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Selected Poems
Yevgeny Yevtushenko is the fearless spokesman of his generation in Russia. In verse that is young, fresh, and outspoken he frets at restraint and injustice, as in his now famous protest over the Jewish pogrom at Kiev.
But he can write lyrically, too, of the simple things of humanity - love, a birthday, a holiday in Georgia. And in 'Zima Junction' he brilliantly records his impressions on a visit to his home in Siberia.
But he can write lyrically, too, of the simple things of humanity - love, a birthday, a holiday in Georgia. And in 'Zima Junction' he brilliantly records his impressions on a visit to his home in Siberia.
96 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1962
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About the author
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
152 books115 followers Евгений Евтушенко
Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko (Russian: Евгений Александрович Евтушенко; born 18 July 1933 in Zima Junction, Siberia) is a Soviet and Russian poet. He is also a novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, actor, editor, and a director of several films.
Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko (Russian: Евгений Александрович Евтушенко; born 18 July 1933 in Zima Junction, Siberia) is a Soviet and Russian poet. He is also a novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, actor, editor, and a director of several films.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 57 reviews
March 21, 2018
An important collection of poems, if a little on the slim side, from one of the greats to emerge from the Soviet Union (whom I didn't realise had died only last year). Two poems in particular are highly political, the long memoir, 'Zima Station' which connects his daily life and trip back home to sub-zero Siberia, and 'Babiy Yar' which deals with Russian anti-Semitism and the 1941 massacres in Kiev, which resulted in a nobel prize nomination.
Yevtushenko was much respected by others at the time both for his poetry and his political stance toward the Soviet Machine. He challenged the state, not in a political way but culturally through words. And as a recognized writer, he was banned from leaving his homeland for some time. But over his life was actually still well traveled and this only helped to strengthen his popularity in the West.
Not everything here struck me as great, a couple of poems didn't seem to fit in with the rest, but overall, considering I hadn't read Yevtushenko before and didn't know what sort of direction he wrote in, the vast majority impressed me. Some brief highlights - 'Waking' opens with,
Waking then was like a lonely dream
in this cottage in this settlement,
thinking: time to go and pick mushrooms,
and ruffling your hair to wake you,
and kissing your eyes open,
all this each day a new discovery...
An extract from 'Lies'
Who never knew
the price of happiness
will not be happy.
Forgive no error
you recognize,
it will repeat itself,
a hundredfold
and afterward
our pupils
will not forgive in us
what we forgave.
And 'The Companion'
Masculine pride was muttering in my mind:
I scraped together strength and I held out
for fear of what she’d say. I even whistled.
Grass was sticking out from my tattered boots.
So on and on we walked
without thinking of rest
passing craters, passing fire,
under the rocking sky of ‘41
tottering crazy on its smoking columns.
Finally some powerful lines from the mighty ' Babi Yar'
Wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar,
The trees look sternly, as if passing judgement.
Here, silently, all screams, and, hat in hand,
I feel my hair changing shade to gray.
And I myself, like one long soundless scream
Above the thousands of thousands interred,
I’m every old man executed here,
As I am every child murdered here.
No fiber of my body will forget this.
May 'Internationale' thunder and ring
When, for all time, is buried and forgotten
The last of antisemites on this earth.
There is no Jewish blood that’s blood of mine,
But, hated with a passion that’s corrosive
Am I by antisemites like a Jew.
And that is why I call myself a Russian!
Yevtushenko was much respected by others at the time both for his poetry and his political stance toward the Soviet Machine. He challenged the state, not in a political way but culturally through words. And as a recognized writer, he was banned from leaving his homeland for some time. But over his life was actually still well traveled and this only helped to strengthen his popularity in the West.
Not everything here struck me as great, a couple of poems didn't seem to fit in with the rest, but overall, considering I hadn't read Yevtushenko before and didn't know what sort of direction he wrote in, the vast majority impressed me. Some brief highlights - 'Waking' opens with,
Waking then was like a lonely dream
in this cottage in this settlement,
thinking: time to go and pick mushrooms,
and ruffling your hair to wake you,
and kissing your eyes open,
all this each day a new discovery...
An extract from 'Lies'
Who never knew
the price of happiness
will not be happy.
Forgive no error
you recognize,
it will repeat itself,
a hundredfold
and afterward
our pupils
will not forgive in us
what we forgave.
And 'The Companion'
Masculine pride was muttering in my mind:
I scraped together strength and I held out
for fear of what she’d say. I even whistled.
Grass was sticking out from my tattered boots.
So on and on we walked
without thinking of rest
passing craters, passing fire,
under the rocking sky of ‘41
tottering crazy on its smoking columns.
Finally some powerful lines from the mighty ' Babi Yar'
Wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar,
The trees look sternly, as if passing judgement.
