Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Biography

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko is a Soviet and Russian poet. He is also a novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, actor, editor, and a director of several films.

Early life

Yevtushenko was born Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Gangnus (later he took his mother's last name, Yevtushenko) in the Irkutsk region of Siberia in a small town called Zima Junction on 18 July 1933 to a peasant family of mixed Russian, Ukrainian and Tatar heritage, "His great-grandfather, Joseph Yevtushenko, a suspected subversive, was exiled to Siberia after the 1881 assassination of Emperor Alexander II and died en route. Both of Yevtushenko's grandfathers were arrested during Stalin's purges as "enemies of the people" in 1937." His maternal grandfather, Ermolai Naumovich Yevtushenko, had been a Red Army officer during the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. Yevtushenko's father, Aleksandr Rudolfovich Gangnus, was a geologist, as was his mother, Zinaida Ermolaevna Yevtushenko, who later became a singer. The boy accompanied his father on geological expeditions to Kazakhstan in 1948, and to Altai, Siberia, in 1950. Young Yevtushenko wrote his first verses and humorous songs "chastushki" while living in Zima, Siberia. "His parents were divorced when [he] was 7 and he was raised by his mother." "By age 10 he had cranked out his first poem. Six years later a sports journal was the first periodical to publish his poetry. At 19, he published his first book of poems, The Prospects of the Future."

After the Second World War, Yevtushenko moved to Moscow. From 1951–1954 he studied at the Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow, from which he dropped out. He published his first poem in 1949 and his first book three years later. In 1952 he joined the Union of Soviet Writers after publication of his first collection of poetry. His early poem So mnoyu chto-to proiskhodit (Something is happening to me) became a very popular song, performed by actor-songwriter Aleksandr Dolsky. In 1955 Yevtushenko wrote a poem about the Soviet borders being an obstacle in his life. His first important publication was the poem Stantsiya Zima (Zima Junction 1956). In 1957, he was expelled from the Literary Institute for "individualism". He was banned from traveling, but gained wide popularity with the Russian public. His early work also drew praise from the likes of Boris Pasternak, Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost.

This text is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License