From early childhood, Yevtushenko considered and felt himself to be a Poet. This is evident from his early poems, first published in the first volume of his Collected Works in 8 volumes. They are dated 1937, 1938, 1939. Not touching verses at all, but talented attempts at the pen (or pencil) of a 5-7 year old child. His writing and experiments are supported by his parents and then by school teachers, who actively participate in the development of his abilities.
Evgeny Yevtushenko’s unforgettable childhood years passed in Winter. “Where am I from? I’m from a certain / Siberian station Zima...” Some of his most poignant lyrical poems and many chapters of his early poems are dedicated to this city.
The poet grew up and studied in Moscow, where he moved in 1947, and attended the poetry studio of the House of Pioneers. He was a student at the Literary Institute, but in 1957 he was expelled for speaking in defense of V. Dudintsev’s novel “Not by Bread Alone.” He started publishing at the age of 16. The first publications of poems in the newspaper "Soviet Sport" dated 1949. Accepted into the USSR Writers' Union in 1952, he became its youngest member.
The first book - "Scouts of the Future" (1952) - bore the generic signs of declarative, sloganeering, pathetic-invigorating poetry of the turn of the 1940s-50s. But the poems “Wagon” and “Before the Meeting” are dated to the same year as the book, which Yevtushenko, almost a quarter of a century later, in the article “Education with Poetry” (1975) would call “the beginning of ... serious work” in literature.
The true debuts were not the first “stilted romantic book,” as the poet himself attests today to “Scouts of the Future,” and not even the second, “The Third Snow” (1955), but the third, “Enthusiast Highway” (1956), and the fourth, “The Promise.” " (1957) books, as well as the poem "Winter Station" (1953-56). It is in these collections and poem that Yevtushenko realizes himself as a poet of a new generation entering life, which will later be called the generation of “sixties,” and loudly declares this with the program poem “The Best of the Generation.”
The beginning of the 1960s - Yevtushenko, one of the first among poets, goes on stage. First, he reads his poems from the stage of the Polytechnic Museum, and later begins to collect stadiums. During the same period, Yevtushenko began to write songs. The first was “Do the Russians Want War” (composer E. Kolmanovsky, first performer Mark Bernes). Later, several more songs were written in collaboration with Kolmanovsky: “Waltz about a Waltz”, “The River Runs”, “My Motherland”, “It’s Raining in the City”, “Murderers Walk on the Earth”, “White Snows” and others. Later, Yevtushenko, as a songwriter, worked with other composers: A. Eshpai, Yu. Saulsky, N. Bogoslovsky, M. Tariverdiev, E. Krylatov...
1959 - the first story by E. Yevtushenko, “The Fourth Meshchanskaya,” was published in the magazine “Youth”. 1963 - E. Yevtushenko’s second story, “The Chicken God,” appears in print.
The poet’s worldview and state of mind were formed under the influence of shifts in society’s self-awareness caused by the first revelations of Stalin’s personality cult.
Recreating a generalized portrait of a young contemporary of the Thaw, E. Yevtushenko paints his own portrait, incorporating the spiritual realities of both social and literary life. To express and affirm it, the poet finds catchy aphoristic formulas, perceived as a polemical sign of the new anti-Stalinist thinking: “Zeal in suspicion is not merit. / A blind judge is not a servant of the people. / It’s worse than mistaking an enemy for a friend, / hastily mistaking a friend for an enemy.” Or: “And the snakes climb into the falcons, / replacing, taking into account modernity, / opportunism to lies / opportunism to courage.”
Declaring his own difference with youthful enthusiasm, the poet revels in the diversity of the world around him, life and art, and is ready to absorb it in all its all-encompassing richness. Hence the exuberant love of life in both the programmatic poem “Prologue” and other consonant poems of the turn of the 1950s and 60s, imbued with the same irrepressible joy of existence, greed for all of it - and not just beautiful ones - moments, to stop, to embrace which the poet irresistibly rushes. No matter how declarative some of his poems may sound, there is not even a shadow of thoughtless cheerfulness in them, which was eagerly encouraged by official criticism - we are talking about the maximalism of the social position and moral program that the “outrageously illogical, unforgivably young” poet proclaims and defends: “No, I don’t need half of anything! / Give me the whole sky! Give me the whole earth!”
