Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Yevtushenko was born Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Gangnus (he later took his mother's last name, Yevtushenko) in the Irkutsk region of Siberia in a small town called Zima[4][5][6] on 18 July 1933[7] to a peasant family of noble descent. He had Russian, Baltic German, Ukrainian, Polish, Belarusian, and Tatar roots. His maternal great-grandfather Joseph Baikovsky belonged to szlachta, while his wife was of Ukrainian descent. They were exiled to Siberia after a peasant rebellion headed by Joseph. One of their daughters – Maria Baikovskaya – married Ermolai Naumovich Yevtushenko who was of Belarusian descent. He served as a soldier in the Imperial Army during World War I and as an officer in the Red Army during the Civil War. His paternal ancestors were Germans who moved to the Russian Empire in 1767. His grandfather Rudolph Gangnus, a math teacher of Baltic German descent, married Anna Plotnikova of Russian nobility.[8] Both of Yevtushenko's grandfathers were arrested during Stalin's purges as "enemies of the people" in 1937.[9]

Yevtushenko's father, Aleksandr Rudolfovich Gangnus, was a geologist, as was his mother, Zinaida Ermolaevna Yevtushenko, who later became a singer.[10] The boy accompanied his father on geological expeditions to Kazakhstan in 1948, and to Altai, Siberia, in 1950. Young Yevtushenko wrote his first verses and humorous chastushki while living in Zima, Siberia. His parents were divorced when he was 7 and he was raised by his mother.[9] By age 10, he had composed his first poem. Six years later a sports journal was the first periodical to publish his poetry. At 19, he published his first book of poems, The Prospects of the Future.[9]

After the Second World War, Yevtushenko moved to Moscow and from 1951 to 1954 studied at the Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow, from which he dropped out. In 1952, he joined the Union of Soviet Writers after publication of his first collection of poetry. His early poem So mnoyu vot chto proiskhodit ("That's what is happening to me") became a very popular song, performed by actor-songwriter Alexander Dolsky. In 1955, Yevtushenko wrote a poem about the Soviet borders being an obstacle in his life. His first important publication was the 1956 poem Stantsiya Zima ("Zima Station"). In 1957, he was expelled from the Literary Institute for "individualism". He was once labeled "the head of the intellectual juvenile delinquents" whose poems were "pygmy spittle".[11][12] He was banned from travelling but gained wide popularity with the Soviet public. His early work also drew praise from Boris Pasternak, Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost.[13][14]

Yevtushenko was one of the authors politically active during the Khrushchev Thaw. In 1961, he wrote what would become perhaps his most famous poem, Babiyy Yar, in which he denounced the Soviet distortion of historical fact regarding the Nazi massacre of the Jewish population of Kyiv in September 1941, as well as the anti-Semitism still widespread in the Soviet Union. The usual Soviet policy in relation to the Holocaust in Russia was to describe it as general atrocities against Soviet citizens and to avoid mentioning that it was a genocide of the Jews. However, Yevtushenko's work Babiyy Yar "spoke not only of the Nazi atrocities, but the Soviet government's own persecution of Jewish people."[15] The poem was published in a major newspaper, Literaturnaya Gazeta,[16] achieved widespread circulation in numerous copies, and later was set to music, together with four other Yevtushenko poems, by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Thirteenth Symphony, subtitled Babi Yar. Of Yevtushenko's work, Shostakovich has said, "Morality is a sister of conscience. And perhaps God is with Yevtushenko when he speaks of conscience. Every morning, in place of prayers, I reread or repeat by memory two poems by Yevtushenko: 'Career' or 'Boots'."[13]

After the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October 1961 – at which the former dictator Joseph Stalin was denounced in public for crimes committed in the 1930s, Yevtushenko was allowed to join the editorial board of the journal Yunost, and in October 1962 was sent to Cuba as a correspondent of Pravda. In 1962, knowing that there was backlash against the anti-Stalin campaign, Yevtushenko wrote Nasledniki Stalina (The Heirs of Stalin), in which he stated that although Stalin was dead, Stalinism and its legacy still dominated the country; in the poem he also directly addressed the Soviet government, imploring them to make sure that Stalin would "never rise again".[17] The poem also taunted neo-Stalinists for being out of touch with the times, saying "No wonder they suffer heart attacks." It was well known that Khrushchev's most dangerous rival, Frol Kozlov had recently had a heart attack.[18] Yevtushenko wrote in his memoirs that he sent a copy of the poem to Khrushchev, who approved its publication. Published originally in Pravda on 21 October 1962, the poem was not republished until a quarter of a century later, in the times of the comparatively liberal Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

In January 1963, he began a tour of West Germany and France, and while he was in Paris, arranged for his Precocious Autobiography to be serialised in L'Express. This created a scandal in Moscow. In February, he was ordered to return to the USSR and at the end of March he was accused by the writer G. A. Zhukov of an 'act of treason' and in April another writer, Vladimir Fedorov, proposed that he be expelled from the Writers' Union.[19] No official action was taken against him, but he was barred from travelling abroad for several years.

