On the Life and Death of Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Yevtushenko got an first early glimpse of fame while he was still in his early 20s, with poems that harshly denounced the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. He ascended to the highest peaks of literary renown several years later when his 1961 epic poem “Babi Yar” was published in the official Literary Newspaper (Literaturnaya Gazeta). The poem was written after his brief visit to the Kiev ravine under which the bones of almost 100,000 Jews lay; it exorcised the official Soviet refusal to recognize that Jews were the principal target of the massacres. “Babi Yar” is an undeniably searing and revolutionary work of political art and the poem breached the taboo of discussing the Jewish specificity of the killing. Though, true to form, he would later admit that he had bowed to official pressure to censor parts of the poem.