Volume 1, Number 3 · September 26, 1963
Barefoot Boy
By Saul Bellow
A Precocious Autobiography
by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew
E.P. Dutton, 124 pp., $3.50
The photographs of Yevtushenko in his Precocious Autobiography show a slender young man, hair combed forward a la Bert Brecht, reciting poetry under spotlights, uninhibited by crowds and microphones. His gestures, hands on his breast as though to lay bare his heart, remind us that Diaghilev, Stanislavsky, Chaliapin did not issue from a void. Russian movements, Russian eloquence are still alive. Patricia Blake in Encounter describes Yevtushenko as 'marvelously handsome and engaging. Dressed in a wildly patterned American sports shirt under a grey silk suit…he waved familiarly at the audience.' Yevtushenko is a star. Fans seek his autograph. The world press covers his activities. His autobiography appears in the Saturday Evening Post with an introduction by the retired head of the C.I.A., Mr. Allen Dulles. He is bad for Them, good for Us. Premier Khrushchev is annoyed. Comrade Ilychev, chief propagandist under Stalin, is furious. In the Soviet Union Yevtushenko has been described as 'Russia's chief juvenile delinquent.' In Miss Blake's account he is shown leading the poet's life, adored by the young, enthusiastic, drinking wine, and eating chocolates. Photographed with Gagarin or waving his arms with attractive recklessness, pressing his own pants, flaunting fur neckties, what Yevtushenko Satisfies, apparently, is the need of a large public, in Russia and abroad, for the figure of a Russian poet who speaks out boldly on matters of conscience, a civic poet of the kind as badly needed in the West as in the East, a symbol of the free spirit.
Review, 1011 words
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