Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko (Russian: Евгений Александрович Евтушенко, Evgenij Aleksandrovič Evtušenko; born July 18, 1933) is a Russian poet, whose work contains scathing attacks on the Soviet bureaucracy as a legacy of Stalin.
Born in Zima Junction, he moved to Moscow as a boy and attended the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute. His first important poem was "Zima Junction," published in 1956.
Yevtushenko was one of the politically active authors during the Khrushchev Thaw. In 1961 he produced the poem "Babi Yar," in which he attacked Soviet indifference to the Nazi massacre of the Jews of Kiev in September 1941. The poem was widely circulated in samizdat but a typical Soviet policy regarding the Holocaust was to present it as atrocities against Soviet citizens, not acknowledging the genocide of the Jews and this politically incorrect poem was published in the state-controlled Soviet press only in 1984. Long before then, it was set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich, who was grateful for Yevtushenko's contribution and defended him against criticism.
In the same year that he released "Babi Yar", he also published "The Heirs of Stalin," claiming that the legacy of Stalinism still dominated the country. Published originally in Pravda, the poem was only republished a quarter of a century later, under the more liberal leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1963, Yevtushenko, already an international literary sensation, was banned from traveling outside the Soviet Union; the ban was lifted in 1965.
Yevtushenko (along with Jean Paul Sartre and others) was one of the signatories of the protest against the harsh sentence given by the Soviet authorities to Joseph Brodsky. Nevertheless, when he was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, there was a flurry of protest, led by Brodsky, who complained that Yevtushenko's attacks on the Soviet Union were launched only in directions approved by the Party.
In the 1970s, Yevtushenko was closely associated with dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
In the post-Soviet era, Yevtushenko has been active promoting the works of former dissident poets, environmental causes, and the memory of victims of the Soviet Gulags.
Yevtushenko now teaches Russian and European poetry and film at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma and at Queens College of the City University of New York.
Yevtushenko in the West
Once he was allowed to travel, Yevtushenko journeyed through the Amazonian Rain Forest. One night in Leticia, Colombia, on the shores of the Amazon River, the poet saw a large fire burning on the south side of the river. He asked his Colombian hosts if they should not all cross the river to help put out the fire. They shrugged and replied: "No importa; es del lado peruano." ("Who cares; it's on the Peruvian side.") Appalled, the Russian wrote a poem in Spanish:
- No hay lado colombiano
No hay lado peruano
Solo hay lado humano
("There is no Colombian side; There is no Peruvian side; There is only the Human side.")
During his Amazonian trek, Yevtushenko encountered Mark Vonnegut, son of Kurt Vonnegut. Mark made a very bad impression on Yevgeny, who told Kurt so when they met later in the USA.
Teldec records recorded Shostakovich's Symphony #13 "Babi Yar" with the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur in January, 1993. Yevtusenko wrote a poem called "The Loss" in English which received its first publication in the booklet which accompanies the recording; his recitation of it is 4'18" long and appears as the 7th and last track on the CD.
External links
Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Collected Poems in English. Part 1:
Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Collected Poems in English. Part 2:
English Translations of Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Poetry
Russian Poets in English. Featuring the Great Poets of the 60-ties including Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrey Voznesensky and Bulat Okudzhava as well famous poet and singer Vladimir Vysotsky