Yevgeny Yevtushenko

His paternal ancestors were Germans who moved to the Russian Empire in 1767.

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

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko (Евге́ний Алекса́ндрович Евтуше́нко; 18 July 1933 – 1 April 2017) was a Soviet and Russian poet.

He was also a novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, publisher, actor, editor, university professor, and director of several films.

Yevtushenko was born Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Gangnus (he later took his mother's last name, Yevtushenko) in the Irkutsk region of Siberia in a small town called Zima on 18 July 1933 to a peasant family of noble descent.

He had Russian, Baltic German, Ukrainian, Polish, Belarusian, and Tatar roots.

His maternal great-grandfather Joseph Baikovsky belonged to szlachta, while his wife was of Ukrainian descent.

They were exiled to Siberia after a peasant rebellion headed by Joseph.

One of their daughters – Maria Baikovskaya – married Ermolai Naumovich Yevtushenko who was of Belarusian descent.

He served as a soldier in the Imperial Army during World War I and as an officer in the Red Army during the Civil War.

Both of Yevtushenko's grandfathers were arrested during Stalin's purges as "enemies of the people" in 1937.

Yevtushenko's father, Aleksandr Rudolfovich Gangnus, was a geologist, as was his mother, Zinaida Ermolaevna Yevtushenko, who later became a singer.

The boy accompanied his father on geological expeditions to Kazakhstan in 1948, and to Altai, Siberia, in 1950.

Young Yevtushenko wrote his first verses and humorous chastushki while living in Zima, Siberia.

His parents were divorced when he was 7 and he was raised by his mother.

By age 10, he had composed his first poem.

Six years later a sports journal was the first periodical to publish his poetry.

At 19, he published his first book of poems, The Prospects of the Future.

After the Second World War, Yevtushenko moved to Moscow and from 1951 to 1954 studied at the Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow, from which he dropped out.

In 1952, he joined the Union of Soviet Writers after publication of his first collection of poetry.

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.

In 1955, Yevtushenko wrote a poem about the Soviet borders being an obstacle in his life.

His first important publication was the 1956 poem Stantsiya Zima ("Zima Station").

In 1957, he was expelled from the Literary Institute for "individualism".

He was once labeled "the head of the intellectual juvenile delinquents" whose poems were "pygmy spittle".

He was banned from travelling but gained wide popularity with the Soviet public.

His early work also drew praise from Boris Pasternak, Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost.

Yevtushenko was one of the authors politically active during the Khrushchev Thaw.

In 1961, he wrote what would become perhaps his most famous poem, Babiyy Yar, in which he denounced the Soviet distortion of historical fact regarding the Nazi massacre of the Jewish population of Kyiv in September 1941, as well as the anti-Semitism still widespread in the Soviet Union.

The usual Soviet policy in relation to the Holocaust in Russia was to describe it as general atrocities against Soviet citizens and to avoid mentioning that it was a genocide of the Jews.

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

The poem was published in a major newspaper, Literaturnaya Gazeta, achieved widespread circulation in numerous copies, and later was set to music, together with four other Yevtushenko poems, by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Thirteenth Symphony, subtitled Babi Yar.

Of Yevtushenko's work, Shostakovich has said, "Morality is a sister of conscience. And perhaps God is with Yevtushenko when he speaks of conscience. Every morning, in place of prayers, I reread or repeat by memory two poems by Yevtushenko: 'Career' or 'Boots'."

After the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October 1961 – at which the former dictator Joseph Stalin was denounced in public for crimes committed in the 1930s, Yevtushenko was allowed to join the editorial board of the journal Yunost, and in October 1962 was sent to Cuba as a correspondent of Pravda.

In 1962, knowing that there was backlash against the anti-Stalin campaign, Yevtushenko wrote Nasledniki Stalina (The Heirs of Stalin), in which he stated that although Stalin was dead, Stalinism and its legacy still dominated the country; in the poem he also directly addressed the Soviet government, imploring them to make sure that Stalin would "never rise again".

The poem also taunted neo-Stalinists for being out of touch with the times, saying "No wonder they suffer heart attacks."

It was well known that Khrushchev's most dangerous rival, Frol Kozlov had recently had a heart attack.

Yevtushenko wrote in his memoirs that he sent a copy of the poem to Khrushchev, who approved its publication.

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.