Biography Evgeny Yevtushenko

Evgeny Yevtushenko (Russian: Евгений Евтушенко) (1933 – 2017),   the acclaimed Soviet and Russian poet was born in Zima Junction in the Irkutsk region. He was also a novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, publisher, actor, editor and director of several films. 

His father, a geologist, and his mother, a singer, moved with him to Moscow in 1935. His first published poem appeared in print in the magazine Sovetsky Sport, when he was 17 years old. In 1951, Yevtushenko entered the Gorky Literary Institute and gained notoriety in the former Soviet Union while in his 20s. His first book, Scouts of the Future (1952) followed by Third Snow (1955).

In 1961, he became famous for his poem Babi Yar that revealed the forgotten tragedy — in September 1941, Nazi occupying forces murdered more than 33,000 Jews in the ravine near Kyiv, Ukraine. Yevtushenko’s deeply moving poem was first published in the Literaturnaya Gazeta. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich incorporated his poem into his Symphony No. 13 (1962). Not only did Yevtushenko condemn the massacre committed by the Nazis, but he also was among the first to explore the complex history of the tragedy that was covered up by Soviet bureaucracy and had never been commemorated. Yevtushenko denounced the official antisemitism in the Soviet Union and he continued to write about prejudice and discrimination against Soviet Jews.

In the 1960s, Yevtushenko was one of the most visible of the young Soviet poets of the Sixties, the “Shestidesyatniki.” In 1966, Yevtushenko spent five weeks in America, visiting 27 universities and giving public poetry readings. However, Yevtushenko did not join the ranks of outright literary dissidents and later was criticized for his “conformism.” In the 1970s, Yevtushenko, besides being a noted poet, was also a “representative of Soviet culture” abroad, and visited over a hundred countries.

In 1991, during an attempted Soviet coup in Russia, Yevtushenko addressed huge crowds with poems in support of democratic reforms. Later, when he moved to the US and taught at the University of Tulsa, he frequently visited Russia, met with journalists and edited a five-volume anthology of Russian poetry. He died in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Sources

Dovlatov, S. “And then Brodsky said….” Graph 3(3) (1999): 10.

Terras, V. A History of Russian Literature. Yale University Press. 1994