Yevtushenko Also Implicated

The Premier also attacked Yevtushenko for his support of Ehrenburg and said that perhaps the young poet, in his pose as an "angry young man," was serving the purposes of "the enemies of our cause."

The important thing about Khrushchev's tirade last week was not so much that he denounced Yevtushenko and Ehrenburg, but that they both will most likely continue to endure and flourish. This is because they are political figures who made political mistakes and politics can be easily handled by the regime. Both Yevtushenko and Ehrenburg accept the framework of Societ society, and by accepting this framework they are assured personal security--and very limited influence.

Why was Pasternak's 'Dr. Zhivago' so desperately suppressed? Not because it contained a political attack on the Soviet regime--that could have been answered. Dr. Zhivago was truly a subversive because he rejected root and branch the whole concept of the revolution. He rejected it by ignoring it, by transcending it through his love for Lara. "You and I," Zhivago tells Lara, "are like Adam and Eve, the first two people who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with--and now at the end of it we are just as naked and homeless."

One cannot see into the hearts of Yevtushenko and Ehrenburg and the other Soviet writers. One is tempted to set up the model of Pasternak, and say to them that that true dedication to art implies only one course of action. Indeed, a character in One Day known only as K-123 listens to a defense of the film producer Eisenstein, makes a disparaging comment, and is told "But what other treatment of the subject would have been let through...?" K-123 replies in a rage "Ha! Let through, you say? Then don't call him a genius! Call him a today, say he carried out orders like a dog. A genius doesn't adapt his treatment to the taste of tyrants!"

Yet we cannot demand Pasternak's martyrdom from all artists, nor perhaps should we want to. Dr. Zhivago will remain an immortal book in the West, but it is inconceivable that it will be read in Russia in the near future. Yevtushenko and Ehrenburg might be toadies, and we might often find them despicable. Yet their dissent, no matter how veiled, will reach the Russian people. And their relentless pressure for new freedoms, no matter how hesitant, can produce an occasional "thaw," can help create a climate that will allow the publication of such works as One Day.

Socialist realism is still sacred scripture, and artistic freedom will continue to be circumscribed by the exigencies of ideology and politics. But the boundaries can be moved. We need Pasternaks; we also need Yevtushenkos and Ehrenburgs