Yevgeny Yevtushenko - Criticism

Criticism

It has been asserted that "Yevtushenko's politics have always been a complicated mixture of bravery, populism, and vulgar accommodation with dictatorship." Judith Colp of The Washington Times, for example, described Yevtushenko as "his country's most controversial modern poet, a man whose reputation is poised between courageous behind-the-scenes reformer and failed dissident." Indeed, "as the Sovietologist and literary critic Robert Conquest put it in a 1974 profile: 'The writers who had briefly flourished went two different ways. Solzhenitsyn and his like into silenced opposition; Yevtushenko and his like, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes in the hope of still influencing matters a little, into well-rewarded collaboration.'" Some argue that before the appearance of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and the dissident movement in Russia, Yevtushenko, through his poetry, was the first voice to speak out against Stalinism (although Boris Pasternak is often considered "to have helped give birth to the dissident movement with the publication of his 'Doctor Zhivago'"). Colp adds: "Sovietologist Stephen Cohen of Princeton University contends that Yevtushenko was among those Soviets who didn't become dissidents but in their own way tried to improve conditions and prepare the way for reform, 'They exhibited a kind of civic courage that many Americans didn't recognize.'" Kevin O'Connor, in his Intellectuals and Apparatchiks, noted that Yevtushenko was "a popular liberal who never experienced the sort of intimidation that characterized regime's treatment of dissident writers Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Voinovich (each of whom was forced to leave the USSR)."

Brodsky repeatedly criticised Yevtushenko for what he perceived as his "conformism", especially after the latter was made member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Commenting on this controversy in A Night in the Nabokov Hotel, an anthology of Russian poetry in English translation, Anatoly Kudryavitsky wrote the following: "A few Russian poets enjoyed the virtual pop-star status, unthinkable if transposed to other parts of Europe. In reality, they were far from any sort of protest against Soviet totalitarianism and therefore could not be regarded as anything else but naughty children of the regime." Furthermore, some criticized Yevtushenko regarding Pasternak's widow, given that "when Pasternak's widow, Olga Ivinskaya, was imprisoned on trumped-up charges of illegally dealing in foreign currency, Yevtushenko publicly maligned her that 'Doctor Zhivago' was not worth publishing in the Soviet Union."

Moreover, "the poet Irina Ratushinskaya, upon her release from prison and arrival in the West, dismissed Yevtushenko as an official poet and the novellist Vasily Aksionov has also refused contact ." Responding to the criticism, Yevtushenko reportedly said:

Who could sanction me to write Babi Yar, or my protests against the (1968 Soviet) invasion of Czechoslovakia? Only I criticised Khrushchev to his face; not even Solzhenitsyn did that. It is only the envy of people who couldn't stand against the propaganda machine, and they invented things about my generation, the artists of the '60s. Our generation was breaking the Iron Curtain. It was a generation crippled by history, and most of our dreams were doomed to be unfulfilled – but the fight for freedom was not in vain.

Yevtushenko further notes that "in several cases personally rose to the defense of these writers, interceding privately for Ratushinskaya's release from a prison, defending Mr. Aksionov and others who were expelled from the Writers Union."

Critics differ on the stature of Yevtushenko in the literature world, with "most Western intellectuals and many Russian scholars extol him as the greatest writer of his generation, the voice of Soviet life." They "acknowledge that his speaking tours have won him converts among audiences impressed with his dramatic readings and charismatic personality. Tina Tupikina Glaessner (1967) refers to him as “one of the greatest poets of the modern age.” She states that “Bratsk Station” offers the greatest insight into Soviet life of any other work in modern Russian literature. Two decades later, in his 1988 article, Michael Pursglove echoes her sentiments referring to Stanciya Zima as “one of the landmarks of Soviet literature."

Others, however, notably Russian critics like "Patricia Pollock Brodsky (1992) takes issue with the interpretation that Yevtushenko has been persecuted by the Russian government." "And most scathing, Tomas Venclova asserts, in his 1991 essay, that few in the Russian literary community “consider his work worthy of serious study." Furthermore, when Yevtushekno criticized the U.S. government in 1972, "Allen Tate called him a 'ham actor, not a poet,' and others not unsympathetic to criticisms of Washington found his frequent condemnations of American 'imperialism,' and comparatively footling criticisms of the Russian police state, thoroughly repulsive."