RIP Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1932-2017

Over the weekend, the Guardian reported on the death of Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. He was 84. Yevtushenko was widely popular in Russia, and as the Guardian reminds us: "At the height of his fame, Yevtushenko read his works in packed soccer stadiums and arenas, including to a crowd of 200,000 in 1991, during a failed coup attempt in Russia." But Yevtushenko might be best known for his poem "Babi Yar," which memorialized the site where 34,000 Jews were murdered during the Second World War. More, from the top:

The acclaimed Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose work focused on war atrocities and denounced antisemitism and tyrannical dictators, has died. He was 84.

Ginny Hensley, a spokeswoman for Hillcrest Medical Center in the eastern Oklahoma city of Tulsa, confirmed Yevtushenko’s death. Roger Blais, provost at the University of Tulsa, where Yevtushenko was a longtime faculty member, said he was told Yevtushenko died on Saturday morning.

“He died a few minutes ago surrounded by relatives and close friends,” his widow, Maria Novikova, was quoted as saying by the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti. She said he died peacefully in his sleep of heart failure.

Yevtushenko gained notoriety in the former Soviet Union while in his 20s, with poetry denouncing Joseph Stalin. He gained international acclaim as a young revolutionary with Babi Yar, an unflinching 1961 poem that told of the slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews by the Nazis and denounced the antisemitism that had spread throughout the Soviet Union.

Until Babi Yar was published, the history of the massacre was shrouded in the fog of the cold war.

“I don’t call it political poetry,” Yevtushenko, who had been splitting his time between Oklahoma and Moscow, said during a 2007 interview with the Associated Press at his home in Tulsa. “I call it human rights poetry; the poetry which defends human conscience as the greatest spiritual value.”

Continue on at the Guardian.