Yevgeny Yevtushenko Quotes (17 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 17 quotes2 likes

Famous Yevgeny Yevtushenko Quotes

“When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.”

“Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

The Observer (15 December 1991).

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

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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.”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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.

“In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable.”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

New York Times (2 February 1986).

“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.”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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

Yevgeny Yevtushenko Quotes

“I was overjoyed when I read Yevtushenko's "Babi Yar"; the poem astounded me. It astounded thousands of people…People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence.”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Solomon Volkov (ed.), Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (New York: Limelight, 2006) pp. 158-9.
Criticism

“[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.”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

New York Times (2 February 1986).

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

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

"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.”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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

“I love sport because I love life, and sport is one of the basic joys of life”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Sports Illustrated (19 December 1966)

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

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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

“He has a clear style and has had much courage – as in his poem "Babi Yar", a memorial to the Jews murdered by the Nazis. But he is no more than a talented poetaster – which is quite obvious to all but Western journalists – and it would be foolish to consider him as more than a skilful publicist.”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Martin Seymour-Smith, Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975) vol. 4, pp. 240-1.
Criticism

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

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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.”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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!”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

"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.”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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