![]() ![]() Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933-2017) - name also spelled Jevgeni Jevtusenko; Evgenii Evtushenko |
Internationally one the best-known poets of the post-Stalin period, who became with The Third Snow (1955) and other works a spokesperson for the younger generation. Throughout the Khrushchev and the Brezhnev periods Yevgeny Yevtushenko travelled widely abroad, giving readings as a symbol of a new freedom in the Soviet Union. Especially in the United States the 6-foot-3-inch Siberian poet received a great deal of attention. Yevtushenko's early poems show the influence of Mayakovsky. In spite of his outspokenness and conflicts with the authorities, he was also loyal to communism. "Why is it that in folk songs of all nations and all ages people express the desire to become birds? Because birds know no borders. People are mortally envious of animals for their freedom, and probably that is why we try to deprive them of it by forcing borders on them—be they the barriers of zoo, the bars of a circus cage, or the transparent but still prison-like walls of an aquarium. People insult their one God-given planet with impassable fences (which Robert Frost described with such a bitter irony)—with barbed wire, with iron or newspaper curtain. The division, the separation of the earth's surface, turns into mutual verbal and physical cannibalism. Our lack of knowledge of each other is like that of a blind sculptor, dangerous in his aggressive naiveté, who creates figures of so-called enemies." (from Divided Twins: Alaska and Siberia by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated by Antonina W. Bouis, Viking Studio Books, 1988, p. 33) Yevgeny Yevtushenko was born in Zima in Irkutsk, a small
junction on the Trans-Siberian Railway. He was a fourth-generation
descendant of Ukrainians exiled to Siberia under the Czars.
Both of his parents were geologist. Yevtushenko's father,
Aleksandr Rudolfovich Gangnus, was
of
Latvian descent, the son of Rudolf Gangnus (1883-1949), a mathematician
and high school teacher. Yevtushenko's maternat grandfather, Yermolai
Yevtushenko,
was a Red Army commander. Both became victims of Stalin's purges. Yevtushenko's parents separated in the late 1930s. The young Yevgeny moved with his
mother, Zinaida Ermolaevna, to Moscow, but after the German
invasion, they were evacuated to Zima. In 1944 they returned back to Moscow.
At school Yevtushenko was a bad student. After being expelled, he accompanied his father on geological expeditions to Kazakhstan in 1948 and to the Altai mountains in 1950. Yevtushenko's first published poem appeared in a sporting jounal in 1949; at that time he wanted to become a soccer player. Razvedchiki griadushchego
(1952, Prospectors
of the Future), with which Yevtushenko debuted as a poet, earned him a
place at the prestigious Gorky Institute of Literature,
but he was soon kicked out for insubordination. A few years after
Stalin's death in 1953, a period of "thaw" began in Soviet culture. Zima Junction
(1956), Yevtushenko's first important narrative poem, was about his
visit to his birth town in the summer of 1953. In the Soviet Union it
was received with enthusiasm: Yevtushenko touched a taboo subject, the
burden of Stalin's heritage. Reviews in the West were generally
favourable, even though Charles Higham did not like Yevtushenko's free
style of writing. "It reads like chopped-up prose, full of boring
anecdotes and conversations, devoid of a single strinking image and
only tolerable at all because of its directness and lack of
pretension." ('The Dullness of Yevtushenko' by Charles Higham, The Bulletin, March 19, 1966) Yevtushenko gained international fame with Babi Yar (1961). The poem is one of most famous literary treatments of the massacre of Jews in
occupied Kiev on 29 September 1941. Yevtushenko denounced the Nazis and at the same time
criticized – like an over-enthusiactic member of the Komsomol – his own country for forgetting the message that the
"Internationale unites the human race." "O my Russian people! / I know that you are really international. / But
those with unclean hands / Have often loudly taken in vain / Your most
pure name." (The Soviet Government and the Jews 1948-1967: A Dumented Study by Benjamin Pinkus, 1984, p. 115) Originally published in the Literaturnaya Gazeta (19 September, 1961), Babi Yar provoked a storm of controversy by breaking the silence about Soviet anti-Semitism. Vladimir Firsov, an anti-experimentalist poet, argued that Yevtushenko sympathized more with Jewish than Slavic victims. Recitals of the poem drew crowds of young people. Yevtushenko stood before the audience as a very courageous person. The writer and painter Olga Carlisle (granddaughter of Leonid Andreyev) described him as a "very tall and slender man with "transparent blue eyes. . . . He is fair and has high cheek bones, his eyes are narrow and shrewd. His manner has a kind of winning candidness, yet it seemed a little calculated, as that of a flirtatious child." ('Yevtushenko, Yevgeny (Aleksandrovich),' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman, 1975, p. 1579) Babi Yar was not officially printed in Russia until 1984. Nevertheless, it was frequently recited in both Russia and abroad. Composer Dimitri Shostakovich set the words to music as the first part of his Thirteenth Symphony; four other poems by Yevtushenko completed the text for the five movements of the work. Despite advisement of Premier Khrushchev, the Soviet Presidium, and a number of artists and writers to call off the premiére, the symphony was performed on December 18, 1962. Shostakovich's work was banned until Yevtushenko made alterations in his verse. The Communist Party secretary Nikita Khrushchev forced to add lines about the Slavs slaughtered in Kiev. 'Nasledniki
