About the work of E. A

EVGENY YEVTUSHENKO ABOUT POETS AND POETRY (“Education with Poetry” - Article first published in 1975). (YEVTUSHENKO 42 years old)

The main educator of any person is his life experience. But in this concept we must include not only “external” biography, but also “internal” biography, inseparable from our assimilation of the experience of humanity through books.

The events in Gorky's life were not only what happened in the Kashirins' dyehouse, but also every book he read. A person who does not like a book is unhappy, although he does not always think about it. His life may be filled with the most interesting events, but he will be deprived of an equally important event - empathy and comprehension of what he read.

The poet Selvinsky once rightly said: “The reader of poetry is an artist.” Of course, the reader of prose must also have artistic perception. But the charm of poetry, more than prose, is hidden not only in thought and in the construction of the plot, but also in the music of the word itself, in intonation, in metaphors, in the subtlety of epithets. Pushkin’s line “we look at the pale snow with diligent eyes” will be felt in all its freshness only by a highly qualified reader.

A true reading of a literary word (in poetry and prose) does not imply cursory information, but an enjoyment of the word, its absorption by all nerve cells, the ability to feel this word with the skin...

Once I was lucky enough to read the poem “Citizens, listen to me...” to the composer Stravinsky. Stravinsky seemed to listen in half-hearing and suddenly, at the line “wisdom with his fingers,” he exclaimed, even closing his eyes with pleasure: “What a delicious line!” I was amazed, because not every professional poet could note such a discreet line. I am not sure that there is an innate poetic ear, but I am convinced that such an ear can be cultivated.

And I would like, belatedly and not comprehensively, to express my deep gratitude to all the people in my life who raised me to love poetry. If I had not become a professional poet, I would still have remained a devoted reader of poetry until the end of my days.
My father, a geologist, wrote poetry, it seems to me that he was talented:

"Firing back from melancholy,
I wanted to run away somewhere
But the stars are too high
And the price for the stars is high..."

He loved poetry and passed on his love for it to me. He read perfectly from memory and, if I didn’t understand something, he explained, but not rationally, namely the beauty of reading, emphasizing the rhythmic, figurative power of the lines, and not only of Pushkin and Lermontov, but also of modern poets, reveling in the verse that he especially liked :

The stallion underneath him sparkles with white refined sugar.
(E. Bagritsky)

The wedding is spinning with a silver hem,
And she doesn’t have earrings in her ears - horseshoes.
(P. Vasiliev)

From Makhachkala to Baku
Moons float on their sides.
(B. Kornilov)

Eyebrows from under the shako threaten the palaces.
(N. Aseev)

I should make nails out of these people,
There couldn't be any stronger nails in the world.
(N. Tikhonov)

Teguantepec, Teguantepec, foreign country,
Three thousand rivers, three thousand rivers surround you.
(S. Kirsanov)

Of the foreign poets, my father most often read to me Burns and Kipling.

During the war years at Zima station, I was left in the care of my grandmother, who did not know poetry as well as my father, but she loved Shevchenko and often remembered his poems, reading them in Ukrainian. When I visited taiga villages, I listened to and even recorded ditties, folk songs, and sometimes I composed something. Probably, education with poetry is generally inseparable from education with folklore, and can a person who does not feel the beauty of folk songs feel the beauty of poetry?

My stepfather, an accordionist, turned out to be a person who loves both folk songs and poems by modern poets. From his lips I first heard Mayakovsky’s “Sergei Yesenin”. I was especially struck by: “You’re shaking a bag of your own bones.” I remember I asked: “Who is Yesenin?” - and for the first time I heard Yesenin’s poems, which were then almost impossible to get. Yesenin’s poems were for me both folk songs and modern poetry.

Returning to Moscow, I greedily pounced on poetry. The pages of the poetry collections that were published at that time seemed to be sprinkled with the ashes of the fires of the Great Patriotic War. “Son” of Antokolsky, “Zoya” Aliger, “Do you remember, Alyosha, the roads of the Smolensk region...” Simonova, “Woe to you, mothers of the Oder, Elbe and Rhine...” Surkova, “It’s not in vain that we cherished friendship like infantrymen cherish a meter of bloody ground when they take him in battle..." Gudzenko, "Hospital. Everything is in white. The walls smell of damp chalk..." Lukonina, "The boy lived on the outskirts of the city of Kolpino..." Mezhirova, "To become a man, It’s not enough for them to be born..." Lvova, "Guys, tell Polya - the nightingales sang today..." Dudin; all this entered into me and filled me with the joy of empathy, although I was still a boy. But during the war, the boys also felt like part of a great fighting people.

I liked Shefner’s book “Suburb” with its alienated images: “And, slowly rotating the emerald green eyes, thoughtless as always, the frogs, like little Buddhas, sat on logs by the pond.” Tvardovsky seemed too rustic to me then, Pasternak too fat. I almost never read poets like Tyutchev and Baratynsky - they looked boring in my eyes, far from the life we ​​all lived during the war.
Once I read my poems to my father about a Soviet parliamentarian killed by the Nazis in Budapest:

"The huge city has darkened,
The enemy is hiding there.
Turned white like an unexpected flower
Flag of truce".

The father suddenly said: “There is poetry in this word ‘accidental’.”

In 1947, I studied at the poetry studio of the House of Pioneers of the Dzerzhinsky district. Our leader L. Popova was a unique person - she not only did not condemn the passion of some studio students for formal experimentation, but even supported it in every possible way, believing that at a certain age a poet must overcome formalism. My friend’s line “and now autumn is running away, flashing yellow spots of leaves” was cited as an example. I wrote then like this:

"The owners are Kipling's heroes -
Celebrate the day with a bottle of whiskey.
And it seems that blood lay among the boils
Printed on tea bags."

