Today at ICUJP I want to talk a Russian poet who hated borders and
walls and loved to build bridges of understanding and connection through
his poetry. His name is Evgeny Yevtushenko and he died recently at age 84, on
April 1st of this year. He was in many ways the Bob Dylan of
the Soviet Union—a quirky, passionate defender of human rights and freedom. He
became world famous by writing a poem called Babi Yar that denounced
anti-semitism. He also denounced Stalinism, war, and everything else that
stifled the human spirit. While I was helping to edit a Quaker-inspired
collection of poetry and fiction in the Reagan era, I got to travel to the
Soviet Union and visit Yevtushenko in his summer home, his dacha, in
Peredelkino. I’d like to share with you a poem he wrote in 1984, during
the period known as Glasnost or Openness. The poem is called “On Borders.”
Before I do, I’d like to
say something about my own journey and how it brought me to the Soviet Union.
Poetry was my entrée into the Quaker peace movement. I’ve loved poetry all my
life but wasn’t able to connect it to peace making until I moved to
Philadelphia in 1984 and became involved with the Quakers. I was drawn to a
book project that was to be edited and published in both countries as a way to
overcome stereotypes by showing that Americans and Russians are not enemies but
human beings. This idea intrigued me and I became one of the book’s editors and
publicists.
Yevgeny Yuvtushenko
loved the idea of our book and was eager to meet with us Quakers, as were many
other Soviet writers. And we were thrilled to meet with him since he was a kind
of rock star. When he gave readings at this time, tens of thousands of
people would show up, cheering him wildly.
Yevtushenko published
his first book of poems when he was only 19 years old and his early work gained
admirers in the West that included Robert Frost. But what made him famous was
Babi Yar, a poem named after a place in the Ukraine where over 30,000 Jews were
massacred. When Yevtushenko visited Babi Yar, he was outraged to discover that
no monument commemorated this terrible slaughter. Anti-semitism was rampant in
the Ukraine and in Russia, and some Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis to
kill Jews. In this poem, Yevtushenko identifies with those Jews who were killed
and persecuted. He wrote:
“I myself am one
massive, soundless scream
Above the thousand
thousand buried here.
I am each old man here
shot dead.
I am every child here
shot dead.
Nothing in me will ever
forget!
The “Internationale,”
let is thunder
When the last
anti-Semite on earth
Is buried forever.
In my blood there is no
Jewish blood.
In their callous rage,
all anti-Semites
Must hate me now as a
Jew.
For that reason, I am a
true Russian!
Yevtushenko saw himself
as a true Russian, and true socialist, because he had compassion for the
poor, the oppressed, the victims of persecution. For Yevtushenkso, being a true
Russian meant hating war and speaking out for justice. I’m sure he’d love to
have visited a group like ours.
He was not a saint. He
was an earthy Siberian who loved women and had many lovers and wives. When I
met him, he had married his fourth and last wife, a teacher considerably
younger than himself. He told us, “You probably think she seems very young. But
when she is married to me for a while, she won’t seem so young.” The way he
said it in his thick Siberian accent seemed very funny at the time.
He was also fascinated
with religion. He wanted to know all about Quakerism and he shared with us how
he gotten sick and visited a church and asked for healing in front of an icon.
This was a surprising and a little shocking coming from a poet who grew up in a
communist country where religion was frowned upon, but Yevtushenko had an open
mind. He wasn’t interested in organized religion but he was certainly a
spiritual person, like the poet Walt Whitman. He sensed the deep unity and
connection between people and all life.
Today I’m sure he’d be
appalled by Trumpism and the rise of bigoted nationalism in Europe and in Russia.
Yevtushenko loved and was deeply rooted in his native land, but he was also an
internationalist. From an early age he expressed his distaste for borders. In
1958, when he was 25 years old and there were severe travel restrictions on
Russians traveling abroad, he wrote this simple, heart-felt and funny poem:
AGAINST BORDERS
All these borders—
they
bug me! Nothing
do I know
of Buenos Aires , or
New York
–and I should
know! I should be able to go
to London
and walk around,
and talk to the people,
even if I can’t talk so good,
just walking
around. Like a little kid
I want to ride a bus
through Paris
some morning,
and I want an art
that is something
else, is an exciting sound—
like myself!
they
bug me! Nothing
do I know
of Buenos Aires , or
New York
–and I should
know! I should be able to go
to London
and walk around,
and talk to the people,
even if I can’t talk so good,
just walking
around. Like a little kid
I want to ride a bus
through Paris
some morning,
and I want an art
that is something
else, is an exciting sound—
like myself!
Yevtushenko’s poetry had
a unique sound, brash, tender, naïve, worldly wise, passionate, funny, the
sound of sometimes shockingly honest feeling, like Bob Dylan’s folk poetry.