The prose “Autobiography”, published in the French weekly “Expresso” (1963), aroused the ire of the then guardians of the canon. Re-reading the “Autobiography” now, after 40 years, you clearly see: the scandal was deliberately inspired and its initiators were ideologists from the CPSU Central Committee. Another elaborative campaign was carried out to tighten the screws and twist hands - to ostracize both Yevtushenko himself and those “dissidents” who opposed N.S.’s pogrom meetings. Khrushchev with the creative intelligentsia. E. Yevtushenko gave the best answer to this by including fragments of the early “Autobiography” in later poems, prose, articles of an autobiographical nature and publishing it with slight abbreviations in 1989 and 1990.
The poet’s ideological and moral code was not formulated right away: at the end of the 1950s, he spoke loudly about citizenship, although at first he gave it an extremely unsteady, vague, approximate definition: “It is not pushing at all, / but voluntary war. / It is great understanding / and she has the highest valor.” Developing and deepening the same idea in “Prayer before the Poem”, which opens “Bratskaya Hydroelectric Power Station”, Yevtushenko will find much clearer, precise definitions: “A poet in Russia is more than a poet. / In it, poets are destined to be born / only to those in to whom the proud spirit of citizenship wanders, / to whom there is no comfort, no peace."
However, these lines, which have become textbooks, would also be written off as declarations, if they were not confirmed by poems, whose publication, being an act of civic courage, became a major event in both literary and (to a lesser, if not greater extent) public life: "Babi Yar" (1961), "Stalin's Heirs" (1962), "Letter to Yesenin" (1965), "Tanks are moving through Prague" (1968), "Afghan Ant" (1983). These peak phenomena of Yevtushenko’s civic poetry were not of the nature of a one-time political action. Thus, “Babi Yar” grows out of the poem “Okhotnoryadets” (1957) and, in turn, responds in 1978 with other consonant lines: “The Russian and the Jew / have one era for two, / when, like bread, breaking time, / Russia raised them."
Matching the heights of E. Yevtushenko's civic poetry are his fearless actions in support of persecuted talents, in defense of the dignity of literature and art, freedom of creativity, and human rights. These are numerous telegrams and letters of protest against the trial of A. Sinyavsky and Y. Daniel, the persecution of A. Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, human rights actions of intercession for repressed dissidents - General P. Grigorenko, writers A. Marchenko, Z. Krakhmalnikova, F. Svetov , support by E. Neizvestny, I. Brodsky, V. Voinovich.
The poet owes frequent trips around the country, including the Russian North and the Arctic, Siberia and the Far East, both many individual poems and large cycles and books of poetry. A lot of travel impressions, observations, and meetings are integrated into the plots of the poems - the wide geography purposefully works in them for the epic breadth of the concept and theme.
In terms of frequency and length, the routes of E. Yevtushenko’s foreign trips have no equal in the writing community. He visited all the continents except Antarctica, using all types of transport - from comfortable liners to Indian pies - and traveled far and wide across most countries. It did come true: “Long live movement and fervor, / and greed, triumphant greed! / Borders bother me... It’s awkward for me / not to know Buenos Aires, New York.”
Nostalgically recalling the “first day of poetry” in the titled poem of the late 1970s, E. Yevtushenko glorifies poetry, which rushed “to the attack of the streets” in that encouraging “thaw” time, “when replacing worn-out words / living words rose from their graves ". With his oratorical pathos as a young tribune, he contributed more than others to “the miracle of revival / trust born of a line. / Poetry is born from the expectation / of poetry by the people and the country.” It is not surprising that it was he who was recognized as the first tribune poet of the stage and television, squares and stadiums, and he himself, without disputing this, always ardently stood up for the rights of the spoken word. But he also wrote an “autumn” reflection, referring precisely to the noisy time of pop triumphs of the early 1960s: “Epiphanies are the children of silence. / Something happened, apparently, to me, / and I rely only on silence... “Who, if not him, therefore, had to energetically refute in the early 1970s the annoying opposition of “quiet” poetry to “loud” poetry, recognizing in them an unworthy “game of freedom from the era,” a dangerous narrowing of the range of citizenship? And, following oneself, proclaim the unvarnished truth of time as the only criterion by which one and the other should be verified? “Poetry, whether loud or quiet, / never be quiet or lying!”
The thematic, genre, and stylistic diversity that distinguishes Yevtushenko’s lyrics fully characterizes his poems. The lyrical confessionalism of the early poem "Winter Station" and the epic panoramic view of the "Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station" are not the only extreme poles. For all their artistic inequalities, each of his 19 poems is marked by a “uncommon expression.” No matter how close the poem “Kazan University” (1970) is to the “Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station”, even with the general epic structure it has its own, specific originality. The poet’s ill-wishers, not without secret and obvious gloating, blame the very fact of writing it for the 100th anniversary of the birth of V.I. Lenin. Meanwhile, “Kazan University” is not an anniversary poem about Lenin, who appears, in fact, in the last two chapters (there are 17 in total). This is a poem about the advanced traditions of Russian social thought, “passed through” the history of Kazan University, about the traditions of enlightenment and liberalism, freethinking and love of freedom.
