A Spit in Time

The times spat at me.

I spit back at the times,

-- Andrei Voznesensky

The outspoken Russian poet is as good as his word. He spits when the mood strikes him, and he seems care less of the consequences. When Nikita Khrushchev personally upbraided him for his unconventional poetry, Voznesensky stubbornly refused to recant. When critics attacked him for formal ism, which in Soviet jargon means experimenting with the language, Voznesensky replied in verse: "They nag me about formalism./Formaldehyde: you stink of it and incense." He helped to stir up the Soviet Writers Congress last May by signing a letter boldly calling for an end to Soviet censorship. Last week copies of a Voznesensky letter to Pravda and one of his latest poems reached the West. They made it plain that their author is still spitting.

Ridiculous Ruse. This time, Voznesensky is sore at the Union of Writers, the party's all-powerful cultural arm that oversees literary activities in the Soviet Union. It was bad enough that the union turned thumbs down on the invitation he had received to give a poetry reading at the Lincoln Center Summer Festival in Manhattan last June, but the style of the denial, he said, was insufferable. It was not until four days before his departure that the union told him the trip was "inadvisable"--presumably because someone had belatedly remembered the rhapsodic verse he wrote about the U.S. after his visit last spring. To make matters worse, the union concocted a series of phony excuses for his absence.

The ridiculous ruse moved the poet to write to Pravda on the day after he had been scheduled to appear in New York: "Why do they pull the wool over everyone's eyes by saying variously that I am ill, that I waited until it was too late before I asked for a ticket, or (now that everyone knows that it's too late to get to the poetry reading) that I'm just about to leave? Of course, the leaders of the Union of Writers must know what they are doing, but why haven't they informed me that I am sick? I am a Soviet writer, a human made of flesh and blood, not a puppet to be pulled on a string. This lying, prevarication and knocking people's heads together is standard practice. I am ashamed to be a member of the same union as these people."

Dangerous Defiance. Pravda did not print the letter, and Voznesensky did not cool off. A few days later, at a poetry reading in a Moscow theater, he expanded his indictment to take in all the boorishness in Soviet culture that was epitomized by Khrushchev's shoe banging at the U.N.:

Lies are written on fat faces

that should be hidden in trousers.

But one is even more ashamed,

perhaps,

when the King of the country

pauses before taking off a shoe

at a public session,

and wonders anxiously:

"Hell, I remember

washing one of my feet yesterday,

but which one: the right or the

left?"

So far, there have been no reports of reprisals against Voznesensky. Nonetheless, his defiance could cost him dearly. Expulsion from the Union of Writers would mean that his books, which now sell as many as 500,000 copies, could no longer be legally distributed in Russia, nor could he give public readings of his works. At worst, Voznesensky could be sent to prison for slandering an organ of the Communist Party.

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