Authors

Discussion

Evgenii Evtushenko undertook two trips to Cuba in 1961 and 1962. Pravda enlisted the young poet as a special correspondent, which meant that Evtushenko was assigned the role of official “poet-journalist” with a Union-wide readership. I surface Evtushenko’s under-studied Cuba-related works in the context of U.S./U.S.S.R. relations. Cuba became a productive matrix through which contemporary Soviet readers could clarify their relationship to Bolshevik revolutionary history and the American political tradition, past and present. In other words, by engaging with Castro’s Cuba, Evtushenko was able to clarify his generation’s relationship to the Soviet and Leninist revolutionary past as well as their competitor/model/mortal enemy –– contemporary America. Further, Evtushenko’s Cuban poetry skillfully related multiple Soviet cultural obsessions: America, Cuba, Castro, Lenin, Hemingway, sexual adventure, internationalism, and the “original” revolutionary spirit. Evtushenko was not mimetically reproducing fully formed topoi in the Soviet cultural imaginary, yet neither was he creating absolutely novel topics of interest. Evtushenko as the Soviet Bard of Cuba appropriated, synthesized, and developed cultural memes that possessed intense but ephemeral resonance.