Yevgeny Yevtushenko Quotes

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko was a Soviet and Russian poet. He was also a novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, publisher, actor, editor and director of several films. Wikipedia  

✵ 18. July 1932 – 1. April 2017
Yevgeny Yevtushenko photo
Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 17   quotes 2   likes

Famous Yevgeny Yevtushenko Quotes

“A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote.”

Andrew R. MacAndrew (trans.) A Precocious Autobiography (1963; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) p. 7.

“In any man who dies there dies with him,
his first snow and kiss and fight.”

И если умирает человек,
с ним умирает первый его снег,
и первый поцелуй, и первый бой...
"People" (1961), line 12; Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi (trans.) Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2008) p. 85.

“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.”

"Babiy Yar" (1961), line 58; Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi (trans.) Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2008) pp. 83-4.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko Quotes

“The hell with it. Who never knew
the price of happiness will not be happy.”

"Lies" (1952), line 11; Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi (trans.) Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2008) p. 52.

“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 Companion" (1954), line 45; Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi (trans.) Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2008) p. 58.

“No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.”

"People" (1961), line 1; Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi (trans.) Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2008) p. 85.

“Time has a way of demonstrating
The most stubborn are the most intelligent.”

A Career http://books.google.com/books?id=qFSwAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Time+has+a+way+of+demonstrating+The+most+stubborn+are+the+most+intelligent%22&pg=PA63#v=onepage

“My dear friend Yevtushenko has, I claim, an ego that can crack crystal at a distance of twenty feet.”

John Cheever, in George Plimpton (ed.) Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Fifth Series (New York: Penguin, 1981) p. 121.
Criticism

“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!”

"Mysteries" (1960), st. 10; Dimitri Obolensky (ed.) The Heritage of Russian Verse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976) p. 452.

“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.”

"Babiy Yar" (1961), line 1; Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi (trans.) Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2008) p. 82.

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