Yevgeny Yevtushenko (b. 1933). Born in Siberia near Lake Baikal, Yevtushenko is Russia's best-known living poet, attracting huge stadium audiences (30,000 at one reading). He has also written essays and toured the world as a speaker, currently spending half of the year teaching at Tulsa University in Oklahoma.
His most recent work is a novel, Don't Die Before You're Dead (1991) which follows the Soviet Union from the end of World War II through the early 1990s. Although he was sometimes held in disfavor during the Soviet years (once labeled "the head of the intellectual juvenile delinquents" whose poems were "pygmy spittle"), Yevtushenko has been immensely popular from the early 1960s until the present.
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