Here, silently, all screams, and, hat in hand,
I feel my hair changing shade to gray.
And I myself, like one long soundless scream
Above the thousands of thousands interred,
I’m every old man executed here,
As I am every child murdered here.
No fiber of my body will forget this.
May 'Internationale' thunder and ring
When, for all time, is buried and forgotten
The last of antisemites on this earth.
There is no Jewish blood that’s blood of mine,
But, hated with a passion that’s corrosive
Am I by antisemites like a Jew.
And that is why I call myself a Russian!
Read
September 23, 2021"To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.
And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.
In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him..."
.
Middle stanzas of "People" by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, tr. From the Russian by Robin Milner-Gulland in Yevtushenko: Selected Poems, 1962.
Also found this alternate translation of these same stanzas, translated by Albert C. Todd for a 1991 selection of Yevtushenko... Always interesting to compare trandslated materials!
"Everyone has his own secret, private world.
In that world is a finest moment.
In that world is a tragic hour,
but it is all unknown to us.
And if someone dies
there dies with him his first snow,
and first kiss, and first fight.
He takes it all with him."
This slim volume has me thirsty for more of his work. Yevtushenko has a contemplative voice and poetic style - he captures the small moments, both in their gravity and evanescence.
This Penguin edition opens with an epic poem "Zimá Junction", about the poet's return to his childhood home in Siberia. It's a sobering and relatable tale of returning to a well-known place with new eyes.
My favorite part of this long poem (some 50 pages) describes berry picking with his aunt and cousins, and watching an ecstatic dance of a woman who they meet while picking berries.
I really like picking berries too... So I would have danced right along with her!
and in that world one excellent minute.
And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.
In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him..."
.
Middle stanzas of "People" by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, tr. From the Russian by Robin Milner-Gulland in Yevtushenko: Selected Poems, 1962.
Also found this alternate translation of these same stanzas, translated by Albert C. Todd for a 1991 selection of Yevtushenko... Always interesting to compare trandslated materials!
"Everyone has his own secret, private world.
In that world is a finest moment.
In that world is a tragic hour,
but it is all unknown to us.
And if someone dies
there dies with him his first snow,
and first kiss, and first fight.
He takes it all with him."
This slim volume has me thirsty for more of his work. Yevtushenko has a contemplative voice and poetic style - he captures the small moments, both in their gravity and evanescence.
This Penguin edition opens with an epic poem "Zimá Junction", about the poet's return to his childhood home in Siberia. It's a sobering and relatable tale of returning to a well-known place with new eyes.
My favorite part of this long poem (some 50 pages) describes berry picking with his aunt and cousins, and watching an ecstatic dance of a woman who they meet while picking berries.
I really like picking berries too... So I would have danced right along with her!
August 17, 2016
Yevgeny Yevtushenko has become one of my favorite poets! And Zima Junction has placed itself in my all time beloved poems. There is something so profound yet simple about his poetry that even after getting lost in translation, the percolating melancholy, and the rising nostalgia leaves you sighing and smiling. When Yevtushenko writes about snow, you rub your hands. When he tells you he misses something, you miss it with him. When he writes about rain, you get drenched. Gorgeous imagery, beautiful thoughts, simple topics. I wish I could speak Russian...
Highly recommended!
Highly recommended!
December 22, 2020
How sharply our children will be ashamed
taking at last their vengeance for these horrors
remembering how in so strange a time
common integrity could look like courage.
Unfortunately history always looks like a posture in Yevtushenko. His powerful Babiy Yar is almost a period piece for him to bellow, "Injustice"--just as a childhood memory of a peasant murder upended his cosmology. These are essentially prose poems detailing travels and his own precocious youth. Not exactly ingratiating.
taking at last their vengeance for these horrors
remembering how in so strange a time
common integrity could look like courage.
Unfortunately history always looks like a posture in Yevtushenko. His powerful Babiy Yar is almost a period piece for him to bellow, "Injustice"--just as a childhood memory of a peasant murder upended his cosmology. These are essentially prose poems detailing travels and his own precocious youth. Not exactly ingratiating.
November 8, 2024
Yevtushenko - Selected poems
The winters in Salmas (Shahpur), Western Azerbaijan, Iran, were very cold and most of the time with lots of snow. I had just spent Thanksgiving with other Peace Corps volunteers and other expatriates at the home of Carlton Coon, Jr., the US Consul in Tabriz, where food, drink, board games, and fascinating conversation stretched the holiday into more than 2 days.
I was told that there was a USIA library in the center of Tabriz, so before I caught the bus back to Salmas, I went there and checked out a relatively new book of Yevtushenko’s poetry. I had read of him and knew he was some sort of media child from the Soviet Union who was allowed to travel abroad, unusual at that time which was at the height of the Cold War. I didn’t know a lot about contemporary poets then, but I trudged on through what I found to be mostly boring poems. There were a few of them that sort of stuck in my mind but none that I would go back to for depth and the music of language.
