Station Winter: Observations and inferences relating to Yevgeny Yevtushenko

1

Yevgeny Yevtushenko is not a perfect human being, despite what the tens of thousands of people who fill sports stadia to hear him speak may have you believe.

He is honest, and people who are honest are almost never perfect.

'Zima Junction', his most important early poem, begins: 'As we get older we get honester'. The poem was published in 1956, when Yevtushenko was twenty-two or twenty-three.

This fact represents a sort of a conflict, if not a paradox.

The young poet is truthful; his statement is a truthful statement. If this is the case then it may also appear to be self-defeating.

In saying that we get honester as we grow older (and 'honester' is a strange hiccup of a word in itself), Yevtushenko implies that we start out with some base level of dishonesty, which may or may not vary from person to person.

It can be safely inferred that Yevtushenko, a man in his early twenties, has yet to reach his peak of honesty (which, incidentally, must surely occur at the point of death).

The young poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a dishonest man. But he is aware of a difference between honesty and truth.

He has based his great work on the paradox of the dishonest lie or the honest fact.

Today, three days before his seventy-ninth birthday, after his four wives, after his implicit support of Vladimir Putin ('a man who has lost his way') Yevtushenko is an honester man.


2

Zima means winter. The literal translation of the poem's title is 'Station Winter'. Zima is also the name of the town, the poet's hometown, a town of 35,000 inhabitants on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

The air temperature in Zima ranges from −50 °C in the winter to +40 °C in the summer. It may be difficult to become attached to a place of such extremes, leaving it in great heat and returning in dangerous cold.

'Zima Junction' is about a return from a kind of self-imposed exile. The town itself, like many in Siberia, is partly a product of exile.

Yevtushenko had exiled himself from a town of exile, perhaps thinking that two negatives make a positive. Finding that this was not the case, he returned to the grandmothers and dogs of his youth.

Yevtushenko is fond of his hometown. He accepts its faults. More generally, his ready acceptance of faults may be one of his faults.

I first read 'Zima Junction' on a train in Norway. I was hungover and homesick.