Sta,—Mr. Amis, in his interesting account of his meeting with
the Soviet poet Yevtushenko, says that he noted an absence of the concrete and the particular in his poems. This is not a characteristic of Yevtushenko's verse as a whole, which is often admirably direct and particular, and full of indi- vidual people and things dealt with in the present indicative and the preterite. Presumably the poems Mr. Amis heard at Cambridge were the exceptions in which some sort of concession is made to the pressures Mr. Amis speaks of. Nor would this be in the least surprising. Those Russians who are engaged in the admirable attempt to overcome bureaucratic intrusion into literature must be especially careful
not to give their critics at home any handle in what they may say in public when abroad. (This was, e.g., noticeable in Yevtushenko's article in the observer, much of which was strictly for the peasants.)
VICTOR LITVIN
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