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.

City Lights has been a revered independent bookstore and publisher of innovative writing for over 60 years. Poet and writer Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded the bookstore in 1953 with Peter D. Martin; two years later, Ferlinghetti took over as sole owner and established City Lights Publishers, carrying forth a vision for both enterprises as avenues for the dissemination of progressive, countercultural literature and ideas. The press became a propelling force of the Mimeo Revolution, putting young avant-garde American authors, including the Beats, into print for the first time for national audiences to discover, as well as publishing leading experimental writers from around the world.

Born in Bronxville, New York, in 1919, Lawrence Ferlinghetti grew up between New York and Strasbourg, France. He studied journalism at the University of North Carolina in 1941 and joined the Navy during World War II. On his return to the U.S., thanks to the G.I. Bill, he completed a master’s degree at Columbia in English Literature, then a doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris. Again returning to the U.S., he would move to San Francisco. He explained: “I was from New York and I tried to settle down there at the end of the war. I tried to get a job at publishers and newspapers, but everything was sewed up. Whereas in San Francisco, it was still wide open. It was still the last frontier in the ‘40s. It seemed like it was possible to do anything you wanted to out here.”

Once settled on the West Coast, Ferlinghetti set about creating a meeting place for writers to gather and for new writing to be discovered with the establishment of the bookstore. Originally called City Lights Pocket Bookshop, it sold only paperback books, a choice intended to broaden the audience for literary work. Ferlinghetti has said that “the idea for the bookstore was to have it function like a community center.” Unlike most bookstores at the time, City Lights was open on weekends and late into the night, encouraging greater access. The store policy was to let people stay and read for as long as they liked. Furthermore, they stocked periodicals—another uncommon practice—that focused on radical politics, and Ferlinghetti has said that the Italian immigrant population of North Beach would flock to get the Italian anarchist newspapers unavailable anywhere else.

The press, established in the basement of the bookstore, grew out of this interest in creating alternative communities for writers and political thinkers in resistance to the cultural conservatism of the early postwar era. “It was an attempt to record a certain dissident part of the voice of our time,” as Ferlinghetti put it. It began with the Pocket Poets Series in 1955—a series of distinctive small-format books by contemporary poets and writers—and soon widened its list to include not only literary poetry and novels but also works on environmental and political issues.

The Pocket Poets Series set the stage for the press’s political and social engagement. The first book in the series was Ferlinghetti’s own Pictures of the Gone World (1955). The following year saw Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (1956) as Number 4 in the series, after Ferlinghetti heard Ginsberg perform the poem at the Six Gallery. This publication thrust the young press into a maelstrom of controversy; Ferlinghetti was arrested and tried on charges of obscenity in 1957. He was acquitted, and the trial proved to be a milestone in the protection of the freedom of artistic expression.

The press would become the epicenter of the San Francisco literary scene of the 1950s and 60s, and was well-known nationally for publishing Beat writers, such as Bob Kaufman, Diane di Prima, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg—subversive American voices that exemplified City Lights’ efforts to provide an alternative literary outlet. And it introduced international poets to U.S. readers through such works as New Young German Poets (1959), edited by Jerome Rothenberg, and Red Cats (1962), featuring poems by three Russian poets—Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, and Semyon Kirsanov—edited and translated by Anselm Hollo. Ultimately, City Lights extended the dissident tone of the Beats into an international literary network intent on questioning convention.

Ferlinghetti’s active life as a poet, artist, and activist would take him around the globe, informing the scope of the press over the next several decades. He is the author of over a dozen books, and his volume A Coney Island of the Mind has sold over a million copies. In the 1970s, Nancy Peters, a former librarian at the Library of Congress, came on as an editor for City Lights, becoming a co-owner in 1984 until she retired in 2007. Elaine Katzenberger, who joined the bookstore staff in 1987, moved over to the publishing side in 1994, where she would take over as publisher and executive director. City Lights continues to thrive, with some 200 books in print. Its bookstore remains a landmark destination for writers worldwide.

The press’s devotion to radical poetries endures with the publication of books by new generations of groundbreaking authors, including social justice advocates, LGTBQ voices, and experimental writers across genres. City Lights also maintains its commitment to the anti-establishment voices it first brought to light in the middle of the 20th century. City Lights, which published Bob Kaufman's Golden Sardine in 1967, will publish the Collected Works of Bob Kaufman in 2019.

Co-written by Suzanne Wise, Staff Writer at Poets House, and Jessica Fletcher, a Poets House Special Collections Research and Writing Fellow, as part of a joint project with the CUNY Graduate Center.