Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Controversial Russian poet and film director.
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In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable.
Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?
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.
Over Babiy Yar
there are no memorials.
The steep hillside like a rough inscription.
I am frightened.
Today I am as old as the Jewish race.
No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.
Give me a mystery – just a plain and simple one – a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little, barefoot mystery: give me a mystery – just one!
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.
The hell with it. Who never knew
the price of happiness will not be happy.
[I] do not like poems that resemble hay compressed into a geometrically perfect cube. I like it when the hay, unkempt, uncombed, with dry berries mixed in it, thrown together gaily and freely, bounces along atop some truck—and more, if there are some lovely and healthy lasses atop the hay—and better yet if the branches catch at the hay, and some of it tumbles to the road.
In any man who dies there dies with him,
his first snow and kiss and fight.
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote.
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