A Month in the Life of Yevtushenko

At the close of The First Circle, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tells how a reporter in Moscow for the French “progressive paper, Liberation,” jotted down “in red ink” that the “provisioning of the capital was excellent.” The correspondent had arrived at this happy conclusion after observing the many vans plying the streets of Moscow bearing the legend—in four languages—brightly imprinted on their sides: “Khleb, Pain, Brot, Bread— Myaso, Viande, Fleisch, Meat.” That these vehicles of plenty were camouflaged police wagons transporting men and women on a one-way trip to hell, the “progressive” reporter did not know, nor did he care to find out.

In New York, on January 21, 1972, at a dinner and reception honoring Yevgeny Yevtushenko at the New School for Social Research where the “provisioning” was indeed “excellent,” reporters for the local “progressive” press were enthralled by the poet’s message of how bright life was for the artist in his homeland. To bolster the poet’s evaluations, and also to put him at ease, the American poet-translator, Stanley Kunitz, pointed to the high esteem in which writers are held in the Soviet Union as compared with their lot in the United States of America. Mr. Kunitz, Tom Topor of the New York Post reported, “compared the fate of poets in the U.S. and the USSR,” adding: “President Nixon [should] take time out from football to read poetry.”

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Max Geltman

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

At the close of The First Circle, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tells how a reporter in Moscow for the French “progressive paper, Liberation,” jotted down “in red ink” that the “provisioning of the capital was excellent.” The correspondent had arrived at this happy conclusion after observing the many vans plying the streets of Moscow bearing the legend—in four languages—brightly imprinted on their sides: “Khleb, Pain, Brot, Bread— Myaso, Viande, Fleisch, Meat.” That these vehicles of plenty were camouflaged police wagons transporting men and women on a one-way trip to hell, the “progressive” reporter did not know, nor did he care to find out.

In New York, on January 21, 1972, at a dinner and reception honoring Yevgeny Yevtushenko at the New School for Social Research where the “provisioning” was indeed “excellent,” reporters for the local “progressive” press were enthralled by the poet’s message of how bright life was for the artist in his homeland. To bolster the poet’s evaluations, and also to put him at ease, the American poet-translator, Stanley Kunitz, pointed to the high esteem in which writers are held in the Soviet Union as compared with their lot in the United States of America. Mr. Kunitz, Tom Topor of the New York Post reported, “compared the fate of poets in the U.S. and the USSR,” adding: “President Nixon [should] take time out from football to read poetry.”