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For more information on Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko, visit Britannica.com.
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| Biography: Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko |
Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko (born 1933), the most popular of contemporary Soviet poets, was the leading literary spokesman for the generation of Russians who grew to maturity after Stalin's death in 1953.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko was born on July 18, 1933, in Zima, Siberia, into a peasant family of mixed Ukrainian, Russian, and Tatar stock. His father, a geologist, and his mother, a geologist and singer, were divorced in the early 1940s, and Yevgeny spent his early childhood in Moscow with his mother and sister, Yelena.
During World War II Yevtushenko was evacuated to Zima, returning to Moscow in 1944. Expelled from school on a false charge, he ran away to Kazakhstan; he joined his father on geological expeditions there and to the Altai, later returning to Moscow. As a youth, Yevtushenko was an athlete; his favorite sports were cycling, table tennis, and soccer.
Early Poems
Yevtushenko published his first poem in 1949 in a Soviet sports magazine and thereafter became a regular contributor to Komsomolskaya Pravda, Literaturnaya Gazeta, Novy Mir, and other important Soviet publications. As a result of the success of his first book of poetry, The Prospectors of the Future (1952), he joined the Soviet Writers' Union and began studying at the Gorky Literary Institute, which he left after several years without graduating.
After Stalin's death in 1953, Yevtushenko abandoned his pro-Stalinist themes and began writing love poetry. The following year he married Bella Akhmadulina, a poet (they were later divorced). Third Snow (1955), his second book of poems, was heavily attacked by official critics, and he became famous. Other volumes of verse were published in 1956 and 1957. "Zima Junction," his finest poem, relates a visit to his hometown in 1953 and reflects the confusion and search for values of a young man in post-Stalinist Russia. The rebellious attitudes characteristic of the poems of these years provoked attacks by the more orthodox Soviet writers and critics, but Yevtushenko's fame continued to grow. His themes, both personal and social, were marked by an unconformist attitude and conveyed a strong feeling of human sympathy.
Later Poems
Longbow and Lyre (1959) contained poems about Georgia and translations from the Georgian language. Poemsof Several Years (1959), a retrospective anthology, contained most of Yevtushenko's best shorter poems. The Apple (1960) marked a distinct falling-off in his work, but his next book, A Sweep of an Arm (1962), contained some of his most powerful poems.
Beginning in 1961, Yevtushenko traveled extensively outside the Soviet Union. He made trips to Bulgaria, France, Ghana, Cuba, the United States, and Great Britain. Everywhere he was received as an unofficial representative of post-Stalinist Russia. Reading his poems before large audiences, he received widespread adulation. Westerners were entranced, as Marc Slonim (1964) wrote, by "this tall, handsome, outgoing Siberian, an athletic, devil-may-care fellow, who personified youth and poetry."
Bratsk Station (1965) is a collection of poems that presents a panoramic view of Russian history and celebrates the creative efforts of the Soviet builders of communism. A 5,000-line, 35-poem cycle, it commemorates the construction of a vast hydroelectric power complex in Siberia; the poet contrasts it as a symbol of faith and human progress to an Egyptian pyramid. The work was not entirely successful, and Slonim argued that Yevtushenko "simply does not have enough breadth and power to make large compositions poetically convincing - despite the sonority, catching rhythm and verbal dynamism of numerous separate passages. It could be argued that, in general, he shows more talent for lyrical stanzas than for narrative poetry or vociferous political verse."
The Immortal Babiy Yar
Perhaps Yevtushenko's most famous poem is "Babiy Yar," written in 1961 and later revised. It memorializes some 96,000 Jews massacred by the Nazis in a ravine near Kiev during World War II. Until the publication of this poem, the Soviet government had not acknowledged that most of the victims of the Babiy Yar massacres were Jews. The poem strongly indicts continuing anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, concluding with the lines: "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." The poem was rapturously received by a Russian public, and was even defended by Nikita Khrushchev, who allowed it to be published in the leading newspaper, Pravda.
An Unpopular Stance
But Khrushchev was not so liberal in 1962, when Yevtushenko dared to publish an uncensored and unscrutinized autobiography in the West. A Precocious Autobiography first serialized in Stern included a frank discussion on the tragic flaws in Soviet society, laid the blame for many of them at the late Joseph Stalin's door, and announced the author's intention of trying to work for social improvement. The result was immediate. Yevtushenko was publicly denounced by Khrushchev for cheap sensationalism, and vilified for his sentiments and even for his literary technique.