One day, poets came to visit us - students of the Literary Institute Vinokurov, Vanshenkin, Soloukhin, Ganabin, Kafanov, still very young, but already having gone through front-line school. Needless to say, how proud I was to perform my poems together with real poets.

The second military generation, which they represented, introduced a lot of new things into our poetry and defended lyricism, from which older poets began to move towards rhetoric. The quiet lyrical poems “The Boy” by Vanshenkin and “Hamlet” by Vinokurov that were subsequently written gave me the impression of a bomb exploding.

“Do you love Bagritsky?” - Vinokurov asked me after the performance at the House of Pioneers.

I am forever grateful to the poet Andrei Dostal. For more than three years he worked with me almost daily in the literary consultation of the Molodaya Gvardiya publishing house. Andrey Dostal discovered Leonid Martynov for me, in whose unique intonation - “Did you spend the night in the flower beds?” - I immediately fell in love.

In 1949, I was lucky again when I met the journalist and poet Nikolai Tarasov in the newspaper "Soviet Sport". He not only published my first poems, but also sat with me for long hours, patiently explaining which line was good, which line was bad and why. His friends - then geophysicist, and now literary critic V. Barlas and journalist L. Filatov, now editor of the weekly "Football-Hockey" - also taught me a lot about poetry, giving me rare collections to read from their libraries. Now Tvardovsky did not seem simple to me, and Pasternak did not seem overly complicated.

I was able to get acquainted with the works of Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Mandelstam. However, my expanding “poetic education” did not at all affect the poems that I published at that time. As a reader, I got ahead of myself, a poet. I basically imitated Kirsanov and, when I met him, I expected his praise, but Kirsanov rightly condemned my imitation.

My friendship with Vladimir Sokolov had an invaluable influence on me, who, by the way, helped me enter the Literary Institute, despite the lack of a matriculation certificate. Sokolov was, of course, the first poet of the post-war generation to find lyrical expression of his talent.

It was clear to me that Sokolov knows poetry brilliantly and his taste does not suffer from group limitations - he never divides poets into “traditionalists” and “innovators,” but only into good and bad. He taught me this forever.

At the Literary Institute, my student life also gave me a lot to understand poetry. In seminars and in the corridors, judgments of each other's poems were sometimes ruthless, but always sincere. It was this ruthless sincerity of my comrades that helped me jump off the stilts. I wrote the poems “Wagon”, “Before the Meeting”, and, obviously, this was the beginning of my serious work.

I met the wonderful, unfortunately still underestimated poet Nikolai Glazkov, who then wrote like this:

"I'm ruining my own life,
I'm playing the fool.
From the sea of ​​lies to the field of rye
the road is long."

I learned from Glazkov how to free up intonation. The discovery of Slutsky’s poems made a stunning impression on me. They seemed to be anti-poetic, and at the same time they sounded the poetry of a mercilessly naked life. If earlier I tried to fight “proseism” in my poems, then after Slutsky’s poems I tried to avoid overly elevated “poetism.”

While studying at the Literary Institute, we, young poets, were not free from mutual influences.

Some of Robert Rozhdestvensky’s poems and mine, written in 1953-55, were as similar as two peas in a pod. Now, I hope they won’t be confused: we have chosen different roads, and this is natural, like life itself.

A whole galaxy of women poets appeared, among whom, perhaps, the most interesting were Akhmadulina, Moritz, Matveeva.

Smelyakov, who returned from the North, brought back the poem “Strict Love,” full of chaste romanticism. With Smelyakov’s return, poetry became somehow stronger, more reliable.

Samoilov began to publish. His poems about Tsar Ivan and “The Tea Room” immediately created for him a strong reputation as a highly cultured master.

All over the country, Okudzhava’s songs, exhaled by time, began to be sung.

Coming out of a long crisis, Lugovsky wrote: “After all, the one I knew does not exist...”, Svetlov again regained his charming, pure intonation.

Such a large-scale work as “Beyond the Distance” by Tvardovsky appeared.

Everyone was reading Martynov's new book, "The Ugly Girl" by Zabolotsky.

Voznesensky appeared like fireworks.

The circulation of poetry books began to grow, and poetry came out into the public square. This was a period of flourishing interest in poetry, unprecedented here and anywhere in the world. I am proud that I had to witness the time when poetry became a national event. It was rightly said: “An amazingly powerful echo - obviously, such an era!”

A powerful echo, however, not only gives the poet great rights, but also imposes great responsibilities on him. The education of a poet begins with education in poetry. But subsequently, if the poet does not rise to self-education through his own responsibilities, he slides down, even despite his professional sophistication.

There is such an allegedly beautiful phrase: “No one owes anyone anything.” Everyone owes everyone, but especially the poet.

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 those poets who came before him, for they gave him the power of speech.
The poet is indebted to today's poets, his comrades in the workshop, for their breath is the air that he breathes, and his breath is a particle of the air that they breathe.
The poet is indebted to his readers and contemporaries, for they hope to speak about time and themselves through his voice.
The poet is indebted to his descendants, for through his eyes they will someday see us.

The feeling of this heavy and at the same time happy debt has never left me and, I hope, will not leave me.

After Pushkin, a poet without citizenship is impossible. But in the 19th century, the so-called “common people” were far from poetry, if only because of their illiteracy. Now that poetry is read not only by intellectuals, but also by workers and peasants, the concept of citizenship has expanded - more than ever, it implies the spiritual connections of the poet with the people.

When I write lyrical poems, I always want them to be close to many people, as if they wrote them themselves. When I work on things of an epic nature, I try to find myself in the people I write about. Flaubert once said: “Madame Bovary is me.”

Could he say this about a worker in some French factory? Of course not. And I hope that I can say the same thing, for example, about Nyushka from my “Bratskaya HPP” and about many of the heroes of my poems and poems: “Nyushka is me.” Nineteenth-century citizenship could not have been as internationalist as it is now, when the destinies of all countries are so closely connected with each other.

