Yevtushenko Selected Poems by Milner-Gulland & Levi: book review

Yevtushenko Selected Poems by Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi: book review

Yevtushenko Selected Poems (1962) is a collection of translated verse by Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko – not necessarily the best of his large output, but of the editors’ favourites. Nor does the selection cover the author’s long and prolific output of a life time of work, but instead focuses only on a ten-year period of his early poems.

Born in 1933 in remote Zima Junction, Siberia, of mixed Ukrainian, Russian, and Tartar heritage, Yevtushenko commenced writing poetry at a young age. In 1957 he was expelled from the Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow for “individualism” and was prevented from traveling abroad, although eventually he was an extensive traveler – visiting France, Georgia, Africa, America, Cuba, and Great Britain.

He was one of the best known poets in 1950s/1960s Soviet Union, and in 1962 Yevtushenko was featured on the cover of Time magazine. He is now known as a novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, lecturer, actor, editor, film director, and (since 1987) honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Critics differ on the stature of Yevtushenko in the literature world, with Tina Tupikina Glaessner (1967) referring to him as “one of the greatest poets of the modern age” and Tomas Venclova (1991) asserting that few in the Russian literary community “consider his work worthy of serious study."

This brief selection includes the autobiographical poem “Zima Junction,” and “Babiy Yar” for which he is most famous, but it also includes light and humorous verses, such as “On a Bicycle” and “Encounter” – in which he writes of seeing Ernest Hemingway (one of his favourite authors) in the Copenhagen airport. It also depicts Yevtushenko’s turn of phrase that evokes emotion in their simplicity and honesty – direct, uncomplicated, and unpretentious. Many lines are distinctly memorable – such as “No people are uninteresting” and “It would be far more terrible to mistake a friend than to mistake an enemy.”

The selection shows the intensely personal, the controversial, the serious, and the light-hearted sides of his work that extends chronologically from 1952 to 1961. It leaves the reader wanting more.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).