Babii Yar
Yevgeny Yevtushenko composed ‘‘Babii Yar’’ in
September 1961. The first public reading of the
poem took place at Oktober Hall in Kiev,
Ukraine, the following month. The opening
lines of ‘‘Babii Yar’’ are a lament that there is
no public monument to remind visitors that
more than 33,700 Kiev Jews were massacred at
Babi Yar in September 1941. In his poem, Yev-
tushenko uses the less common Russian spelling
for Babii Yar; however, the more common and
customary spelling for the location itself is Babi
Yar, which is how the massacre there is most
often referenced. Much of Yevtushenko’s focus
throughout ‘‘Babii Yar’’ is then directed toward
the anti-Semitism that was so prevalent in the
Soviet Union after the end of World War II. To
illustrate the damage caused by anti-Semitism,
he explores the long history of anti-Semitism
from the ancient Greeks to the Holocaust.
‘‘Babii Yar’’ was first published inLiteratur-
naya Gazeta, a Soviet magazine, in 1961. After
the poem’s publication, Dmitri Shostakovich
telephoned Yevtushenko and asked if he could
set the poem to music. The result is Shostako-
vich’sSymphony No. 13, in which, during the
first movement, a male chorus sings Yevtushen-
ko’s poem. The Soviet Communist government
would not permit Shostakovich’s symphony to
be performed, however, unless Yevtushenko
changed the words to focus on the Ukrainian
and Russian victims who were also killed at
Babi Yar rather than on the Jewish victims.36
YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO
1961