Hot "Barracko" From

By R.Z. Sheppard

How does Yevgeny Yevtushenko spell relief? G-L-A-S-N-O-S-T. Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev's campaign of "openness" has given him another opportunity to star in his most celebrated role. Since he first packed them in at Mayakovsky Square during the early days of Khrushchev, the dramatic Siberian has been known internationally as the thaw poet. Less privileged Soviet writers know him for his adaptability on thin ice.

Almost at the End demonstrates why. A collection of prose and poetry, the book is nicely timed with the reappearance of Yevtushenko, 53, as a prominent spokesman for Gorbachev's liberalization campaign. The new work is theatrical but tame. The targets are either old monsters or the class of unreconstructed bureaucrats whom the new regime has pledged to replace. The daring urgency of earlier poems, such as The Heirs of Stalin and Babi Yar, has given way to all- purpose indictments of totalitarianism and effusions of universality. "I ; would like to be born in every country,/ have a passport for them all" is how he begins.

The sentiment is generously larded throughout the collection, although, in fairness, Yevtushenko's verse is more effective in recital. At his best, he is a performance artist whose readings enchant audiences who may not understand what he is saying. He seduces them not with the message but with the medium, the Russian language, with its soft buzzings and throaty sighs.

The centerpiece of the volume is Fuku, an 87-page autobiographical odyssey that combines verse and narrative. The title is attributed to an African word used by Latin-American peasants to describe con men and exploiters. Yevtushenko has a little list, starting with Christopher Columbus, whom he evokes as a gold-hungry conquistador and an impatient actor on the set of a television mini-series (" 'When will this all end?!' grumbled Columbus, feeling his face to see if his gray beard had come unglued. 'Somebody, bring me a gin and tonic . . .' ").

The well-traveled poet visits Santo Domingo, where the series is being shot. Elsewhere, he alludes to his own movie, The Kindergarten, about his childhood in the Siberian town of Zima Junction. Fuku and the film share events and images of Yevgeny the boy:

From my guts I learned the hunger of war.

My ribs taught me the geography of Russia.

Nobody gave me so-called fame,

I snatched it myself, by the neck, like a chicken.

Yevtushenko is proud of his popular success and pugnacious about his critics:

A poet today,

like a coin of Peter the Great,

has become really rare.

He even frightens his neighbors on the globe.

But I'll find understanding with my successors

one way or another.

Until then, there are the perks of fame: access to Che Guevara, an invitation to party with Robert Kennedy and a judgeship at the 1984 Venice Film Festival, where the passionate individualist from the U.S.S.R. succumbs to a cultural bureaucracy in the West.

Almost at the End has a way of passing smoothly through the ideological looking glass. What seems to be the cult of personality on one side appears as celebrity on the other. Perhaps even legend:

I was not on the stage,

I was the stage in the blood of my epoch,

in the vomit of this age,

and everything in my life

which seemed to you not my blood,

but just the thirst for fame,

I do not doubt

someday you'll call heroic deeds.

This sort of grandstanding must surely offend writers who have suffered physical and mental pain under the Soviet system while Yevtushenko flourished. But that is an old, sad story of envies, misunderstandings and compromises that the author does not confront. Rather he defends his style on the justifiable grounds that poetry springs from rude experience and common speech:

More than from Tolstoy

I learned from blind beggars

who sang in train cars about Count Tolstoy.

From barracks I learned more than from Pasternak

and my verse style was hot "barracko."

Unfortunately, a good deal of it is overcooked.

I am a shopping bag stuffed

with all the world's shoppers.

I am everybody's photographer,

a paparazzo of the infamous.

I am your common portrait,

where so much remains to be painted.

Your faces are my Louvre,

my private Prado.

I am like a video player,

whose cassettes are loaded with you.

Lines like these have little to lose in translation.