Schmemann, Serge. 2010. Poets and Thaws and Dictators and Faded History

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Poets and Thaws and Dictators and Faded History. By:

SCHMEMANN, SERGE. New York Times. 6/7/2010, p22. 0p.

Abstract: By the time I met the poet Andrei Voznesensky in the early

1980's, he was in that limbo in authoritarian societies reserved for

forces too powerful to destroy but too dangerous to let loose. His

poetry was quietly published. He traveled abroad. At his two-story

wooden dacha among the tall pines of the renowned writer's village of

Peredelkino outside Moscow, he and his writer wife, Zoya

Boguslavskaya, openly received foreigners. He struck me as anything

but a rebel. He was more the country gentleman, whose appearance

he cultivated with silk ascots and long scarves thrown casually over

the shoulder. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] ( AN: 51226841)

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Poets and Thaws and Dictators and Faded History

By the time I met the poet Andrei Voznesensky in the early 1980's, he was in that limbo in

authoritarian societies reserved for forces too powerful to destroy but too dangerous to let loose.

His poetry was quietly published. He traveled abroad. At his two-story wooden dacha among the

tall pines of the renowned writer's village of Peredelkino outside Moscow, he and his writer wife,

Zoya Boguslavskaya, openly received foreigners. He struck me as anything but a rebel. He was

more the country gentleman, whose appearance he cultivated with silk ascots and long scarvesthrown casually over the shoulder.

But it had not been all that long since he was one of the ''shestidesiatniki,'' the generation of the

60s, who sprouted in the cultural ''thaw'' that Nikita Khrushchev opened with his denunciation of

Stalin in 1956. Almost instantly, brilliant shoots unfurled through the cracks in the long-solid ice --

poets, writers, painters, singers and musicians who seemed to instantly pick up where their

silenced, cowed or murdered predecessors had left off.

Mr. Voznesensky, who died on Tuesday at age 77, was part of a clutch of young poets -- Yevgeny

Yevtushenko, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Bella Akhmadulina -- who electrified Russians who

crowded into Moscow's Polytechnical Museum (by coincidence a brief walk from K.G.B.

headquarters), or gathered at Vladimir Mayakovsky's statue and finally packed stadiums.

Their poems, like those of the revolutionary poet Mayakovsky, were not for literary salons. They

were meant to be performed in public, before agitated throngs. They were freewheeling, ironic,

muscular, emotional, jocular, radical, controversial and invariably thrilling.

''We had an urge to shout at the top of our voices,'' Voznesensky wrote years later. ''The 60s



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found themselves in the synthesis of the world and the stage, the poet and the actor.''

The thaw sent Mr. Voznesensky frequently to the West, where he was lionized as a harbringer of

a new, post-Stalin Russia. But the staid, brutish party chieftains back home were not so

charmed, and before long Khrushchev ended the thaw as abruptly as he had started it. Mr.

Voznesensky was his exhibit No. 1 at the celebrated reception in 1963 at which Khrushchev

vented his rage at the artists.

But the true writer in the Soviet Union never lost moral power. ''The poet is two people,'' Mr.

Voznesensky once said. ''One is an insignificant person, leading the most insignificant of lives.

But behind him, like an echo, is the other person who writes poetry. Sometimes the two coexist.

Sometimes they collide; this is why certain poets have tragic ends.''

He certainly knew of what he spoke. As the 60s faded into history, it became fashionable to the

''shestidesiatniki'' as quislings, to scoff at their populism and their quasi-official status. But the

person in Mr. Voznesensky who wrote poetry reached deep into Russian hearts.

His poem ''A Million Red Roses,'' put to music and sung by Alla Pugacheva, helped create her

vast popularity.

I was at the premiere in 1981 of ''Yunona i Avos,'' Russia's first real rock opera, to which

Voznesensky wrote the lyrics and Aleksei Rybnikov the music. To this day I can feel the electricity

spread through the audience from the blend of Western rock, church chants and a daring theme

of Russian-American romance. It was heady stuff, back when Soviet-American relations were at

a low.

By the time he died, Mr. Voznesensky had been heaped high with awards and distinctions. His

death prompted a predictable outpouring of tributes from Russia and around the world. I was

especially struck by one from a blogger named Gerasim, evidently a man of the 60s himself, in

response to someone who had lamented that the last of Russia's spiritual and moral guideposts

were dying off.

''Very convenient!'' scoffed Gerasim. ''So they're the guilty ones. They died, you see, and took the

guideposts with them.''

He added: ''No, brother! It won't work that way. People rejected their guideposts themselves,

while they were still alive. And these same people, if they want to, can bring them back.''

Late Edition - Final

~~~~~~~~

By SERGE SCHMEMANN

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Schmemann, Serge. 2010. Poets and Thaws and Dictators and Faded History

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