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

И если умирает человек,
с ним умирает первый его снег,
и первый поцелуй, и первый бой...

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.

Politics had much to do with tastes in poetry. Russian poets, especially if they were politically outspoken, were garnering huge followings among college students in the West. Yevgeny Yevtushenko was having a big year in 1968, both in political controversy at home and in artistic recognition abroad. Born in 1933, he belonged to a new school of Russian lyric poetry. Critics frequently suggested that others from the new school, such as Boris Pasternak’s protégé Andrey Voznesensky, also born in 1933, were better poets. But in the 1960s Yevtushenko was the most famous working Russian poet in the world. In 1962 he published four poems highly critical of the Soviet Union, including “Babi Yar,” about a massacre of Jews unsuccessfully covered up by the Soviets.