(JTA) — Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, best known for his poem “Babi Yar,” which commemorates one of the worst Nazi atrocities, has died at 84.
Yevtushenko died on Saturday in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he had been a faculty member at the University of Tulsa since the mid-1990s.
The poem written in 1961 about the massacre at Babi Yar in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, that killed some 34,000 Jews, was the first to expose anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. The poem was set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Symphony No 13.
Yevtushenko grew up in Moscow and was invited to study …read more
Source: JTA