Therefore, I tried to find people close to me in spirit not only among the builders of Bratsk or the fishermen of the North, but also wherever the struggle for the future of humanity takes place - in the USA, in Latin America and in many other countries. Without love for the homeland there is no poet. But today the poet does not exist without participating in the struggle taking place all over the globe.

To be a poet of the world's first socialist country, which uses its own historical experience to test the reliability of the ideals suffered by humanity, imposes a special responsibility. The historical experience of our country is and will be studied through our literature, through our poetry, for no document in itself has psychological insight into the essence of the fact.

Thus, the best in Soviet literature acquires the high significance of a moral document, capturing not only the external, but also the internal features of the formation of a new, socialist society. Our poetry, if it does not stray either towards invigorating embellishment or towards skeptical distortion, but has the harmony of a realistic reflection of reality in its development, can be a living, breathing, sounding history textbook. And if this textbook is true, then it will rightfully become a worthy tribute to our respect for the people who fed us.

The turning point in the life of a poet comes when, having been brought up on the poetry of others, he begins to educate readers with his poetry. The “powerful echo”, returning, can, with the force of a return wave, knock the poet off his feet if he is not resistant enough, or so concussed that he loses his hearing for poetry and for time. But such an echo can also educate. Thus, the poet will be educated by the return wave of his own poetry.

I sharply separate readers from admirers. The reader, with all his love for the poet, is kind, but demanding. I found such readers both in my professional environment and among people of various professions in different parts of the country. They were always the secret co-authors of my poems. I still try to educate myself with poetry and now often repeat the lines of Tyutchev, whom I fell in love with in recent years:

"It is not possible for us to predict
How our word will respond, -
And we are given sympathy,
How grace is given to us..."

I feel happy because I was not deprived of this sympathy, but sometimes I feel sad because I don’t know if I will be able to fully thank him for it.

Aspiring poets often write letters to me and ask: “What qualities do you need to have to become a real poet?” I have never answered this, as I considered, naive question, but now I will try, although this may also be naive.
There are perhaps five such qualities.

First: you need to have a conscience, but this is not enough to become a poet.
Second: you need to have intelligence, but this is not enough to become a poet.
Third: you need to have courage, but this is not enough to become a poet.
Fourth: you need to love not only your own poems, but also those of others, however, this is not enough to become a poet.
Fifth: you need to write poetry well, but if you don’t have all the previous qualities, this is also not enough to become a poet, because

"There is no poet outside the people,
Just as there is no son without the father's shadow."

Poetry, according to a well-known expression, is the self-awareness of the people. “To understand themselves, people create their poets.”

Evgeny Yevtushenko (see photo below) is a Russian poet. He also gained fame as a screenwriter, publicist, prose writer, director and actor. The poet's surname at birth is Gangnus.

Evgeny Yevtushenko: biography

The poet was born in the city of Zima, Irkutsk region, on July 18, 1932. His father, a Baltic German by birth, Gangnus Alexander Rudolfovich, was an amateur poet. Mother, Yevtushenko Zinaida Ermolaevna, was a geologist, actress, and honored cultural figure. After returning to Moscow from evacuation in 1944, she gave her son her maiden name.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko began publishing in 1949, his very first poem was published in Soviet Sport. In 1952-1957 He studied in the name of Maxim Gorky, but was expelled for supporting the novel “Not by Bread Alone” by Dudintsev and “disciplinary sanctions.”

In 1952, Yevtushenko’s first book of poems, entitled “Scouts of the Future,” was published. The author later called her immature and juvenile. In the same 1952, Evgeniy, bypassing the candidate stage, became the youngest member of the Writers' Union.

In the period of the 1950-1980s, characterized by a real poetic boom, Yevgeny Yevtushenko entered the arena of colossal popularity together with B. Akhmadulina, B. Okudzhava, A. Voznesensky, R. Rozhdestvensky. They infected the whole country with their enthusiasm; independence, freshness, and informality were felt in their work. The performances of these authors attracted large stadiums, and soon the poetry of the “Thaw” period began to be called pop poetry.

Essay on creativity

The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko is the most “loud” lyricist of the galaxy of poets of that time. He published many collections of poems that gained popularity. These are “Highway of Enthusiasts”, and “Tenderness”, and “The Third Snow”, and “Apple”, and “Promise”, and others.

His works are distinguished by a variety of genres and a wide range of moods. The first line of the introduction to the 1965 poem “Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station”, “A poet in Russia is more than a poet,” became a catchphrase that has steadily entered into everyday use, and a manifesto of Yevtushenko’s own creativity.

He is also no stranger to subtle, intimate lyrics (for example, the 1955 poem “There used to be a dog sleeping at my feet”). In his 1977 poem “Northern Surcharge,” Yevtushenko composes an ode to beer. Several cycles of poems and poems are devoted to anti-war and foreign themes: “Bullfight”, “Mom and the Neutron Bomb”, “Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty”, etc.

The poet's stage performances have become famous: he successfully recites his own works. Evgeny Yevtushenko, whose biography is very rich, has released several audio books and CDs (“Berry Places” and others).

1980-1990s

In 1986-1991 Yevtushenko was a secretary on the board of the Writers' Union, and in December 1991 he was appointed secretary on the board of the Commonwealth of Writers' Unions. Since 1988 - member of the Memorial society, since 1989 - co-chairman of the April writers' association.

In May 1989, he was elected as a people's deputy from the Dzerzhinsky IO of Kharkov and worked in this position until the collapse of the Union.

In 1991, Evgeny Yevtushenko signed a contract with a university in the American city of Tulsa (Oklahoma) and went there to teach. The poet currently lives in the USA.

Health status

In 2013, Evgeniy Alexandrovich’s leg was amputated. In December 2014, the poet became ill while he was on tour in Rostov-on-Don, and due to a sharp deterioration in his health, he was hospitalized.

