Yevgeny Yevtushenko has died

[ThelmaLou]

Not a household name today, but he was at one time.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, an internationally acclaimed poet with the charisma of an actor and the instincts of a politician whose defiant verse inspired a generation of young Russians in their fight against Stalinism during the Cold War, died on Saturday in Tulsa, Okla., where he had been teaching for many years. He was 83.
…

Mr. Yevtushenko’s poems of protest, often declaimed with sweeping gestures to thousands of excited admirers in public squares, sports stadiums and lecture halls, captured the tangled emotions of Russia’s young — hope, fear, anger and euphoric anticipation — as the country struggled to free itself from repression during the tense, confused years after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953. In 1961 alone Mr. Yevtushenko gave 250 poetry readings…

Source

In this passage, the New York Times excerpts some lines from one of his poems. (My italics.)

“Stalin’s Heirs” opens with a description of Stalin’s body being borne in his coffin out of the Red Square mausoleum to a grave near the Kremlin wall.

Sullenly clenching
His embalmed fists,
He peered through a crack,
Just pretending to be dead.
He wanted to remember all those
Who carried him out.

Mr. Yevtushenko went on:

*I turn to our government with a plea:
To double,
And triple the guard at the grave site
So Stalin does not rise again,
And with Stalin, the past.
*
And later, the main point of the poem:

We removed
Him
From the mausoleum.
But how do we remove Stalin
From Stalin’s heirs?
…

How indeed do we keep the past from repeating itself?

This is a long article, but a really great one about him.

пусть он покоится с миром*
Courtesy of Google Translate. Apologies if it’s not correct.

[Evan_Drake]

The world has had a loss.

[Bullitt]

Thank you for posting this. The world has lost a great person. From the NY Times,

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, an internationally acclaimed poet with the charisma of an actor and the instincts of a politician whose defiant verse inspired a generation of young Russians in their fight against Stalinism during the Cold War, died on Saturday in Tulsa, Okla., where he had been teaching for many years. He was 83.

ETA: Oh yeah, ThelmaLou already included that quote.

[gkster]

Conversation With An American Writer - Conversation With An American Writer...

Oh, our descendants will burn with bitter shame
to remember, when punishing vile acts,
that most peculiar time, when
plain honesty was labeled ‘courage’.

[ThelmaLou]

Timely, eh?

[Evan_Drake]

At the risk of injuring solipsism, it is possible Americans are today under less threat than Russians under Stalin, and Russians too.
It would be insulting to millions of dead Zeks to suggest otherwise.

[JRDelirious]

But the threat merely sleeps or is torpid, it is not truly dead yet - it may never be - and he knew it.

[Evan_Drake]

All things may return, the world in cycles, as our ancestors believed; but at present the bulk of American citizens are not sitting on darkened stairways clutching each other, waiting to be taken to gulag camps.
And people like Y. would laugh at if you suggested now is the same as the Yezhovchina.

[ThelmaLou]

@Evan_Drake

At the risk of injuring solipsism, it is possible Americans are today under less threat than Russians under Stalin, and Russians too.
It would be insulting to millions of dead Zeks to suggest otherwise.

Your point is well made. Not saying the political situations are the same, just that those words are timely.