Yevtushenko became one of the best known poets of the 1950s and 1960s in the Soviet Union.[20] He was part of the 1960s generation, which included such writers as Vasily Aksyonov, Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Anatoly Gladilin; as well as actors Andrei Mironov, Aleksandr Zbruyev, Natalya Fateyeva, and many others. During the time, Anna Akhmatova, a number of whose family members suffered under the communist rule, criticised Yevtushenko's aesthetic ideals and his poetics. The poet Victor Krivulin quoted her, saying that "Yevtushenko doesn't rise above an average newspaper satirist's level. Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky's works just don't do it for me, therefore neither of them exists for me as a poet."[21]

Alternatively, Yevtushenko was much respected by others at the time both for his poetry and his political stance toward the Soviet government. "Dissident Pavel Litvinov had said that '[Yevtushenko] expressed what my generation felt. Then we left him behind.'"[9] Between 1963 until 1965, for example, Yevtushenko, already an internationally recognised littérateur, was banned from travelling outside the Soviet Union.[22] In 1963, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature for his poem Babiyy Yar.[23][24]

Generally, however, Yevtushenko was still the most extensively travelled Soviet poet, possessing an amazing capability to balance between moderate criticism of the Soviet regime, which gained him popularity in the West, and, as noted by some, a strong Marxist–Leninist ideological stance,[9] which allegedly proved his loyalty to Soviet authorities.

At that time, KGB Chairman Vladimir Semichastny and the next KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov reported to the Communist Politburo on the "Anti-Soviet activity of poet Yevtushenko." Nevertheless, some nicknamed Yevtushenko "Zhenya Gapon," comparing him to Father Georgy Gapon,[25] a Russian priest who at the time of the Revolution of 1905 was both a leader of rebellious workers and a secret police agent.

Yevtushenko (right) with US President Richard Nixon, 1972

In 1965, Yevtushenko joined Anna Akhmatova, Korney Chukovsky, Jean-Paul Sartre and others and co-signed the letter of protest against the unfair trial of Joseph Brodsky as a result of the court case against him initiated by the Soviet authorities.[26] He subsequently co-signed a letter against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.[27]

Nevertheless, "when, in 1987, Yevtushenko was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Brodsky himself led a flurry of protest, accusing Yevtushenko of duplicity and claiming that Yevtushenko's criticism of the Soviet Union was launched only in the directions approved by the Party and that he criticised what was acceptable to the Kremlin, when it was acceptable to the Kremlin, while soaking up adulation and honours as a fearless voice of dissent."[22] Further, of note is "Yevtushenko's protest of the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, an event now credited with inaugurating the modern dissident movement and readying the national pulse for perestroika. Both writers had toiled under pseudonyms and stood accused, in 1966, of "anti-Soviet activity" for the views espoused by their fictional characters. But Yevtushenko's actual position was that the writers were guilty, only punished too severely."[27] "Yevtushenko was not among the authors of the "Letter of the 63" who protested [their convictions]."[9]

On 23 August 1968, Yevtushenko sent a telegram to the Soviet prime minister Alexei Kosygin lamenting the invasion of Czechoslovakia, but "when Yevtushenko was nominated for the poetry chair at Oxford in 1968, Kingsley Amis, Bernard Levin, and the Russian-Hungarian historian Tibor Szamuely led the campaign against him, arguing that he had made life difficult for his fellow Soviet writers."[27]

He was filmed as himself during the 1950s as a performing poet-actor. Yevtushenko contributed lyrics to several Soviet films and contributed to the script of Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba, 1964), a Soviet propaganda film.[28] His acting career began with the leading role in Vzlyot (Take-Off, 1979) by director Savva Kulish, where he played the leading role as Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.[29] Yevtushenko also made two films as a writer/director. His film Detsky Sad (Kindergarten, 1983)[30] and his last film, Pokhorony Stalina (Stalin's Funeral, 1990)[31] deal with life in the Soviet Union.[29]

In 1989, Yevtushenko was elected as a representative for Kharkiv in the Soviet Parliament (Congress of Peoples Deputies), where he was a member of the pro-democratic group supporting Mikhail Gorbachev.[9] In 1991, he supported Boris Yeltsin, as the latter defended the parliament of the Russian Federation during the hardline coup that sought to oust Gorbachev and reverse "perestroika".[14][32] Later, however, when Yeltsin sent tanks into restive Chechnya, Yevtushenko reportedly "denounced his old ally and refused to accept an award from him."[32]

In the post-Soviet era, Yevtushenko actively discussed environmental issues, confronted Russian Nationalist writers from the alternative Union of the Writers of Russia, and campaigned for the preservation of the memory of victims of Stalin's Gulag. In 1995, he published his huge anthology of contemporary Russian poetry entitled Verses of the Century.[33]

After October 2007, Yevtushenko divided his time between Russia and the United States, teaching Russian and European poetry and the history of world cinema at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma and at Queens College of the City University of New York as well as at Florida Atlantic University. In a 1995 interview, he said, "I like very much the University of Tulsa. My students are sons of ranchers, even cowboys, oil engineers. They are different people, but they are very gifted. They are closer to Mother Nature than the big city. They are more sensitive."[34]

In the West, he was best known for his criticism of the Soviet bureaucracy and appeals for getting rid of the legacy of Stalin.[35] He was working on a three-volume collection of 11th to 20th-century Russian poetry and planned a novel based on his time in Havana during the Cuban Missile Crisis (he was, reportedly, good friends with Che Guevara, Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda).[13][14][32]

In October 2007, he was an artist-in-residence with the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland, College Park, and recited his poem Babi Yar before a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13 by the University of Maryland Symphony Orchestra. The first time that the two works that Shostakovich set to Yevtushenko texts were performed on the same program, was in 1998 at the University of Houston's Moores School of Music, under the baton of Franz Anton Krager, with Yevtushenko present. The performance was the idea of the then-President of the Moores School of Music Society, Philip Berquist, a long-time friend of Yevtushenko, after the poet informed him that the two works had never been performed together. Yevtushenko had told Berquist that Leonard Bernstein had wanted to do so, but it never came to realisation.

The first translation of Yevtushenko's poetry into English was Yevtushenko: Selected Poems, a translation by Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi published in 1962.[36]