Russian poet who decried tyranny and prejudice
OKLAHOMA CITY — Acclaimed Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose work focused on war atrocities and on denouncing anti-Semitism and tyrannical dictators, has died. He was 84.
Ginny Hensley, a spokeswoman for Hillcrest Medical Center in Tulsa, Okla., confirmed his death. Roger Blais, provost at the University of Tulsa, where Yevtushenko was a longtime faculty member, said he was told Yevtushenko died Saturday morning.
“He died a few minutes ago surrounded by relatives and close friends,” his widow, Maria Novikova, was quoted as saying by the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti. She said he died peacefully in his sleep of heart failure.
Yevtushenko gained notoriety in the former Soviet Union while in his 20s, with poetry denouncing Josef Stalin. He gained international acclaim as a young revolutionary with “Babi Yar,” the unflinching 1961 poem that told of the slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews by the Nazis and denounced the anti-Semitism that had spread across the Soviet Union.
At the height of his fame, Yevtushenko read his works in packed soccer stadiums and arenas, including to a crowd of 200,000 in 1991 that came to listen during a failed coup attempt in Russia. He also attracted large audiences on tours of the West.
Until “Babi Yar” was published, the history of the mass killings nearly two decades earlier was shrouded in the fog of the Cold War.
“I don’t call it political poetry, I call it human rights poetry; the poetry which defends human conscience as the greatest spiritual value,” Yevtushenko, who had been splitting his time between Oklahoma and Moscow, said during a 2007 interview with The Associated Press at his home in Tulsa.
Yevtushenko said he wrote the poem after visiting the site of the mass killings in Kiev, Ukraine, and searching for some kind of historical marker memorializing what happened there but finding none. “I was absolutely shocked when I saw it, that people didn’t keep a memory about it,” he said.
It took him two hours to write the poem that begins,
Yevtushenko was born deep in Siberia in the town of Zima, a name that translates to winter. He rose to prominence during Nikita Khrushchev’s rule. His work was outspoken and drew on the passion for poetry that is characteristic of Russia, where poetry is more widely revered than in the West. Some considered it risky, though others said he was only a showpiece dissident whose public views never went beyond the limits of what officials would permit.
Dissident exile poet Joseph Brodsky was especially critical, saying Yevtushenko “throws stones only in directions that are officially sanctioned and approved.” Brodsky resigned from the American Academy of Arts and Letters when Yevtushenko was made an honorary member.
Former University of Tulsa President Robert Donaldson, who specialized in Soviet policy, invited Yevtushenko to teach at the university in 1992.
“I like very much the University of Tulsa,” Yevtushenko said in a 1995 interview with the AP. “My students are sons of ranchers, even cowboys, oil engineers. They are different people, but they are very gifted.”
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on the social media site Vkontakte that Yevtushenko “knew how to find the key to the souls of people, to find surprisingly accurate words that were in harmony with many.”
A spokesman for President Vladimir Putin said the poet’s legacy would remain “part of Russian culture.”