SOURCE: Pursglove, Michael. “Yevtushenko's Stantsiya Zima: A Reassessment.” New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 2 (1988): 113-27.

In the following essay, Pursglove provides a close textual analysis of Stantsiya Zima, which he classifies as a landmark in Soviet Literature.

Nineteen eighty-six saw the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of one of the landmarks of Soviet literature, Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Stantsiya Zima. At the time of its appearance in the journal Oktyabr' in October 1956, its twenty-three-year-old author was virtually unknown. This heavily autobiographical poema catapulted him to fame. Its narrator was seen as the representative of a generation which had grown up under Stalinism and which now, amid the reverberations of Khruschev's secret speech denouncing Stalin's ‘cult of personality’ in February 1956, was reassessing all the values it had hitherto accepted unquestioningly. The poem's themes provoked widespread controversy at the time and have remained at the centre of critical attention ever since.¹ Far less attention...