Khrushchev himself was under the gun, and in fact, was ousted in October 1964, and replaced by the unyielding, intensely conservative Leonid Brezhnev. Like other literary figures, Yevtushenko began to chafe under the scrupulously observed new restrictions, and was allowed neither to travel nor to give his usual poetry readings.
He lived in relative obscurity until 1966, when his name surfaced again in connection with the trial of Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, two writers who had been caught after smuggling supposedly anti-Soviet books to the West for clandestine publication under pen names. Along with several other writers, Yevtushenko protested the trial, and was almost stopped from traveling to America that same year. Permitted to go only because his passport had already been issued, he later claimed to have been told by Senator Robert Kennedy that America's Central Intelligence Agency had been the agency responsible for getting the writers into trouble. Supposedly, they had contacted their Russian counterparts and told them about Sinyavsky and Daniel and their ploy for publication, in order to deflect attention away from criticism against the Vietnam War.
Interviewed in 1987 by Time magazine, he commented on why he felt it imperative to support these writers despite the danger to his own reputation. Using the expression glasnost, the Russian word for "openness", that will forever be associated with Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union's democratic leader of the 1980s, Yevtushenko looked back on the Daniel/Sinyavsky trial and remarked: "Glasnost is us. We fought for it for many years past."
Fresh Fields to Conquer
In 1991, a collection of his work called Fatal Half Measures, was published by Random House. Centered around the themes of glasnost and perestroika, the book contained excerpts from several earlier works, all supporting Yevtushenko's strong political convictions. His concerns about the rising racism and increasing desperation of Russian society came strongly to the fore, as they have done in many other works. In the essay "A Nation Begins with Women", Yevtushenko entreated that Russian women at last be treated with long-overdue respect, paid salaries on a par with those earned by men doing the same jobs, and offered opportunities to hold positions of authority in an economy long monopolized by men. Perhaps his most telling comment is the one concluding this piece: "Can a nation be respected if it does not respect its women?"
Yevtushenko had also been trying his wings in new fields. His first novel, Wild Berries was published in 1984, to a lukewarm reception, and after several others, Don't Die Before You're Dead (1995) received favorable attention from most major reviewers. Dealing with the attempted coup that took place in Russia in 1991, the book detailed the fortunes of several actual people (Yeltsin, Gorbachev) as well as fictional ones, designed to show a panorama of Russian society.
Yevtushenko also ventured into photography, with Divided Twins: Siberia and Alaska and Invisible Threads . Even films offered him a world of novelty worthy of exploration. In 1995 a movie he co-directed, called I Am Cuba, found an audience, though judgmental, generally labelling it, in the words of The Nation "a film that has still not found its historical moment." This was certainly no deterrent to the vigorous Yevtushenko, who had always regarded the possibility of improvement as a zestful challenge.
By 1996 he was back in New York, teaching Russian poetry and literature at Queens College. He chose to live among his students in Queens, rather than in Manhattan, with the majority of his more prosperous colleagues because he enjoyed the wide ethnic mix that Queens had always offered.
Further Reading
All of Yevtushenko's major works are available in English translation, in several versions of varying quality. Bratsk Station, and Other New Poems, translated by Tina Tupikina-Glaessner, Geoffrey Dutton, and Igor Mezhakoff-Koriakin, is a brilliant translation of Yevtushenko's major work. Another good source on Yevtushenko is his A Precocious Autobiography, translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew (1963). For critical commentary, see Marc Slonim's, Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems (1964), and Olga Carlisle's, Poets on Street Corners: Portraits of Fifteen Russian Poets (1969).
Additional Sources
Fatal Half Measures, Random House, 1991.
Atlantic Monthly, October, 1995.
New York Times, November 12, 1995; February 7 1996.
The Nation, March 20, 1995.
Time, February 9, 1987.
| Russian History Encyclopedia: Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko |
(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.
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
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko |
Bibliography
See The Collected Poems, 1952-1990 (1991).
| Quotes By: Yevgeny Yevtushenko |
Quotes:
"In any man who dies there dies with him, his first snow and kiss and fight. Not people die but worlds die in them."
"He who is conceived in a cage, yearns for the cage."
"Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?"
| Wikipedia: Yevgeny Yevtushenko |
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| Yevgeny Yevtushenko | |
|---|---|
Yevgeny Yevtushenko (right) with Richard Nixon |
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| Born | July 18, 1933 Zima Junction, Siberia |
| Occupation | poet, film director, teacher |
| Nationality | Russian |
| Ethnicity | Russian, Ukrainian, Tatar |
| Notable work(s) | Babi Yar |
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Influences
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Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko (Russian: Евге́ний Алекса́ндрович Евтуше́нко) (also transliterated as Evgenii Alexandrovich Evtushenko, Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, or Evgeny Evtushenko) (born July 18, 1933) is a Soviet and Russian poet. He was also a novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, actor, editor, and a director of several films.
Contents |
Born Yevgeni Aleksandrovich Gangnus (later he took his mother's last name, Yevtushenko) in the Irkutsk region of Siberia in a small town called Zima Junction[1][2][3][4] on 18 July, 1933 to a peasant family of mixed Russian, Ukrainian and Tatar heritage.[5]. "His great-grandfather, Joseph Yevtushenko, a suspected subversive, was exiled to Siberia after the 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander II. But he died on the way. Both of Mr. Yevtushenko's grandfathers were arrested under Stalin's purges as "enemies of the people" in 1937."[6] His maternal grandfather, named Ermolai Naumovich Evtushenko, had been a Red Army officer during the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. Yevtushenko's father, named Aleksandr Rudolfovich Gangnus, was a geologist, as was his mother, named Zinaida Ermolaevna Evtushenko, who later became a singer. 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 songs "chastushki" while living in Zima, Siberia. "His parents were divorced when [he] was 7 and he was raised by his mother."[6] "By age 10 he had cranked out 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."[6]
After the Second World War, Yevtushenko moved to Moscow. From 1951-1954 he studied at the Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow, from which he dropped out. He published his first poem in 1949 and his first book three years later. In 1952 he joined the Union of Soviet Writers after publication of his first collection of poetry. His early poem So mnoyu chto-to proiskhodit (Something is happening to me) became a very popular song, performed by actor-songwriter Aleksandr Dolsky. In 1955 Yevtushenko wrote a poem about the Soviet borders being an obstacle in his life. His first important publication was the poem Stantsiya Zima (Zima Junction 1956). In 1957, he was expelled from the Literary Institute for "individualism". He was banned from traveling, but gained wide popularity with the Russian public. His early work also drew praise from the likes of Boris Pasternak, Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost.[7], [8]
Yevtushenko was one of the authors politically active during the Khrushchev Thaw (Khrushchev declared a cultural "Thaw" that allowed some freedom of expression). In 1961 he wrote what would become perhaps his most famous poem, Babi Yar, in which he denounced the Soviet distortion of historical fact regarding the Nazi massacre of the Jewish population of Kiev in September 1941, as well as the antisemitism still widespread in the Soviet Union. The usual Soviet policy in relation to the Holocaust in Russia was to describe it as atrocities against Soviet citizens, and to avoid mentioning that it was a genocide specifically of the Jews. Therefore, Yevtushenko's work Babi Yar was quite controversial and politically incorrect, "for it spoke not only of the Nazi atrocities, but the Soviet government's own persecution of Jewish people."[9] Following a centuries-old Russian tradition, Yevtushenko became a public poet. The poem achieved widespread circulation in the underground samizdat press, and later was set to music, together with four other Yevtushenko poems, by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Thirteenth Symphony, subtitled Babi Yar. Publication of the poem in the state-controlled Soviet press was delayed until 1984. Reportedly, the poem "was published abroad and appeared in clandestine fashion in the Soviet Union."[10] Alternatively, some note that the poem was published in a major newspaper "Literaturnaya Gazeta" [11] and achieved widespread circulation in numerous copies. 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.’”[7]
In 1961, Yevtushenko also published 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". Published originally in Pravda, the poem was not republished until a quarter of a century later, in the times of the comparatively liberal party leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Yevtushenko became one of the best known poets of the 1950s and 1960s in the Soviet Union.[12] He was part of the 1960s generation, which included such writers as Vasili Aksyonov, Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina, Robert Rozhdestvensky; 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 late Russian poet Victor Krivulin quotes her saying that "Yevtushenko doesn't rise about 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."[13]
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.'"[6] In 1963 (until 1965), for example, Yevtushenko, already an internationally recognised littérateur, was banned from travelling outside the Soviet Union.[14]
Generally, however, Yevtushenko was still the most extensively travelled Soviet poet, possessing an amazing capability to balance between moderate criticism of Soviet regime, which gained him popularity in the West, and, as noted by some, a strong Marxist-Leninist ideological stance,[6] which allegedly proved his loyalty to Soviet authorities.[citation needed]
At that time the 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 George Gapon[15], a Russian priest who at the time of the Revolution of 1905 was both a leader of rebellious workers and a secret police agent.
