Fatal Half Measures

Abstract

FATAL HALF MEASURES / Yevgeny Yevtushenko For over thirty years, the internationally renowned Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko has been a strong literary and political voice in the Soviet Union. The following prose excerpts are taken from his upcoming volume of essays, Fatal Half Measures: The Culture of Democracy in the Soviet Union, edited and translated by Antonina W. Bouis, to be released in March, 1991, by Little, Brown and Company. The collected essays chronicle the poet's own artistic development and the growth of his political awareness; of equal concern to him is the intellectual and artistic development of his contemporaries. In writing of the cultural and social pressures they continually confronted, Yevtushenko defends his theory that perestroïka is actually a matter of political evolution that has been quietly under way since the death of Stalin. In Fatal Half Measures Yevtushenko writes of events that span four decades. The excerpts we have selected reflect the variety of his experience and interests, though always within the context of the poet's political concerns and his commitment to his homeland. Yevtushenko currently lives and writes in the Soviet Union, where he is an elected member of the Congress of People's Deputies. From "Moscow Memories" IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND a city, you have to faU in love there at least once, get sick at least once, be robbed at least once, find something accidentaUy at least once, bury someone at least once, and walk through the city with a chUd in your arms at least once. AU these things happened to me in Moscow, and therefore the city is mine—it is filled with shades of my happiness and misfortunes, ghosts of people who have died for many, but are eternal residents of Moscow for me. When I recently passed the construction site of the Olympic stadium in the neighborhood of the former Meshchanskaya streets, famed for their hooUgans in my childhood, I thought with sadness about how many of my memories were buried in the foundation of that stadium and how the thousands of fans roaring in the stands would never know the secrets of our chUdhoods, pressed down by the marvelous sports palace, including the site of my first kiss. The Missouri Review · 283 I came to Moscow from Siberia in 1944, when I was twelve. My mother—a popular singer—was at the front, and my father, divorced, was somewhere in Siberia, and I Uved alone in a communal apartment inside an old wooden house, surrounded by bird cherry trees and poplars. Like many chüdren of that period, I was left to my own devices. My nanny was the street. The street taught me to fight, steal, and be afraid of nothing. There was one fear the street did not take away from me—fear of losing my bread cards. I carried them in a canvas bag tied around my neck on a shoe-lace. Then one day after a fight, the bag was gone. An old woman, standing in Une, gave me her late husband's cards and said, "You can eat for the dead man___ " With the other boys I sold cigarettes, buying them in packs and selling them singly. But on Victory Day all the cigarette vendors in the city were giving them away, the ice cream women were giving away ice cream in Red Square. It looked Uke aU of Moscow was in Red Square. AU the women, spinning in waltzes to accordion music, were wearing oUcloth boots—I don't remember anyone in shoes. American and English officers were tossed into the air, and we kids scrambled for foreign coins that came out of their pockets. One American gave me some gum; I thought it was candy and swaUowed it. Wounded soldiers sat with their arms around each other and drank on the steps of the Mausoleum. Couples French kissed under the blue Kremlin firs. Every city is made up of hundreds of thousands of memories, invisible to the tourist eye. "Then why bother going to strange cities, if you're never going to get to the bottom of their secrets anyway?" a lazybones might ask. To understand the memories of other cities...