Russian poet Yevtushenko wrote of atrocities, tyranny
‘Babi Yar’ told of slaughter of 34,000 Jews
OKLAHOMA CITY Acclaimed Russian poet Yevgeny A. Yevtushenko, whose work focused on war atrocities and denounced anti-Semitism and tyrannical dictators, has died. He was 84.
Ginny Hensley, a spokeswoman for Hillcrest Medical Center in the eastern Oklahoma city of Tulsa, confirmed Yevtushenko’s death. Roger Blais, the provost at the University of Tulsa, where Yevtushenko was a longtime faculty member, said he was told Yevtushenko died Saturday morning.
Yevtushenko’s son, Yevgeny Y. Yevtushenko, said his father died about 11 a.m. and that doctors said he was suffering from stage 4 cancer.
“He passed away pretty peacefully, painlessly,” the younger Yevtushenko said. He said family members and friends, including his widow, Maria Novikova, were with his father in his final hours.
“I was holding his hand about the last hour or so,” he said. “He knew he was loved.”
He said his father was first diagnosed with cancer about six years ago.
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 throughout 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.
With his tall, rangy body, chiseled visage and declaratory style, he was a compelling presence on stages when reading his works.
“He’s more like a rock star than some sort of bespectacled, quiet poet,” said former University of Tulsa President Robert Donaldson, who specialized in Soviet policy during his academic years at Harvard.
Until “Babi Yar” was published, the history of the massacre 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 something memorializing what happened there — a sign, a tombstone, some kind of historical marker — but finding nothing.
“I was so shocked. I was absolutely shocked when I saw it, that people didn’t keep a memory about it,” he said.