In 1965, Yevtushenko joined Anna Akhmatova, Kornei Chukovsky, Jean-Paul Sartre and others and co-signed the letter of protest against the unfair trial of Joseph Brodsky (a fellow poet influenced by Anna Akhmatova) as a result of the court case against him initiated by the Soviet authorities.[16] He subsequently co-signed a letter against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
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."[14] 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."[17] "Yevtushenko was not among the authors of the "Letter of the 63" who protested [their convictions]."[6]
Moreover, "when Yevtushenko was nominated for the poetry chair at Oxford in 1968, 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."[17]
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 (1964), a Soviet propaganda film. His acting career began with the leading role in Vzlyot (1979) by director Savva Kulish, where he played the leading role as Russian rocket scientist Tsiolkovsky. Yevtyshenko also made two films as a writer/director. His film 'Detsky Sad' ('Kindergarten', 1983) and his last film, 'Pokhorony Stalina' ('Stalin's Funerals', 1990) deal with life in the Soviet Union.
In 1989 Yevtushenko was elected as a representative in the Soviet Parliament (Congress of Peoples Deputies), where he was a member of the pro-democratic group supporting Mikhail Gorbachev and "represent[ed] the little-known Ukrainian city of Kharkov."[6] In 1991, he supported Boris Yeltsin, as the latter's defended the parliament of the Russian Federation during the hardline coup that sought to oust Gorbachev and reverse "perestroika".[10], [8] Later, however, when Yeltsin sent tanks into restive Chechnya, Yevtushenko reportedly "denounced his old ally and refused to accept an award from him."[10]
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.[18] Reviewing this anthology, Russian poet Alexey Purin referred to it as "a huge book, a huge flop. Really, a collection of names rather than a collection of good poetry."[19] Purin (himself a traditionalist)[citation needed] mentioned that Yevtushenko included only mainstream poetry written according to "good old canons"[citation needed], and totally ignored nearly all of the avant-garde authors[citation needed], notably Gennady Aigi, Vladimir Earle and Rea Nikonova. More recently, Yevtushenko has been criticised for refusing to speak out against Russian President Vladimir Putin's liberties during his presidency. Yevtushenko responded by saying that "Putin, like Russia, is struggling to find his way in a time when ideals have been shattered and expedience reigns."[10]
Yevtushenko, who now (October, 2007) divides his time between Russia and the United States, teaches 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. In the West he is best known for his criticism of the Soviet bureaucracy and appeals for getting rid of the legacy of Stalin. He is now working on a three-volume collection of Russian poetry from the 11th-20th century, and plans a novel based on his time in Havana during the Cuban Missile Crisis (he was, reportedly, good friends with Che, Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda).[10], [8], [7]. In October 2007 he was an artist-in-residence with the School 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, which sets five of his poems, by the University of Maryland Symphony Orchestra and the men of the UM Choirs, with David Brundage as the bass soloist. A similar performance with Yevtushenko present took place at the University of Houston's Moore's School of Music in 1997. In addition to the Babi Yar symphony, Shostakovich's Execution of Stephan Razin (another text setting by Yevtushenko) was also performed.