The end of December, two years later, I was headed with a dozen or so others for Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, to teach English to Arab soldiers who manned anti-aircraft defenses. We were boarded on a KLM flight headed for a stopover in Amsterdam. I was sitting next to a dour looking person who kept to himself. I studied him carefully when we were passed our cocktails by the stewardess. It was Yevtushenko. I had been reading about him in the paper over the last few days. He had been in NY on some sort of cultural exchange. (A spy I thought—still do.)
“I should be thrilled,” I thought, "...Maybe ask him to sign the KLM menu. But, I didn’t. With a streak of Texas mule in me, my mind ran thusly: “If he’s going to be stuck up about it then I will too. After all, he’s already established and is his country's State pet poet, whereas I’m just starting. It’s not poet meets poet here.” I had lately discovered that all you had to do to call yourself a poet was to put a thought down as nonsensical as you like, keep the margins straight—or not, confuse readers with inappropriate metaphors, and discard meter and rhyme. Easy-peasy.
We did have our own self-proclaimed poet in our little group who insisted on writing his poetry with a special fountain pen (and who would get mad when he ran out of ink or forgot his pen). No pen, no opus. As we disembarked at Schiphol, I asked our stewardess if that was indeed Yevtushenko and she said that it was and that he was “big in Russia”.
Later as we sat down for drinks I told my fellow sojourners about whom I had been sitting next to. They did not know about Yevtushenko, except for the fountain pen poet who denied that it could have been him, because he was in Russia.
In later years I tried to read Yevtushenko again and thought how proud I was of myself for not engaging him in conversation and “asking him about his work”. If he was such an observant writer, curious about the world, he should have asked me about what I was up to, but knowing me back then I would have made up a wild story totally untrue just to thwart another spy, or any guy.
The winters in Salmas (Shahpur), Western Azerbaijan, Iran, were very cold and most of the time with lots of snow. I had just spent Thanksgiving with other Peace Corps volunteers and other expatriates at the home of Carlton Coon, Jr., the US Consul in Tabriz, where food, drink, board games, and fascinating conversation stretched the holiday into more than 2 days.
I was told that there was a USIA library in the center of Tabriz, so before I caught the bus back to Salmas, I went there and checked out a relatively new book of Yevtushenko’s poetry. I had read of him and knew he was some sort of media child from the Soviet Union who was allowed to travel abroad, unusual at that time which was at the height of the Cold War. I didn’t know a lot about contemporary poets then, but I trudged on through what I found to be mostly boring poems. There were a few of them that sort of stuck in my mind but none that I would go back to for depth and the music of language.
The end of December, two years later, I was headed with a dozen or so others for Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, to teach English to Arab soldiers who manned anti-aircraft defenses. We were boarded on a KLM flight headed for a stopover in Amsterdam. I was sitting next to a dour looking person who kept to himself. I studied him carefully when we were passed our cocktails by the stewardess. It was Yevtushenko. I had been reading about him in the paper over the last few days. He had been in NY on some sort of cultural exchange. (A spy I thought—still do.)
“I should be thrilled,” I thought, "...Maybe ask him to sign the KLM menu. But, I didn’t. With a streak of Texas mule in me, my mind ran thusly: “If he’s going to be stuck up about it then I will too. After all, he’s already established and is his country's State pet poet, whereas I’m just starting. It’s not poet meets poet here.” I had lately discovered that all you had to do to call yourself a poet was to put a thought down as nonsensical as you like, keep the margins straight—or not, confuse readers with inappropriate metaphors, and discard meter and rhyme. Easy-peasy.
We did have our own self-proclaimed poet in our little group who insisted on writing his poetry with a special fountain pen (and who would get mad when he ran out of ink or forgot his pen). No pen, no opus. As we disembarked at Schiphol, I asked our stewardess if that was indeed Yevtushenko and she said that it was and that he was “big in Russia”.
Later as we sat down for drinks I told my fellow sojourners about whom I had been sitting next to. They did not know about Yevtushenko, except for the fountain pen poet who denied that it could have been him, because he was in Russia.
In later years I tried to read Yevtushenko again and thought how proud I was of myself for not engaging him in conversation and “asking him about his work”. If he was such an observant writer, curious about the world, he should have asked me about what I was up to, but knowing me back then I would have made up a wild story totally untrue just to thwart another spy, or any guy.
January 29, 2022
Waking then was like dreaming.
Waking then was like a lonely dream
in this cottage in this settlement,
thinking: time to go and pick mushrooms,
and ruffling your hair to wake you,
and kissing your eyes open,
all this each day a new discovery.
