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Siberian Roots. Poets in particular have won greater latitude than they have enjoyed since the early, heady days of the Revolution. From medieval times, when illiterate peasants listened spellbound to wandering "reciters," the intellectual Russians have always revered poets above potentates. Among them—from Pushkin, who died "invoking freedom in an age of fear," to Pasternak, who, at the cost of much personal bravery, was almost the only writer of his generation to deride Stalin's shibboleths—have been Russia's most impassioned foes of injustice. Evgeny Evtushenko, the most famed and gifted young poet in Russia today, follows in their footsteps.
"Zhenya," as handsome, 28-year-old Evtushenko is invariably called, started out where many another Russan poet has ended—in Siberia. The blond, beanpole-tall (6 ft. 3 in.) poet comes of Ukrainian, Tartar and Latvian stock that has never, he grins, "been collectivized." Though he likes to be taken for a country boy, he is a Muscovite by upbringing and accent, and his background rubs off on his sophisticated, often colloquial poetic style. His deep appeal lies in a rare faculty for sensing—and transmitting—the doubts and yearnings of a generation that has lost its illusions and is beginning to find its voice. Evtushenko is this generation's flag-bearer, a daring young man, but not to the point of martyrdom.
Noiseless Verse. Poets of protest such as Evgeny Evtushenko (pronounced Yevgainy Yeftooshenko) have, in the past, been isolated from the vast, unlettered mass of Russian society. Today, through far-ranging recital tours and huge editions of their verse, they are reaching the widest, best-educated public in Russian history. The result has been a remarkable poetic revival. In theaters and student hostels from White Russia to Central Asia, overflow crowds listen to poets with almost religious fervor. On Sunday nights in summer, city squares echo to the liquid, incantatory cadences of Pushkin. Lermontov and. often. Zhenya Evtushenko. One good reason for poetry's popularity: scraps of "noiseless verse," as Russian writers call work that is too avant-garde or radical for publication, can easily be mimeographed and surreptitiously distributed from one group of youths to another. Though several underground poetry sheets have drawn official condemnation, not a single editor has lost his head.
Simply put, Russia's writers are seeking truth. Evtushenko's verse and his contemporaries' conversation come back to the word time and again. Their generation has seen truth ripped from maps and histories; their search for facts is an obsession. After Stalin's death, Evtushenko went back to see. he said, if any kind of truth had survived in his native Siberia; even there he was disappointed. In a poem named for his home town, Zima (literally, Winter), he quoted the adage: "Truth is good but happiness is better," adding forlornly: "But without truth there is no happiness."