Evtushenko Evgeniy

Evtushenko Evgeniy

Born on July 18, 1933 at Zima station in the Irkutsk region. Father is a geologist, mother is a musician. Until 1944, Yevgeny Yevtushenko lived in Siberia. The first poems were written in 1949, that is, exactly fifty years ago. After the autobiographical poem “Winter Station,” Yevtushenko became the most popular Soviet poet for a whole decade, both in the Soviet Union and abroad. At one time, he protested against the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968, and at the fifth congress of the Writers' Union he sharply self-criticized his works about the Stalinist period, written in the fifties. In 1962-69 he was a member of the editorial board of the magazine "Youth", from 1967 to 1981 he was a member of the board of the Writers' Union of the Soviet Union. In March 1974 he spoke out in defense of Solzhenitsyn, who was expelled from the Soviet Union, and, surprisingly, in August 1974 he published a poem in Izvestia in defense of the ideological struggle. Such inconsistency of Yevgeny Yevtushenko was regarded by many as a desire to always be in the center of events, and this was annoying. Joseph Brodsky is famous for saying: “If Yevtushenko is against collective farms, then I am for it.”
In 1961 - the poem "Babi Yar", in 1984 - the State Prize of the Soviet Union for the poem "Mother and the Neutron Bomb". In 1995 - the anthology "Strophes of the Century".
He is an honorary member of the Spanish and American Academies, the University of Santa Domingo. Teaches in December 1991, he became secretary of the board of the Commonwealth of Writers' Unions. In 1989, he was elected as a deputy of the USSR from the Dzerzhinsky territorial electoral district of the city of Kharkov.
Married. Five sons.