Magnum Opus

I reluctantly sat at my grandmother’s kitchen table as she feed me piping-hot chicken noodle soup and a piece of fresh rye bread. I was twelve years old and my world was very simple and easy. My existence revolved around me trying to fulfill all of my petty, self-centered desires. I would not take no for an answer. There was nothing that I went without. Suffering was foreign.

         “You know Collin, Nannie came over to the United States during the Russian Revolution. It was not easy for her to come into America. She needed to know someone in America. Thankfully she knew someone in Buffalo.”
     
         I blew on my soup and rolled my eyes at the story I had heard a multitude of times. The story that my grandmother held so close to her heart was so far from my realm of existence; I lived in America, the land of opportunity. I never knew what it was like to be denied something.

    “I know Grandma. You told me this story a million times. I remember. Uncle Max shot his finger off so he didn’t have to fight for the Russian Army. I know Grandma, horrible.”

I never understood the hardships, the pain and turmoil, but I also could not understand the beauty and pride that lays precedence in the hearts of the Russian people, until I attended Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poetry reading at the University at Buffalo on November 1st. When I received an invitation to attend the reading, I was not sure what his reading was going to entail: what themes were laden in his poems? Was he going to speak solely in Russian? I had never heard of Yevtushenko, so I was curious to see what his poetry was like. After conducting some of my own research, I discovered that Yevtushenko is an outspoken political activist, writer, poet, dramatist, and filmmaker who opposed many of the Soviet Union’s ideologies. His magnum opus, “Babi Yar,” discussed the Soviet Union’s down play of the horrific events that occurred in a Kiev ravine, in which 34,000 Jewish people lost their lives during the Holocaust. This poem inspired the noted Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovich, to write his “Symphony No. 13.”

Before attending Yevtushenko’s reading, my fellow attendees and I met to discuss some of his poetry. The discussion turned to aesthetics, and how and why we gauge meaning and value from various forms of art.  We discussed the differences between mainstream and commercial art in comparison to “high-brow” literature and visual art. We talked about how certain forms of art make us work harder to contextualize and formulate an understanding of meaning, how if good art allows for its participant to create their own meaning. I was curious to see if Yevtushenko’s poetry fit on this spectrum.

       When we arrived at Lippes Concert Hall on UB’s North Campus, I realized I was surrounded by predominately Russian-speaking Americans. The lobby was full of people conversing in this immensely tonal, beautifully soft, consonant/vowel language. It was refreshing to hear individuals speaking their native tongue, not feeling obligated to conform to Western culture’s predominantly English-speaking standards. Inside the actual venue was incredible: the concert hall showcased a brass organ perched up high over the stage, looking out with its splendid symmetry and grandeur. It was overwhelming. The concert hall started to fill and I could not help but overhear all the Russian being spoken around me. It was almost as though the majority of the Russian-speaking population came out to acknowledge and remember their home country and traditions.
       
          When Yevtushenko graced the stage, he had a presence unlike anything I had experienced. He had passion- a fire in his eyes that was unparalleled to anything I had seen. It was like he had a memory of the past that was haunting him, and when he looked at the audience, you felt that emotion sitting in the pit of your stomach. The poet was also accompanied by three English students: Daniel J. Schweitzer, a Ph.D. candidate in American literature; Paige Melin, a senior English and French dual major; and Jennifer Johnson, a senior English and theatre and dance major. It was then that I learned that Yevtushenko’s reading was going to involve a diverse array of speakers, and would be recited in both English and Russian. The exchange of stanza reading in which one of the students recite a verse, and then Yevtushenko would recite the next stanza was incredibly interesting. Here you had an American college student who was doing their best to read Yevtushenko’s poetry with the poet sitting right next to them, potentially worrying that their reading would not do the poem’s emotive rhetoric justice.
         
        I think the readers did a good job striving to recite the poem with the proper emotion at the proper time. At times there was an immense contrast between reader’s tonality and reading style, but I felt that when a plethora of readers recite different parts of poem, there are going to be differences in projection.  It was also fascinating to hear certain stanzas in English and Russian, because while I got some context from the English speaking stanzas, when I was hearing the Russian verses I had to go solely off my imagination which was dictated by Yevtushenko’s tone, rhythm, and overall dramatic approach. This was not entirely the case for the vast majority of attendants, who were most likely bilingual speakers who understood both the English and the Russian. It is hard enough to gain an understanding of most poetry, let alone poetry read in a completely different language; through this, I came to the realization that language is everything when trying to understand another human being, and we often endure disconnect and misunderstanding because of languages inability to fully articulate a situation. For me, I was left, essentially to the status of an infant because I could only go by Yevtushenko’s tone to gain the meaning.
    
        When Yevtushenko did speak English, he was relatively inaudible and the language failed to stick in my brain. At times Yevtushenko was shrieking, and at other times he was quiet. I had to infer the truth of what I made an inference of what I thought the overall theme or mood of the poem was based solely off the reader’s emotion. My vulnerability and susceptibility to the language of the reader was very humbling and made me come to the conclusion at how vast the world really is, and how little I have seen or experienced.

        It was here that I remembered my grandmother, who constantly tried to help me understand a past that I never really connected to until I heard Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poetry. After the reading, I felt I had been transported to a different part of time and life that my grandmother was trying to get me to see. Language can transcend time and place, and it took a world-renowned poet to make me realize that power.


~Collin Schreiner~