The poems "Ivanovo Calico" (1976) and "Nepryadva" (1980) are immersed in Russian history. The first is more associative, the second, dedicated to the 800th anniversary of the Battle of Kulikovo, is event-driven, although its figurative structure, along with epic narrative paintings recreating a distant era, includes lyrical and journalistic monologues connecting the centuries-old past with the present.
At the masterly combination of numerous voices of the public, greedy for exciting spectacles, a bull doomed to slaughter, a young but already poisoned by the “poison of the arena” bullfighter, sentenced until he himself dies, again and again to “kill according to duty,” and even sand soaked in blood The poem "Corrida" (1967) is built in the arena. A year later, the poet’s exciting “idea of blood,” which paid for the centuries-old destinies of mankind, also invades the poem “Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty,” where the murders of Tsarevich Dmitry in ancient Uglich and President John Kennedy in modern Dallas are placed in a single chain of bloody tragedies of world history.
The poems “Snow in Tokyo” (1974) and “Northern Surcharge” (1977) are based on plot narratives about human destinies. In the first, the poem's idea was embodied in the form of a parable about the birth of talent, freed from the shackles of the immobile, sanctified by the age-old ritual of family life. In the second, unpretentious everyday reality grows on purely Russian soil and, presented in the usual flow of everyday life, is perceived as their reliable cast, containing many familiar, easily recognizable details and details.
Not in the original, but in a modified form, the journalistically oriented poems “Full Growth” (1969-1973-2000) and “Prosek” (1975-2000) are included in the eight-volume collected works of E. Yevtushenko. What is explained by the poet in the author’s commentary on the second is also applicable to the first: he wrote both quarters and more than a century ago “, quite sincerely clinging to the remnants of illusions that were not completely killed... since the times of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station.” The current rejection of them has almost prompted a renunciation of the poems as well. But the raised hand “fell down, as if independently of my will, and did the right thing.” It was just as right as friends, the editors of the eight-volume edition, did when they persuaded the author to save both poems. Having heeded the advice, he saved them by removing the excesses of journalism, but keeping the realities of past decades intact. “Yes, the USSR no longer exists, and I am sure that there was no need to revive even the music of its anthem, but the people who called themselves Soviet, including me, ... remained.” This means that the feelings with which they lived are also part of history. And the history of our lives, as so many events have shown, cannot be erased..."
The synthesis of epic and lyricism distinguishes the political panorama of the modern world unfolded in space and time in the poems “Mom and the Neutron Bomb” (1982) and “Fuku!” (1985). Unconditional primacy belongs to E. Yevtushenko in depicting such interconnected phenomena and trends in the agonizing Soviet reality of the 1980s, such as the resuscitation of Stalinism and the emergence of domestic fascism.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko tore away the thick veil of bashful silences about the legalization of Russian fascism and its first public demonstration in Moscow on Pushkin Square “on Hitler’s birthday / under the all-seeing sky of Russia.” Back then, in the early 1980s, there really was a “pathetic bunch of guys and girls” “playing swastikas.” But, as the emergence of active fascist parties and movements, their paramilitary formations and propaganda publications showed in the mid-1990s, the poet’s alarming question sounded on time and even ahead of time: “How could it happen / that these, as we say, units, / were born in the country / of twenty million or more shadows? / What allowed them, / or rather, helped them to appear, / what allowed them / to grab onto the swastika in it?”
1980 - E. Yevtushenko’s book “Talent is a Non-random Miracle” is published, which contains his best critical works.
In Yevtushenko’s poetic dictionary, the word “stagnation” appeared in the mid-1970s, that is, long before it entered the political lexicon of “perestroika.” In the poems of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the motif of mental peace and discord with the “stagnant” era is one of the dominant ones. The key concept of “perestroika” will appear after a while, but the poet already has a sense of the dead end of the “pre-perestroika” path. It is therefore natural that he became one of those first enthusiasts who not only accepted the ideas of “perestroika”, but actively contributed to their implementation. Together with academician A. Sakharov, A. Adamovich, Yu. Afanasyev - as one of the co-chairs of Memorial, the first mass movement of Russian democrats. As a public figure, who soon became a people's deputy of the USSR and raised his deputy voice against censorship and the humiliating practice of processing foreign trips, the dictates of the CPSU, its hierarchy in personnel matters from district committees to the Central Committee and the state monopoly on the means of production. As a publicist who intensified his speeches in the democratic press. And as a poet, whose revived faith, having acquired new incentives, expressed itself loudly in the poems of the second half of the 1980s: “Peak of Shame”, “Perestroika of Perestroika”, “Fear of Glasnost”, “We can’t live like this any longer”, “Vendee”. The latter is also about literary existence, in which an inevitable split was brewing in the Union of Writers of the USSR, whose monolithic unity turned out to be one of the phantoms of the propaganda myth that disappeared after the “Gekachepist” putsch in August 1991.
