Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Artist-in-Residence for the School of Music

Nature of the Residency: On Thursday, Friday and Saturday, October 25-27, 2007, the Celebrated Russian Poet Yevgeny Yetvushenko visited the School of Music to collaborate with the University of Maryland Symphony Orchestra in a weekend of events placing focus on the Holocaust. The residency featured a scholarly, looking at Yevtushenko's 1961 poem Babi Yar, at the Holocaust in the Ukraine, and at Holocaust commemoration in the Soviet Era. Mr. Yevtushenko spoke on how Babi Yar was born, both as a poem and as a symphonic composition.

Public Presentation: On Friday, October 26, 2007, the University of Maryland Symphony Orchestra and Men of the UM Choirs performed Dmitri Shostakovich's 13th Symphony. This work is a setting of Yevtushenko's, Babi Yar; the poem and symphonic work together constitute a strong denunciation of Russian and Nazi anti-Semitism. As an integral part of this unique performance, Mr. Yevtushenko narrated his poem.

Biographical Information: Yevgeny Yetvushenko, the best-know member of the post-Stalin generation of Russian Poets, was born in Irkutsk (a region within Siberia) in 1933, a descendent of Ukrainians exiled to Siberia. In 1944 at the end of World War II his family relocated to Moscow, where he studied at the Gorky Institute of Literature from 1951 to 1954. Yevtushenko's first important narrative poem Stantsyia Zima (Zima Junction) was published in 1956. In 1961 Yevtushenko published Babi Yar, denouncing the Nazi massacre of the Jewish population of Kiev in 1941, the Soviet concealment of that massacre, as well as a widespread Soviet anti-Semitism. Babi Yar ultimately became Yevtushenko's best known poem. Also in 1961, Yevtushenko published Nasledniki Stalina (The Heirs of Stalin) addressing the Soviet government and urging them to put to rest the legacy of Stalin. During the 1960s, in the wake of his outspoken promotion of artistic freedom and support for human rights and his strong support for Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Yevtushenko lost his right to travel outside the Soviet Union. In the immediate post Soviet era, he was a strong supporter of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Yevtushenko now lives in the United States and teaches poetry and European cinema at Queens College in New York and the University of Tulsa.

If you have questions, contact the UM School of Music.