"Pornography’ By Soviet Poets

Press, Volume C, Issue 29504, 4 May 1961, Page 13

"Pornography’ By Soviet Poets

[By JOHN MILKER) MOSCOW. Three young Soviet poets have been sharply attacked for a rare offence in contemporary Soviet literature — pornographic writing. The vehicle for their talents was a popular literary magazine called “Yunost” (Youth) with sales of more than half a million. Their latest poems have now been analysed by “Komsomolskaya Pravda,” the powerful organ of the Young Communist League, which was so scandalised that it printed many of the offending verses in a blistering criticism. Its classification of pornography would probably appear strange to many Western readers. But books dealing with sexual matters in the vein of “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” and other Western best-sellers are unknown here for reasons which have as much to do with the moral puritanism which goes deep into Russia's past as with the strict control exercised by the Soviet Government over all publishing. The days when Soviet writers and poets Were compelled, at the price of dullness, to concentrate on tractors instead of love and sex are gone. But if they want to get into print, they are still supposed to know where to draw the line. According to “Komsomolskya Pravda,” the three young poets overstepped that line. “Young Angry” I One of them, named Yevgeni Yevtushenko, has for ■long been the “Angry Young i Man” of contemporary Comjmunist literature with a i strong list of censures against his name. He first fell foul of the authorities in 1957, during the thaw in Soviet literature, when writers and poets finally threw off much of the ideological straitjacket for the Stalinist era. His sin involved political and ideological factors, and since then he has been a favourite target of many powerful critics. By his poems in “Yunost,” said “Komsomolskaya Pravda.” Yevtushenko “still clearly preserves a yearning for originality, for cheap popularity.” One of his poems called "Muska" (a girl’s name), the newspaper summed up as concerning “a woman, a dirty profligate, who is out on a spree night i after night with ‘riff-raff with | sticky hands.’ Suddenly a

fairy-tale prince from a fish institute appeared and they were very happy." Yevtushenko’s crime here was “pornographically poeticising the rotten morality of all such women.” On slightly different grounds he aroused the wrath of the newspaper for writing a poem which began: He wore'narrow trousers Read Hemingway Debunked Gerasimov Approved Picasso. In the poem, Yevtushenko defended a nihilist and inferred that “honest production workers” were a symbol of intellectual poverty and narrow-mindedness. “Komsomolskaya Pravda,” obviously aghast, commented: “Such honest production workers created sputniks. And young aesthetes have produced nothing but a show of dirty words." “Dirty Scenes” Another young poet rapped for “glorifying dirty scenes” was Andrei Voznesienski. One of the verses printed which incensed the newspaper referred to a girl who had "finger-marks on her blouse.” Another ran: Couples are clinching at the club Dances a¥e raising the hems of skirts Love? You can take your pick of it. The third poet, Sergei Polikarpov, “embarrassed” the newspaper by writing such lines as: Your painted Ups smell of ripeness We ore not yet on familiar terms But your eyes are those of cats in March Seeking wedding darkness. The newspaper emphasised strongly the official attitude to such verses. The young poets had fallen under the "rotten influence" of bourgeois ideologists who were subversively engaged in trying to corrupt Soviet youth with “nihilism and pessimism." The idea behind this corruption, it said, is to weaken the ideals of love and friendship of Soviet youth and to glamorise egotism, depravity and hard drinking. The young poets, it declared, have become obsessed by “robbers, riff-raff, hard-drinking men and light-minded women.” And, the newspaper warned 'hem, “they should stop and think about just whom they were helping by propagating such banality."