Poems from the 1990s, included in the collections “The Last Attempt” (1990), “My Emigration” and “Belarusian Blood” (1991), “No Years” (1993), “My Golden Mystery” (1994), “Late Tears” " and "My very best" (1995), "God is all of us..." (1996), "Slow Love" and "Tippling" (1997), "Stolen Apples" (1999), "Between Lubyanka and Polytechnic " (2000), "I will break through into the twenty-first century..." (2001) or those published in newspaper and magazine publications, as well as the last poem "Thirteen" (1993-96) indicate that in the "post-perestroika" work of E. Yevtushenko is intruded by motives of irony and skepticism, fatigue and disappointment.
At the end of the 1990s and in the first years of the new century, there was a noticeable decline in Yevtushenko’s poetic activity. This is explained not only by a long stay in teaching in the USA, but also by increasingly intense creative quests in other literary genres and art forms. Back in 1982, he appeared as a novelist, whose first experience - "Berry Places" - caused contradictory reviews and ratings, from unconditional support to sharp rejection. The second novel - "Don't Die Before You Die" (1993) with the subtitle "Russian Fairy Tale" - with all the kaleidoscopic plot lines and diversity of characters inhabiting it, has as its guiding core the dramatic situations of the "perestroika" era. A notable phenomenon of modern memoir prose was the book “Wolf Passport” (M., 1998).
The result of more than 20 years of not just compilation, but research work by Yevtushenko is the publication in English in the USA (1993) and Russian (M.; Minsk, 1995) languages of the anthology of Russian poetry of the 20th century “Strophes of the Century”, a fundamental work (more than a thousand pages , 875 personalities!). Foreign interest in the anthology is based on objective recognition of its scientific significance, in particular, as a valuable teaching aid for university courses in the history of Russian literature. The logical continuation of the “Stanzas of the Century” will be an even more fundamental work completed by the poet - the three-volume work “In the Beginning Was the Word.” This is an anthology of all Russian poetry, from the 11th to the 21st centuries, including “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” in a new “translation” into modern Russian.
Evgeny Yevtushenko was the editor of many books, the compiler of a number of large and small anthologies, hosted creative evenings for poets, compiled radio and television programs, organized recordings, and himself read poems by A. Blok, N. Gumilyov, V. Mayakovsky, A. Tvardovsky, wrote articles, including for record sleeves (about A. Akhmatova, M. Tsvetaeva, O. Mandelstam, S. Yesenin, S. Kirsanov, E. Vinokurov, A. Mezhirov, B. Okudzhava, V. Sokolov, N. Matveeva, R. Kazakova and many others).
Yevtushenko’s entire creative path was inseparably accompanied by a far from amateurish and not at all amateurish interest in cinema. The visible beginning of his film creativity was laid by the “poem in prose” “I am Cuba” (1963) and the film by M. Kalatozov and S. Urusevsky, shot according to this script. A beneficial role as a creative stimulus was probably played in the future by friendship with Fellini, close acquaintance with other masters of the world screen, as well as participation in S. Kulish’s film “Take Off” (1979), where the poet starred in the leading role of K. Tsiolkovsky. (The desire to play Cyrano de Bergerac in E. Ryazanov’s film did not come true: having successfully passed the audition, Yevtushenko was not allowed to film by decision of the Cinematography Committee.) Based on his own script, “Kindergarten,” he directed the film of the same name (1983), in which he also acted as a director. , and as an actor. In the same triune capacity of screenwriter, director, and actor he appeared in the film “Stalin's Funeral” (1990).