Stalina' (1961, The Heirs of Stalin) was a slap in the face of the
cultural elite. Curiously, it was published presumably with Party
approval in Pravda,
and contained a warning that Stalin did not die. "And I appeal / to our
government with a plea: / to double, / and treble, the guard at this
slab, / so that Stalin will not rise again, / and with Stalin-the
past." In a interview Yevtushenko confessed that he broke down in
tears upon learning of the dictator's death in 1953. Awakening
began from the funeral, where people were trampled to death. Yevtushenko
dealt with burning topics of the day with a strong rhetorical note; his
poems echoed the feelings of a whole disillusioned generation. It
has been said that most of his political poems are bad verse
in a good cause. In the West, Yevtushenko attacks
on Stalinism and bureaucracy resonated with the New Left. As a correspondent for Pravda, Yevtushenko visited Cuba, where befriended Fidel Castro, and wrote with Enrique Piñeda Barnett the screenplay for Mikhail Kalatozov's episodic film Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba), released two years after the missile crisis in 1964. This propagandistic work fell soon into obscurity, but decades later in was and hailed as a masterpiece especially due to Sergei Urusevsky's innovative camerawork. Yevtushenko's Cuban friends included the dissident poet Heberto Padilla (1932-2000), whose work he made known in the Soviet Union. He adviced Padilla to keep a low profile. In December 1962, Nikita Khrushchev arranged an informal discussion
with Soviet intelligentsia, in which Yevtushenko defended the right of
artist and writers to decide on their own what art was. To
Khrushchev's remark, "If person is born ugly, only the grave will
correct him," he replied: "Nikita Sergeevich, we live in a time
when mistakes are corrected not by graves, but by live, honest, and
truthful Bolshevik words." (Zhivago’s Children by Vladislav Zubok, 2011, p. 212) When the famous eighty-eight-year-old American poet Robert Frost visited the Soviet Union in 1962, he met Yevtushenko in Moscow. Later Frost wrote in an unfinished letter that "the nearest anything disagreeable was with their most prominent poet of all, Yevtushenko, who had been to Cuba and found refreshment of the revolutionary spirit there in friendship with Castro, and may be coming here." (Robert Frost in Russia by Franklin D. Reeve, 1964, p. 61) Nevertheless, the two writers went to the Café Aelita, where they drank Georgian wine and recited poetry. Yevtushenko
was allowed to travel widely in the West until 1963, when he published
'Notes for an Autobiography' without official permission in the
moderately left-wing French newspaper L'Express. As a result, his privileges and favors were withdrawn, but restored
two years later. The text appeared in English in book form, entitled A Precocious Autobiography (1963). At the time of the 1968 Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia, Yevtushenko was on vacation in the Crimea with Vasily Aksyonov; Aksyonov drowed his rage in alcohol, Yevtushenko send a cable to Leonid Brezhnev in protest: "I DON'T KNOW HOW TOO SLEEP. I DON'T KNOW HOW TO CONTINUE LIVING," he complained. (Problems of Communism, January-February 1968, p. 68) Yevtushenko also denounced the invasion in the poem 'Russian Tanks in Prague.' However, this was not known in England, where his former friend Kingley Amis joined a campaing against Yevtushenko, after he was nominated for the poetry chair at Oxford. Yevtushenko did not get the post. From the 1970s, Yevtushenko was active in
many fields of culture: writing novels, acting, film directing, and
photography. He gained a huge success with the play Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty,
which was produced in Moscow by Yuri Lyubimov. "Mr. Yevtushenko,
increasingly orthodox in his writings and regarded by younger writers
as a full‐fledged member of the Soviet Establishment, has his players
re‐enact the assassinations of President Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But in one scene that suggests his targets
are beyond America as well as in it, the actors also crucify Christ on
an iron curtain." (Hedrick Smith in The New York Times, October 29, 1972) Another highlight in the life of Yevtushenko in the same year: with Stanley Kunitz,
James Dickey, Richard Wilbur, and the former Senator Eugene J.
