Yevgeny Yevtushenko quotes
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Birthdate: 18. July 1932
Date of death: 1. April 2017
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.
Quotes Yevgeny Yevtushenko
„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.
„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.
„In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable.“
New York Times (2 February 1986).
„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.“
Solomon Volkov (ed.), Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (New York: Limelight, 2006) pp. 158-9.
Criticism
„I love sport because I love life, and sport is one of the basic joys of life“
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.“
"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.“
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.“
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.
„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 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.
