Yevtushenko, the soul of the thaw, has died

He was the poet who sang of man's simple dream to face the evils of bureaucracy and politics. The yearning for "something else" than the apparent perfection of Soviet life. His denunciation of anti-Semitism. For young people, against nationalist rhetoric.

Rome (AsiaNews) - On April 1, in the days when the winter snows melt, one of the greatest "prophets of the thaw", the poet and writer Yevgeny Yevtushenko passed away. His death comes as Russia tries to find a way to the "thaw" after yet another long political and cultural stagnation. The fame of this great poet goes back to the sixties, when uncertainties in Khrushchev’s post-Stalinist Soviet Union led people to organize evenings of poetry and literature in the Moscow Polytechnic Museum, of which Yevtushenko was one of the main leaders .

In 1952, at just 20 years old, he had become one of the youngest member of the Union of Writers of the USSR, after the publication of his first collection, explorers of the future. This echoed the revolutionary futurism of Mayakovsky, denouncing the evils of bureaucracy and imagining that while the leaders are concerned about his future, the simple man still manages to dream on his own. In his poetry, beyond social issues, there is the constant yearning for "something else" than the apparent perfection of Soviet life, as in the poem After each lesson, also cited by Luigi Giussani in his The Religious Sense "the good things in life / there are many: dates / flowers, theater ... the only thing missing / is what you want – what is missing, / is the essential thing."

In 1991, at the collapse of communism, the poet emigrated to the United States, teaching at the University of Oklahoma, visiting Russia from time to time. His fame, almost legendary as part of the movement towards Soviet dissent, aroused the most contradictory reactions. Always original and unpredictable even in his comments on the evolution of domestic politics by intellectual protest, he became a very public man of influence and power, and was a landmark in the years of Gorbachev’s perestroika. In 1961 he wrote the famous poem Babij Jar,  denouncing Soviet anti-Semitism which referred to the Nazi massacre of the Jewish population in the vicinity of Kiev, one of the largest massacres of the Holocaust, in which 33,771 people were killed. The Soviets hid the memory of that tragedy, revealing feelings not too dissimilar to those of the Nazis. Yevtushenko’s poem was a warning to many generations of Russians and others, with a similar effect to the Diary of Anna Frank. His friend and great composer Dmitrij Šostakovič put Yevtushenko’s poem to music in the famous Thirteenth Symphony.

Many commentators have noted that in recent times a consciousness of the past is failing in Russia, drowned out by nationalist rhetoric increasingly less attractive especially for young people. The history of the ancient greatness of Russia fails to warm the hearts, the memory of the now fading Soviet times even in adults, and very young have not even that of the tumultuous nineties, so far used by Putin and his associates as a bogey for a population in search stability and prosperity. Perhaps it is worth returning to the student poetry of Yevtushenko beloved by Don Giussani, to the simple and very human search for a truer meaning of life: "You are my young traveling companion. / I, your old friend. / I am assailed by thoughts of what will happen / to your brown hair. / And if I torment you with the disquieting search/  for something greater, something sublime, / I who was the first in many things I believed, / so that now you also can believe ... ".

• russia
• religious freedom
• evgeni Yevtushenko
• bureaucracy
• nationalism
• vladimir putin