We stayed on at the settlement for a month,
gardens, chirping birds,
the meadow paths winding among the wheat,
tense creak of the floorboards underfoot.
And when we cut the sunflower into two
there was no need for special explanations.
When under the presentiment of dawn
we ran down into the river
(gudgeon tickle your feet in those reaches)
there was no place for complicated questions.
At first it didn't seem a mystery
incapable of human explanation
that you lay dreaming in the night beside me.
I thought it due from a just destiny
that every morning was my rendezvous
with you, which never could or would be broken.
And how I flattered myself
nothing in you could be unknown to me.
You don't belong to the mind's calculations,
and you disproved each of my demonstrations,
since to be unexpected is your truth.
You came to me never with what I knew,
never the days' familiar repetitions,
but new beginning and your new surprise.
We felt no quarrel on that droning flight,
and yet there was a presence
moving around us circle by circle,
flying with us and measuring up on us.
* * *
My love will come
will fling open her arms and fold me in them,
will understand my fears, observe my changes.
In from the pouring to bang the taxi door
she'll run upstairs through the decaying porch
burning with love and love's happiness,
she''ll run dripping upstairs, she won't knock,
will take my head in her hands,
and when she drops her overcoat on a chair,
it will slide to the floor in a blue heap.
* * *
This can't go on:
is after all injustice of its kind.
How in what year did this come into fashion?
Deliberate indifference to the living,
deliberate cultivation of the dead.
Their shoulders slump and they get drunk sometimes
and one by one they quit;
orators at the crematorium
speak words of gentleness to history.
What was it took his life from Mayakovsky?
What was it put the gun between his fingers?
If with that voice of his, with that appearance,
if ever they had offered him in life
some crumbs of gentleness.
Men live. Men are trouble-makers.
Gentleness is a posthumous honour.
Waking then was like a lonely dream
in this cottage in this settlement,
thinking: time to go and pick mushrooms,
and ruffling your hair to wake you,
and kissing your eyes open,
all this each day a new discovery.
We stayed on at the settlement for a month,
gardens, chirping birds,
the meadow paths winding among the wheat,
tense creak of the floorboards underfoot.
And when we cut the sunflower into two
there was no need for special explanations.
When under the presentiment of dawn
we ran down into the river
(gudgeon tickle your feet in those reaches)
there was no place for complicated questions.
At first it didn't seem a mystery
incapable of human explanation
that you lay dreaming in the night beside me.
I thought it due from a just destiny
that every morning was my rendezvous
with you, which never could or would be broken.
And how I flattered myself
nothing in you could be unknown to me.
You don't belong to the mind's calculations,
and you disproved each of my demonstrations,
since to be unexpected is your truth.
You came to me never with what I knew,
never the days' familiar repetitions,
but new beginning and your new surprise.
We felt no quarrel on that droning flight,
and yet there was a presence
moving around us circle by circle,
flying with us and measuring up on us.
- Waking, pg. 55-56
* * *
My love will come
will fling open her arms and fold me in them,
will understand my fears, observe my changes.
In from the pouring to bang the taxi door
she'll run upstairs through the decaying porch
burning with love and love's happiness,
she''ll run dripping upstairs, she won't knock,
will take my head in her hands,
and when she drops her overcoat on a chair,
it will slide to the floor in a blue heap.
- Waiting, pg. 67
* * *
This can't go on:
is after all injustice of its kind.
How in what year did this come into fashion?
Deliberate indifference to the living,
deliberate cultivation of the dead.
Their shoulders slump and they get drunk sometimes
and one by one they quit;
orators at the crematorium
speak words of gentleness to history.
What was it took his life from Mayakovsky?
What was it put the gun between his fingers?
If with that voice of his, with that appearance,
if ever they had offered him in life
some crumbs of gentleness.
Men live. Men are trouble-makers.
Gentleness is a posthumous honour.
- Gentleness, pg. 78
September 6, 2021
A slim, excellent introduction to Yevtushenko and a book I've purchased secondhand many, many times in order to distribute amongst family and friends.
It never goes unappreciated.
Lots of beautiful ruminations on life and humanity, without ever skimping on the hardships of the journey within.
It never goes unappreciated.
Lots of beautiful ruminations on life and humanity, without ever skimping on the hardships of the journey within.
July 19, 2009
Yevgeny Yevtushenko is one of my favorite Russian poets. Years ago, while I was in graduate school at the State University of New York at Buffalo, I bought this copy. I still enjoy repairing to this collection every so often.
There is a nice, albeit brief, introduction to his work, written by Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi. It does provide useful context for the poetry to follow. But it is the poetry that is the heart of this slim work. A few lines to illustrate his art. . . .
"Zima Junction"
"As we get older we get honester,
that's something."
"Lies"
"Telling lies to the young is wrong.
Proving to them that lies are true is wrong."