On August 24, 2015, the poet had a pacemaker installed to eliminate problems with his heart rhythm.

Criticism

Yevtushenko's manner and literary style provided a wide field for criticism. He was often reproached for pathetic rhetoric, glorification, and hidden self-praise.

Joseph Brodsky, in an interview in 1972, spoke very negatively about Yevtushenko as a person and poet. He described Eugene as “a huge factory for reproducing himself.”

Personal life

Officially, Yevtushenko was married four times. She became his first wife (since 1954). They often fought, but quickly made up because they loved each other selflessly. When Bella became pregnant, Eugene asked her to have an abortion because he was not ready to be a father. On this basis, the stars of Soviet literature divorced. Then, in 1961, Galina Sokol-Lukonina became Yevtushenko’s wife. The woman could not have children, and in 1968 the couple adopted a boy named Peter. Since 1978, the poet’s wife was his passionate Irish fan, Jen Butler. In marriage with her, sons Anton and Alexander were born. Currently, Yevtushenko’s wife is Maria Novikova, born in 1962. They met in 1987, when Maria, who at that time had just graduated from medical school, approached the poet to ask for an autograph for her mother. Five months later they got married. The couple has two sons: Dmitry and Evgeniy. Thus, the poet has five sons in total.

Yevtushenko himself says that he was lucky with all his wives, and only he is to blame for divorces. The 83-year-old poet has a lot to remember, because he broke many women’s hearts!

