Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko

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Yevgeny Yevtushenko (2009)

Evgeni Alexandrowitsch Evtuschenko ( Russian Евгений Александрович Евтушенко , scientific transliteration Evgenij Aleksandrovič Evtušenko ; born  July 18, 1932 in Nizhneudinsk or Sima , Soviet Union ; †  April 1, 2017 in Tulsa , was a Russian poet and writer from Oklahoma .

Live and act

The son of a geologist couple, Yevtushenko was born in Siberia and spent his early childhood with his grandmother in Sima. His father, Alexander Rudolfowitsch Gangnus , of German descent, composed and taught the boy his love for poetry at an early age. The grandfather Rudolf Gangnus was a mathematician .

In order to avoid reprisals because of the non-Slavic-sounding name, the grandmother made sure that Yevgeny received his mother's maiden name; in addition, the date of birth was officially changed to 1933 in order to enable a move to Moscow in 1944 .

Yevtushenko had to change middle school because of truancy and various insubordination and was eventually expelled from school at the age of fifteen due to a false accusation before graduating. He worked from the age of fourteen, first in a kolkhoz , then in a sawmill. In 1948 and 1950 he took part in his father's geological expeditions to Kazakhstan and the Altai and returned to Moscow to become a poet. In 1949 the magazine Sowjetsport printed his first poem. From then on he became a “newspaper poet”; The obligatory lines about Stalin were also regularly included in his works. His first volume of poetry, Kundschafter der Zukunft , published in 1952, received critical acclaim, but was not very successful with the public. Because of his publications, Yevtushenko was accepted into the Writers' Union and the Maxim Gorki Literature Institute , even without a school leaving certificate , where he used his student days to rethink his style and topics. In 1956, when he dared to praise the novel Man Does Not Live on Bread Alone (Не хлебом единым) by Vladimir Dudintsev , Yevtushenko was removed from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute.

After various publications in the 1950s, the breakthrough came with the audience in 1961 with the two poems Babi Yar (Бабий Яр), and Do you think the Russians want war? (Хотят ли русские войны?). Babi Yar appeared in the Literaturnaja Gazeta and was also set to music ( Shostakovich's 13th Symphony has the subtitle 'Babi Yar'). Yevtushenko was exposed to critical voices from the established Soviet cultural scene. Despite some repression - for a time he lived in Pechora in northern Russia  - he was very productive and received international attention; his works have appeared in 72 languages. Labels like "poet rebel", "cult figure of the 1960s", "political idol" or "politically unreliable" tried to characterize him.

Yevtushenko also devoted himself to prose from an early age. His first story Fourth Meshchanskaya Street (-етвертая Мещанская; a street in Moscow; from "мещанин", actually " petty bourgeois ", also used in the sense of " philistine ") was published in 1959 in the magazine Junost . His first novel Berryrich Regions (Ягодные места, in the Federal Republic under the title Where the berries ripen ) appeared in the early 1980s.

In September 1986, Yevtuschenko said on the television program Kennzeichen D ( ZDF ) on the question of the reunification of Germany : “I think that this great German people, from which such great philosophy, music and literature emerged, that they must be reunified in the future. But it takes time. It depends on the atmosphere, on the global atmosphere ”. A few weeks later, his statement was a topic at a meeting between Erich Honecker and Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow.

From 1989 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Yevtushenko was a member of the Supreme Soviet , having been elected by a large margin in a Kharkov constituency in the elections on May 14, 1989 .

The keystone novel Do not die before your time (Не умирай прежде смерти), published in 1993, showed his view of the change in the Soviet Union ( perestroika ). In 1998 an autobiographical work was published under the title Der Wolfspass (Волчий паспорт). Both books contain an (identical) chapter dedicated to the events of the August coup in Moscow in 1991 against Gorbachev. During the August coup, Yevtushenko was an eyewitness to the defense of the White House ; from the balcony he read a poem that was dedicated to the people demonstrating on the street.

Until 1991 Yevtushenko lived and worked in Moscow, later mainly in Tulsa (USA), where he died on April 1, 2017.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko was married four times: from 1955 with the poet Bella Achmadulina , from 1962 with Galina Sokol-Lukonina (a joint adoptive son), from 1978 with the British translator - including of Yevtushenko's works into English - Jan Butler (two sons together) and from 1986 until his death with Marija Novikowa (two sons).

