Early life Yevtushenko was born
Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Gangnus (he later took his mother's last name, Yevtushenko) in
Irkutsk Oblast of
Siberia in a small town called
Zima on 18 July 1933 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. Both of Yevtushenko's grandfathers were arrested during
Stalin's purges as "enemies of the people" in 1937. 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. 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.
During the Khrushchev Thaw 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." 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'." 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. 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. 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. 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." 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.'" In 1963, he was nominated for the
Nobel Prize in Literature for his poem
Babiyy Yar. 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, 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, a Russian priest who at the time of the Revolution of 1905 was both a leader of rebellious workers and a
secret police agent.
Controversy , 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. 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." Yevtushenko also made two films as a writer/director. His film
Detsky Sad (
Kindergarten, 1983) and his last film,
Pokhorony Stalina (''Stalin's Funeral'', 1990) deal with life in the Soviet Union.
In the West 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." In the West, he was best known for his criticism of the
Soviet bureaucracy and appeals for getting rid of the legacy of
Stalin. 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). ==Criticism==