Yevtushenko Offstage

Friday, March 11, 2011            

On our way back from grocery stores, my friend, a Russian instructor, asked me to stop by Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s house and do him a favor.  There was an Asian work of art in his living room waiting to be deciphered.  

It had long been my wish and ambition to meet with this man—an onstage phenomenon—offstage.  I am not content with sharing the audience’s passion and enthusiasm in a hall, a stadium, or a square for a distant spectacle; I desire a close-up look at and into it.

Yevtushenko is a spectacle; I realized this while attending his poetry concert last November.  He would, unfortunately, remain distant today; my friend told me that after a surgery series his lean body has become skinny, and he currently has to lie upstairs.  I, therefore, was supposed to write down the meaning of the Chinese or Japanese calligraphy and go. 

“It cannot take longer than 5 minutes,” my friend assured me of the safety of my frozen vegetables in the car, as we parked at Yevtushenko’s old reddish-brown house.  They were, however, immediately forgotten, when I caught sight of an African wood sculpture at the front door.  It looked like a guardian angel and shamanic prophet to me, revealing the house owner’s taste of spirituality.  I felt my suppressed wish rising and my abandoned ambition returning.

My friend knocked at the door; Yevtushenko’s mother-in-law greeted us.  She was a tiny lady in her eighties, with a fine and finely made-up face.  My friend and she began to talk in Russian; I remained silent, looking around.

The house’s internal décor is as old reddish-brown and perplexingly exotic as its façade.  Each individual item invites exploration.  Albeit I doubted at first sight the compatibility of all items with one another, I had the impression that the house owner lays more stress on startling contrast than soothing harmony.

What struck me most was Yevtushenko himself.  Instead of lying upstairs, he was sitting in the living room.  “Sitting” is not the exact word.  His body was so light and his limbs so slender that I, watching him stretching luxuriously in the sofa, instantly associated a branch floating on the water.

“Tell me what it says!”  Hardly had my friend introduced me to the family, when the hungry poet pointed at a wall scroll.  It’s a horse portrait of classical Chinese ink painting style, with three vertical lines in calligraphy on the top right side.  “The spirit of the Chinese people,” I started spontaneous rendition, “is embodied in the longma (dragon horse)—a legendary winged horse with dragon scales in Chinese mythology.  Maintain the vigor, the buoyancy, and the originality of your mind!”  

Yevtushenko’s eyes sparkled with excited luster.  He insisted that, instead of bidding farewell after decryption, I must take a seat and speak to him. 

Time for a close-up. 

I had seen quite a few images of him before that moment; most of them belong to a time when the world was in different colors.  I was prepared for disappointment caused by the gap between real, aged celebrities and their historically and artistically glorified photos.  I was, therefore, overjoyed that Yevtushenko proved common sense wrong.

His offstage existence was way more naturally theatrical and intense than his onstage presence.  The arguable artificiality of his manners and the occasional superficiality of his performance evaporated in the sunshine of his temperature.  While talking with him face to face, I was not only charmed by his signature eyes, which in 1980s inspired Zhulin, a Chinese woman writer, to a crystal-like essay, “The Blue Forget-Me-Not” (Lanse de wuwangwo hua).  The dancing wrinkles and shifting shades on his face intrigued me as well; they both fine-tuned his charisma and enlarged the power of his storytelling.

In addition, I was surprised by his eager and genuine interest in my study and travel in Europe and my parents’ life and work in China, past and present.  To every statement of facts made by me he came up with at least one follow-up question.  His self-consciousness seemed not to entirely live up to his reputation. 

Despite their different personalities, Yevtushenko offstage shared an aura with the “lions” I met at Yale in private—Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom.  I believe not that this is simply the ‘benefit of the age’ (Hartman was born in 1929, Bloom 1930, and Yevtushenko 1933); rather, the aura manifests to me the infinity of intellectual cosmos and the particularity of temperamental constellation.   

Another parallel among the three poetic souls concerns their first impression of me: With a restrained laugh, Bloom described me as so “difficult” that he even wanted to “shoot” me; in a teasing tone, Hartman asked me “why are you so judgmental?”  Today in Yevtushenko’s house, he granted me a new medal: “You are tough!”

While neither of us noticed the time and carried on our talk, my friend was worried about her appointment in 20 minutes to drive Yevtushenko’s wife to a doctor.  She hence politely interrupted our up to now non-stop conversation.  As I was about to leave, Yevtushenko suddenly announced an invitation to meet me after his recovery and continue our dialogue at a place that I initially did not comprehend.  His wife, who had been lying aside listening to us quietly, now jumped in and solved my puzzle: It’s the name of an exquisite seafood restaurant.  Yevtushenko made an additional note that the chef cooks an extravagant dish exclusively at his command.  This might be proof of his narcissism; yet I did not mind—not primarily because I am a great fan of seafood.

The last words of Yevtushenko before our planned reunion were:

“Be softer!”

PS: As we came out half an hour (as opposed to 5 minutes) later, my frozen vegetables became ‘softer’ indeed.