The Reader -- Volume XV Number 2 -- Summer 1995 -- Page One

Don't Die Before You're Dead

By Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Translated by Antonina W. Bois
Key Porter Books Limited, Toronto, 398 pages, $28.95
Reviewed by Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

Between 1961 and 1991 I read approximately 2,080 issues of Time. I missed some when Time was intermittently banned by the military regime of General Juan Onganía in Argentina in the mid-sixties and in 1968 in Mexico around the time of the student massacre at Tlatelolco. My knowledge of Yevgeny Yevtushenko was coloured by a Time bias, and my impressions of him were influenced by the accompanying photographs, which always showed an intense but serious-looking man.

I didn't recognize him when Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko (in Vancouver recently on a book tour and as part of the Vancouver Writers Festival's author series) waltzed into the room wearing a smile from ear to ear and a pink, purple, green, and blue leisure jacket and matching hat he said he had purchased in a market in Chichi-castenango, Guatemala. Since this loud, smiling man could not possibly be the poet who had written "Babi Yar" (1962), I asked him for a grim Andropov-style face. Looking very seriously into my lens he said, in pretty good Spanish with a Cuban accent, "Andropov was my most faithful fan. He read all of my books," and immediately burst into laughter. I tried to bait him by pointing out his large capitalist Rolex. "I think you are a tyrant trying to make me pose in such a serious way. This is a Russian Rolex."

A few days later at the Jewish Community Centre in Oakridge he recited "Babi Yar", and only then did he become the Yevtushenko I had thought he was. But that image quickly faded when he read from his autobiographical novel, Don't Die Before You're Dead, of the attempted coup in 1991. He read to us a chapter narrated by Chunya, the hedgehog that lives with Lyza, an ageing former soccer star who lies in a drunken stupor (having partaken of that cheap black-capped vodka, not of the more exclusive white-capped sipped by the privileged nomenklatura). He is wakened by Boat, his former girlfriend, a professional climber and sometime airline steward, who has come to summon him to the barricades. "'I've forbidden you to come here. Especially through the window,' he grumbled. 'We had an agreement. . . .' 'What's the matter, don't you know?' 'What am I supposed to know?' 'They could be coming back, Lyza.' 'Who?' 'The ones who put people away.'"

His soccer coach, the Great Degustator, had persuaded Lyza to drop Boat. He "had put his cards on [Lyza] and he decided to cure him of his love. He started getting women for him. Oh, no these weren't the stinking whores from the railroad stations or the painted taxitutes in the beckoning cabs. These were practically honest lays -- secretutes, who didn't necessarily want money, but accepted perfumes, not very expensive jewelry, stockings, clothes and dinners out -- although they didn't mind cash, either. When needed, they arrived politely and almost sincerely, and when the need was satisfied, they left tactfully, shutting their purses with a soft click. As the Great Degustator told Lyza, smiling sweetly, 'A call girl is as convenient as masturbation -- you get pleasure and you don't have to see her home.'"

Don't Die Before You're Dead is a very funny book. It is full of characters, probably all real, since their made-up names, the Crystal Clear Communist, the Human Cello, the Great Camp Inmate, the Global Georgian (probably Shevardnadze!) and the Ice Hole Democrat protect Yevtushenko from the clutches of a new Russian phenomenon, a Western-style libel lawsuit. When Gorbachev is approached to play himself in a movie where he is to talk to an angel, I realized that Yevtushenko's book was beginning to resemble a Carl Hiaasen novel with scenarios that challenged credibility. But then I remembered that Gorbachev had indeed played himself and talked to an angel in Faraway, So Close!, the sequel to the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire. Yes, Peter Falk and Gorbachev in the same movie!

The novel is written in the third person except those chapters where Yevtushenko plays himself, in the first person. I was intrigued by these and other uncommon literary devices. After reading Yevtushenko's autobiography, A Precocious Autobiography (1963), John Steinbeck said to him, "`You know, perhaps in some future encyclopedia they will write about you as a prose writer who began as a celebrated poet. . . ." Steinbeck could be wrong. Don't Die Before You're Dead ends with a killer poem, "Goodbye Our Red Flag".

. . . I didn't take the Tsar's Winter Palace.

I didn't storm Hitler's Reichstag.

I am not what you call a "Commie."

But I caress the Red Flag

and cry.

Alex Waterhouse-Hayward is on an all-Russian binge unaided by vodka of either the black- or white-capped variety. He is currently reading Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.