Reaction: To a Young Talent

Sergei Mikhalkov, To a Young Talent. March 22, 1963

This poem captured the pushback that followed the Thaw’s brief exhilaration of public poetry culture. Sergei Mikhalkov, a loyal cultural insider, addressed a fashionable “non-state poet” who performed outsiderhood as a pose, courting applause while claiming persecution and demanding recognition. The speaker mocked modernist bravado and the admirers who celebrated it, warning that rebellion could become its own conformity, useful mainly as publicity. The poem shows how Soviet cultural authority tried to discipline a new poetic generation not only by policing ideas, but by ridiculing the style of independence.

Original Source: Izvestiia, 22 March 1963, p. 3.

You said that you were
A non-state poet, beyond the pale,
and you squinted into the crystal goblet,
Sitting there dressed like a London dandy.

You said: "You have the medals,
Your work has been recognized by the country,
But I got none, I am beyond the pale;
Such as I do not get awards."

Your irony had the ring
Of off-hand candor;
The onset of unthinking maturity,
No longer childishness.

You've been so long accustomed
To plucking the blossoms of applause
That you can no longer distinguish
Flattery from praise.

The doors to the apartment, both back and front,
You've flung open wide,
And the breeze that stirs your lyre
Has whipped up a chain of turbulence.

And persons to whom your fate, your star
Are matters of indifference
Embrace and kiss you cynically,
Like bosom friends.

Our progressive! The most honest one!
We hear their tipsy cry.
But there is also such a thing
As progressive paralysis!

Dressed in modernism, poses and bravado,
As in an opera cape,
What award do you expect,
"Non-state" poet?

My verse is not an epigram
To strike the target.
My only regret now is that
You'll make use of it for publicity.

Source: Priscilla Johnson and Leopold Labedz, eds., Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962-1964 (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1964), pp. 191-192.