Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko in Spartanburg, SC on April 19. Free admission and open to the public.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko will be at Wofford College, Spartanburg, SC on April 19, 2007. Open to the public with free admission. 7:30 pm Leonard Auditorium. 

Wofford College website: wofford.edu. Map and directions may be found here. 

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko. In the West he is most famous for his dissident work that contains scathing attacks on the Soviet bureaucracy and the legacy of Stalin, but he is also a writer of lyrical and romantic poetry.

His first important poem was "Zima Junction," published in 1956. Yevtushenko was one of the politically active authors during the Khrushchev Thaw. In 1961 he produced the poem "Babi Yar," in which he attacked Soviet indifference to the Nazi massacre of the Jews of Kiev in September 1941. The poem was widely circulated in samizdat and was set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Thirteenth Symphony, but was published in the state-controlled Soviet press only in 1984.

In the same year that he released "Babi Yar", he also published "The Heirs of Stalin," claiming that the legacy of Stalinism still dominated the country. Published originally in Pravda, the poem was only republished a quarter of a century later, under the more liberal leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev.

In the 1970s, Yevtushenko was closely associated with dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In the post-Soviet era, Yevtushenko has been active promoting the works of former dissident poets, environmental causes, and the memory of victims of the Soviet Gulags. Yevtushenko now teaches Russian and European poetry and film at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma and at Queens College of the City University of New York.

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