Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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Yevgeny Yevtushenko bigraphy, stories - Russian poet, film director, teacher

Yevgeny Yevtushenko : biography

18 July 1933 –

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko (also transliterated as Evgenii Alexandrovich Evtushenko, Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, or Evgeny Evtushenko). (born 18 July 1932) is a Soviet and Russian poet. He is also a novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, actor, editor, and a director of several films.

Notes

Criticism

It has been asserted that "Yevtushenko’s politics have always been a complicated mixture of bravery, populism, and vulgar accommodation with dictatorship." 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." Indeed, "as the 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.’" 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 StalinismDonald W. Patterson, "Renowned Poet to Visit City," News & Record (Greensboro, NC), 8 April 1999, p. 3. (although Boris Pasternak is often considered "to have helped give birth to the dissident movement with the publication of his ‘Doctor Zhivago’"). Colp adds: "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.’" 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)."Kevin O’Connor, Intellectuals and Apparatchiks, Lexington Books, 2008, p. 89.

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.Daniel McLaughlin. "West awakes to Yevtushenko: One of the greatest poets alive will perform at the Galway Arts Festival, but he is not without his critics," The Irish Times 17 July 2004, p. 56.Dovlatov, S. And then Brodsky said… Graph, Issue 3.3, 1999, p.10. 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."Kudryavitsky, A. Introduction. In A Night in the Nabokov Hotel. 20 Contemporary Poets from Russia Edited by Anatoly Kudryavitsky. Dublin, Dedalus Press 2006) ( 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."

Moreover, "the poet Irina Ratushinskaya, upon her release from prison and arrival in the West, dismissed Yevtushenko as an official poet and the novellist Vasily Aksyonov has also refused contact [with Yevtushenko]."For Yevtushenko, a Search for a Little Respect. CELESTINE BOHLEN. The New York Times. Section 1; Part 1, Page 16, Column 3; Foreign Desk 20 November 1988. Responding to the criticism, Yevtushenko reportedly said: