[In his long poem Ivan the Terrible and Ivan the Fool], Yevtushenko puts his money on the workers, on the blue-eyed, ill-used, unstoppable Ivan the Fool, against Ivan the Terrible, the disastrous but not entirely guilty autocrat. The second Ivan takes many forms, and a panorama of Russian history sweeps by, growing from the central incident of the founding in 1905 of one of the earliest soviets at a calico factory in Ivanovo-Voznesensk…. [We] are denied the musical resources that contained the thoughts, and have to follow only the thoughts themselves, uncomfortable in an English unused to conscious rhetoric. Like a black and white photo of a coloured picture, the translation shows the shapes and subjects, not the living tones. The tone is hard to pin down: is he serious? Or is he laughing at himself for saying 'Remain unsullied, proletarian firmament'? Or wringing his hands at the unlikeliness...