I AM DIFFERENT
POETRY OF EVGENY YEVTUSHENKO
Yevtushenko is a multi-talented, very popular poet of our time; many of his poems, set to music, have become hits. He is also a director, I had the opportunity to star in his film “Stalin’s Funeral,” where he was also the author of the script and, apparently, the hero.
How did a young man from the Siberian village of Zima become a famous poet?
Yevtushenko is very life-like; he knows how to write talentedly about everything - from the first snow to such an “industrial” topic as the construction of the Bratsk hydroelectric power station.
His heroes are countless - these are ordinary people and working people - cashiers, bartenders, saleswomen, elevator operators and jazzmen. The poet reveals not only their work. But also their soul. Thus, thanks to the warmth, the rude employee of “Balchug” turns into a gentle girl.
The poet often turns to metaphor and reincarnation. Here is the carriage that became home. Or “When your face rose,” like the Sun. Or he enters the image of a wallet offering its treasure.
The poet and lyrical hero is the embodiment of movement. He loves novelty and gets tired of routine.
“I am different,” he writes. ("Prologue").
“I know - you will tell me: where is the integrity?
Oh, there is great value in all this!”
Maybe he lacks a dogmatic core, his views on life are changing. But his strong point is his knowledge of life. Here he writes about the station and Winter. What details in the description of a quiet village! Here is the biography of his grandfathers, soldiers, and childhood memories, when now “everything has become smaller.” A warm welcome from relatives, and people's ambiguous attitude towards Stalin's death. And how many characters: a girl whose husband drinks. Two uncles. Moscow journalist who blew the sails away. Someone called it a "hole." But what kind of life is there, and how the poet describes it.
The theme of the Motherland is a cross-cutting theme for Yevtushenko. He loves her, but not with blind love, but critically. Then, in 1953, “time to think.” Everyone thinks. The fifties in general were a time of searching.
“Everything thinks: doctor of medicine,
What in the boat complains to his wife,
And a woman on a motorcycle
Flying vertically along the rock." ("Park")
“I have two favorites: the revolution and you.”
But he is against the pomp of celebratory anniversaries. Later, this is especially visible in the “Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station”, he, rejecting Stalin and Stalinism, appeals to Lenin.
Also in the poem there is his favorite hero - Vladimir Mayakovsky - a tribune and an enemy of vulgarity.
It is no coincidence that the hero of the film “Stalin’s Funeral,” Zhenya, was called “Mayakovsky” in his class. Here is the sympathetic poem “Mayakovsky’s Mother.” He compares himself to Stenka Razin.
"The best of the generation,
Take me as a trumpeter!
But sometimes a spirit of denial appears in the poet. “I curse everything recklessly.” “In pursuit of cheap popularity,” evil tongues say about him. The poet speaks out against grounded philistinism. In the prosperity of that time, Yevtushenko sees an echo of the tragedy “Commissars are walking in orderly rows, dying for me.” And the poem “Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station” ends with Bulat Okudzhava’s song “And the Commissars in Dusty Helmets.”
“Citizenship is an awkward talent
Why drag like on a rope,
Those who snort arrogantly - to her.”
And also, which has become a textbook: “The bed is already made,
And you stand there, confused, and repeat in a whisper: what then…” - is this about Stalin’s death, or personal? And even officialdom: the song “Do the Russians want war?”, but now we know about the war firsthand.
Yevtushenko is a child of the war, and remembers a lot about it. Both his fathers and his older comrades were at the front. "Oh, weddings on military days
Deceptive comfort
Unrevealed words
About the fact that they won’t kill”… (“Weddings”)
He was a Soviet poet through and through. But after perestroika, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, disillusioned with socialism, will become a democrat.
Yevtushenko himself is a Cosmopolitan. He writes about Tatars and Jews. He “feels awkward not knowing either Buinos Aires or Orco.” He travels around the world, which results in a series of American poems. America has the great Hemingway. But he also notices her callousness and alienation. It glorifies the national Cuban hero José Antonio.
In recent years, the poet has been living in the USA.
In his youth, the poet already had a foretaste of a glorious future.
"He will stand recognized above the world
And he will say new words"
And new words were spoken! Yevtushenko is in a hurry to live
“Don’t be afraid to be young and early.
Being young and late is the problem!”
But he writes with sympathy about the losers: “In every business there is an occasional boy.”
“Citizens, listen to me” - essentially about whether it is necessary to publish if the poems are “not very good”? Now that you can print any poetry at your own expense, this is especially relevant.
Real poetry is a challenge.
“Great talent always worries
And my head is spinning with heat
Maybe it doesn't look like a rebellion
And at the beginning of the rebellion."
Extraordinaryness is always a rebellion against the ordinary - wittingly or unwittingly.
Later, the poet, realizing that youth with its maximalism is leaving, inspires other fighters:
“Come on boys, come on, be brave.”
Sometimes courage is simple honesty. But a moment will come for young people too and they will begin to “become kinder from their own cruelty.”
Yevtushenko's poems are humane. In the poem “In Memory of Ksenia Nekrasova,” he writes: “There are no uninteresting people in the world.” All people are interesting in their own way.
“He was interesting among people
By its very invisibility."
The poet’s poems are deeply psychological; Yevtushenko’s volume will replace a good psychology textbook!
"I'm greedy for people
And he’s still greedy,” he admits.
“It’s scary not to understand each other...
But it’s also scary to understand each other in everything.” Also in the poem “Depth”:
“I know that sometimes there is danger
In the clearness of the wave,
After all, the rivulets ringing with clarity -
Not yet a sign of depth.
But I also know something else,
And I don't bet a penny
A senselessly deep whirlpool,
Where you can’t make out anything.”
He is not a supporter of extremes; the golden mean is close to him.
In the poem “Two Cities,” the author rushes between them – the city “Yes,” where everything is possible, but boring, and the dreary, tough city “No,” which, however, gives nerve to life.
He also has subtlety in his love lyrics. He conveys all the nuances and complexity of relationships well.
“You are big in love. You are brave
I am timid at every step.
I won't do anything bad to you