"Visit"
"with one sudden thought, how little I
Have done in life, how much I can do."
"Waking"
"And how I flattered myself
From time to time with proving to myself
Nothing in you could be unknown to me.
You don't belong to the mind's calculations,
And you disproved each of my demonstrations,
Since to be unexpected is your truth."
All in all, a nice, although brief, introduction to the poetry of Yevtushenko.
There is a nice, albeit brief, introduction to his work, written by Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi. It does provide useful context for the poetry to follow. But it is the poetry that is the heart of this slim work. A few lines to illustrate his art. . . .
"Zima Junction"
"As we get older we get honester,
that's something."
"Lies"
"Telling lies to the young is wrong.
Proving to them that lies are true is wrong."
"Visit"
"with one sudden thought, how little I
Have done in life, how much I can do."
"Waking"
"And how I flattered myself
From time to time with proving to myself
Nothing in you could be unknown to me.
You don't belong to the mind's calculations,
And you disproved each of my demonstrations,
Since to be unexpected is your truth."
All in all, a nice, although brief, introduction to the poetry of Yevtushenko.
Read
August 11, 2019A tiny sample, powerful and disturbing. “Zima Junction” and “Babi Yar” are obvious highlights, but the whole collection is fascinating.
January 12, 2023
Skillfully contemplative and so very important. I’m still not quite sure how to feel about parts of this collection, but there is no doubt in my mind that these poems are works of art.
August 1, 2023
Not people die but worlds die in them
May 12, 2015
Beautiful poems.
"THOSE weddings in wartime 1 The deceiving comfort !
The dishonesty of words about living.
Sonorous snowy roads.
In the wind’s wicked teeth I hurry down them
to a hasty wedding at the next village.
With worn-out tread and hair down in my eyes
I go inside, I famous for my dancing,
into the noisy house.
In there tensed up with nerves and with emotion
among a crowd of friends and family,
called up, distraught, the bridegroom
sitting beside his Vera, his bride.
Will in a few days put his greatcoat on
and set out coated for the war.
Will see new country, carry a rifle.
May also drop if he is hit.
His glass is fizzing but he can’t drink it.
The first night may be the last night.
And sadly eyeing me and bitter-minded
he leans in his despair across the table
and says, ‘Come on then, dance.’
Drinks are forgotten. Everyone looks round.
Out I twirl to begin. Clap of my feet.
Shake.
Scrape the floor with my toe-cap.
Whistle. Whistle. Slap hands,
Faster, leaping ceiling-high.
Moving the posters pinned up on the walls:"
---
"MY love will come
will fling open her arms and fold me in them,
will understand my fears, observe my changes.
In from the pouring dark, from the pitch night
without stopping to bang the taxi door
she’ll run upstairs through the decaying porch
burning with love and love’s happiness,
she’ll run dripping upstairs, she won’t knock,
will take my head in her hands,
and when she drops her overcoat on a chair,
it will slide to the floor in a blue heap."
---
"A SHOT-UP forest full of black holes.
Mind-crushing explosions.
He wants some berries, he wants some berries:
the young lieutenant, lying in his blood.
I was a smallish boy,
who crawled in the long grass till it was dark
and brought him back a cap of strawberries,
and when they came there was no use for them.
The rain of July lightly falling.
He was lying in remoteness and silence
among the ruined tanks and the dead.
The rain glistened on his eyelashes.
There were sadness and worry in his eyes.
I waited saying nothing and soaking,
like waiting for an answer to something
he couldn’t answer. Passionate with silence
unable to see when he asked me,
I took his party card from his pocket.
And small and tired and without understanding
wandering in the flushed and smoking dark,
met up with refugees moving east
and somehow through the terribly flashing night
we travelled without a map, the priest
with his long grey hair and his rucksack,
and me and a sailor with a wounded arm.
Child crying. Horse whinnying.
And answered to with love and with courage
and white, white, the bell-towers rang out
speaking to Russia with a tocsin voice.
Wheatfields blackened round their villages.
In the woman’s coat I wore at that time,
I felt for the party card close to my heart."
"THOSE weddings in wartime 1 The deceiving comfort !
The dishonesty of words about living.
Sonorous snowy roads.
In the wind’s wicked teeth I hurry down them
to a hasty wedding at the next village.
With worn-out tread and hair down in my eyes
I go inside, I famous for my dancing,
into the noisy house.
In there tensed up with nerves and with emotion
among a crowd of friends and family,
called up, distraught, the bridegroom
sitting beside his Vera, his bride.
Will in a few days put his greatcoat on
and set out coated for the war.
Will see new country, carry a rifle.
May also drop if he is hit.
His glass is fizzing but he can’t drink it.
The first night may be the last night.
And sadly eyeing me and bitter-minded
he leans in his despair across the table
and says, ‘Come on then, dance.’
