Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko (Russian: Евге́ний Алекса́ндрович Евтуше́нко;[1] 18 July 1933 – 1 April 2017)[2][3] was a Soviet-Russian poet, novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, publisher, actor, editor, university professor, and director of several films.

His grandfather Rudolph Gangnus, a math teacher of Baltic German descent, married Anna Plotnikova of Russian nobility.

His early poem So mnoyu vot chto proiskhodit ("That's what is happening to me") became a very popular song, performed by actor-songwriter Alexander Dolsky.

However, Yevtushenko's work Babiyy Yar "spoke not only of the Nazi atrocities, but the Soviet government's own persecution of Jewish people.

Published originally in Pravda on 21 October 1962, the poem was not republished until a quarter of a century later, in the times of the comparatively liberal Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

In January 1963, he began a tour of West Germany and France, and while he was in Paris, arranged for his Precocious Autobiography to be serialised in L'Express.

During the time, Anna Akhmatova, a number of whose family members suffered under the communist rule, criticised Yevtushenko's aesthetic ideals and his poetics.

In 1965, Yevtushenko joined Anna Akhmatova, Korney Chukovsky, Jean-Paul Sartre and others and co-signed the letter of protest against the unfair trial of Joseph Brodsky as a result of the court case against him initiated by the Soviet authorities.

"[22] Further, of note is "Yevtushenko's protest of the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, an event now credited with inaugurating the modern dissident movement and readying the national pulse for perestroika.

"[9] On 23 August 1968, Yevtushenko sent a telegram to the Soviet prime minister Alexei Kosygin lamenting the invasion of Czechoslovakia, but "when Yevtushenko was nominated for the poetry chair at Oxford in 1968, Kingsley Amis, Bernard Levin, and the Russian-Hungarian historian Tibor Szamuely led the campaign against him, arguing that he had made life difficult for his fellow Soviet writers.

[29] In 1989, Yevtushenko was elected as a representative for Kharkiv in the Soviet Parliament (Congress of Peoples Deputies), where he was a member of the pro-democratic group supporting Mikhail Gorbachev.

[9] In 1991, he supported Boris Yeltsin, as the latter defended the parliament of the Russian Federation during the hardline coup that sought to oust Gorbachev and reverse "perestroika".

[35] He was working on a three-volume collection of 11th to 20th-century Russian poetry and planned a novel based on his time in Havana during the Cuban Missile Crisis (he was, reportedly, good friends with Che Guevara, Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda).

[36] Michael Weiss, writing in The New York Sun in 2008, asserted that "Yevtushenko's politics have always been a complicated mixture of bravery, populism, and vulgar accommodation with dictatorship.

"[27] 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.

"[9] 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.

'"[9] 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).

"[37] The exile poet Joseph Brodsky repeatedly criticised Yevtushenko for what he perceived as his "conformism", especially after the latter was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

"[40] Responding to the criticism, Yevtushenko reportedly said: Who could sanction me to write Babi Yar, or my protests against the (1968) Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia?

"[40] Critics differ on the stature of Yevtushenko in the literature world, with "most Western intellectuals and many Russian scholars extol[ing] him as the greatest writer of his generation, the voice of Soviet life.

She states that "Bratsk Station" offers the greatest insight into Soviet life of any work in modern Russian literature.

Two decades later, in his 1988 article, Michael Pursglove echoes her sentiments, referring to Stantsiya Zima as "one of the landmarks of Soviet literature.

He refused to join in the official campaign against Boris Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago and the recipient of the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature.

[42] His son Yevgeny reported that Yevtushenko had been diagnosed with cancer about six years before and that he had undergone surgery to remove part of a kidney, but the disease had recently returned.

"[10] Following his death, Yevtushenko was described by his friend and translator Robin Milner-Gulland as "an absolute natural talent at performance" on BBC Radio 4's Last Word programme.

[44] Milner-Gulland also wrote, in an obituary in The Guardian, that "there was a brief stage when the development of Russian literature seemed almost synonymous with his name", and that amidst his characteristics of "sharpness, sentiment, populism, self-confidence and sheer enjoyment of the sound of language", he was "above all a generous spirit".

[45] Raymond H. Anderson stated in The New York Times that his "defiant" poetry "inspired a generation of young Russians in their fight against Stalinism during the Cold War".