But I’m unlikely to be able to do good things.” The poet writes about cowardice, and about what is most inherent.
"We love hypocritically, cautiously
We are friends half-heartedly, timidly.” He is full of hope - and confused.
"endowed me with wealth
They didn’t tell me what to do with him” - is this about youth, or about talent?
"I'm playing smart in front of a fool
And I’m becoming more and more a fool” - not in the eyebrow, but in the eye!
Yevgeny Yevtushenko has many poems about love. The poet understands and sympathizes with his female heroines. He wants them to be freed from sadness, but he is unable to do this.
His hero understands his girlfriends and cares about their peace. But he is rushing around, searching, from the outside it looks like that. Like betrayal, but you can’t do without it.
He is the author of the famous song “On a Spring Night, Think of Me.” He was married to Bella Akhmadulina, dedicated his poems to her
“But I feel the breath of participation
And your face floats out of the darkness
And a distant voice: “Don’t you be separated…”
Comrade features, and again you... The relationship was uneven, but the dedications to her entered immortality like a song from the movie “The Irony of Fate”:
“This is what’s happening to me.” These songs are soulful and deep. And “Darling, sleep” is original - it’s a lullaby... for a woman.
Love is sometimes, alas, superfluous, as in the poem “An Extra Miracle.” Beauty bursts into the established order of things as an uninvited guest.
“You are kind, and I can’t find fault with you,
But in its compassion it is evil.
If you weren't so beautiful
It wouldn't be so scary. "
"Every woman is guilty
A gift - without the possibility of a gift" (“Premonition of the verse”)
But the sad poem “Procession with Madonna” first - girls in white with hope, and a portrait with Madonna - a symbol that separates them from the future - women in black with a difficult past, deception...
Later, a feeling of maturity comes to the poet. The poems become more seasoned and polished. He remembers his youth with nostalgia.
There are parties of poets, well known to his “colleagues,” “Let it seem like a game
It’s not for nothing that we wheeze in these disputes.” He writes about the century: “I am older than myself at your 33,” “Mothers are leaving.”
The years go by
"Different times have come
Other names have arisen."
Yevtushenko resorts to an interesting metaphor here. New names are now “leaders,” but not in the literal sense; the poet calls youth who live to the fullest the leaders. And the older ones “only have experience left.”
“It’s autumn time inside me,” he admits. In the poem there are thoughts about the meaning of life, about the eternal. The poem “White Snow is Falling” became a song.
"It's snowing white
As always
Like under Pushkin. Stenka,
And like after me.”
Yevtushenko communicated with the poet Joseph Brodsky. For this poem, he and Brodsky wrote a tsinton - an alternation of lines under the common pseudonym Brodenko.
The poet turns to the theme of the classics. And this is not surprising. They are the heralds of generations, and they are also forerunners.
The poet's life is tragic. “Poets in Russia were born
With a Dantes bullet in the chest." (“Lermontov”) Lermontov had a difficult fate. No wonder he lived so short. Poem by M.Yu. Lermontov’s “On the Death of a Poet” displeased the chief of gendarmes, Benckendorff.
But the gendarme hears the refrain “There is God’s judgment...” In the poem “Pushkin Pass,” Yevtushenko compares himself with the new Chatsky. The fate of the classics of Pushkin's time is sad. But they remained for centuries. But the poet is looking for the secrets of their genius. And hopes to overcome the symbolic Pushkin Pass.
“And we must not give in to laziness,
To break ourselves without half measures,
And among their predecessors in overcoming -
It’s not about weakness to look for an example.”
The history of the poem "Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station" is interesting. Yevtushenko stood up for dissidents, and for this he was “exiled” to the north, to Zima station. And the poet, to rehabilitate himself, writes a poem about the builders of a power plant in Bratsk, which is in the same area. Perhaps there was a social order? Life is complicated.
In the poem “Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station” the poet also appeals to the classics. For each he finds a brief and apt description. The poem is not only about the builders, it contains the history of Russian revolutionaries and Soviet history, it shows in the faces of the participants in the construction of the power plant the Peasant girl Nyushka, the Bolshevik, but also the local peasant Ivan Stepanovich, who saw the hydroelectric power station and died of confusion... It is about morality, and its flaws, about love and poetry. It is made in the form of a dispute between the Egyptian Pyramid, which was built by slaves, and the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station, which was built by enthusiasts, and the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station wins. “We are not slaves,” people say, and this poem, the song of socialism, is sung by Lenin a lot. Then the author changed his attitude towards this poem and changed a lot. But in October 2015, he gave a concert in Luzhniki, “A Poet in Russia is More than a Poet,” which was based on his poems from the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station and the poems of the poets he wrote about there.
Time is running.
Evgeny Yevtushenko was fascinated by form at the literary institute. He uses it masterfully. In the same Bratsk hydroelectric power station, the rhythm conveys the mood of each part - from Mayakovsky’s “ladder” to the heavy syllable of the part “In a moment of weakness.” In addition to traditional rhymes, he has many of his own inventions. So, he uses internal rhymes: “hipsters - with calves”, full rhymes: “if you buy - a fig”, “pity - greed”. The poem “White Snows Are Coming,” despite the failure of stress and declination, is piercingly soulful.
All these advantages - a huge variety of themes and styles, aphorism, sincerity, citizenship and vitality make him a great poet, and his poems - a wonderful encyclopedia of life.
PART 2
The late Yevtushenko in his works, having parted a little with lightness and emotionality, becomes more mature and sometimes tragic. From idealism he moves to realism. Here is a poem “for your information”, where he states: youth is unique. Yevtushenko said that he is distinguished by his unusual biography: “I walked from Kamchatka to Vologda.” “Borders bother me,” he wrote. And as if to fulfill his desires - he himself is the most traveling poet: USA, Portugal, Latin America. And he introduced us to his poems and poems. readers, with these countries.
