Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko (born 1933), the most popular of contemporary Russian poets, was the leading literary spokesman for the generation of Russians who grew to maturity after Stalin's death in 1953.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko was born on July 18, 1933, in Zima, Siberia, into a peasant family of mixed Ukrainian, Russian, and Tatar stock. His father, a geologist, and his mother, a geologist and singer, were divorced in the early 1940s, and Yevgeny spent his early childhood in Moscow with his mother and sister, Yelena.

During World War II Yevtushenko was evacuated to Zima, returning to Moscow in 1944. Expelled from school on a false charge, he ran away to Kazakhstan; he joined his father on geological expeditions there and to the Altai, later returning to Moscow. As a youth, Yevtushenko was an athlete; his favorite sports were cycling, table tennis, and soccer.

Early Poems

Yevtushenko published his first poem in 1949 in a Soviet...