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Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Soviet and Russian poet (1933–2017)

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko (18 July 1933 - 1 April 2017) is a controversial Russian poet and film director. During the Soviet era he spoke out publicly against Stalinism and rejected socialist realism, but was himself criticised by many Soviet dissidents.

In any man who dies there dies with him,
his first snow and kiss and fight.

Quotes

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Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?
  • The hell with it. Who never knew
    the price of happiness will not be happy.
    • "Lies" (1952), line 11; Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi (trans.) Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2008) p. 52.
  • So on and on
    we walked without thinking of rest
    passing craters, passing fire,
    under the rocking sky of '41
    tottering crazy on its smoking columns.
    • "The Companion" (1954), line 45; Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi (trans.) Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2008) p. 58.
  • Give me a mystery – just a plain and simple one – a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little, barefoot mystery: give me a mystery – just one!
    • "Mysteries" (1960), st. 10; Dimitri Obolensky (ed.) The Heritage of Russian Verse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976) p. 452.
  • Over Babiy Yar
    there are no memorials.
    The steep hillside like a rough inscription.
    I am frightened.
    Today I am as old as the Jewish race.
    • "Babiy Yar" (1961), line 1; Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi (trans.) Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2008) p. 82.
  • No Jewish blood runs among my blood,
    but I am as bitterly and hardly hated
    by every anti-semite
    as if I were a Jew. By this
    I am a Russian.
    • "Babiy Yar" (1961), line 58; Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi (trans.) Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2008) pp. 83-4.
  • No people are uninteresting.
    Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
    Nothing in them is not particular,
    and planet is dissimilar from planet.
    • "People" (1961), line 1; Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi (trans.) Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2008) p. 85.
  • И если умирает человек,
    с ним умирает первый его снег,
    и первый поцелуй, и первый бой...
    • In any man who dies there dies with him,
      his first snow and kiss and fight.
    • "People" (1961), line 12; Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi (trans.) Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2008) p. 85.
  • A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote.
    • Andrew R. MacAndrew (trans.) A Precocious Autobiography (1963; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) p. 7.
  • I love sport because I love life, and sport is one of the basic joys of life
    • Sports Illustrated (19 December 1966)
  • In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable.
    • New York Times (2 February 1986).
  • [I] do not like poems that resemble hay compressed into a geometrically perfect cube. I like it when the hay, unkempt, uncombed, with dry berries mixed in it, thrown together gaily and freely, bounces along atop some truck—and more, if there are some lovely and healthy lasses atop the hay—and better yet if the branches catch at the hay, and some of it tumbles to the road.
    • New York Times (2 February 1986).
  • Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?
    • The Observer (15 December 1991).
  • Time has a way of demonstrating
    The most stubborn are the most intelligent.

Criticism

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  • My dear friend Yevtushenko has, I claim, an ego that can crack crystal at a distance of twenty feet.
    • John Cheever, in George Plimpton (ed.) Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Fifth Series (New York: Penguin, 1981) p. 121.
  • The worldwide sensation created by the appearance in 1961 of a brief poem, "Babi Yar," by Yevgeni Yevtushenko , condemning Nazi and prerevolutionary antisemitism, and the mutilation by Soviet censorship of Babi Yar (1966; Eng. 1967, revised 1970), a documentary novel by Anatoli Kuznetsov about the Nazi massacre of Soviet Jews in a ravine near Kiev, demonstrate that, in contrast to other areas of Soviet life, there was no real thaw in Soviet literature's treatment of Jewish themes.
  • Politics had much to do with tastes in poetry. Russian poets, especially if they were politically outspoken, were garnering huge followings among college students in the West. Yevgeny Yevtushenko was having a big year in 1968, both in political controversy at home and in artistic recognition abroad. Born in 1933, he belonged to a new school of Russian lyric poetry. Critics frequently suggested that others from the new school, such as Boris Pasternak’s protégé Andrey Voznesensky, also born in 1933, were better poets. But in the 1960s Yevtushenko was the most famous working Russian poet in the world. In 1962 he published four poems highly critical of the Soviet Union, including “Babi Yar,” about a massacre of Jews unsuccessfully covered up by the Soviets.
  • Although the USA eventually overtook the Soviet [space] programme, the early feats were widely remembered. Gagarin had the looks and affability of a film star and toured the world as his country’s semiofficial ambassador. He gave a human face to the communist order. Others did the same. Yevgeni Yevtushenko, an overrated poet but a larger-than-life personality and an advocate of de-Stalinisation, gave public readings in North America and Europe. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in the world’s main languages in 1963; its withering critique of the labour-camp system in the 1940s was taken as proof that the USSR was starting to look at its past with honest eyes. Soccer goalkeeper Lev Yashin was widely renowned. Soviet athletics teams had regular success at the Olympic games and brought glamour to the USSR.
    • Robert Service, Comrades: A History of World Communism (2009)
  • He has a clear style and has had much courage – as in his poem "Babi Yar", a memorial to the Jews murdered by the Nazis. But he is no more than a talented poetaster – which is quite obvious to all but Western journalists – and it would be foolish to consider him as more than a skilful publicist.
  • I was overjoyed when I read Yevtushenko's "Babi Yar"; the poem astounded me. It astounded thousands of people…People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence.
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