Yevtushenko, Yevgeny Alexandrovich

YEVTUSHENKO, YEVGENY ALEXANDROVICH

(b. 1932), Russian poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, photographer, film actor; member of Congress of People's Deputies, 1989–1991.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko was brought up in Siberia by his mother; when she moved with him to Moscow in 1944 she registered his date of birth as 1933. He published his first poem in 1949 and his first book in 1952. Yevtushenko studied at the Union of Writers' training school, the Gorky Literary Institute, Moscow, in the early 1950s. He emerged after 1956 as one of the leading lights of the Thaw under Nikita Khrushchev, in many ways epitomizing its values and aspirations, and has remained a public figure ever since. His personal lyrics expressed a new and liberating sense of passionate individuality, and his poems on public themes called for and declared a fresh commitment to revolutionary idealism, in the spirit of Mayakovsky. His attitudes were underpinned by a frequently asserted commitment to the supremacy of Russia as a fountainhead of positive human values, notwithstanding Russia's own dark history and the blandishments of Western civilization.

Yevtushenko declaimed his poetry in a histrionic manner that has reminded some Americans of U.S. fundamentalist preachers. In the early 1960s Yevtushenko became hugely popular in Russia, and his recitals (often in the company of his then wife Bella Akhmadulina, Andrei Voznesensky, and Bulat Okudzhava) attracted large crowds to the stadiums in which they were characteristically held. Yevtushenko's national and international reputation was established by two poems in particular, "Baby Yar" (published September 1961) and "The Heirs of Stalin" (published in Pravda, October 1962), which call respectively for unrelenting vigilance against anti-Semitism and the recurrence of Stalinism in Russia.

Yevtushenko soon began travelling abroad, a proclivity that has eventually taken him by his own count to ninety-five different countries. More than any other aspect of his activities, his freedom and frequency of travel led others to question the fundamental nature of his relationship with the Soviet authorities. His own protestations about how he was continually censored, rebuked, and restricted, and how he persistently used his position to plead for others in more parlous situations, have increasingly been interpreted as part and parcel of his conniving in being used as a licensed dissident

whose fundamental adherence to the Soviet system and willingness to accommodate himself to it never wavered. His outstanding poetic mastery has never been in doubt, but beginning in the 1970s, the rise of poets who rejected Yevtushenko's flamboyant style, public posturing, and acceptance of privilege led to a growing view of him as a figure of the hopelessly compromised past. Partly in response, Yevtushenko branched out into other areas of creativity. During the later 1980s he demonstratively led the way in publishing Russian poetry that had been censored during the Soviet period. Since the collapse of the USSR he has lived mainly in the United States, regularly traveling back to Russia for public appearances, and has continued to publish prolifically in a variety of genres and argue his case in media interviews.

See also: mayakovsky, vladimir vladimirovich; okudzhava, bulat shalovich; thaw, the

bibliography

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny. (1991). The Collected Poems, 1952–1990, ed. Albert C. Todd. New York: Holt.

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny. (1995). Don't Die Before You're Dead. New York: Random House.

Gerald Smith