Whey Poetry Rocked Russian Stadiums

They used to be literary lions, Russian poets. Now, though as talented as ever, they're barely read at all. The New York Times looks at the state of poetry in Russia.

From the piece...

The death on Tuesday of Andrei Voznesensky, a stirring poet of the post-Stalin “thaw era” in the 1950s and early 1960s, caused many to recall a time when that reach was enormous. Voznesensky’s generation of poets, which included Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Bella Akhmadulina, declaimed their work in sports stadiums to overflow crowds. A moment presented itself — the relative artistic freedom of the early Khrushchev era — and these poets pounced on the microphone. As Mr. Voznesensky put it, with a punk lip curl: “The times spat at me. I spit back at the times.”

The poets of the thaw era were liberating figures, and have frequently been likened to the West’s most word-drunk rockers and singer-songwriters: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen. They were political, sexy, a bit louche and sometimes ridiculous. They squabbled. Mr. Yevtushenko seemed to be alluding to poets too, when he asked, “Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?”

The attention paid to Mr. Voznesensky’s death is a reminder not just of that ecstatic thaw era, but of how important Russia’s poetry has been over three centuries, from Aleksandr Pushkin to Anna Akhmatova, to the country’s sense of itself. It is a vast and elusive country, one that poetry — that pointed words — helped to unite.