Yevtushenko: Oklahoma Is O.K.

TULSA, Oklahoma -- For nearly four decades, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, arguably the greatest living Russian poet, was the conscience of the Soviet regime.


He protested the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and fought with words to raise the Iron Curtain. His poetry readings could fill a stadium of 30,000. At the height of the failed coup attempt in 1991, he was asked to read "my best bad poem" to 200,000 from the balcony of the Russian White House. And, a debate still simmers in Russia about the degree of his complicity with Soviet authorities.


Thumbing through an anthology of his poems -- he has published nearly 50 books of poetry, which have been translated into 72 languages -- he finds one written three years after Josef Stalin's funeral in 1953.


"It's embarrassing for me not to know Buenos Aires and New York," he reads in a booming voice. "I want to walk ... through London and talk with everyone, even in broken English. I want to ride through Paris in the morning, hanging on the bus like a boy."


Yevtushenko, celebrity dissident and renowned poet, is now the world citizen he longed to be. And for at least half of the year, he calls Tulsa -- yes, Tulsa -- his home.


"Tulsa is a most typical American city," he says, his blue eyes full of charm and mischief.


Yevtushenko, 62, was invited to an arts conference at the University of Tulsa some time ago and fell in love with the place. The people, the lifestyle, reminded him so much of his childhood in Zima Station in Irkutsk, Eastern Siberia.


One year his son Mitya, then 2 years old, wandered out of the house where the family was staying and disappeared. Yevtushenko searched the neighborhood into the darkness, finally locating him a few blocks away, sitting on the curb under the care of a concerned woman.


"He was on his second Pepsi, so he was doing pretty good," Yevtushenko says.


A short time later, his house on the Black Sea burned during ethnic fighting.


"It was nothing personal, just madness," he says. "Then I remembered how Tulsa saved my child. It touched me so much."


So, when Yevtushenko is not in Moscow or anywhere else around the world speaking out against Russian politics or the vulgarity he says is overcoming Russian culture, he comes home to America's heartland.


"I am a Russian citizen," he says. "Nobody could cut Russia from me. I am part of Russian history. I am also a citizen of the world."


He first came to Tulsa in 1992 to teach at the invitation of university president Robert Donaldson, who specialized in Soviet policy during his years at Harvard.


Yevtushenko will teach next semester at Queens College in New York, then return to Tulsa with his wife, Masha, and two sons, ages 6 and 5.


"I like very much the University of Tulsa," he says. "My students are sons of ranchers, even cowboys, oil engineers. They are different people, but they are very gifted. They are closer to Mother Nature than the big city. They are more sensitive."


When Gorbachev was in Oklahoma recently, speaking out against Boris Yeltsin's policies and expressing hope the election would produce a "coalition of common sense," he received a standing ovation, which Yevtushenko believes he deserved.


"It happens in America, too," he says of Gorbachev's plunge in popularity at home. "There is a proverb that no prophet is welcome in his own village. I am Russian. I appreciate him. That doesn't mean all Russians understand or like him."


The visit inspired another poem by Yevtushenko that reflects his part-time home:


"In Russia -- confusion and diffusion.


Reputations like rubles are falling.


But in Oklahoma are falling only autumn leaves."


His latest book, released recently in the United States, is called "Don't Die Before You're Dead," reflecting his fear that Russians who were deprived much of their lives would die spiritually before physically.


It is an autobiographical novel. It is a love story and a political thriller, but not a political statement. "I put human values on politics," he says.


The failed coup of 1991 is the centerpiece of the story, and Yevtushenko had a front-row seat. Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, widely unpopular because of the economic and social ills Russians face, gets sympathy and respect from Yevtushenko as the "mapmaker of the 21st century."