The poet is creatively attached to the stage no less than to the screen. And not only as a brilliant performer of poetry, but also as initially the author of dramatizations and stage compositions (“On this quiet street” based on “Fourth Meshchanskaya”, “Do the Russians want war”, “Civil Twilight” based on “Kazan University”, “Proseka” , “Bullfight”, etc.), then as an author of plays. Some of them became events in the cultural life of Moscow - for example, "Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station" at the Moscow Drama Theater on M. Bronnaya (1967), "Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty" at the Lyubimovsky Theater on Taganka (1972), "Thank you forever..." in Moscow Drama Theater named after M.N. Ermolova (2002). It was reported about the premieres of performances based on E. Yevtushenko’s play “If All Danes Were Jews” in Germany and Denmark (1998). In 2007, the Olimpiysky sports complex hosted the premiere of the rock opera “White Snows Are Coming,” based on the poems of Yevgeny Yevtushenko by composer Gleb May
The works of E. Yevtushenko have been translated into more than 70 languages, they have been published in many countries around the world. In the Soviet Union and Russia alone, and this, it should be admitted, is far from the majority of what was published, by 2003 more than 130 books had been published, including more than 10 books of prose and journalism, 11 collections of poetic translations from the languages of the fraternal republics and one translation from Bulgarian, 11 collections - in the languages of the peoples of the former USSR. Abroad, in addition to the above, photo albums, as well as exclusive and collectible rarities, were published in separate publications.
E. Yevtushenko's prose, in addition to the novels mentioned above, consists of two stories - "Pearl Harbor" (1967) and "Ardabiola" (1981), as well as several short stories. Hundreds, if not thousands of interviews, conversations, speeches, responses, letters (including collective letters with his signature), answers to questions from various questionnaires and surveys, summaries of speeches and statements are scattered in the media alone. Five film scripts and plays for the theater were also published only in periodicals, and photographs from personal photo exhibitions “Invisible Threads”, shown in 14 cities of the country, in Italy and England, were published in booklets, prospectuses, newspaper and magazine publications.
Dozens of the poet’s works stimulated the creation of musical works, starting from “Babi Yar” and a chapter from the “Bratskaya Hydroelectric Power Station”, which inspired D. Shostakovich to almost prohibit “from above” the Thirteenth Symphony and the symphonic poem for choir and orchestra “The Execution of Stepan Razin”, highly appreciated by the State Prize ", and ending with the popular songs "The river runs, it melts in the fog...", "Do the Russians want war", "Waltz about a waltz", "And the snow will fall, it will fall...", "Your traces", "Thank you for silence”, “Don’t rush”, “God willing” and others.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko is one of the most prominent figures in Russian poetry of the second half of the 20th century. His work reflected the power of sincere feeling, a passionate desire to intervene in life, to comprehend its complexities through his own experience. According to the critic E. Sidorov, “Yevtushenko’s poetry is like a cardiogram of time, sometimes distorted by the inaccuracy of the poetic instrument, but always sincere and honest. His poems, which every now and then lose in harmony and integrity of aesthetic equipment, often gain in relevance and topicality.”
In the early poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, poems about love occupy a significant place. They contain timidity, self-doubt, and the ambiguity of feeling, which makes one suspect that it is not real (“You are great in love...”), and sincere, deep adoration, and a caring attitude towards the beloved (“It’s scary not to understand each other...” ), and the first love collision - experiences from the disunity of “close souls” (“This is what’s happening to me...”). The poem “This is what’s happening to me...” written in 1957 was dedicated to Bella Akhmadulina. In this poem, the lyrical hero speaks with utmost frankness about what worries him and makes him suffer:
...connection of strangers and disunity of close souls!
Love and friendship, feelings so necessary for the lyrical hero, cannot bring him complete happiness and understanding, since the “old friend” does not come to him, and instead of his beloved, “the wrong one comes to me.” This disunity of people in the world is the reason for the poet’s sadness and loneliness. The theme of loneliness will flash in the poem “I rent a room on Sushchevskaya...”, and then in the poem “Don’t...” It is simultaneously a conversation with oneself and a monologue addressed to one’s beloved. The refrain “don’t…”, repeated at the beginning of each stanza, introduces disharmony into the sound of the poems and thereby emphasizes the disharmony of relationships, that is, the disunity of the hero with his beloved. Over the years, the poet will come to a more complete and profound understanding of the feeling of love. One of the best
One of the love cycle poems of the late 60s was the poem “When your face rose...” Here the understanding of the essence of love changes dramatically. If a few years earlier it seemed like just a “connection” of close souls, now something else is mistaken for love (“I understand - this fear is love”). In these verses, the image of a beloved woman appears, endowed with childlike gullibility and masculine endurance, and courage, and youthful impetuosity, and passion, and long-suffering. Life is not flexible and kind to such people. With such people in life it is difficult, but reliable:
I live with double anxiety and pain.
I live by your hearing, your touch,
I live by your sight, by your tears,
Your words, your silence.
My being is like two beings.
The last two bent my arms with heavy weight.
