A Melancholy Idyll

It's very symptomatic that S. Lesnevskii's article, which began this exchange, appears right next to material by A. Urban and G. Krasnikov, who are discussing Evgenii Evtushenko's narrative poem Mom and the Neutron Bomb [Mama i neitronnaia bomba]. Lesnevskii says that in our era book-events have become a rarity, that it seems as though no one is exclaiming, "Look - the stars have again been decapitated…." First of all, such books are rare precisely because they become events. This is how it has always been and always will be. Second, isn't Evtushenko's new long poem an event of that order? I'll note in passing that Krasnikov's position with regard to its poetic qualities is nearer to mine than Urban's. But with regard to Lesnevskii's thesis that not a single school of poetry in the last quarter-century has produced a poet of the epoch…. "Large things can only be seen at a distance." Esenin is completely correct in this. The water of history should stand a little. At the moment we see in its impetuous stre...