He compares the artist to silent cinema - this is not only psychologism, but also imagery! In 1975, the poet wrote a wonderful poem “Alder Earring”, which became a song for the movie “And That’s All About Him”. Many of the songs that we love since childhood are Yevtushenko’s songs - “This is what’s happening to me”, “Do the Russians want war”! Yevtushenko has a great sense of humor. “Don’t give a damn” - Fenya is personified by a clingy, ugly woman. In the poem "Intelligence and Stupidity" the poet refutes traditional criteria. “You will not find warmth in a cold serpent.” “A man is not a man when he does not have the blissful stupidity of impulses.” As a dialectician, Yevtushenko concludes that stupidity is the shadow of the mind.
"What does it mean to grow wiser,
When will the soul of unbelief taste the poison?
Better let my memory fail me
But may gullibility be with me!”
Yevtushenko is the first to notice the late Soviet grimaces - philistinism, bureaucracy, and ridicules it. These are money dealers profiting from the memory of Vysotsky, and dudes in “Mother and the Neutron Bomb”, “garbage in which the whole world is stuck” - cars, the “Ostankino needle” on which people were put, he is the discoverer of this expression. The poet complains about calmness, a symbol of “stagnation.” He is waiting for the wind of change... but the wind can also blow away the necessary things of the past. and the poet himself. The poet seemed to have foreseen all the paradoxes of the coming “perestroika”, and he himself was its engine, in fact. A sad poem about a "drunk cow". who is being led to slaughter. The poet writes a lot about sad things, but he is an optimist, and this is the secret of his success. The poem “There is no poet outside the people” is typical, where the poet stands up against window dressing and against ignorance and arrogance, and against “singing along.”
"There is alienation sang along
What is the connection with the people who sang along?
Dump trucks scare him
he was homesick for his bast shoes."
The poet is not at all a soil scientist who yearns for peasant Rus'. He's more of a Westerner. In the poem "Nepryadva" he also touches on the dispute between the "Westerners" and the Slavophiles." In his opinion, they have long been reconciled... Pushkin, having united everything in himself. The poet is ready to glorify such signs of progress as Kamaz, oil rigs, and the built Bratsk Hydroelectric power station!. He glorifies work - the work of a builder, the work of a worker, and a good poet is also a hard worker! Well, who is a poet? In his opinion, a poet is not a pure esthete, but not a “worker” either, he must know the culture. Well, it turns out involuntarily that the poet, even in a socialist country... is slightly bourgeois. In Yevtushenko, Soviet romance and revolutionary spirit are still strong, but still not “leftism.” He is closer to Salvador Allende than the extreme communists (“The Dove from Santiago”).
In general, you can trace life in the country and its changes from Yevtushenko, he is historical, he studies and knows history, he worked a lot in the archives.
In the poem "Kazan University" the poet reflects the history of the university. As always, his approach is versatile: Kazan is the Tatar capital, and the birthplace of the university, well, its main student is V. Ulyanov. And it turns out that the poem is about free-thinking fighters for the revolution and their opponents. Lenin is the central figure of the poem, but the background that nurtured him is also important - time, forerunners and associates, but “there are no uninteresting people in the world”, they are interesting in themselves - the poet skillfully knows how to describe the simplest hero, what can we say about the interesting ones? And these heroes are not idols, but living people with their weaknesses and illnesses. And through the lips of Professor Lesfargue he pronounces the word “Glasnost”, which was included in perestroika.
This poem is an excursion into yesterday, which makes it possible to understand Today and even Tomorrow, which will happen at the end of the 20th century.
In 1978, there was a rumor about Yevtushenko’s suicide. At the same time, a coup took place in Chile and the dictatorship of General Pinochet was established. The poet writes the poem "Dove from Santiago" about Chilean events. Salvador Allende, a left-wing socialist, did not want and could not prevent the impending Pinochet coup. All sympathies are on the side of Allende, who was “ruined by cleanliness.” Yevtushenko raises the question: is it permissible to destroy those who may be guilty of the tragedy? Allende did not want to prevent the impending rebellion. But “the blood of the innocent changes the direction of the road and it cannot be right.” Yevtushenko was an anti-Stalinist, and opposed it when it was not very popular. He quite caught this time when the former heroes disappeared. He himself had two grandfathers who suffered from Stalinism. Extremes meet, and the author is at a crossroads. The poet raises another important issue - duality. It tells a story based on a real incident. Twenty-year-old Chilean Enrique is constantly forced to choose in life: between his father and mother, who live separately, between a forty-year-old actress who wants to prolong her youth, and a girl of the same age, he is an artist, but even in high matters not everything is smooth - there is a dispute between the classics and the avant-garde . His two friends, the tinsmith priest, personify ultra-leftism and conservatism. Enrique is “above the fray,” but he is forced to be torn between two conflicting friends. The cinema hall is also split in two - a symbol of the people, where half are “for” Allende and half are “against”. Allende himself is also ambivalent, unable to cope with the elements of chaos.
"How good and simple it is to be soulless
There is no way out - those born with a soul."
And this duality of the hero in everything receives its tragic outcome. The young man dies, at the same time morally killing his family, friends and... an innocent pigeon. Evgeny Yevtushenko emphasizes the parallel with himself. And he is often divided, and he himself thought about this topic
"Everything in my life has changed so much,
That it was impossible to glue it together." And he was accused of all sins, of taking a step to the left or to the right. And the same difficult phone calls...
Yevtushenko touches on the topic of fascism, which, unfortunately, has not been eradicated, he writes about “scum, with fascism covered up for the time being.” Fascism is not only Hitler or Mussolini - it grows from below, from anger and meanness. “I hate death” - the poet’s words sound like a refrain.
Readers are always interested in the biography of the poet. This is the key to understanding creativity. And having lifted the veil of his roots, Yevgeny Yevtushenko writes the poem “Mom and the Neutron Bomb.” The best biography is the autobiography of the poet himself, and the question of his past finally finds an answer in this poem.
Biography and essay on creativity