And it takes two bullets to kill me:
There are two lives in me - both mine and yours.
The image of the beloved becomes more complex in another poem (“You are completely devoid of pretense...”) In it, the poet abandons the external circumstances of the fate of the beloved woman and goes entirely into the field of the psychology of love. Escape from the past and reckoning with it is not yet a victory for love: “And I was just the first person you ran into in the dark while running away.” The true drama of the beloved’s character is revealed later and precisely in the internal sphere, in psychology:
And it seems that you are with me, and it seems that you are not.
In fact, I have been abandoned by you.
Carrying a bluish light in my hand,
You are wandering through the ashes of the past.
What do you want there? It's empty and dark!
Oh, the mysterious power of the past!
You couldn't love him on your own
Well, I fell in love with its ruins.
Ash and ash are powerful.
They are probably hiding something inside themselves,
Over what she so desperately burned,
The arsonist cries like a child.
One of the best creations of love lyrics by Yevgeny Yevtushenko is his “Spell,” which can be ranked among the outstanding works of this genre in Russian poetry. The dignity and nobility with which the feeling in this poem is expressed is surprisingly organically combined with the broad and free chant of the verse and the strict ring composition. The deep lyrical emotion is growing, growing with each line, to reach its climax in the last breath, in the last prayer:
I pray to you - in the quietest silence.
Or in the rain rustling above,
Or under the snow flickering in the window,
Already in a dream and yet not in a dream -
On a spring night, think about me And on a summer night, think about me,
On an autumn night, think about me And on a winter night, think about me.
S. Vladimirov noted: “Perhaps, Russian poetry did not know such a degree, such a level of frankness in verse, such energy of self-disclosure, as in the work of Yevtushenko. The whole world seems to be concentrated, transferred into the poet’s soul, everything is perceived only as his own emotional state.
In this case, nothing falls out or is taken outside of this world. It is not without reason that accusations of excessive conceit and immodesty arise. Indeed, it may seem that the poet is too focused on himself. But this is the essence of his poetic position, the source of truth, the reality of his verse, no matter how sentimental his feelings, unrestrained enthusiasm, selfless immersion in the experience of the moment may sometimes seem.”
Yevgeny Yevtushenko's lyrics go beyond moral self-expression. The poet is attentive to life, his inquisitive mind and keen eye see everything around him. Interest in people, the search for characters are already evident in Yevtushenko’s earliest lyrics. The poet delves into the personal life of the people around him and sees that everyone has their own dreams and their own grief, their own holidays and their own everyday life, their own hopes and disappointments - everyone has their own destiny. The formula “There are no uninteresting people in the world” was announced in 1960 as the first result of observations. This poem is addressed to those people who are usually called simple:
There are no uninteresting people in the world. Their destinies are like the history of the planets.
Each one has everything special, its own,
And there are no planets similar to it.
And if someone lived unnoticed and was friends with this invisibility,
He was interesting among people because of his very uninterestingness.
Yevtushenko sees in each person his own unique world and worries that we know as much as possible about each other, including those closest to us. The “secret personal world” remains closed and unknown to people around, and the death of every person is an irreparable loss:
And if a person dies,
His first snow dies with him,
And the first kiss, and the first fight.
He takes all this with him...
This is the law of the ruthless game,
It is not people who die, but worlds.
We remember people, sinful and earthly...
What did we really know about them?
People are leaving... They cannot be brought back.
Their secret worlds cannot be revived.
And every time I want to scream again from this irrevocability.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko came to poetry with a sense of the rebellious role of the poet. Even before Voznesensky’s “Masters,” he proclaimed: “Great talent always disturbs and, with the heat of the head spinning, does not resemble a rebellion, perhaps, but the beginning of a rebellion.” But several years passed when, in complete contradiction with the initial declarations, the poet spoke out: “I want to be a little old-fashioned, otherwise I will be temporarily washed away...” The theme of poetry is heard in many of Yevtushenko’s works (the poem “Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station”, a cycle of poems about the North, a poem "Long Screams") In the poems of the northern cycle, Yevtushenko more than once asks the question - do the people need his poetry, is everything that is left behind real - crowded evenings, success, large circulations of books, controversies surrounding his name? The desire to be heard by one’s people is acute and piercing in the poem “Citizens, listen to me...”, written in 1963. On the ship, in the crowd of passengers, he is shocked by the painful cry at the beginning of the song, full of confusion and pain: “Citizens, listen to me...” These words sound like a plea for help, a desire to overcome human indifference to someone else’s plea. But it is difficult for a poet to reach other people's hearts. He is lonely, and his suffering pours out in painful lines:
It's scary if they don't want to listen.