Yevtushenko’s poems spoke to a rising generation of Russians who were sick to death
of the Iron Curtain and all that it represented. He became so popular the
authorities didn’t know what to do with him, whether to jail him or hail him as
a symbol of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. Some radical dissidents considered
him a sell out for not being more outspoken. But Yevtushenko was not afraid to
take risks; he defended dissidents, and aligned himself with those on the
cutting change of social change in his country. He was a dreamer, a visionary.
And his dream of
overcoming borders come true. During the course of his career he traveled to
over 92 countries to give poetry readings. And he got to teach in a place he
loved—Tulsa, Oklahoma. Yes, he preferred Oklahoma to New York, probably because
it reminded him of the little town where he grew in Siberia—Zima Station.
Yevtushenko loved people, Americans as well as Russians…
That’s why we choose
this poem to introduce our collection called the “The Human Experience.”
It’s a challenge to read
one of Yevtushenko’s poems and do it justice. A poet who heard Yevtushenko read in Madison, WI, wrote:
Forget your slams, your rap, your Bukowski sputtering drunk on stage. Check out Yevtushenko if you ever get the chance. He brought all of Russia, poetry, history, culture, his life to the stage. He shouted, whispered, sang to the rafters, laughed, appeared humble, aggressive, defiant, flailed his arms, pranced around the stage, even walked into the audience, ala the old Phil Donahue, reciting his poems by heart to people—to women, especially.
Well,
I’m not going to go quite that far, but I will wear my Russian hat and try my
best to read like a Russian, and hopefully give you some sense of what this
unique Russian poet is like.
ON BORDERS
|
A Verse from
"Fuku"
|
In every border post
there's something
insecure.
|
Each one of them
|
is longing for
leaves and for flowers.
|
They say
the greatest
punishment for a tree
is to become a border post.
The birds that pause
to rest
on
border posts
can't figure out
what kind of tree they've
landed on.
I suppose
that at first, it
was people who invented borders,
and then borders |
started to invent
people.
It was borders who
invented police,
armies, and border
guards.
|
It was borders who
invented
customs-men, passports, and other shit. Thank God,
we
have invisible threads and threadlets,
born of the threads of blood
from the nails in
the palms of Christ.
These threads
struggle through,
tearing apart the
barbed wire
leading love to join love
and anguish to unite
with anguish.
And a tear,
which evaporated
somewhere in Paraguay,
will fall as a snowflake
onto the frozen
cheek of an Eskimo.
And a hulking
New York skyscraper
with bruises of neon,
|
mourning the forgotten
smell of plowlands,
dreams only of embracing a lonely Kremlin tower, but sadly that is not allowed .
The Iron Curtain,
unhappily squeaking
her rusty brains,
probably thinks:
"Oh, if I were
not a border,
if jolly hands would pull me apart
and build from my
bloody remains
carousels,
kindergartens, and schools."
In my darkest dreams I see
my
prehistoric ancestor:
he collected skulls like trophies
in
the somber vaults of his cave,
and with the bloodied point of a stone spearhead
he marked out the
first-ever border
on the face of the
earth.
|
That was a hill of
skulls.
|
Now it is grown into
an Everest.
The earth was
transformed
|
While borders still
stand
|
and became a giant
burial place.
|
we are all in
prehistory.
Real history will
start
when all borders are
gone.
The earth is still
scarred,
mutilated with the
scars of wars.
Now killing has
become an art,
when once it was
merely a trade:
From all those
thousands of borders
we
have lost only the human one-
the border between good and evil.
But while we still
have invisible threads
joining each self
with millions of
selves,
there are no real superpower states. Any fragile soul on this earth
is the real
superpower.
|
My government
is the whole family
of man, all at once.
Every beggar is my
marshal,
|
giving
me orders..
I recognize only one
race
the race of all races.
How foreign is the
word foreigner!
I have four and a half
billion leaders.
And I dance my Russian,
And I dance my Russian,
my
death-defying dance
on the invisible threads
on the invisible threads
that connect the
hearts of people.
TRANSLATED BY ANTONINA
W. BOUIS AND
ALBERT C. TODD
ALBERT C. TODD
Turning the Iron Curtain
into a playground seemed like a poet’s fantasy in 1984, but
“My generation of poets did a lot of things to break the Iron Curtain. We wounded our hands breaking this Iron Curtain with our naked hands. We didn't work in gloves.”
I think we can learn a lot from this extraordinary event. Today we need to use the same tools to break down the walls of Trumpism. We need imagination and hard work, we need poets and activists, workers and dreamers, teachers and students, people of faith and people of conscience, mothers and fathers, a coalition of all colors and ethnicities and sexual orientations, all working together to tear down walls of fear and build bridges of peace and understanding. As an American poet Robert Frost said, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.” Can I get an Amen?
