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    A Study Guide for Yevgeny Yevtushenko's "Babii Yar"
    A Study Guide for Yevgeny Yevtushenko's "Babii Yar"
    A Study Guide for Yevgeny Yevtushenko's "Babii Yar"
    Ebook36 pages24 minutes

    A Study Guide for Yevgeny Yevtushenko's "Babii Yar"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Yevgeny Yevtushenko's "Babii Yar," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 2, 2016
    ISBN9781535819039
    A Study Guide for Yevgeny Yevtushenko's "Babii Yar"

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      A Study Guide for Yevgeny Yevtushenko's "Babii Yar" - Gale

      08

      Babii Yar

      Yevgeny Yevtushenko

      1961

      Introduction

      Yevgeny Yevtushenko composed Babii Yar in September 1961. The first public reading of the poem took place at Oktober Hall in Kiev, Ukraine, the following month. The opening lines of Babii Yar are a lament that there is no public monument to remind visitors that more than 33,700 Kiev Jews were massacred at Babi Yar in September 1941. In his poem, Yevtushenko uses the less common Russian spelling for Babii Yar; however, the more common and customary spelling for the location itself is Babi Yar, which is how the massacre there is most often referenced. Much of Yevtushenko's focus throughout Babii Yar is then directed toward the anti-Semitism that was so prevalent in the Soviet Union after the end of World War II. To illustrate the damage caused by anti-Semitism, he explores the long history of anti-Semitism from the ancient Greeks to the Holocaust.

      Babii Yar was first published in Literaturnaya Gazeta, a Soviet magazine, in 1961. After the poem's publication, Dmitri Shostakovich telephoned Yevtushenko and asked if he could set the poem to music. The result is Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13, in which, during the first movement, a male chorus sings Yevtushenko's poem. The Soviet Communist government would not permit Shostakovich's symphony to be performed, however, unless Yevtushenko changed the words to focus on the Ukrainian and Russian victims who were also killed at Babi Yar rather than on the Jewish victims. Yevtushenko made the changes, as requested; after the fall of Communism, the original text was reinserted in performances outside of Russia. It is the original text that appears in anthologies of Yevtushenko's poetry, such as Early Poems (1966), which was published in the United Kingdom, and The Collected Poems (1992), published in the United States. The former was the first printing of Babii Yar in one of Yevtushenko's books. Babii Yar is also included in Holocaust Poetry (1995), compiled by Hilda Schiff.

      Author Biography

      Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko was born at a small settlement, Stantzia Zima (Winter Station), along the Trans-Siberian Railway, on July 18, 1933. Yevtushenko's father, Gangus, was a geologist; he was

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