Russia: Poetry Underground

In Russia, no poet need starve if he can hack out odes extolling “socially useful” goals. In revolt against sloganeering paeans that read like Pravda set to rhyme, hundreds of Soviet writers privately turn out poems about lovemaking, maladjustment, and other concerns of the soul neglected by seven-year plans. They call such extracurricular outpourings “poetry for the desk drawer,” because it is unproletarian and unpublishable. Yet one of the most revealing aspects of Russian evolution since Stalin has been the growth of the desk drawer.

There seems to be a vast and avid audience for poetry of passion and protest. Through recitals in locked apartments, surreptitiously distributed copies of poems, or late-night sessions in public squares and parks, young Russians have organized an efficient underground distribution system for verse written, as one poet explains, “for our souls’ sake”—as opposed to the Party-line literature that the late great Boris Pasternak described as being dumped on the populace “forcibly, like potatoes under Catherine the Great.”*

Desk-drawer poetry has ranged recently from barbs at Soviet society to lyrics celebrating what one young poet calls the “unwise dream—freedom.” Of late, restive Party leaders have urged the government to close the drawer on such “bourgeois” themes. Last week the poetry problem found its way into the program of the 22nd Party Congress.

Beat Keats. In a whimsical but nonetheless pointed peroration, famed Cossack Novelist Mikhail (And Quiet Flows the Don) Sholokhov wryly contrasted the obscure existence led by talented young poets in the provinces with the “triumphs of our currently fashionable boudoir poets.” Neatly exploiting peasant resentment of city slickers, Sholokhov blamed the “backwardness” of Red letters on the fact that the great majority of writers live in big cities, thus have “only superficial knowledge of quickly flowing and changing reality.” In their “impossibly narrow trousers and absurdly broad-shouldered jackets,” he scoffed, they are interested only in showing off to “the hysterical squeals of beatnik chicks.”† He added that such poets would, in any case, be useless on the farm since they would soon be “nostalgic for warm toilets and the other city blessings.”

Main target of Sholokhov’s scorn was plainly Evgeny Evtushenko, 28, the current idol of serious poetry lovers and the young intelligentiki. A shaggy, twice-married Angry Young Muscovite who sports jazzy French suits and boasts a modern, two-room apartment, Evtushenko looks, and at times sounds, rather like a beat Keats. Though he produces periodic Party paeans on such acceptable themes as the Communist worker, Evtushenko is celebrated for vividly erotic lyrics (“Coursing regally, your whole body feels you are a queen”) that have drawn down official ire for their “scandalous and somewhat noisy notoriety.” One poem that raised official blood pressures was about a low-life nihilist—”He wore narrow trousers/ He read Hemingway”—who in the poem’s climax loses his life trying to save a drowning comrade. This, to Marxist critics, is “poetic dishonesty.”

“Pygmy Cosmopolitan.” Moscow’s biggest literary furor in months was prompted by another Evtushenko poem, Bdbiy Yar, named for a ravine near Kiev where the Nazis massacred 52,000 Jews. In a moving lament that was also a call to resist the anti-Semitism of Khrushchev’s Russia, Poet Evtushenko—who is not Jewish—mourned:

Let the Internationale sound out joyously

When the last anti-Semite on earth is buried.

In retaliation for this “insult” to the Soviet people, Evtushenko was berated as a “pygmy cosmopolitan.” Last month, more than 5,000 young Muscovites showed their feeling by packing around the statue of Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. chanting: “We want Evtushenko.” Their hero mounted to an improvised platform and read a poem, You Can Call Me a Communist, but which pointedly declares: “I will remain firm to the end and never become an unctuous bootlicker.”

For young writers, censure in such ossified Party organs as Life and Literature can be as big a boost as being banned in Boston. Since Evtushenko and the few other desk-drawer poets lucky enough to achieve publication are seldom permitted editions of more than a few thousand, their works are mostly transmitted verbally or copied from furtive, short-lived poetry magazines with names such as Cocktail and Boomerang. In Moscow and Leningrad, there are hundreds of unpublishable poets who advertise their calling by aping scruffy U.S. beatniks down to dirty dungarees, unkempt beards, and unfathomable doggerel.

If they appear wildly eccentric against the puritan drabness of Khrushchev’s Russia, few such poets can compete in nonconformity with Vladimir Mayakovsky, Stalin’s poet laureate. Mayakovsky was a brilliant, brattish libertine who alternated between slavish drivel in praise of Communism and biting satires against it. Sickened by repression and criticism, he committed suicide in 1930. Stalin astounded Party hacks by decreeing that he was Russia’s “best and most talented” poet, adding ominously: “Indifference to his work and memory is a crime.” Independent-minded young Russians think none the better of Mayakovsky for Stalin’s seal of approval. But they remember the unfinished last poem in which he derided the regime’s “gang of self-seeking poets and rogues.” Communist propaganda, wrote Mayakovsky, “sticks in my throat, too.”

* An “enlightened” ruler and admirer of Prussia’s Frederick the Great, who made his peasants plant potatoes to ensure food supplies for his armies, Catherine hoped potato cultivation would relieve Russian poverty. It had little effect.

† In Russian, beatniks are known as stilyagi, literally “stylists,” i.e., people who imitate foreign styles,