SOURCE: "Well Versed," in Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette, March 28, 1996, p. 1D.

In the following essay, Burnside provides an overview of Yevtushenko's literary career in comparison to contemporary and past writers and themes.

When a friend took Yevgeny Yevtushenko to Babi Yar, the site near Kiev where the Nazis massacred more than 30,000 Jews in two days, he felt enraged. Not only at the thought of what the Nazis had done, but also at how the site stood barren, as if nothing had ever happened there.

Moved by what he saw as a "dumpy ravine" holding "so many bones of innocent people," the Soviet poet picked up a pen and wrote his own monument ["Babi Yar"], a response to an act that led him to both reproach anti-Semites and declare his Russian ancestry.

"It's a miracle how quickly I wrote it," he said during a telephone interview from Queens College...