Yevtushenko is allegedly known for his many liaisons.[10] Yevtushenko has been married four times: in 1954 he married Bella Akhmadulina, who published her first collection of lyrics in 1962. After divorce he married Galina Semenova. Yevtushenko's third wife was Jan Butler (married in 1978) (an English translator of his poetry with whom he visited Ireland several times), and fourth Maria Novika (married in 1986).[20] He has five children, all boys.[10] His current wife teaches Russian at Edison Preparatory School in the United States, near the University of Tulsa, where Yevtushenko himself spends half the year, lecturing on poetry and European cinema.[10]
In 1961, Yevtushenko was featured on the cover of Time magazine. In 1993, Yevtushenko received a medal as 'Defender of Free Russia,' which was given to those who took part in resisting the hard-line Communist coup in August 1991. In July 2000 the Russian Academy of Sciences named a star in his honor. In 2001, his childhood home in Zima Junction, Siberia, was restored and opened as a permanent museum of poetry.[8] Yevtushenko received in 1991 the American Liberties Medallion, the highest honor conferred by the American Jewish Committee.[21]
"Yevtushenko's politics have always been a complicated mixture of bravery, populism, and vulgar accommodation with dictatorship."[17] Judith Colp of The Washington Times, for example, described Yevtushenko as "his country's most controversial modern poet, a man whose reputation is poised between courageous behind-the-scenes reformer and failed dissident."[6] Indeed, "as the great Sovietologist and literary critic Robert Conquest put it in a 1974 profile: 'The writers who had briefly flourished [under Khrushchev's thaw] went two different ways. Solzhenitsyn and his like into silenced opposition; Yevtushenko and his like, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes in the hope of still influencing matters a little, into well-rewarded collaboration.'"[17] Some argue that before the appearance of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and the dissident movement in Russia, Yevtushenko, through his poetry, was the first voice to speak out against Stalinism[9] (although Boris Pasternak is often considered "to have helped give birth to the dissident movement with the publication of his 'Doctor Zhivago'").[6] "Sovietologist Stephen Cohen of Princeton University contends that Yevtushenko was among those Soviets who didn't become dissidents but in their own way tried to improve conditions and prepare the way for reform, [saying that] 'They exhibited a kind of civic courage that many Americans didn't recognize.'"[6] Kevin O'Connor, in his Intellectuals and Apparatchiks, noted that Yevtushenko was "a popular liberal who never experienced the sort of intimidation that characterized regime's treatment of dissident writers Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Voinovich (each of whom was forced to leave the USSR)."[22]
Brodsky repeatedly criticised Yevtushenko for what he perceived as his "conformism", especially after the latter was made member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.[10][23] Commenting on this controversy in A Night in the Nabokov Hotel, an anthology of Russian poetry in English translation, Anatoly Kudryavitsky wrote the following: "A few Russian poets enjoyed the virtual pop-star status, unthinkable if transposed to other parts of Europe. In reality, they were far from any sort of protest against Soviet totalitarianism and therefore could not be regarded as anything else but naughty children of the regime."[24] Furthermore, some criticized Yevtushenko regarding Pasternak's widow, given that "when Pasternak's widow, Olga Ivinskaya, was imprisoned on trumped-up charges of illegally dealing in foreign currency, Yevtushenko publicly maligned her [and added] that 'Doctor Zhivago' was not worth publishing in the Soviet Union."[6]
Moreover, "the poet Irina Ratushinskaya, upon her release from prison and arrival in the West, dismissed Yevtushenko as an official poet and Vasily Aksionov, the novelist who now lives in Washington, has also refused contact [with Yevtushenko]."[25][opinion needs balancing] Responding to the criticism, Yevtushenko reportedly said
Who could sanction me to write Babi Yar, or my protests against the (1968 Soviet) invasion of Czechoslovakia? Only I criticised Khrushchev to his face; not even Solzhenitsyn did that. It is only the envy of people who couldn't stand against the propaganda machine, and they invented things about my generation, the artists of the '60s. Our generation was breaking the Iron Curtain. It was a generation crippled by history, and most of our dreams were doomed to be unfulfilled - but the fight for freedom was not in vain.[10]
Yevtushenko further notes that "in several cases [he] personally rose to the defense of these writers, interceding privately for Ratushinskaya's release from a prison, defending Mr. Aksionov and others who were expelled from the Writers Union."[25]
Critics differ on the stature of Yevtushenko in the literature world, with "most Western intellectuals and many Russian scholars extol[ing] him as the greatest writer of his generation, the voice of Soviet life."[26] They "acknowledge that his speaking tours have won him converts among audiences impressed with his dramatic readings and charismatic personality. Tina Tupikina Glaessner (1967) refers to him as “one of the greatest poets of the modern age.” She states that “Bratsk Station” offers the greatest insight into Soviet life of any other work in modern Russian literature. Two decades later, in his 1988 article, Michael Pursglove echoes her sentiments referring to Stantisiya Zima as “one of the landmarks of Soviet literature."[26]
Others, however, notably Russian critics like "Patricia Pollock Brodsky (1992) takes issue with the interpretation that Yevtushenko has been persecuted by the Russian government."[26] "And most scathing, Tomas Venclova asserts, in his 1991 essay, that few in the Russian literary community “consider his work worthy of serious study."[26] Furthermore, when in 1972, Yevtushekno criticized U.S.'s government, "Allen Tate called him a 'ham actor, not a poet,' and others not unsympathetic to criticisms of Washington found his frequent condemnations of American 'imperialism,' and comparatively footling criticisms of the Russian police state, thoroughly repulsive."[17]
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