It's scary if they start listening.
Suddenly the whole song, on the whole, is shallow,
Suddenly everything in her will be insignificant, except for this painful thing with blood:
“Citizens, listen to me...”?!
In his article “Education with Poetry,” Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote: “Becoming a poet is the courage to declare oneself a debtor. The poet is indebted to those who taught him to love poetry, for they gave him a sense of the meaning of life... The poet is indebted to his descendants, for through his eyes they will someday see us.” Conviction of the special role of the poet in Russia sounds with particular force in “Prayer before the Poem” (“Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station”). The introduction to the poem contains a number of themes and motifs characteristic of Yevtushenko’s work: the theme of the poet’s civil service, his special role in Russia - the role of the people’s herald and prophet, connecting the past, present and future with his work; motive of doubt in one’s abilities, a critical attitude towards one’s abilities. Finally, the “prayer” addressed to seven major Russian poets is essentially a manifesto, Yevtushenko’s poetic program. Beginning “Pushkin Pass” with self-deprecation in front of the names of Pushkin and Griboyedov, Yevtushenko leads his thought to the character of the artist, to the fact that “a genius is also a weak person,” but by the strength of character he overcame his weakness. And this is where a major goal is identified: to learn from geniuses to overcome weaknesses: “So that we are not consoled by parallels when weaknesses push us into failure, so that we can, ascend, overcome - Pushkin’s pass has opened...”.
In “Prayer before the Poem,” Yevtushenko sums up everything that happened before, humbly kneeling down, asking for help from the great Russian poets... Turning to Pushkin, Yevtushenko asks to give him his melodiousness and ability to “burn the hearts of people with a verb,” to Lermontov - his a bilious view of life, to Nekrasov - to give the pain of his dissected muse, to Blok - to give a prophetic nebula, to Pasternak - so that his candle burns forever, to Yesenin - to give his tenderness for happiness, to Mayakovsky - to give a formidable intransigence, so that he too, the poet Yevtushenko, cutting through time, could tell his fellow descendants about it. The most remarkable thing about this “Prayer” is that Yevtushenko was almost the first of the poets of his generation to express the newly emerging tendency to turn towards the classics, towards the traditions of Russian literature.
Today's creativity of Yevgeny Yevtushenko is diverse. In recent years, the poet has addressed a variety of contemporary issues. The “difficult talent” of citizenship imposes great responsibility for the effective power of speech. Yevtushenko expressed his unity with the fate of Russia in the poem “What will I tell you, Russia?”:
How can I help you, Russia?
And is it possible to help the one who, not for the first time, has wisely driven poets away from power?
Russia is the female image of God.
Your bread is my bread.
Your sadness is my worry.
Your destiny is my destiny.
“The nature of Yevtushenko’s creative nature does not give him the opportunity for peace and wise, balanced judgments. He overtakes himself at every turn of life, and it is remarkable that this quality does not go away over the years... Some kind of eternal, fleet-footed and light-minded youth bubbles inside, creating a unique character, very charming, but also annoying with its reluctance to dwell on anything important.
The critic Lev Anninsky once accurately noted: “The details of everyday life shine in Yevtushenko’s work as if with an independent light, so that sometimes the connection between the details and the whole disappears, and the very optionality of colors becomes poetry here.” The “optional” nature of details that become poetry is characteristic of the poet to this day. Everyday details, masterfully mastered by verse, give his works warmth and charm, which intensify when the detail is highlighted with humor...
Arriving in Poltava, the poet immediately remembered that the roots of his family were in Ukraine, in the Zhitomir region. Great-grandfather - Pole, aristocrat Joseph Boykovsky once married a Ukrainian woman bought from captivity.
At the end of August, in a hospital in Tulsa (Oklahoma, USA), the famous Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko underwent a serious operation, amputating his right leg.
The poet is not going to rest on his laurels: this summer he published several books, one of which - “My Football Games” - he, by his own admission, wrote for exactly forty years.
Evgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko (1933-2017) - Russian poet. He was born in 1933 at the Zima station in the Irkutsk region into a family of geologists. He grew up and studied in Moscow, and spent the war years in evacuation in Siberia, in his small homeland. Yevtushenko began writing poetry in childhood; his first publications were already at the age of sixteen. Yevtushenko determined his calling early: he studied at the Literary Institute, in 1952 he became the youngest member of the Writers' Union and at the same time published the first collection of poems, “Scouts of the Future,” imbued with the youthful pathos of building a new society.
