Born in Siberia, Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933–2017) won acclaim as a poet of protest during the post-Stalin years of the Soviet Union and became an international literary celebrity. Known as a prolific poet who wrote thousands of poems, often about social and political topics, Yevtushenko was also a novelist, essayist, filmmaker, and member of the first freely elected parliament of the Soviet Union under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev. Yevtushenko’s writing career stretched long past the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he taught for decades at American universities. His legacy is complicated, with detractors arguing that he strategically navigated strictures of the Soviet state, allowing him to publish and travel, while other more outspoken critics were exiled and imprisoned. Proponents uphold Yevtushenko as a voice of resistance who took risks to bring various Soviet oppressions to light and turned an eye to wrongdoing around the world.
Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Gangnus was born in Zima, a Siberian logging town, on July 18, 1933. His parents divorced when he was young, and he took his mother’s last name. He lived with his mother in Moscow, until being evacuated in 1941 due to the threat of German invasion, and he returned to the capital in 1944. Yevtushenko’s father, a geologist by trade and an avid reader, introduced his son to literature at an early age. After the war, he brought the budding poet along on expeditions in Kazakhstan, where he would recite poems from memory. While still a teenager, Yevtushenko began to publish his poetry in periodicals, and he was accepted into the prestigious Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. He published his first poetry collection, The Prospects of the Future (1952), at age nineteen.
After the death of Stalin in 1953, Yevtushenko became part of a group of young poets that began to test the possibilities for more vocal criticism of the leader and his legacy. Yevtushenko knew the costs of Stalinism first hand; both his grandfathers fell victim to the ruler’s Great Purge. His gifts as a theatrical orator and his poems, which explored the personal as well as the sociopolitical, made him a popular and well-known poet when he was still in his twenties. During this period, Nikita Khrushchev rose through the ranks to lead the Soviet Union, relaxing censorship, though writers and intellectuals still faced possible persecution. For example, Yevtushenko was expelled from the Gorky Institute in 1957 for his support for Vladimir Dudintsev’s banned novel Not by Bread Alone (1956).
In the next decade, Yevtushenko was catapulted to a new level of fame with the publication of the poem “Babi Yar” (1961), commemorating the site of a 1941 massacre of thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. In two days, nearly 34,000 Jews were murdered at Babi Yar, a ravine northwest of Kiev, and thousands more Jews, along with Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies, and others, were killed there in the following months—an estimated 100,000 deaths in all. The Soviet Union had refused to memorialize the site as a place of Jewish extinction, and Yevtushenko’s poem, though edited to appease state censors, was for many an electrifying acknowledgment of Soviet anti-Semitism. Lines from Yevtushenko’s “Babi Yar,” along with lines from some of his other poems, were used by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Thirteenth Symphony in 1962, which helped to bring the poet to the wider world’s attention.
Yevtushenko not only became one of the leading poets in the Soviet Union, with thousands packing stadiums for his readings; he also became one of the most recognized poets around the globe, appearing on the cover of Time magazine in 1962. He traveled widely in the U. S. and elsewhere, giving readings and meeting with celebrated writers like T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost and political figures including Robert F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. He continued to speak out against Soviet government policies: he decried the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, he intervened on behalf of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and he condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. However, he was criticized for not joining other writers in protesting the trials of poet Yuli Daniel and journalist and human rights activist Alexander Ginzburg.
Yevtushenko’s political work and artistic output extended beyond the poetry he is best known for. In the final years of the Soviet Union, Yevtushenko served as an elected member of the Soviet Parliament. In addition to his many collections of poetry, he also published two novels, one of which focuses on an attempted coup of Mikhail Gorbachev. He also wrote screenplays and made and acted in several movies. In his later years, he maintained homes in Russia and in America, where he taught at the University of Tulsa, among other colleges. While his celebrity became more muted in the new millennium, he is remembered as an irrepressible, larger-than-life figure of literary history whose public life and work as a poet were enormously consequential. Looking back on Yevtushenko’s postwar break-out from the vantage point of 2017, Russian-American critic Vladislav Davidzon writes, “It is hard to imagine the scale of his importance now, as he constituted a direct lineage to the great Russian poetic tradition, of elevating moral figures to the state of political arbiters in a dictatorial culture of autocracy.”
Co-written by Poets House and Jessica Fletcher, a Poets House Special Collections Research and Writing Fellow, as part of a joint program with the CUNY Graduate Center.