Life & Wisdom Quote by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Yevtushenko begs for a “plain and simple” mystery the way a starving man begs for bread: not as a parlor trick, but as a last defense against a world that won’t stop explaining itself. The repetition - “Give me a mystery... give me a mystery... just one!” - lands like a chant, a protest, a refusal to be managed by certainty. For a Soviet-era poet whose public life was braided with politics, surveillance, and compulsory clarity, that insistence carries heat. This isn’t escapism; it’s a demand for private space.

The subtext sits inside his oddly tender adjectives. “Diffidence and silence” turn mystery into a virtue of restraint, almost a moral posture: the right not to declare, not to confess, not to perform ideological transparency. Then he miniaturizes it into “a slim little bare-foot mystery,” a childlike image that undercuts the grand, chest-thumping mysteries of state and nation. Barefoot implies vulnerability and poverty, but also honesty - no heavy boots, no marching. He wants something unarmored.

What makes the line work is its countercultural reversal: in an age that treats disclosure as progress and loudness as authenticity, Yevtushenko asks for the opposite. One small, stubborn unknown becomes a kind of human rights claim. The poem doesn’t romanticize obscurity; it mourns how rare it’s become to have even a single corner of life that isn’t audited, interpreted, or forced into speech.