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Creative Schizophrenia. Zhenya was 19 when Stalin died. In revulsion from political themes, he sought refuge in love lyrics. The conservative critics who had effusively praised his first, insipid book of verse savaged his second, making the book an overnight hit and Zhenya a national name. Ever since, says Evtushenko. he has suffered from creative schizophrenia ; when he writes love poetry he is attacked for escapism ; when he returns to social themes he is faulted for wasting his lyric talent. The same ambivalence, he grins, marks Pushkin, his idol. His other heroes: Boris Pasternak; Hemingway, "my favorite prose writer by far"; Fidel Castro, whom he quotes gleefully as saying "Art should be free"; and Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, the explosively original Bolshevik suicide who, like Evtushenko 30 years later, bitterly satirized the smug commissars of his time.
Along with Evtushenko, almost all the ablest writers of the New Left are preoccupied with the doubts and dreams of Soviet youth. The most notable: Vladimir Tendryakov, a young prose writer whose most memorable story, about an escaped convict who bilks his rescuers, is a horrifying allegory aimed subtly at ex-Convict Joseph Stalin; Victor Rozov, most censured and celebrated for a script about a disturbed youth who cannot understand how his elders could defend evil from political necessity; Vasily Aksenov, whose young jets are pictured as mixed-up idealists; Victor Nekrasov, a psychological novelist with a penchant for the bewildered and inarticulate.
The literature of truth is still highly controversial in Russia. Poets and novelists no longer face firing squads; but a writer who goes too far can be cut off from his royalties, or locked up. One recent victim was Author Michael Naritsa, 53, who suffered exile and imprisonment under Stalin, began asking for trouble again in 1960 when he smuggled his latest novel, The Unsung Song, out of the country by unorthodox means: unable to contact a foreign publisher, he bundled up his manuscript, attached to it a labeled plea in four languages (see cut}, and thrust it into the hands of two surprised West German tourists who were strolling down a Leningrad street. The tourists got it published abroad, and Naritsa got a visitation from the agents of the Committee of State Security (KGB); today he is under detention in a "mental home." Nikita Khrushchev, who remembers well that writers helped ignite Hungary's uprising, warned Soviet authors in 1957 that if they went too far, "my hand would not tremble on the trigger." Bureaucracy still battles stubbornly to control literature, but even Nikita himself concedes that books of "quality" are more important than unreadable platitudes.
Law of Big Numbers. Evtushenko has powerful friends at court, notably Voronov, a member of Pravda's editorial board, and, through him, Izvestia Editor Alexis Adzhubei, Khrushchev's son-in-law. Another influential supporter is 71-year-old Novelist Ilya Ehrenburg, whose 1954 novel, The Thaw, gave history's chapter heading to destalinization. In 1960 Evtushenko rated a passport, has subsequently wandered widely in Western Europe, Africa and elsewhere abroad. On two trips to Cuba he gathered material for a movie scenario, visited the house where Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea.