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Going to the other extreme, some Western critics have hopefully deduced from his unpopularity with Stalinist critics that Evtushenko is a rebel against the system and a secret ally of the West. In fact, though not a party member, he is permitted exceptional latitude only because he is careful to leave his basic allegiance to country and system in no doubt. "For my death." In country." he criticizing writes, its "my life abuses, he and ex my plains, his aim is to improve, not destroy, the Soviet society. Says he: "The banner is undefiled. even though some of its bearers stumbled in the mire." Evtu shenko and other literary gadflies resemble a loyal opposition, whose foe is the Stalin ist rearguard in Moscow and Peking ; they have been called the New Left. Says an anti-Stalinist Soviet official: "Evtushenko & Co. are not a cancer, just a head cold." Pancake Poet. And so. in a way. Evtushenko's courage has not been put to the severest test, as Pasternak's was. But if a change came in his fortune, Zhenya would not be the first Evtushenko to suffer for his views. In the wave of repression that followed Czar Alexander II's assassination in 1881, Great-Grandfather Joseph Evtushenko was banished from the Ukraine as a suspected subversive, died on the grueling 3,500-mile trek to eastern Siberia. Joseph's 18 children settled finally in Zima, a bleak lumber station on the trans-Siberian railroad, where Zhenya was born in 1933. Son of a concert singer and a geologist father. Zhenya spent his early childhood in the old quarter of Moscow. There he lived with his gifted, handsome mother Zinaida and her father, a grizzled artilleryman who was a lieutenant general when he vanished forever during Stalin's 1938 Red army purge. Shortly after, Zhenya's father left Zinaida, explained that her father's "crimes" endangered his career. Zhenya, who adopted his mother's surname, never forgave him.
His literary flair was there from the first. At ten, he wrote a novel; at twelve, he was jotting down his own verses for folk melodies. One day in 1945 he heard a group of washerwomen singing his lyrics. "That did it." says he. "From then on I was poetry-struck." After wartime evacuation to Zima, he made goalkeeper on an all-Moscow schoolboy team and signed up for professional soccer. Day before he was to report for training, Soviet Sport published his first poem to see print, and Zhenya turned his sights on literature's big league. He started turning out poems "like pancakes." mostly flat odes to stock Stalinist subjects. ("Very bad." he admits.) They opened the door to Gorky Literary Institute, where he studied desultorily for years without graduating.