheaval that would shake the nation to its roots. Says an old Russian adage: "If it is written with a pen, you can't remove it with a hatchet."