Soviet-era poet Yevtushenko dies

OBITUARY

YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO, a Russian Soviet-era poet who found a large following in the West in the 1960s, died on Saturday of heart failure in the United States at the age of 84, Russian news agency RIA Novosti said.

“He died peacefully a few minutes ago, surrounded by his loved ones,” the agency quoted his wife, Maria Novikova, as saying.

Yevtushenko shot to fame as a symbol of non-conformism during a brief artistic thaw in the early 1960s under party boss Nikita Khrushchev.

To the dismay of liberals, he then became a loyal supporter of the regime and was showered with state privileges until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

His best-known work is Babi Yar, an epic poem published in 1961, about a Nazi atrocity in Kiev in 1941 in which tens of thousands of Jews were massacred.

His attacks on Stalinism and Soviet bureaucracy, culminating in The Heirs of Stalin (1962), together with his demands for greaterartisticfreedom,weretacitly sanctioned by the Communist Partyandhewasallowedtotravel widely abroad, where he read to enthusiastic audiences.

Butinthe1970s,tothedistress ofhisadmirers,hisreputationwas tarnishedbygrowingpartyorthodoxy, punctuated by sporadic defenceofbeleaguereddissidentauthor Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Yevtushenko was born in Siberia at Zima, near Irkutsk, in 1933, a fourth-generation descendant of Ukrainian exiles.

“Yevtushenko was a legend... who lived according to his own formula: a poet in Russia is more than a poet,” Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Natalia, told Rossiya-24 channel. “He influenced the time in which he lived, he changed many things,” Zoya Boguslavskaya, the widow said.