Putin the President and Yevtushenko the Poet

Yevgeny Yevtushenko - or YevYev, as I like to call him - is one of Russia's leading poets, a man widely known for his progressive-liberal political stance, his keen intelligence and his long string of wives. Vladimir Putin is the President of Russia. He is known for his questionable human rights record, his downright hypocritical attitude to free speech and his often shirtless defiance of the boundaries of good taste. One would expect that YevYev would join the majority of dissident or morally driven writers in an outspoken denunciation of Putin's regime. But no, he is surprisingly soft on his president. Vlad is a man who is merely struggling to find his way, YevYev says, implying that he is to be pitied, helped through a rough patch. But have a look at the photos of Putin with the fishing rod and the bare chest. Does that look like a man who has lost his way?

I've thought about why YevYev is so soft on VP and here is my theory. YevYev is sitting in an expensive cafe in some or other middle-class Prospekt in Moscow. He's writing about politics and eating a piece of millionaire's shortbread which should be good, given the cost, but actually tastes like Play-Doh. He is at that stage of his life, he thinks, where he has come to know what Play-Doh tastes like. He thinks of Putin, and how he too must have reached that same stage of his life by now. Despite the tough-guy image, the guns, the tigers, Putin is a man who knows what Play-Doh tastes like.

So, what YevYev is really saying when he says that Putin is struggling to find his way is that the two of them are similar in many respects and it's hard to denounce someone similar to yourself without denouncing yourself, which is something no self-respecting Russian (except perhaps Daniil Kharms) would do.

This is where I come in. It's here that I infer that, by saying Putin is struggling to find his way, YevYev is implying the same thing about himself. I hope he can forgive me this conjecture - after all, he is a writer too. I'd also like to think that he can forgive me for disagreeing with him, for me saying that Putin has not merely lost his way, that he has done so much more that is wrong. But what do I know, I who have yet to learn or relearn the taste of Play-Doh.

Five Pencils

He has forgotten to bring out a pen and so he buys a packet of five pencils. He sits in a café and begins a short story about two people who are walking along a cliff path on a summer evening in the south of England, discussing literature and probably sex. The first pencil is soon blunt, and of course he does not have a sharpener. By the time the protagonists have reached and decided to descend an accessible route down the cliff the second pencil is also blunt. The third pencil fails him as the two people light a fire and throw stones into the darkening sea. By the time his fourth pencil is finished his characters are looking up to the top of the cliff where they see two people who, from this distance, look exactly like them - clothes, relative height, hair - perfect doppelgängers. Seabirds wheel and squawk as the air grows colder, etc etc. At this point he becomes aware that five pencils will not be enough to complete his story. He makes a snap decision: in future he will only write stories that can be finished within the lifespan of one sharpening of a single pencil. He takes out the fifth pencil and begins to write the story of a man who, having forgotten to bring out his pen, buys a packet of five pencils and goes into a café to write a story about two people