PENGUIN CLASSICS

YEVTUSHENKO: SELECTED POEMS

YEVGENY ALEKSANDROVICH YEVTUSHENKO was born in 1933 at Zima, Siberia, and grew up there and in Moscow. He took his mother’s surname, of Ukrainian origin; his father’s was Gangnus (he was an engineer and intellectual of Latvian descent). His maternal grandfather was a Red Army general, of peasant origin; both his grandfathers fell victim to Stalin’s purges.

As a teenager Yevtushenko went on geological expeditions, was a keen athlete and a precocious poet. His first published volume (1952) got him into the Moscow Literary Institute – from which he was subsequendy expelled for insubordination. After Stalin’s death (1953) he emerged as the most prominent of the (mostly) young writers who publicly challenged the rigidity of Soviet life and culture in the atmosphere of the ‘Thaw’; simultaneously they strove to reintroduce authentic feeling and intimacy to literature. At large public poetry readings Yevtushenko was a notable performer, a skill also used to good effect in visits by invitation to other countries – where his impact was considerable – from 1960. All these themes are chronicled in his Precocious Autobiography (1962), and reflected in much of his poetry (notably the narrative ‘Zima Junction’, 1956).

The year 1961 saw the publication in a journal of ‘Babiy Yar’, a meditation on anti-semitism that became his most famous short poem. The Soviet authorities veered between permissiveness and repression, taken aback by Yevtushenko’s role as ‘loyal oppositionalist’. However he continued to write, diversifying into prose (two novels and discursive memoirs), journalism, films – with acting roles in several – theatre, photography, and anthologizing Russian poetry. From 1988 to 1991 he represented Kharkov in parliament. He has received many public honours. Married four times, he has five sons. Since the end of the Soviet Union he has lived partly in Moscow, pardy in Tulsa (Oklahoma) teaching at the university there, and in New York.

PETER LEVI was a poet, Jesuit priest, archaeologist, travel-writer, biographer, scholar and prolific reviewer and critic. He was lecturer in Classics at Campion Hall, Oxford, and later at Christ Church. Born in 1931, at the age of seventeen he joined the society of Jesus in the novitiate, was ordained in 1964, and remained a Jesuit until he resigned the priesthood in 1977. Subsequently he married and spent a year as archaeological correspondent for The Times before returning to academic life, as a fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1984 to 1987.

Peter Levi received particular acclaim for The Light Garden of the Angel King (1984), an account of travels in Afghanistan. He published over twenty collections of poetry, including Collected Poems: 1955–1975 (1976). His many religious, critical and scholarly works include a translation of the second-century Greek traveller and geographer Pausanias’ Guide to Greece (1971), a ground-breaking version of The Psalms (1976) for Penguin Classics, and books on Greece, the Ancient World and travel. He edited The Penguin Book of English Christian Verse (1994) and wrote The Penguin History of Greek Literature (1985).

His final publication was the posthumous poetry collection Viriditas (2001). Peter Levi died in 2000.

ROBIN MILNER-GULLAND is Research Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Sussex, where he taught in the School of European Studies from 1962 to 2001. He has lectured and broadcast widely, including in Russia, and is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Society of Antiquaries. Among his publications are Soviet Russian Verse: An Anthology (1966), Russian Writing Today (with M. Dewhirst, 1977), An Introduction to Russian Art and Architecture (with J. E. Bowlt, 1980), Cultural Atlas of Russia (1989), The Russians (1997) and many translations (for example of Yevtushenko, Zabolotsky and Kharms).

Contents

Introduction

This book came into being by chance. It seems not long ago (albeit in another age) that, just beginning postgraduate work in a field of Russian studies, I was on a train from Oxford to London and found myself sitting opposite the brilliant but ill-fated scholar Alasdair Clayre. We got into conversation, and he told me about his friend, the poet Peter Levi, then training to become a Jesuit priest, who wanted to cooperate with a poetically aware Russianist to find out more about a young Soviet writer, Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Peter had come across him in an article in the periodical Soviet Survey, and was intrigued by excerpts in prose translation from a long narrative poem; he sensed he could make them come alive as English verse. We met, and I got hold of the full text of the poem; we tried working on various passages (with no particular thought of publication) and before too long had done the whole of what Peter decided to call ‘Zima Junction’ (Stantsiya Zima, literally ‘Station Winter’, the name of the Siberian setdement where Yevtushenko had been born in 1933).

Then I got to Moscow for a year, among the first to benefit from a postgraduate exchange that was a product of the Khrushchev ‘Thaw’, which itself had stoked Yevtushenko’s fame. One forgets how extraordinary that seemed, how closed off the Soviet Union up till then had been (only diplomats or journalists regularly got in or out of it – tourism was stricdy controlled and hugely expensive). At a Moscow University poetry reading I managed to pass a note to Yevtushenko – already famous as a public performer – so beginning a long friendship and creative collaboration; I was the first Englishman he had met. I got home to learn that Penguin Books were interested in the project. Peter and I tackled a number of shorter poems, all from the decade around ‘Zima Junction’ (1952–61), to produce this Penguin volume: two students translating a recent ex-student (Yevtushenko had been slung out of the Moscow Literary Institute for insubordination). So emerged this small book, costing at the time half-a-crown (now twelve and a half pence); the royalties, after a three-way split, came out at three farthings (less than half a decimal penny) each per copy. Appropriately, there soon seemed to be one on every student’s shelf: it outsold all other books of foreign poetry in translation, with the exception of E. V. Rieu’s Odyssey (which anyhow had been rendered into prose).