On it’s face, “Don’t Disappear” isn’t extraordinary so much as sad, embarrassing, desperate. Yevtushenko’s final drafts of this poem appeared in 1977. It’s a poem addressed to a lover, and the structure is simple: six stanzas rooted around the anaphora, “Don’t disappear…”. 

The context

A love poem with a third party, or shadow, deserves a little context.

Y. married poet Bella Akhmadulina in 1954. They stayed married until 1959, but Y. couldn’t stand the attention Bella received from admirers. Jealousy, both sexual and literary, plagued their relationship. According to official rumor:

The marriage finally fell apart when Akhmadulina unexpectedly became pregnant. Yevtushenko did not want children and insisted that she terminated the pregnancy. Following the ensuing divorce, Yevtushenko said that their love “had not died; it had stopped being,” and he later attempted to win her back. Despite their difficulties, the pair did ultimately manage to remain friends, and when Yevtushenko married his last wife, Maria, Akhmadulina even came to help set the table for the wedding meal.

In 1961, Y. married Galina Sokol-Lukonina. In 1968, the couple adopted a boy named Peter. I can’t find information about when Galina and Y. divorced, so it’s possible that this poem was written to Galina with Jan Butler in the background.

Or to Irish translator Jan Butler, who was translating his work in the 1970’s—and whom he eventually married in 1978. They had two sons before divorcing in 1986.

Less than a year later, in 1987, Y. met Maria Novikova. They married in the same year. Maria became his fourth and final wife. They had two sons before Y. died in 2017.

*

And now, the poem itself. I’ll start with Albert C. Todd’s translation, because it’s the one that often comes up when this poem is mentioned. It is Wednesday and I am nit-picking. I wanted to re-read it in order to examine the ellipses. To see how Yevtuschenko’s use of ellipses changes the poem. And to compare the translations.

Don’t Disappear (translated by Albert C. Todd)

Don't disappear.... By disappearing from me, 
you will disappear from yourself, 
betraying your own self forever, 
and that will be the basest dishonesty.

Don't disappear.... To disappear is so easy.
It's impossible to resurrect one another.
Death drags down too deep.
Death even for a moment is too long.

Don't disappear.... Forget the third shadow.
In love there are only two. There are no thirds.
We both will be pure on Judgment Day, 
when the trumpets call us to account.

Don't disappear.... We have redeemed sin.
We both are free of the law, we are sinless.
We are worthy together of the forgiveness of those
whom we have unintentionally wounded.

Don't disappear.... One can disappear in an instant, 
but how could we meet later in the centuries ahead? 
Is your double possible in the world, 
and my double? Only barely in our children.

Don't disappear.... Give me your palm.
I am written on it-this I believe.
What makes one's last love terrible
is that it is not love, but fear of loss.

Rupert Moreton’s translation is richer somehow, more carnal, more intimate. It also works with a rhyme scheme that Todd likely abandons in his translation. It’s fuller. It’s thicker. It’s more formal and baroque and possibly prettier. Of course it builds this brocade over the same desperation, but in a classical mode.

Don’t Disappear" (translated by Rupert Moreton)

Don’t disappear… For if that’s what you do,
in pieces from your very self you’ll vanish,
betraying all you are for ever, too –
this basest fraud we only then can banish.

Don’t disappear… for it’s too easy and
we find we cannot resurrect each other.
Death pulls us in too deeply in its sand.
It’s careless to succumb to dying’s smother.

Don’t disappear… Third shadows cast away –
in love there are but two. The third’s deception.
And we shall both be pure on Judgement Day,
when trumpets summon us to that reception.

Don’t disappear… for sin we have atoned.
We are not under judgement, we are shriven.
Of course, we didn’t really mean to wound
our peers, so we deserve to be forgiven.

Don’t disappear. You can in but a wink –
but how then can we manage future meetings?
Of doubles – yours and mine – then can we think?
It may but happen in our children’s greetings.

Don’t disappear. So, give your palm to me.
I truly think you’ll find on it I’m written.
The final love is dreadful, for you see
it isn’t love – by fear of loss we’re bitten.

A few notes on “showpiece dissidence”

How to determine when a poet is engaging in “showpiece dissidence”? What does “selling out” mean in the context of public poetry? Who is the riskiest risker? And who is merely mouthing the dissent that is trending?

I don’t know. I don’t know that we can know without rising to the defense of an ideology.

Y. never took a clear ideological position—he often straddled a line (or a nuance) to the point of estrangement from the Russian exile community. Joseph Brodsky, for example, resigned from the American Academy of Arts and Letters when Yevtushenko was made an honorary member. "He throws stones only in directions that are officially sanctioned and approved," Brodsky said.

Or he doesn’t throw the right stones. He criticizes anti-Semitism and Stalin but not Marx. He questions the bonuses given to writers who celebrated Russia and the Soviet state but he stays loyal to the state, itself. He identifies as Russian, as a Soviet citizen, at a time when resistance requires the cutting of all ties. Or he solidifies a friendship with a cigarette stub. Or he works within the system and doesn’t defect. He gets published in major magazines. He receives state awards. He benefits from the right to travel abroad, one of the most coveted freedoms in the USSR and Iron Bloc states. The list of wrongs is long.

Y. was, in fact, a reformer, a reform communist rather than a revolutionist. His 1965 interview with Olga Carlisle makes this clear. Carlisle introduces the interview:

In 1965, Yevtushenko tells me that he still believes that a renewed Marxism might be reconciled with literary integrity; that the present system is not incompatible with human and artistic growth. This is an uncomfortable position today in Moscow, where a stifling Socialist Realism is the only sanctioned aesthetic doctrine.

As an idealist, an admirer of abstraction, Y.’s love poems to women never rose to the level of ardor that his love poems for Russia embody.

Can a poet be a patriot of place as well as a dissident? Would it have been better if Y. was a White Russian monarchist, a firmly-anti-communist dissident who rejected the whole rather than its particular?

Hitler hated the USSR too. We forget how close one totalitarianism nestles to another.

After Y.’s death, Dan Piepenbring suggested:

“..sometimes a poet can achieve that rare thing: popularity. All it requires is persistence, good fortune, and cultural conditions dramatically different from those of the contemporary U.S. At the height of his powers, Yevtushenko commanded audiences of thousands in the Soviet Union, where his readings gave voice to the hopes and fears of a generation struggling to come out from under Stalinism.” 

Whether Y.’s popularity came at the price of friends in high places isn’t always the appropriate question to ask. I say this because friends in high places impact the career of poets in every country—whether a democracy or a dictatorship. To different degrees, the anointment is there in the ointment of any public art.

(As for the problematic, Y., like many male poets of his generation, speaks from a socialization that marginalizes the lives and value of female or LGBTQ persons. I don’t hold him to a standard that didn’t exist when he was navigating the years of Soviet communism. Or rather, I don’t know what revelation can come from holding him that.)

"It's not enough to fight for freedom. We must also fight the misuse of freedom, and develop our idea of it. Most people don't care about freedom of speech because they don't have anything to say.” Y. said this in 2006, when he was still holding a candle of hope that Putin might usher in a new era for Russia.

Did he realize that religious nationalism would be the vehicle for consolidation of authoritarianism? How does a poetics of aspirational patriotism interact with propaganda to create a sense of complacency or fatalism? Why am I asking myself these questions aloud in a room without windows and a language with so few words for longing?