SOURCE: A review of Don't Die before You're Dead, in America, Vol. 175, No. 1, July 6, 1996, pp. 34-5.

In the following review, Thompson pans Don't Die before You're Dead, charging Yevtushenko with obfuscating historical realities.

Between the cold-blooded planners of Soviet strategy, on the one hand, and those who adamantly refused to participate in the Soviet enterprise, on the other, there has always been enough crawl space to accommodate people like Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a Russian poet and court dissident during the Krushchev and Brezhnev years. His first novel [Don't Die before You're Dead] depicts the ups and downs of Gorbachev's perestroika and its aftermath, the Yeltsin years. It is written in a style reminiscent of John Dos Passos, and its "newsreel" chapters are replete with flash-blacks and split personalities. Borrowings from Russian writers likewise abound. The plot unfolds over a period of three days, recalling a similar schedule in Dostoevsky's...