Awards

In 1994 the asteroid (4234) Evtushenko was named after him. In addition to numerous awards in his own country, he was the first foreign poet to receive the prestigious American Walt Whitman Prize in 1999 . At American universities, he gave lectures from his textbook Anthology of Russian Poetry . Since 1987 he has been an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters . In Italy he was awarded the Premio d'Annunzio in 2008 . He received the State Prize of the Russian Federation in 2009.

Works

Published in German
  • Babij Yar , 1961, DNB 1031976043
  • The following happened to me ... Poems in Russian and German. Selected, introduced and translated from Russian by Franz Leschnitzer , Volk und Welt, Berlin 1962, DNB 451188195 .
  • Poems. Translated by Walter Fischer, Schönbrunn, Vienna 1963.
  • The following has happened to me. Poems 1963.
  • The chicken god. From d. Soot. by Rene Drommert. Printed in the period from January 18, 1963. Text see web link.
  • The chicken god: two love stories. From d. Soot. by Thomas Reschke, Verl. Kultur u. Progress, Berlin (GDR) 1966.
  • The third memory. Poems, Spectrum People and World, Berlin 1970.
  • Under the skin of the Statue of Liberty / The University of Kazan. Vers Dichtungen 1974, ISBN 3-455-03667-8 .
  • Poetry, prose, documents. Munich 1979, ISBN 3-485-00300-X .
  • Ягодные места , Moscow 1981.
    • Where the berries ripen. Roman, Vienna 1982, ISBN 3-552-03428-5 (Federal Republic of Germany edition)
    • Berry-rich areas Berlin (GDR) 1984 (GDR edition)
  • Ardabiola , Fantastic Novelle, Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin, GDR, 1983
  • Mother and the neutron bomb. (with Aljonna Möckel, Klaus Möckel, Pablo Picasso), Vienna 1984, ISBN 3-552-03626-1 .
  • The chicken god. 3 love stories. Vienna 1985, ISBN 3-552-03724-1 .
  • Fuku. Poem, Berlin 1987.
  • Selected poems. Munich 1991, ISBN 3-257-20061-7 .
  • Heart strike. Collection of poems, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-203-78765-2 .
  • Don't die before your time. Roman, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-423-12282-X .
  • The poems. A selection by the author. Munich 1997, ISBN 3-7951-1284-2 .
  • Der Wolfspass, adventure of a poet's life, autobiography (original title: Volčij pasport, translated by Thomas Reschke ), Volk und Welt, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-353-01173-0 : paperback edition: dtv 12947, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-423-12947 -6 .

Quotes

  • Ziolkowski put it well: "All of our knowledge in the past, present and future is nothing compared to what we will never know." That is not sad. That's nice. If there is the infinity of the unattainable, then knowledge also has hope of infinity. from: Berry-rich areas

Web links

Commons : Yevgeny Yevtushenko  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Legendary Russian poet Yevtushenko this in US. In: TASS . April 1, 2017, accessed April 1, 2017 .
  2. ↑ Kerstin Holm: Always a young rebel poet. On the death of Yevgeny Yevtushenko . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of April 3, 2017, p. 12.
  3. ↑ Manfred Wilke : The Honecker visit in Bonn 1987 , section: The wish of a Russian poet
  4. ^ Results for constituency 520 in the Kharkov newspaper Krasnoye snamja, May 16, 1989; scan
  5. ^ Yevgeny Yevtushenko obituary. The Guardian , April 2, 2017
  6. ↑ Minor Planet Circ. 23351
  7. ↑ Honorary Members: Yevgeny Yevtushenko. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 27, 2019 .
  8. ^ Poem written in Kiev about the persecution and extermination of the Jews; the motif was set to music by Dmitri Dmitrijewitsch Shostakovich in his 13th symphony (op. 113)
personal data
SURNAME Yevtushenko, Yevgeny Alexandrovich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Евтушенко, Евгений Александрович (Russian); Evtušenko, Evgenij Alexandrovič (scientific transliteration)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet or Russian poet and writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 18, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Nizhneudinsk or Sima , Soviet Union
DATE OF DEATH April 1, 2017
Place of death Tulsa , Oklahoma , United States