Director,
Writer,
Actor,
Narrator,
Recites poems

Born 1933, USSR

 

Died 2017

Evgeniy YEVTUSHENKO

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Евгений Александрович ЕВТУШЕНКО

Evgueni EVTOUCHENKO

Also : Evgeni EVTUSHENKO, Evgeny YEVTUSHENKO

Biography

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, poet, songwriter, screenwriter, director and actor, was born in Zima, in the Irkutsk region, on 18 July 1933. From 1951 to 1955 he studied at the Gorky Institute in Leningrad. He immediately began publishing poems. In one of them, which became famous, ‘Winter Station’, and a series of others published in early 1957 in Young Guard, he resolutely denounced, in the name of the revolutionary ideal, Stalinist tyranny and corruption: he was expelled from the Institute of Literature and the Komsomol.
In 1961, in a scathing poem, ‘Babi Yar’, he denounced anti-Semitism; his popularity soared and spread far beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. Together with other young poets, Yevgeny Yevtushenko organised poetry readings that drew crowds of several thousand people. In 1962, ten thousand people turned out to see Yevtushenko off as he set off for Cuba to work on the screenplay for *Soy Cuba* (*Я Куба*). That same year, he published The Heirs of Stalin. Following the period of hope and enthusiasm that de-Stalinisation represented for artists, the stagnation of the 1970s was marked by a return to centralised authoritarianism, with, externally, the repression of 1968 in Czechoslovakia and, internally, a return to a certain conformism and, in art, to socialist realism. Some of the young poets of the early 1960s, such as the poet and singer Galich, would emigrate, whilst others, like Yevtushenko, would ‘settle down’, losing their revolutionary fervour and, at the same time, a significant portion of their audience. In 1984, Yevtushenko was awarded the Soviet Union’s State Prize for his poem Mum and the Neutron Bomb (Мама и нейтронная бомба).

Commentaries

- Ces poètes soviétiques déplaçaient les foules 2025, Fenêtre sur la Russie

- Знаменитые поэты, которые засветились в кино [Poètes célèbres étant intervenus dans des films] 2021, nashe.ru

- Писатели и поэты в кино [Ecrivains et poètes dans le cinéma] 2021, Библиотека им. С. Есенина

- Ретроспектива фильмов, приуроченная к 65-летию России без Сталина в музее ГУЛАГа [Rétrospective de films consacrés au 65ème anniversaire de la Russie sans Staline au Musée du Goulag] 2018, mayak-parnasa.livejournal.com

- 8 знаменитых поэтов, засветившихся в кино Артем ЗАЯЦ, 2017, film.ru