SOURCE: "Half Free," in New Statesman & Society, March 15, 1991, p. 37.

In the following review, Rumens evaluates the themes and styles of The Collected Poems with respect to Yevtushenko's emerging poetic identity.

"Who the hell is this damned Y Y?" asks Yevtushenko in the forward to Stolen Apples (1973), ironically parroting his various critics: "An unofficial diplomat performing secret missions for the Kremlin?… A Soviet Beatle?… An export item, perhaps, like vodka or black caviar?… When is Yevtushenko sincere? When he is writing about Vietnam or Babii Yar?"

Perhaps he has had to be many different people. Yet the Collected Poems, for all its variety, is a consistent narrative, dominated by the haunted figure of a Russian poet, as deeply rooted as any of his breed, sent by success and the mid-20th-century publicity machine into dizzy orbit between the two arch-enemies of the cold war, beaming messages first to one...