Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (born July 18, 1933, Zima, Irkutsk oblast, Russia, U.S.S.R.—died April 1, 2017, Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S.) was a poet and spokesman for the younger post-Stalin generation of Russian poets. His internationally publicized demands for greater artistic freedom and for a literature based on aesthetic rather than political standards signaled an easing of Soviet control over artists in the late 1950s and ’60s.

A fourth-generation descendant of Ukrainians exiled to Siberia, Yevtushenko grew up in Moscow and the small town on the Trans-Siberian Railway line that is the setting of his first important narrative poem, Stantsiya Zima (1956; Zima Junction). He was invited to study at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow, and he gained popularity and official recognition after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953. Yevtushenko’s gifts as an orator and publicist, his magnetic personality, and his fearless fight for a return to artistic honesty soon made him a leader of Soviet youth. He revived the brash, slangy, unpoetic language of the early Revolutionary poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergey Yesenin and reintroduced such traditions as love lyrics and personal lyrics, which had been discouraged under Stalinism. His poem Baby Yar (1961), mourning the Nazi massacre of an estimated 34,000 Ukrainian Jews, was an attack on lingering Soviet anti-Semitism.

Yevtushenko’s travels and poetry readings in the United States and Europe established cultural links with the West, but he fell into disfavour at home when he published his Precocious Autobiography in Paris in 1963. He was recalled and his privileges were withdrawn, but he was restored to favour when he published his most ambitious cycle of poems, Bratsk Station (1966; originally published in Russian), in which he contrasts the symbol of a Siberian power plant bringing light to Russia with the symbol of Siberia as a prison throughout Russian history.

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Yevtushenko’s play Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty, which was composed of selections from his earlier poems about the United States, was produced in Moscow in 1972. His first novel, published in Russian in 1982, was translated and published in English as Wild Berries in 1984; that same year, a novella, Ardabiola, appeared in English translation. In 1978 he embarked on an acting career, and in 1981 a book of his photographs, Invisible Threads, was published. He published more poetry in The Collected Poems, 1952–1990 (1991), The Best of the Best: The Evening Rainbow (1999; also published as Evening Rainbow), and Walk on the Ledge: A New Book of Poetry in English and Russian (2005). His autobiographical novel Don’t Die Before Your Death (1994; also published as Don’t Die Before You’re Dead) treats the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in Soviet Russia in 1991.