35 Facts About Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko was a Soviet-Russian poet, novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, publisher, actor, editor, university professor, and director of several films.

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

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

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

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

Yevgeny Yevtushenko's parents were divorced when he was 7 and he was raised by his mother.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yevgeny Yevtushenko became one of the best known poets of the 1950s and 1960s in the Soviet Union.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko was part of the 1960s generation, which included such writers as Vasily Aksyonov, Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Anatoly Gladilin; as well as actors Andrei Mironov, Aleksandr Zbruyev, Natalya Fateyeva, and many others.

Alternatively, Yevgeny Yevtushenko was much respected by others at the time both for his poetry and his political stance toward the Soviet government.

In 1965, Yevgeny Yevtushenko joined Anna Akhmatova, Korney Chukovsky, Jean-Paul Sartre and others and co-signed the letter of protest against the unfair trial of Joseph Brodsky as a result of the court case against him initiated by the Soviet authorities.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko subsequently co-signed a letter against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko was filmed as himself during the 1950s as a performing poet-actor.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko contributed lyrics to several Soviet films and contributed to the script of Soy Cuba, a Soviet propaganda film.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko's acting career began with the leading role in Vzlyot by director Savva Kulish, where he played the leading role as Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

In 1989, Yevgeny Yevtushenko was elected as a representative for Kharkiv in the Soviet Parliament, where he was a member of the pro-democratic group supporting Mikhail Gorbachev.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko was working on a three-volume collection of 11th to 20th-century Russian poetry and planned a novel based on his time in Havana during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The first time that the two works that Shostakovich set to Yevgeny Yevtushenko texts were performed on the same program, was in 1998 at the University of Houston's Moores School of Music, under the baton of Franz Anton Krager, with Yevgeny Yevtushenko present.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko had told Berquist that Leonard Bernstein had wanted to do so, but it never came to realisation.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko was expelled from his university in 1956 for joining the defense of a banned novel, Vladimir Dudintsev's Not by Bread Alone.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko refused to join in the official campaign against Boris Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago and the recipient of the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko denounced the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; interceded with the KGB chief, Yuri Andropov, on behalf of another Nobel laureate, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; and opposed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko was married four times: in 1954 he married Bella Akhmadulina, who published her first collection of poems in 1962.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko had five sons: Dmitry, Sasha, Pyotr, Anton and Yevgeny.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko's wife taught Russian at Edison Preparatory School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko himself spent half the year at the University of Tulsa, lecturing on poetry and European cinema.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko died on the morning of 1 April 2017, at the Hillcrest Medical Center in Tulsa.

In 1962 Yevgeny Yevtushenko was featured on the cover of Time magazine.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko received in 1991 the American Liberties Medallion, the highest honour conferred by the American Jewish Committee.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko was made a Laureate of the International Botev Prize, in Bulgaria in 2006.