SOURCE: A review of Don't Die Before You're Dead, in Times Literary Supplement, November 17, 1995, p. 27.

In the following review, Chamberlain appreciates the vitality and balance of the account of the 1991 Russian putsch in Don't Die Before You're Dead.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a household name in Russia, where his poetry has entered the language. His ability to survive in a position of privilege through four decades of Soviet life has, however, so damaged his moral reputation that a few years ago his enemies burnt him in effigy. It is a mark of his professionalism as a writer that this novel [Don't Die before You're Dead], in which he appears as a character, does not reduce to an apologia. It is a vast, emotionally satisfying tableau of Russian lives rooted in fear.

In August 1991, the world held its breath for three days when Gorbachev was under house arrest in the...