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Much the same situation dignifies Maximov's novel, A Man Survives (Grove). Seryosha, his young hero, of ten spouts familiar teen-age protests. "I hate the whole world," he shouts at one point. "I hate everybody who has the right to bang his fist on the table, to give marks." But the reader is mistaken who thinks he is listening in on James Dean complaining to Dad because he can't have the family car for a double date. Seryosha's father has been taken away by the NKVD, and the boy has encountered in Joseph Stalin and the local commissar a pair of fa ther images worthy of hate.
With flashbacks, brief jagged confrontations, and dirty language — all of them daring deviations from stodgy stylistic norms in Stalin's time — Maximov tells how the rebellious Seryosha lives as an outlaw on the seamy side of the Soviet establishment, first stealing vegetables to sell on the black market, then working for a smuggler plying the border trade back and forth from Turkey. Eventually he is drafted to fight in World War II.
In quick images, Maximov slashes a scene in place. His hero, hating the smug, virtuous world, rejects the sympathy of the few kind and decent people he encounters because it is rage itself, he comes to understand, that keeps him alive. "I defend myself against them," he thinks in a rare moment of self-understanding, "with all the fury accumulated in years of wolfish life." Eventually he gives in and accepts society, because he realizes that, bad as it is, it is redeemed by individual acts of humanity.
Snows & Saints. In poetry, Evgeny Evtushenko, 30, is still the major voice, and has taken the brunt of the backlash that followed his first outspoken poems. But nowadays Evtushenko's reputation is being matched by that of Andrei Voznesensky, 30, more gifted and only slightly less flamboyant ex-student of architecture. Voznesensky's newest volume of verse will appear in the U.S. in translation this spring.
Western critics have already begun to cool their original ardor for new Soviet verse and lately have begun to grumble that Evtushenko and Voznesensky have neither read T.S. Eliot nor profited by exposure to the likes of William Carlos Williams. The complaint is true, but beside the point. Voznesensky and Evtushenko invite useful comparison not with the sophisticated Western poets of today but with Carl Sandburg singing of the Western plains or the chest-thumping celebrations of Walt Whitman. Like Sandburg, and like the U.S. folk singers who make up rhymes for the freedom riders, the new Soviet poets tend to alternate between lyrical simplicity and passionate rhetoric, as in these excerpts translated in Encounter:
You whisper of childhood, as we touch cheeks,
That country of childhood, where horses and suns
And honeycombs glitter like icons.
And look at your hair, its honey tints . . .
I live in Russia, among snows and saints!
I am sorrow
I am the voice of war
the embers of cities
on the snows of the year '41
I am hunger
I am the throat of a woman
whose body like a bell
hangs over the naked square . . .