Drinks are forgotten. Everyone looks round.
Out I twirl to begin. Clap of my feet.
Shake.
Scrape the floor with my toe-cap.
Whistle. Whistle. Slap hands,
Faster, leaping ceiling-high.
Moving the posters pinned up on the walls:"
---
"MY love will come
will fling open her arms and fold me in them,
will understand my fears, observe my changes.
In from the pouring dark, from the pitch night
without stopping to bang the taxi door
she’ll run upstairs through the decaying porch
burning with love and love’s happiness,
she’ll run dripping upstairs, she won’t knock,
will take my head in her hands,
and when she drops her overcoat on a chair,
it will slide to the floor in a blue heap."
---
"A SHOT-UP forest full of black holes.
Mind-crushing explosions.
He wants some berries, he wants some berries:
the young lieutenant, lying in his blood.
I was a smallish boy,
who crawled in the long grass till it was dark
and brought him back a cap of strawberries,
and when they came there was no use for them.
The rain of July lightly falling.
He was lying in remoteness and silence
among the ruined tanks and the dead.
The rain glistened on his eyelashes.
There were sadness and worry in his eyes.
I waited saying nothing and soaking,
like waiting for an answer to something
he couldn’t answer. Passionate with silence
unable to see when he asked me,
I took his party card from his pocket.
And small and tired and without understanding
wandering in the flushed and smoking dark,
met up with refugees moving east
and somehow through the terribly flashing night
we travelled without a map, the priest
with his long grey hair and his rucksack,
and me and a sailor with a wounded arm.
Child crying. Horse whinnying.
And answered to with love and with courage
and white, white, the bell-towers rang out
speaking to Russia with a tocsin voice.
Wheatfields blackened round their villages.
In the woman’s coat I wore at that time,
I felt for the party card close to my heart."
July 29, 2020
I studied Russian History for a year at the University of Chicago in 1960-61. I became a fan of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky during high school years, and fervently believed Russian authors knew more about human nature than any others. At the end of the academic year (May 1961) I was invited by my Russian History Professor, Tomas Riha, to an event at his apartment hosting Russian Poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The poet was known to me only through my Professor and reading I had done about cultural life in Russia. At that time, the book under review, the first volume of poems by Yevtushenko translated into English, had not yet been published. The event was small and quiet. I was a very young 20: small town girl from Minnesota and not yet "experienced". Yevtushenko, seven years my senior, was handsome, dashing and very impressive. As I recall, he spoke no English - I did not speak Russian (I enrolled in a Russian class for the next academic year). We drank champagne and had horderves. Late in the evening Yevtushenk0 said to me, in broken English, with appropriate hand gestures, "French voman, Marianne, French voman" and insisted that champagne be poured into one of my shoes from which he drank!
In the years since, I have maintained my interest in Russian History, and poetry of all sorts. I purchased the volume under review in 1963, while attending graduate school at the University of Minnesota.
It is a small book, but both of his most famous poems are represented -Zima Junction and Babi Yar.
I wish I could read them in Russian - my studies did not progress enough to do so. I like his voice, his courage to speak out about Jews in Russia. his connection with nature, and what I perceive to be a zest for life (perhaps I see the young man I met in 1961). I've read about his complicated relations with the Soviets and the controversy about whether he adequately supported fellow Russian authors.
I reread the poems in this 1962 publication and am convinced he was a poet of valor, talent and history.
Epilogue
In 2010 my sister and I traveled from Bejing to Moscva on the Trans Siberian Railroad. We stopped in Irkutsk (near Yevtushenko's birthplace), and while lunching in a hotel I saw a man who very much resembled Yevtushenko. I asked him if he knew the poet - he was a relative!
In the years since, I have maintained my interest in Russian History, and poetry of all sorts. I purchased the volume under review in 1963, while attending graduate school at the University of Minnesota.
It is a small book, but both of his most famous poems are represented -Zima Junction and Babi Yar.
I wish I could read them in Russian - my studies did not progress enough to do so. I like his voice, his courage to speak out about Jews in Russia. his connection with nature, and what I perceive to be a zest for life (perhaps I see the young man I met in 1961). I've read about his complicated relations with the Soviets and the controversy about whether he adequately supported fellow Russian authors.
I reread the poems in this 1962 publication and am convinced he was a poet of valor, talent and history.
Epilogue
In 2010 my sister and I traveled from Bejing to Moscva on the Trans Siberian Railroad. We stopped in Irkutsk (near Yevtushenko's birthplace), and while lunching in a hotel I saw a man who very much resembled Yevtushenko. I asked him if he knew the poet - he was a relative!
May 13, 2019
This is the first book I bought upon arriving home from Viet-Nam in 1970. That 75-cent edition from the San Francisco airport is beside me as I write.
