SOURCE: A review of Don't Die before You're Dead, in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 277, No. 2, February 1996, pp. 113-14.

In the following review, Adams comments on the vivid narrative techniques of Don't Die before You're Dead.

Mr. Yevtushenko's exciting novel [Don't Die before You're Dead] about the 1991 attempt to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev's government puts the reader right on the barricades along with the author. It throws together personal observation, real and imaginary characters, actual and fictional events, satire and tragedy, past and present, prose and poetry. The fictional characters include an honest, and therefore disaffected, policeman, an émigré poet returned from Paris, and a former soccer star fallen into drunken decay. The real characters, with the exception of Gorbachev. Boris Yeltsin, and the author, are given generic names such as 'the Crystal-Clear Communist' and 'the Great Degustator.' The fictional characters permit the author to portray aspects of Soviet...