describing a sheer cliff hanging over a ravine that
became a mass grave. This site creates fear,
which can be understood in two ways. The fear
might certainly be the fear associated with an
event so terrible that even the location seems to
be haunted. In this case the fear that the victims
felt at the moment of their death still pervades
the location. A second possible fear is the con-
cern that such an event might happen again—
that there could once again be a time when peo-
ple’s lives could have so little value that many
thousands could die in a brutal fashion in such a
short period of time.
After referring to the event and briefly
describing the location, the speaker begins a sec-
tion in which he refers to the history of anti-
Semitism. He identifies himself as Jewish. It is
important to know that Yevtushenko is not Jew-
ish; instead, his speaker assumes this identity in a
rhetorical strategy allowing Yevtushenko to place
himself historically into the Jewish experience. He
writes that he is as old as the anti-Semitism that
Jews have encountered throughout the ages,
beginning with the enslavement of Jews by
ancient Egyptians. The speaker understands the
suffering of each one of the many Jews who have
faced oppression during the past several thousand
years. He imagines that he is one of the Jewish
slaves who were used by the Egyptians to make
their ancient land great. The speaker next imag-
ines that he is Jesus, a Jew who was crucified for
his religious beliefs. The speaker envisions himself
with the scars from the wounds that Jesus suf-
fered at the hands of his tormenters.
The speaker also sees himself as Alfred Drey-
fus, a French military officer who, though inno-
cent, was tried and convicted of treason in 1894.
Dreyfus endured a public shaming ceremony in
which he was stripped of his military rank and
was then exiled to Devil’s Island, a penal colony
off the coast of South America, where he was
sentenced to spend the rest of his life. Dreyfus
was a Jew, and his unjust conviction and impris-
onment were the result of anti-Semitism in France
at the end of the nineteenth century. Dreyfus is
yet another example of the injustice caused by
anti-Semitism. He was accused and secretly tried
and never permitted to see the contrived evidence
used against him. Yevtushenko refers to those
who persecuted Dreyfus as Philistines, the ancient
biblical enemy of the Jews, who in this case acted
as accuser, prosecutor, and judge. In Yevtushen-
ko’s poem, Dreyfus’s reputation is destroyed and
he is subjected to public attacks. He is jailed, an
outcast from society.Lines 22–42
In the first few lines of this section, Yevtushenko
continues to personally identify with Jewish vic-
tims of anti-Semitism. He recalls the pogroms of
Byelostok, known in English as Bialystok, in
what is now Poland. Pogroms were violent riots
directed against Jewish inhabitants. The 1906
pogrom in Bialystok killed more than a hundred
people. Yevtushenko envisions himself as a
young Jewish boy who has been kicked and
beaten and who lies covered with blood on the
floor. The boy must watch his mother being
beaten by drunken men. The smell of vodka
helps to define the men, who use alcohol to fuel
their violent attack. Perhaps Yevtushenko is
suggesting that they need the alcohol to give
them the gall to beat up a child and his mother.
The setting for the beating is a bar, and the bully
who beats the woman is a grain clerk. He is just
an ordinary man, not a soldier, and so the vio-
lence is not a result of a military action of some
kind. These violent men scream that the beating
of the boy’s mother is a patriotic act. To beat up
the Jews glorifies Russia.
In the next lines, Yevtushenko moves from the
list of anti-Semitic atrocities to call upon his fellow
Russians to join the international community and
condemn those whose actions denigrate theirMEDIA
ADAPTATIONS A recording of Yevtushenko reading ‘‘Babii
Yar’’ in Russian (with the actor Alan Bates
reading the poem in English) was released by
Caedmon in 1967.
A recording of Dmitri Shostakovich’sSym-
phony No. 13, in which ‘‘Babii Yar’’ is sung
by a men’s chorus, was released by Everest
in 1967. The album was recorded during a
live performance in Moscow on November
20, 1965.Babii Yar