McCarthy, he filled the Felt Forum of Madison Square Garden on January
28 – twice in a single evening. Yevtushenko remained politically outspoken throughout his career. The KGB records show that he was active behind the scenes
in support of Solzhenitsyn
when the Nobel Prize Winner was arrested and exiled. Yevtushenko sent
an immediate telegram of protest to Brezhnev, in which he said that
while he disagreed with Solzhenitsyn on many points, the author's
explosive study Gulag contained "terrible documented pages about the bloody crimes of the Stalinist past." ('Excerpts From Yevtushenko Statement,' The New York Times, 18.2.1974) Moreover, Yevtusenko wrote to the KGB chief Yuri Andropov, the future general secretary of the Communist Party: "There is only one way out of this situation, but nobody will dare choose it: recognize Solzhenitsyn, restore his membership in the Writers' Union, and afterward, just declare suddenly that Cancer Ward is to be published." (Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life by D.M. Thomas, 1999, p. 358) Later he also suggested that Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize for Literature, which the author had rejected under pressure of the Soviet Government, should be posthumously restored. "He earned it with his entire life and work," Yevtushenko stated in an article. ('Posthumous Nobel For Pasternak?' The Washington Post, January 2, 1988) His own speeches were constantly censored in magazines. In 1985, when Mikhail S. Gorbachev had just risen to power, Literaturnaya Gazeta left out several major sections of Yevtushenko's remarks about Stalin's purges, the evils of collectivization, and the privileges of the elite. Yevtushenko himself declined to comment on the editing. Wild Berries (1981),
Yevtushenko's first novel, was rejected by critics (the author was advised to stick to
poetry), but it became a huge popular success. The
story, which fused the past and the future, history and fantasy, dealt with, among other things, the Stalinist
collectivization of agriculture and the elimination of the kulaks,
land-owning peasants. Yevtushenko directed the film Kindergarten (1983) and
acted in it. "As a debut for any writer-director, "Kindergarten" would
be highly ambitious--a large-scale World War II epic as seen through
the eyes of a child. Not surprisingly, Yevtushenko’s vision is often
poetic; yet "Kindergarten," for all its impressive craftsmanship, is
disappointingly conventional." (Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times, April 26, 1986) Vanessa Redgrave starred in Yevtushenko's film Stalin's Funeral
(1990). "Five years ago, "Stalin’s Funeral" would have been a
sensation. . . . Now, however, the Soviet audience is all too well
acquainted with the evils of the Stalin regime, so long hidden behind
the heroic propaganda." (Carey Goldberg, Los Angeles Times, December 26. 1990) When Yevtushenko was appointed in 1987 honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Russian-born poet Joseph Brodsky resigned in protest - he
considered his colleague a party yes man. Brodsky bitterly stated: "He
throws stones only in directions that are officially sanctioned and
approved." ('Brodsky Quits Arts Group Over Yevtushenko Induction' by Edwin McDowell, The New York Times, June 20, 1987) Yevtushenko's readers defended the poet
faithfully, stating that "you can't blame him that he survived." Yevtushenko became a member of the Congress of People's Deputies in 1989 and next year he was appointed vice president of Russian PEN. In 1993 Yevtushenko received the Defender of Free Russia medal, which was given to those who took part in resisting the hard-line Communist coup in August 1991. After the accession of Gorbachev to the CPSU general secretaryship, Yevtushenko introduced to Soviet readers many silenced poets in the journal Ogonek. He aroused public awareness of the pollution of Lake Baikal, and following the collapse of communism, he supported the plan to erect a monument to the victims of Stalinist repression opposite Lubianka, headquarters of the KGB. In Don't Die Before You're Dead (1995) Yevtushenko gave his satirical account of the August 1991 coup, which eventually lifted Boris Yeltsin to power. In one scene the slain Grand Duchess Olga whispers her last poems into Yeltsin's ear. Yevtushenko was married four times: in 1954 he married Bella Akhmadulina, who published her first collection of lyrics in 1962. After divorce he married Galina Semyonovna Sokol. Yevtushenko's third wife was the British translator Jan Butler; they married in 1978. Butler worked as a translator in Moscow for thirteen years. In 1986 Yevtushenko marrried Maria Novika. Since 1994, Yevtushenko was a professor at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where taught poetry and film. His criticism of President Vladimir Putin was considered mild compared to the dramatic impact he made with his attacks on the legacy of Stalinist cultural policy. Yevtushenko died on April 1, 2017, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the age of 84. He had suffered from cancer. For further reading: Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems by M. Slonim (1967); 'Introduction' by Robin Milner Gulland, in Selected Poems, translated by Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi (1962/2008); 'The Politics of Poetry: The Sad Case of Yevgeny Yevtushenko' by Robert Conquest, in New York Times Magazine (30 September, 1973); 'Yevtushenko, Yevgeny (Aleksandrovich),' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975); Soviet Russian Literature Since Stalin by Deming Brown (1978); Evgenii Evtushenko by E. Sidorov (1987); Soviet Literature in the 1980s by N.N. Shneidman (1989); Refernce Guide to Russian Literature, ed. by Neil Cornwell (1998); Strict Wildness: Discoveries in Poetry and History by Peter Viereck (2008); Grazhdane, poslushaĭte menia!: Evgeniĭ Evtushenko, lichnostʹ i tvorchestvo by E. Sidorov (2010); Evtushenko: Love Story by Ilʹia Falikov (2014); Ne tolʹko Evtushenko by Vladimir Solovʹev (2015);'Yevgeny Yevtushenko,' in ¡Some People!: Anecdotes, Images, and Letters of Persons of Interest by Robert Lima (2015); Moi drug--Evgeniĭ Evtushenko by Feliks Medvedev (2017); "IA vam neobkhodim ...": Evgeniĭ Evtushenko: Vstrechi by Arnolʹd Kharitonov (2018); Poets of the Round Table: Jidi Majia in Conversations with Sixteen World Poets on Poetics, Poetry and Eco-writing by Jidi Majia, Jidi Majia (2023) Selected works:
|