How sharply our children will be ashamed
taking at last their vengeance for the horrors
remembering how in so strange a time
common integrity could look like courage
-from "Talk"
A poet is transcendent, and Yevtushenko, of blessed memory, is a poet.
How sharply our children will be ashamed
taking at last their vengeance for the horrors
remembering how in so strange a time
common integrity could look like courage
-from "Talk"
A poet is transcendent, and Yevtushenko, of blessed memory, is a poet.
January 20, 2016
This is an amazing book of poetry. These poems are from a time and place and yet they are timeless and reach far and wide because they map a familiar terrain of the soul. These lines were composed in the repressive communist Russia I grew up hearing about yet they are the visions and observations of a young man whose spirit couldn't be contained by borders or authority.
October 27, 2021
I took a very long break from starting this boo to finishing it but this collection of translated poetry by Soviet poet Yevtushenko is incredible, evocative, and touching. Translated as accurately as possible while maintaining the original sense of rhythm, it is hard to say how much this translation carries the spirit of the original text but based on these translations, Yevtushenko was a treasure.
Yevtushenko's ability to conjure up time and place with a nostalgic familiarity is the most striking weapon in his arsenal and is apparent in near enough all of the poetry in this collection. Throughout childhood reminiscences and revisitation, we see an image of the author's life through a familial and personal lens that seems filled with both aged wisdom and youthful simplicity. Starting with the author's most famous poem, the autobiographical Zima Junction, which runs for the first fifty pages of this 91-page book, it is the perfect scene-setter for Yevtushenko's aforementioned style as it is probably the most extreme example of it within the entire text.
The rest of the collection consists of similar nostalgic poems, albeit of less length, and it is those that recontextualized the first epic poem as the logical extremity of the author's verse and it is these follow-up poems that I found myself being completely captivated by, admittedly Zima Junction was perhaps a little too long for somebody like me, relatively new to poetry, to enjoy unquestionably. His poems all rely on memory, yet some strike upon a more profound chord as he deals with the political issues of the time and talks from his lived experience of tragedy, this staged side-by-side with verse about the joys of riding a bicycle; with both being conjured just as convincingly as the other. While many poems in the collection are touching, none seem more imbued with greater purpose than Babiy Yar, a protest poem about growing anti-Semitic rhetoric in the Soviet Union. I will end this review, which I hope indicates high recommendation with the closing lines of Babiy Yar.
No Jewish blood runs among my blood,
but I am as bitterly and hardly hated
by every anti-semite
as if I were a Jew. By this
I am a Russian
Yevtushenko's ability to conjure up time and place with a nostalgic familiarity is the most striking weapon in his arsenal and is apparent in near enough all of the poetry in this collection. Throughout childhood reminiscences and revisitation, we see an image of the author's life through a familial and personal lens that seems filled with both aged wisdom and youthful simplicity. Starting with the author's most famous poem, the autobiographical Zima Junction, which runs for the first fifty pages of this 91-page book, it is the perfect scene-setter for Yevtushenko's aforementioned style as it is probably the most extreme example of it within the entire text.
The rest of the collection consists of similar nostalgic poems, albeit of less length, and it is those that recontextualized the first epic poem as the logical extremity of the author's verse and it is these follow-up poems that I found myself being completely captivated by, admittedly Zima Junction was perhaps a little too long for somebody like me, relatively new to poetry, to enjoy unquestionably. His poems all rely on memory, yet some strike upon a more profound chord as he deals with the political issues of the time and talks from his lived experience of tragedy, this staged side-by-side with verse about the joys of riding a bicycle; with both being conjured just as convincingly as the other. While many poems in the collection are touching, none seem more imbued with greater purpose than Babiy Yar, a protest poem about growing anti-Semitic rhetoric in the Soviet Union. I will end this review, which I hope indicates high recommendation with the closing lines of Babiy Yar.
No Jewish blood runs among my blood,
but I am as bitterly and hardly hated
by every anti-semite
as if I were a Jew. By this
I am a Russian
December 13, 2020
And sad, and free, and on, and on...
I feel like hiraeth governs a lot of people's lives, and a strong sense of longing to belong, and to come back to a place where one once belonged, is central to the human condition. Yevtushenko articulates this very clearly in Zima Junction, which pulls at your heartstrings and makes you long along with him.
Homecoming is always bittersweet - too many bad plays and poems and movies and books have been written with it in mind; Zima Junction is the exception. You have returned but you are not entirely you as you were when you lived there. People love you, and want to hear about your life further away, but as you tell them - proud to have gone - you also are somewhat downhearted that you're no longer solely the product of your hometown, but other experiences which make you an oddity for them. The last two lines of Zima Junction really got me. His home town addresses him, saying essentially, "Have me in mind, I shall be watching. You can return to me. Now go."
