Russian Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko Speaks at Elliot School

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, an internationally known Russian poet, was on campus last night for a poetry recitation and a question and answer period with students Thomas Keegan, Jennifer Hopkins and Michael Abts. Described as “a Russian mixture of Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan,” Yevtushenko garnered fame as a revolutionary when his poetry stood up and criticized the Soviet silence about the Holocaust and widespread anti-Semitic attitudes in the USSR.

In a sold out show at the Elliot School, Yevtushenko electrified the audience with personal stories at his only public appearance during his Washington, D.C., visit. Starting with an apology for his “Cold War English,” Yevtushenko was both charming and exceptionally animated, rolling his R's and pausing his recitation to ask the audience: “Did you get my image?”

Friends with the like of Carl Sandberg, John Steinbeck, Leonard Bernstein and Pablo Neruda, Yevtushenko has a particularly global attitude that comes across in his poetry.

“I would like to be born in every single country, have a passport for them all to throw all foreign offices into panic, be every fish in every ocean and every dog in the streets of the world!” he exclaimed last night, in the opening lines of his poem “I Would Like.”

In a slideshow playing on the screen as guests entered was a picture of Yevtushenko with Nixon, whom he warmly addressed as, “The not yet Watergated Nixon” when describing their interaction at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959.

His first visit to the United States was in 1961. Last night in describing his experiences in the United States during the Cold War, he cited a time when a few individuals attacked him during a poetry recitation and broke two ribs. Despite the incident he claimed that most Americans were gracious and identified very much with his revolutionary poetry. His American poet friends, he said, taught him the “feeling of freedom.”

In 1968, Mr. Yevtushenko again spoke out against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and during the perestroika years, he became known for his opposition to the Soviet war in Afghanistan. He has been awarded Russia’s “Defender of Freedom” medal.