In the 1950s, Yevtushenko published four collections of poems and wrote poems. At this time, his skill as a poet grew stronger, and Yevtushenko entered the next decade as a real “sixties” poet. A feature of Yevtushenko’s poetry was its relevance. He responds to all significant events taking place in the country and the world. The geography of Yevtushenko’s poems is enormous: Siberia, the Far North, the Arctic, the Far East. For a poetic description of modernity, he relies on the traditions of Russian classical poetry. For example, in the introduction to the poem “Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station,” dedicated to the construction of a hydroelectric power station on the Siberian Angara River, he turns to the poets of the past - Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Mayakovsky as a source of inspiration:
Give me, Pushkin, your melodiousness,
Your uninhibited speech
Your captivating fate -
As if being naughty, the verb is to burn.
Yevtushenko’s creative activity and active civic position are determined by the poetic declaration expressed by himself at the beginning of the introduction to the poem:
A poet in Russia is more than a poet.
Poets are destined to be born in it.
The theme of memory occupies an important place in Yevtushenko’s work. The poem “Babi Yar” (1961) is dedicated to her about one of the most tragic events in the history of mankind - the mass execution of Jewish families by the Nazis in 1941 in Kyiv.
The main themes of Yevtushenko’s poetry are civic duty, love, and eternal philosophical questions. The poet treats living nature with care and love. Thus, in “The Ballad of the Seals” (1966), he writes bitterly about these animals being exterminated for their valuable, beautiful fur:
Seals, seals, you are like children,
You should live and live in the world...
The poet remains faithful to civil lyricism all his life. The love lyrics have strong confessional intonations; the lyrical hero Yevtushenko seems to be talking about his feelings and his soul. Yevtushenko’s philosophical lyrics combine the motifs of the homeland, fate, and personal choice. This is, for example, the poem “White Snow is Falling” (1965).
Evgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko, one of the most popular and widely known modern poets, was born on June 18, 1933 in the city of Zima, Irkutsk region, into the family of an employee. After graduating from ten years of school, from 1951 to 1954, he studied at the Literary Institute. A. M. Gorky. Began publishing in 1949.
E. Yevtushenko’s first book, “Scouts of the Future,” appeared when the poet turned 19 years old. Since that time, his collections of poetry have been systematically published, in which he strives to express the feeling of the connection between modernity and history, the feeling of connection between an individual and society, between historical events taking place in different countries of the world.
The geography of his travels throughout the Soviet country and abroad found its poetic reflection in the works of Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
Yevtushenko’s poems show the creative activity of his contemporary. The poet responds to every event in the poetic life of the world, he writes about international youth forums and the struggle for peace, about new buildings in Siberia and the rise of virgin soil in Kazakhstan, about the war in Vietnam and the Cuban revolution, about world sports and scientific and technological progress. In his work, which organically combined the romantic mindset of modern youth with serious thoughts about the meaning of life, Yevtushenko added a significant touch to the portrait of the generation that entered life after the last world war. The poet’s feelings and thoughts about the present day, personally experienced, give his poem uniqueness and originality.
Not everything in Yevtushenko’s poetry is equally strong and convincing. In particular, the reader cannot help but pay attention to the amazing diversity of human types in his poem “Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station”, but the same reader will also notice the lack of compositional harmony of the poem, and the sometimes lack of connection between its individual pictures and chapters.
E. Yevtushenko loves people and writes about them warmly and respectfully (Nyushka, Kramer in “Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station”, Mark Bernes in the poem “He Loved You, Life”, Chukovsky in “Sail”, Hikmet in “The Heart of Hikmet”, Pyotr Shchepochkin in poem “Northern bonus”).
Civic pathos is also inherent in the prose works of E. Yevtushenko - the story “Ardabiola” (1980), the novel “Berry Places” (1981). An integral part of the writer’s literary work were critical and journalistic speeches, which comprised the collections “Talent is a Non-random Miracle” (1980) and “Fulcrum” (1981).
The insightful lyricist E. Yevtushenko wrote many poems about love and friendship. He is the author of the popular songs “Do the Russians want war”, “The river is running”, “It’s raining in our city”, “And it’s snowing”, “Waltz about the waltz”, “While murderers walk the earth”, “Take your time”, “Comrade” guitar”, etc. To the words of E. Yevtushenko by composer D.D. Shostakovich created the 13th symphony and the symphonic poem “The Execution of Stepan Razin”.
The creativity of E. Yevtushenko is diverse in genre and thematic terms. Addressing the most diverse problems of our time, the poet, in their aesthetic illumination, relies on the traditions of A. Pushkin, N. Nekrasov, V. Mayakovsky, A. Tvardovsky.