create a complete picture, as Langer admits, but
it can create a composite of that experience,
which he suggests can illuminate the event and
help readers decipher it. This is the function of
poetry that Gubar argues is essential; what hap-
pened at Babi Yar is the kind of moment that
when ‘‘rendered in writing allows authors and
readers to grapple with the consequences of trau-
matic pain without being silenced by it.’’ There is
no way that Yevtushenko or any other poet can
make the events at Babi Yar comprehensible,
but Yevtushenko’s approach in dealing with
anti-Semitism and the need for remembrance is
one way to allow readers to have a voice in
preventing genocide. If poetry is to have the
role that Sidney envisioned it having more than
three hundred years ago, the ability to teach
lessons is even more important for Holocaust
poetry.
Yevtushenko wrote ‘‘Babii Yar’’ to change
the world. When he found it incomprehensible
that no memorial marked the place of such a
massive act of genocide, his poem became that
memorial. In his textA Defense of Poetry,written
in 1821, Percy Bysshe Shelley argues that poetry
does not simply reflect the world; it changes the
world. Poetry makes things happen. According to
Shelley, poets ‘‘are the institutors of laws, and the
founders of civil society.’’ He emphasizes the
social importance of poetry, which plays upon
the subconscious and thus can transcend ideology
and ‘‘creates anew the universe.’’ Poetry is more
than beauty; it is useful and beneficial to society
because it removes distinctions of class and gen-
der and, by extension, differences of religion.
Shelley, of course, could never have predicted an
event such as the Holocaust, just as those who
now know of it find it difficult to accept that such
inhumanity could have ever been directed toward
other human beings.
What was missing from the events that took
place at Babi Yar, or Auschwitz, or Treblinka,
or any of the other sites of mass annihilation of
the Jewish population was empathy for those
who were being murdered. The perpetrators at
Babi Yar did not see Jewish infants and children
as human beings. When Yevtushenko places
himself at Babi Yar on September 29, 1941, he
does what those who committed the murders did
not do. He envisions himself as a gray-haired old
man or as a young child. Yevtushenko does as
Shelley mandates in asserting that ‘‘a man, to be
greatly good, must imagine intensely and com-
prehensively.’’ According to Shelley, a man must
possess the ability to imagine the pain of others,
to ‘‘put himself in the place of another and of
many others; the pains and pleasures of his spe-
cies must become his own.’’ Shelley’s words
found little application in the actions of the
Nazis or even in the actions of the ordinary
civilians who collaborated with the Nazis. The
poet, as defined by Shelley, not only ‘‘beholds
intensely the present as it is,’’ or as it should be
according to moral laws, but also holds forth the
promise of ‘‘the future in the present.’’ It took a
poet such as Yevtushenko to look at the
neglected ravine at Babi Yar and see beyond
the garbage-strewn site to witness the humanity
of those who lost their lives at that place. It was a
poet who looked at that site and saw what
bureaucrats did not see—the absolute need to
remember the tragedy that occurred there.
The importance of poetry is, as Shelley
claims, ‘‘never more to be desired than at periods
when...an excess of the selfish and calculating
principle’’ exceeds the ‘‘laws of human nature.’’
Holocaust poetry can illuminate the injustice of
tyranny, the inhumanity of mankind, and the
unfathomable suffering of those whose only
offense was to have existed. It remains the imper-
ative of poets to illuminate what is unspeakable.
As Yevtushenko illustrates with ‘‘Babii Yar,’’
poets can change the world. And as Shelley
notes at the end of his argument, ‘‘Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world.’’
Source:Sheri Metzger Karmiol, Critical Essay on ‘‘Babii
Yar,’’ inPoetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning,
2009.Jonathan Z. Ludwig
In the following review, Ludwig discusses the
political importance of Yevtushenko’s poetry.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko notes in the opening
line of ‘‘Bratsk Hydroelectric Station’’ that ‘‘a
poet in Russia is more than a poet’’ (160).
Throughout history, poets have used their
poetry to call for societal, governmental, and
political changes within their country. It is Rus-
sian poets, perhaps, who have acted in this polit-
ical role most openly. In the last forty years, few
poets in Russia have been as prolific a writer and
as major a political player as Yevtushenko has
been. It is fitting, therefore, that this collection of
poems, a collection which includes selectionsBabii Yar