The last line is then:
I went, and I am still going.
His poems are concerned with nature, and the simple agriculture pursuits of life under the Soviet Union - mushroom picking (which, from looking into Chikatilo, I found was a very common pass time!), berry picking, harvest, and the slow transition from peasantry to urban life, and the value shift that comes from it.
June 27, 2022
Great poet of Soviet Russia who was fortunate enough to emerge in the last years of Stalin who had suppressed literature. He saw old truths in a fresh new way. Born in the remote town of Zima on the trans-Siberian railway, his mixture of Ukrainian and Tartar blood made him the ideal voice of the peasants and revolution. His famous poem "Zima Junction/Station" recalls his Siberian boyhood and return to his hometown after years spent in Moscow. One of the great themes of this epic poem is seeing good in bad situations which reflects the fact that he was made to dance and sing during the war as a boy. Other powerful themes explored are: maturity, objective change, self-discovery, the role of memory, passing of time, the impact of anxiety and hardship, exile, distance and war, the need for fortitude and patriotism, the importance of family(namely his grandfather and uncles), the reality of love, violence and class, the quest for home and truth and the contrasts of hope and worries, faith and unbelief, sleeping/dreaming and awakening/sleeplessness. This is a short but sweet volume giving a quick insight into the man as a personal and social poet, sometimes all in the same poem.
October 6, 2021
It's hard to know here whether I didn't click with the poems themselves or the translation, which was apparently a collaboration between a poet who knew no Russian and a student of Russian who was not a poet, a team composition that doesn't inspire in me much trust. I also admit to not being immediately familiar with the political and social climate these poems were being written into (which wasn't helped by the fact that the original years each poem were written wasn't printed alongside the text of the poems but all clustered into the end) and so I felt missing much valuable context. However I found the writing itself rarely grabbed me, which again may be the translation. I also had some misgivings about what he's saying in some passages. I did quite like the poem People, which had it opened the collection rather than closing it, might have given me more excitement from the start. Ah well, maybe I'll revisit with better eyes another day.
August 29, 2025
Short book at ~100 pages. Half of it is one poem named Zima Junction, which he wrote in his early twenties about his Siberian hometown. It was pretty good but I found the later ones better, especially Babiy Yar (his most famous poem) and the ones about love (Waiting, Waking, Colours).
Favorite quotes:
"If the way I see you now is not the way / in which we saw you once, if in you / what I see now is new / it was by self-discovery I found it." (Zima Junction)
"Count happiness connatural to the mind / more than truth is, and yet / no happiness to exist without it" (Zima Junction)
"When your face / appeared over my crumpled life / at first I understood / only the poverty of what I have. / Then its particular light / on woods, on rivers, on the sea, / became my beginning in the coloured world / in which I had not yet had my beginning." (Colours)
Favorite quotes:
"If the way I see you now is not the way / in which we saw you once, if in you / what I see now is new / it was by self-discovery I found it." (Zima Junction)
"Count happiness connatural to the mind / more than truth is, and yet / no happiness to exist without it" (Zima Junction)
"When your face / appeared over my crumpled life / at first I understood / only the poverty of what I have. / Then its particular light / on woods, on rivers, on the sea, / became my beginning in the coloured world / in which I had not yet had my beginning." (Colours)
February 7, 2020
A controversial figure both in his native Russia and abroad (Michael Weiss notably describe his politics as “a complicated mixture of bravery, populism, and vulgar accommodation with dictatorship”). This Penguin Modern European Poets edition from 1962, drawing on much of Yevtusenko’s early work (including his long autobiographical poem ‘Zima Junction’) is helpful in reminding the reader of the poetry - which, when the volume was first published, was only just beginning to be encroached on by the shadow of reputation.
March 28, 2020
I've always been impressed by the life in Yevtushenko'a poems. The life he led in the Soviet Union as a young man shines through in every poem. There is a mass of history referred to, a history worth investigating and paying attention to.
July 18, 2020
Someone gave me this a long time ago and I couldn't fall into it. But as I'm going through my poetry shelves, trying to free some space, I realize I want to hang on to it perhaps a little longer. While I didn't like everything I did like some pieces and lines well enough.
March 8, 2025
My favorites here were waking and later Zima junction is another beast but I enjoyed it immensely as well. I appreciated how much I needed to think about all the complicated context that went into these poems and is important for understanding them.
October 6, 2017
First read early 1970s...
December 16, 2019
A slim collection of poems that range across a surprising spectrum from pastoral to subversive.
March 18, 2020
Deep, beautiful, touching poetry.
September 29, 2022
Beautiful poetry. Powerful storytelling.
January 10, 2023
4.5
Really enjoyed this selection. 'Colours' was gorgeous.
Really enjoyed this selection. 'Colours' was gorgeous.
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