Encyclopedia of Russian History

(d. 1585), Cossack chieftain, leader of an expedition that laid the basis for Russia’s annexation of Siberia.

Little is known about Yermak’s early biography, and many of the details of his Siberian cam1710

YESENIN, SERGEI ALEXANDROVICH

(1895-1925), popular poet of the Soviet period, known for his evocations of the Russian countryside and the Soviet demimonde.

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

YEVTUSHENKO, YEVGENY ALEXANDROVICH

Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin (also spelled Es-enin) born in 1895 in Konstantinovo, a farm village in the Riazan province, where he attended school. He came to prominence in Petrograd in 1915 as part of a group of “Peasant Poets.” His early work was noted for its elegiac portrayal of rural life and religious themes.

Yesenin was an ambivalent supporter of the October Revolution and the Soviet state. He tried to write on revolutionary themes, but his explorations of intimate relationships, urban street life, and the disappearance of old rural Russia were more popular. Yesenin was also known for his charisma, heavy drinking, and scandalous behavior. He was married three times, once to the American dancer Isadora Duncan. Yesenin committed suicide in December 1925, shortly after writing his final poem, “Good-bye, My Friend, Good-bye,” in his own blood.

Yesenin’s popularity continued after his death, as readers were drawn to his unconventional lifestyle and introspective poetry. This concerned the Communist leadership, who believed that Yesenin had both reflected and encouraged a growing sense of disaffection and “hooliganism” among Soviet youth. Numerous attacks on “Yeseninism” appeared in the Soviet press in 1926 and 1927. He was also criticized by the so-called proletarian writers for his anti-urban bias and individualism. As a result, official policy toward Yesenin’s works was ambivalent, and no new editions of his work were published between 1927 and 1948.

There was increased interest in Yesenin’s work in the 1960s and 1970s. His influence was evident on the rising generation of bard-singers, such as Vladimir Vysotsky, and also on the emerging “Village Prose” movement. One of Yesenin’s illegitimate sons, Alexander Volpin-Yesenin, was an early dissident and human rights advocate. Major collections of Esenin’s work include Radunitsa (1916), The Hooligan’s Confession (1921), and Selected Works (1922).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McVay, Gordon. (1976). Esenin: A Life. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis. Slonim, Marc. (1977). Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems, 1917-1977, 2nd rev. ed. London and New York: Oxford University Press.

BRIAN KASSOF

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

YEVTUSHENKO, YEVGENY ALEXANDROVICH

(b. 1932), Russian poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, photographer, film actor; member of Congress of People’s Deputies, 1989-1991.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko was brought up in Siberia by his mother; when she moved with him to Moscow in 1944 she registered his date of birth as 1933. He published his first poem in 1949 and his first book in 1952. Yevtushenko studied at the Union of Writers’ training school, the Gorky Literary Institute, Moscow, in the early 1950s. He emerged after 1956 as one of the leading lights of the Thaw under Nikita Khrushchev, in many ways epitomizing its values and aspirations, and has remained a public figure ever since. His personal lyrics expressed a new and liberating sense of passionate individuality, and his poems on public themes called for and declared a fresh commitment to revolutionary idealism, in the spirit of Mayakovsky. His attitudes were underpinned by a frequently asserted commitment to the supremacy of Russia as a fountainhead of positive human values, notwithstanding Russia’s own dark history and the blandishments of Western civilization.

Yevtushenko declaimed his poetry in a histrionic manner that has reminded some Americans of U.S. fundamentalist preachers. In the early 1960s Yevtushenko became hugely popular in Russia, and his recitals (often in the company of his then wife Bella Akhmadulina, Andrei Voznesensky, and Bulat Okudzhava) attracted large crowds to the stadiums in which they were characteristically held. Yev-tushenko’s national and international reputation was established by two poems in particular, “Baby Yar” (published September 1961) and “The Heirs of Stalin” (published in Pravda, October 1962), which call respectively for unrelenting vigilance against anti-Semitism and the recurrence of Stalinism in Russia.