Biography and essay on creativity
Evgeny Yevtushenko's father is geologist and amateur poet A. R. Gangnus (1910-1976).
In 1944, upon returning from evacuation from the Zima station to Moscow, the poet’s mother, Zinaida Ermolaevna Yevtushenko (1910-2002), changed her son’s surname to her maiden name (about this in the poem “Mom and the Neutron Bomb”) - when preparing documents for change of surname, a mistake was deliberately made in the date of birth: they wrote down 1933 so as not to receive a pass, which was required to be obtained at the age of 12.
He began publishing in 1949, his first poem was published in the newspaper “Soviet Sport”.
From 1952 to 1957 he studied at the Literary Institute. M. Gorky. Expelled for “disciplinary sanctions”, as well as for supporting Dudintsev’s novel “Not by Bread Alone.”
In 1952, the first book of poems, “Scouts of the Future,” was published; the author subsequently assessed it as youthful and immature.
In 1952, he became the youngest member of the Union of Writers of the USSR, bypassing the stage of candidate member of the joint venture.
“I was accepted into the Literary Institute without a matriculation certificate and almost simultaneously into the Writers' Union, in both cases considering my book to be sufficient grounds. But I knew her worth. And I wanted to write differently." - Yevtushenko, “Premature Autobiography.”
In subsequent years, he published several collections that became very popular (“The Third Snow” (1955), “Highway of Enthusiasts” (1956), “Promise” (1957), “Poems of Different Years” (1959), “Apple” (1960) , “Tenderness” (1962), “Wave of the Hand” (1962)).
The appearance of the young poet on the literary scene coincided with the Khrushchev thaw and the partial liberalization of Soviet society. Yevtushenko’s fresh and bright poems resonated with the positive sentiments of young people.
One of the symbols of the thaw were the evenings in the Great Auditorium of the Polytechnic Museum, in which Yevtushenko also took part, along with Robert Rozhdestvensky, Bella Akhmadulina, Bulat Okudzhava and other poets of the wave of the 1960s. At poetry evenings at the Polytechnic, three authors were treated differently: Yevtushenko, Voznesensky, and Akhmadulina.
One of E. Yevtushenko’s first public appearances before a large audience took place at the Central Lecture Hall in Kharkov in 1961. The organizer of this speech was the Kharkov literary critic L. Ya. Livshits.
His works are distinguished by a wide range of moods and genre diversity. The first lines from the pathetic introduction to the poem “Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station” (1965): “A poet in Russia is more than a poet,” is a manifesto of Yevtushenko’s own creativity and a catchphrase that has steadily come into use. The poet is no stranger to subtle and intimate lyrics: the poem “A dog used to sleep at my feet” (1955). In the poem “Northern Surcharge” (1977), he composes a real ode to beer - the favorite folk drink, which was then so lacking in the Far North. The poet touches on a variety of topics, including overtly political ones.
Yevtushenko traveled throughout the Soviet Union and the entire globe in search of his themes and heroes. He also writes about working people - hunters, builders, geologists... (“Northern Surcharge”, “Communication Boat”). Several poems and cycles of poems are devoted to foreign and anti-war themes: “Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty”, “Bullfight”, “Italian Cycle”, “Dove in Santiago”, “Mom and the Neutron Bomb”.
This is a prose poem about peace and war and possible nuclear...
He is the son of MOPR, and the leitmotif in the poem is the struggle between MOPR and Rolling Stone - Western masculine, which in the end has now won... The poet’s mother sang during the war, and her voice was strained. A separate topic is Jesus Christ. Evgeniy Aleksandrovich was a pioneer, but he is for God in his soul, and is worried that the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was blown up. Two bloods merged in him - a Komsomol mother, and a “surprisingly non-Komsomol” father.
The author drank all the realities of the war, including fatherlessness, poverty, his stepfather left them when his “child non grata” sister was born. And then, while rewriting composers’ reports to help his mother, the author thinks about his own fame. The poet writes about his youth, the first sprouts of capitalism, rich “hipsters” - the children of the elite, and then, in the USA, he himself is already on an equal footing with these dudes. The poet exposes the dark sides of life - drug addiction of all stripes, drunkenness, materialism, and “addiction to power and money.” And the apotheosis of all is the “leader” of drug addicts - the “nuclear drug addict”.
Any war means destruction and death. Auschwitz flashes before my eyes, and the poet describes the eerie fake Christmas tree in war-stricken countries. What will happen in a nuclear war? And the poet, with his characteristic rich imagination, paints in detail, albeit a little drawn out, an eerie picture of the apocalypse of nuclear war - the last of the wars. from which even a bunker cannot save you. Tomorrow may not be bright, but terrible. The poet’s mother subtly remarks, “God, what greed for things can lead to. Because of this, they probably invented the neutron bomb.” All the heroes are afraid of war, including the former dude Lev and the “professor with the eyes of a Carbonari,” and the poet is closest to the teenage pacifists from Perugia, who wrote “stop the neutron bomb”!
This poem brings together the threads of the poet’s life and worldview. This is the strongest anti-war poem.
Yevtushenko is not only a poet. He is an excellent poetry reader, actor, director... He is a multifaceted gifted person.
YUTUSHENKO STUDIES
In 1978, in a poem dedicated to Yuri Nekhoroshev, the poet states with humor that “Yevtushenko scholars have appeared.” But this appearance is not so bad, and not by chance - it means that the poet has reached a significant level!
Yevtushenko writes about these people and the stages of his biography in the book “Wolf Ticket”. According to him, the first Yevtushenko scholar was from Irkutsk. In 1996, V. Prishchepa published the monograph “Seminary”, which contains a unique review and catalog of all facets of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s work over the past years.
In this book, the poet mentions “the number one Yevtushenko expert - submariner Yura Nekhoroshev.” It is interesting that, according to Yevtushenko, he began to seriously study his work during the Cuban missile crisis. “Yevtushenko expert Number One knew by heart all the “Yevtushenkiana,” which consisted mainly of denunciations of me. He didn’t idealize me, but he didn’t love those who didn’t love me.” Yu. Nekhoroshev created the “Union of Yevtushenkov Scholars”, the first congress of which he still managed to hold. This union consisted of Muscovite Yevtushenko scholars - the chairman of the chess club, a submariner, a cyberneticist, the head of security at the printing house, an anesthesiologist and his wife, a cardiologist, Leningraders - a pharmacist, an engineer, a Donetsk designer, an Irkutsk police captain, a Ziminsk journalist, an Altai philologist, a Murmansk people's deputy of Russia ..."
Yevtushenko scholars performed readings of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poems throughout the Soviet Union...
Yuri Nekhoroshev wrote the “Bibliographic Index”. He is the author of several collected works of the poet and bibliographic reference books (Yu. Nekhoroshev, A. Shitov - Chelyabinsk, 1981; Yu. S. Nekhoroshev - M.: Book, 1984, vol. 7), in which many critical reviews, articles, abstracts of dissertations about the writer’s works of 1949-1982
Today, many articles in magazines, books and master's and doctoral dissertations have been written about the poetry of E. Yevtushenko.
The most prominent expert on Yevtushenko is Valery Prishchepa, a native of the Bratsk region. He graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Irkutsk State University, and is now a professor at the Department of Literature at Khakass State University. He defended his candidate and doctoral dissertations on the works of Yevtushenko. His colleague, Vitaly Komin, is an Irkutsk journalist who studied, lived and worked in Zim in the 1940s and 1950s. For more than 50 years he has been studying the life and work of the poet, accompanying Yevtushenko on his numerous trips to Siberia
In the magazine “Irkutsk Writer” 1 for 2014, Professor V. Zorkin published an article “The Contribution of Irkutsk People to Yevtushenko Studies.” He highly appreciates the monograph by Irkutsk journalist V. Komin and Abakan resident, Doctor of Philology, V. Prishchepa “Winter is the capital of Evgeny Yevtushenko”, published in Irkutsk in 2013, notes that “there are no such studies in Russia, much less abroad today does not exist...” This is not the first appeal to the work of our fellow countryman. On July 22, 2015, a presentation of the book “By the Steps of Years,” dedicated to the poet Evgeny Yevtushenko, took place at Helios JSC (Bratsk). The book was presented by its authors V.V. Komin and V.P. Prishchepa, famous Yevtushenko scholars. For the authors, Vitaly Komin and Valery Prishchepa. Together, Vitaly Komin and Valery Prishchepa previously published the books “Winter is the capital of Yevgeny Yevtushenko” and “He came to the 21st century: the creative path of Yevgeny Yevtushenko.”
Journalist Vitaly Komin and Khakass University professor Valery Prishchepa spoke in great detail about the work on the new book and presented a documentary about the poet’s recent visit to the cities of Irkutsk, Zima and Angarsk. The management of the plant, represented by Andrey Vladimirovich Smirnov, as well as all the poet’s admirers wished the authors good luck in publishing other interesting works from their planned series “By the Steps of Years”. The series was expected to have 10 volumes. But during the poet’s lifetime, only two were published. Recently, Siberian authors completed work on the third book...
Yevgeny Yevtushenko died on April 1 in the USA in a hospital at the age of 85...

LITERATURE:
1 Evgeny Yevtushenko. Collected works in 3 volumes. MOSCOW, “Fiction”, 1984
2 Runin B. Lessons from a poetic biography (Notes on the lyrics of Evg. Yevtushenko). – Questions of literature, 1969, No. 2
3 Nekhoroshev Yu., Shitov A. Evgeniy Evtushenko. Scientific auxiliary bibliographic index. Chelyabinsk, 1981
4 Sidorov E. Evgeniy Yevtushenko: Personality and creativity. M., 1995
5 Artemov V., Prishchepa V. The Man Who Was Not Defeated: A Critical-Biographical Essay on the Life and Work of E. Yevtushenko. Abakan, 1996

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.