The Magical Chorus

a different Siberian village, Nizhneudinsk.

On the disparity in the date Yevtushenko’s explanations are rather vague, but the rest is not hard to figure out. A famous Russian poet, as Yevtushenko expected to be from an early age, could not have a German-sounding surname or be born in a place with an unpoetic name. He used his mother’s surname, and he squeezed everything possible out of the romantic-sounding Zima (Winter) Junction, including a very long poem.

Yevtushenko paraded around in shiny imported suits, multicolored caps, and bright ties, while the more stylish Voznesensky wore white ascots, coquettishly tied in a knot. And red-haired Akhmadulina astonished her audiences with her exotic looks: a delicate oval face “from Botticelli’s brush” and slanted eyes of a “Siamese cat,” as her first husband, Yevtushenko, described her.

Akhmadulina read her polished poems in a flirtatious and rather mannered way, never failing to impress her public, not as big as those of her friends, since her works were more refined and distanced from current events. Not everyone was enchanted, as evinced in a bitter entry in the diary of her second husband, the writer Yuri Nagibin: “Akhmadulina is cruel, devious, vengeful, and not at all sentimental, even though she is brilliant at playing touching helplessness…. Bella is as cold as ice, she loves no one but—not even herself—but the impression she makes.”²⁴

Akhmadulina and her friends were not anti-Soviet poets (her mother, according to Yevtushenko, was high up in the KGB).²⁵ As Yevtushenko recalled, in the early 1950s among student friends, someone said, “The revolution is dead and its corpse stinks.” Young Akhmadulina, her eyes sparkling angrily, exclaimed, “You should be ashamed of yourself! The revolution is not dead. The revolution is sick. We have to help the revolution.”²⁶

Yevtushenko admitted that even after he came to hate Stalin, he continued to idealize Lenin, who was an idol for him until the start of perestroika. He gladly glorified Castro’s Cuba in his poetry (and wrote the screenplay for Mikhail Kalatozov’s propaganda film I Am Cuba) and had no difficulty writing sloganeering poems on any propagandistic topic. Robert Rozhdestvensky and many other young writers worked in the same vein in the mid-1950s, when the period known as the Thaw became a time for them of a brief but turbulent affair with the regime.

It may seem that at first, Khrushchev had to sympathize with the idealistic young poets, for he needed potent allies in the intelligentsia in his tightrope walk of de- Stalinization. His support, followed by sudden violent attacks, helped to make them world famous. Still, in Russia, not everyone was impressed.

Akhmatova had a skeptical attitude toward the “stadium poets.” In private conversation she called Yevtushenko Mayakovsky’s epigone “but without his genius” she compared Voznesensky with Igor Severyanin, a popular turn-of-the-century poet (“the same tastelessness and cheap blasphemy”); and in connection with Akhmadulina unexpectedly cited the mannered poems of Mikhail Kuzmin, who died forgotten in 1936.²⁷

Khrushchev tried to form his own cultural elite. Fadeyev, the once talented writer made into the overseer of Soviet literature by Stalin, he removed from power. Now, after the publication of Fadeyev’s panicky letters to Khrushchev in 1953, it is clear that it was the new ruler’s markedly cold attitude toward the writer, and not at all Fadeyev’s pangs of conscience over his role in the Stalinist repressions of his colleagues, as was previously thought, that pushed Fadeyev to his unexpected suicide in 1956 at the age of fifty-four.

Khrushchev also got rid of another Stalin favorite, Fadeyev’s deputy Konstantin Simonov, six-time winner of the Stalin Prize and author of the celebrated wartime poem “Wait for Me.” The new Soviet leader had been infuriated by Simonov’s directive that appeared in Literaturnaya Gazeta shortly after Stalin’s death: “The most important, the loftiest goal placed before Soviet literature is to capture in all its majesty and in all fullness for contemporaries and future generations the image of the greatest genius of all times and all nations—the immortal Stalin.”²⁸ (Much later, the mortally ill Simonov would dictate perhaps the best memoirs of meetings with Stalin.)

Khrushchev interrupted the career of yet another Stalin protege, Alexander Gerasimov, president of the Academy of Arts of the USSR and four-time laureate of the Stalin Prize. Gerasimov’s audience with Khrushchev, during which the artist tried to persuade him that de-Stalinization was a mistake, ended in a scandal: the temperamental Gerasimov stalked out of Khrushchev’s office and slammed the door. Gerasimov was ordered to submit his resignation; that night he drank a whole bottle of vodka and almost died of a heart attack.

The ubiquitous paintings of Stalin were sent into museum warehouses; but on others, especially those where the ruler was depicted next to Lenin, artists painted over Stalin with other figures and the works continued to be exhibited and reproduced, eliciting knowing smirks.

Under Khrushchev’s aegis, an adventurous theater was founded in Moscow—the Sovremennik [Contemporary], headed by the young and gifted Oleg Efremov. The actors of the theater, whose productions were always sold out, especially after the premiere of Yevgeny Shvarts’s slyly satiric The Naked King, called themselves “children of 1956,” that is, the momentous year of the anti-Stalinist Twentieth Party Congress and also of their theater’s birth. Khrushchev’s benevolence was in contrast to Stalin, who shut down the experimental Chamber Theater of the great Alexander Tairov in 1949.

The cultural policy of the Soviet state changed in another important area, too. In 1951, only three feature films—Unforgettable 1919, Admiral Ushakov, and The Composer Glinka— were in production at Mosfilm, the country’s main studio.²⁹ This was the result of the elderly Stalin’s crazy idea that if he made only a few movies but with the best cadres and under his own supervision, they would all be masterpieces. When all three directors calamitously fell sick at the same time, work at Mosfilm came to a complete halt; bats moved into the dark pavilions.

By contrast, by 1960 annual production had grown to more than a hundred feature films. They included two movies about World War II that won prizes at the Cannes Film Festival: Kalatozov’s lyrical The Cranes Are Flying, starring the unforgettable Tatyana Samoilova and Alexei Batalov, and the moving Ballad of a Soldier by Grigory Chukhrai, for many years the calling card of new Soviet cinema in the West. For the first time since the classic era of the avant-garde—Eisenstein et al.—authoritative Western critics were writing about Soviet films with respect.

Akhmatova liked to say, “I’m a Khrushchevian.”³⁰ She was grateful to Khrushchev for the return of millions from the camps, including her son, Lev Gumilev, who had spent almost fourteen years there. Yet Khrushchev never did allow the publication of Akhmatova’s anti-Stalin poem Requiem, which had to wait until 1987 to appear.

Khrushchev disliked Akhmatova, although for different reasons than Fadeyev or Simonov: for him she was a representative of the prerevolutionary “reactionary literary swamp” (in Zhdanov’s term). Instead, Khrushchev placed Alexander Tvardovsky in the role of the country’s first poet. Mayakovsky was too “futurist” for Khrushchev, while Tvardovsky, basking in the fame of his wartime narrative poem about the exploits of the soldier Terkin and with his Party membership and position as deputy of the Supreme Soviet, seemed like a dependable ally. Even his “peasant” looks—Tvardovsky was tall, broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, with dignified but plain manners and speech— suited Khrushchev.

The poet could not get Terkin in the Other World (a satirical sequel) into print for