Yevtushenko made the changes, as requested;
after the fall of Communism, the original text
was reinserted in performances outside of Rus-
sia. It is the original text that appears in anthol-
ogies of Yevtushenko’s poetry, such asEarly
Poems(1966), which was published in the United
Kingdom, andThe Collected Poems(1992), pub-
lished in the United States. The former was the
first printing of ‘‘Babii Yar’’ in one of Yevtush-
enko’s books. ‘‘Babii Yar’’ is also included in
Holocaust Poetry(1995), compiled by Hilda
Schiff.
Author Biography
Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko was
born at a small settlement, Stantzia Zima (Win-
ter Station), along the Trans-Siberian Railway,
on July 18, 1933. Yevtushenko’s father, Gangus,
was a geologist; he was also a Latvian intellec-
tual who read poetry and other literature and
who made sure that his son also read literature.
Yevtushenko’s mother, Zinaida, also a geolo-
gist, was a Ukrainian whose family had lived in
Siberia for many generations. Zinaida took Yev-
tushenko and his sister, Yelena, to live in Mos-
cow in the late 1930s. Because of the war,
Yevtushenko and his sister were evacuated
from Moscow in 1941 and returned to Zima to
live with their grandmother. Their parents
divorced shortly afterwards, and their father
remarried and moved to Kazakhstan. In 1944,
Yevtushenko returned to Moscow and to
school. He was expelled from school and joined
his father in Kazakhstan, where he found a job
with a geological expedition. For a while Yev-
tushenko thought about a career playing soccer,
but then in 1949 his first poem was published in
Soviet Sport. Yevtushenko was soon encouraged
to become a writer and enrolled at the Gorky
Literary Institute in Moscow, where he studied
from 1951 to 1954.
Yevtushenko’s first book of poetry,The
Prospectors of the Future, was published in
- He followed this with another collection
of poems,Third Snow, in 1955. Additional col-
lections of poetry quickly followed, including
Highway of the Enthusiastsin 1956 andPromises
in 1957. In 1959 Yevtushenko had two collec-
tions of poetry published,The Bow and the Lyre
andPoems of Several Years, which was a retro-
spective anthology of some of his earlier poetry.
Yevtushenko began traveling outside the Soviet
Union in 1961. By this time he was quite well
known, and his poem ‘‘Babii Yar’’ had added to
his notoriety. He attracted large crowds wher-
ever he went. In 1962 he published an unauthor-
ized autobiography (by Soviet Union standards)
in Germany, titledA Precocious Autobiography,
in which he criticizes Soviet society. He was then
denounced by the Soviet government, and his
works were heavily criticized. The book was
published in English in 1963.
After Yevtushenko’s 1965 collection of
poetryBratskaya GESwas published to critical
acclaim, he was once again in the good graces of
Soviet authorities. ‘‘Babii Yar’’ was first included
in a dual Russian and English edition of his
poetry titledEarly Poems. This work was issued
in 1966 and reissued in 1989. The edition of
Yevtushenko’s poetry most frequently discussed
isThe Collected Poems, issued in 1991. At more
than 600 pages, this volume, which contains
much of the author’s poetry, is considered one
of his major works. Also in 1991, Yevtushenko
published a collection of political speeches and
essays titledFatal Half Measures: The Culture of
Democracy in the Soviet Union. Yevtushenko is a
prolific writer. Over the course of his career he
has published dozens of books of poetry, both in
Russian and in English, as well as plays and
novels. He also wrote a documentary, in which
he starred. While Yevtushenko was frequentlyYevgeny Yevtushenko(The Library of Congress)Babii Yar