Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Latin American tour (1968). Chile. “In the volcano of the fiercest struggle”

At the end of 1967 Yevgeny Yevtushenko went on a big Latin American tour, visiting Chile, Uruguay, Colombia and Mexico with poetry performances. According to the internal rules of the Writers' Union, the poet had to write a brief official report on the trip for the Secretariat of the Union. However, Yevtushenko's report can be called neither brief nor official: it is written extensively, passionately and with the express purpose of impressing his superiors with his success and convince them of his reliability and usefulness. In the first part, devoted to Chile, the author of Babi Yar deals with the balance of political forces in the country, speaks of the insufficient — or inadequate — Soviet presence; pays considerable attention to the public response to the literary and political processes in the USSR (the Siniavsky and Daniel case, the Trial of the Four); and, finally, talks about his poetry recitals. The text of the report, preserved in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), is published for the first time, and is accompanied by an introductory article and commentary.

E.A. Yevtushenko, Latin America, Chile, 1968