Yevgeny Yevtushenko - Poetry Appreciation Bookclub

September Update

Jenny Howard prepared notes and selected poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933-2017) for our September meeting. He was born in Zima Junction, a remote lumber station in Siberia; died Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he had been teaching for many years. His "defiant" poetry "inspired a generation of young Russians in their fight against Stalinism during the Cold War" (Anderson in The New York Times). He achieved a staggering lot of awards

Ron Pretty reckons, “Yevtushenko’s two best poems are Babi Yar and Girl Beatniks. Most of the others seem rather formless and prolix. I wonder how good the translations are, but leaving that aside, I think many of them would be stronger if tightened. My Universities is more than a little self-indulgent. Stalin's Heir is interesting, but could be sharpened & better structured.”

Peter Frankis suggests the humour in Stalin’s Heirs redeems the poem’s declamatory tone and Yevtushenko’s overwriting, particularly with the image of the dead dictator still issuing instructions via a telephone installed in his coffin - deadly serious stuff, but funny too.

Babi Yar refers to the Nazi atrocities and the Soviet persecution of Jewish people. The poem was set to music, together with four other Yevtushenko poems, by Shostakovich in his Thirteenth Symphony, subtitled Babi Yar.

The group enjoyed the less declamatory Girl Beatnik and the sense of a true poet struggling with inspiration in Poetry Gives Off Smoke, “And then like a slugger’s hook / across the chops of the ages, / a line!”.

The group also discussed the idea that although the poems may not work all that well on the page, they worked quite well when read aloud. Yevtushenko’s use of oratory and rhythm particularly made the poems easy to read and hear. We could really imagine Babi Yar belted out at a football stadium. In our terms he’s probably more of a performance poet than a poet for the page.

In 1991, Yevtushenko did read Babi Yar to a crowd of 200 000 people during the failed coup attempt in Russia! Such a large fan-base rivals our October poet, the Nobel Prize winner, Bob Dylan. 

Jack Oats