
Yevgeny Yevtushenko has died - lermontov
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/02/yevgeny-yevtushenko-obituary
======
coffeemug
According to wikipedia:

When Yevtushenko first visited Babi Yar he was shocked to find no memorial.
Instead he saw a garbage dump, right on top of thousands of dead bodies, with
trucks coming in to dump more garbage.

He was so moved by the sight that he wrote the poem in a couple of hours in
his hotel room.

~~~
sratner
To anyone reading the original or a translation, also recommend listening to
the poem performed by the author:
[https://youtu.be/OlWWhLVDd80](https://youtu.be/OlWWhLVDd80)

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jacquesm
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_Yar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_Yar)

[http://remember.org/witness/babiyar](http://remember.org/witness/babiyar)

~~~
neotek
I know this sounds naive and stupid and maybe even glib, but I just don't
understand how and why something like this could happen.

How could anyone be complicit in the slaughter of tens of thousands of people
in a single day, not even just in a moral sense but even in a _physical_
sense. How does the body not shut down when confronted with the horror of such
a thing?

If someone was shot in the head as I watched, even if I knew there was zero
danger of being shot myself, I know that my body would react with pure
revulsion and I would find it hard to stand up, much less take part. It seems
it would just be an evolved response, something intrinsic.

But these men just slaughtered thousands of people like pigs - how? Why?

~~~
dgellow
That's the most horrible thing we learned during the 20th century. That kind
of atrocities haven't been perpetrated by 'monsters', 'psychopath' or however
we could depict the authors to remove their humanity. They have been done by
'us', normal human, people who thought of themselves as good persons and
thought they were fighting for a good cause and doing the right thing.

They way you do it is little by little. You first makes the person feel
entitled, you give him reasons to hate the 'enemy', you remove accountability
of the executant by using a strict hierarchy and by engineering the killing
process. At one point it becomes 'normal' and 'logic' to do what you do.

~~~
dryajov
Thats a great way of describing the process of creating an enemy, the question
is what you do with that enemy. Natzy Germany took it to the extreme of total
extermination. I can't help but notice how this is still a very effective
tactic that governments, in particular in the west, continue to use to advance
its military agenda - we just haven't got to the point of were we see another
full blown extermination in progress. However, and the scariest part of this
is that all the machinery to achieve that is in place and has only improved.
The media (willingly or unwillingly) is very effective at painting an enemy,
dehumanizing him and eventually justifying military action. Can this be
changed, is there a way of doing the right thing, without abusing it?

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krick
It never occured to me that Yevtushenko is known in the West. Why it's even
the case?

~~~
kobeya
Many of us are interested in foreign affairs?

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Jhfbw6vt
Though less famous than Babi Yar, I would suggest this poem as a more general
read, applicable to scenarios including but beyond wartime atrocities:
[https://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/yevgeny-
yevtushenko/li...](https://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/yevgeny-
yevtushenko/lies-69/)

~~~
bzbarsky
Do you happen to have a link to the original? I tried some searching based on
back-translation attempts, but coming up empty so far...

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FunesKk
I once hung out with Professor Yevtuschenko at a LazerQuest in Tulsa, OK. Cool
guy, accent a little like Count Chocula, knowledge of poetry and European
politics second to none.

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gozur88
>But his fame was secured by the publication in 1961 of what must be the poem
of the 1960s, Babi Yar. It derived from his visit to a ravine near Kiev where
the Nazis had perpetrated a massacre 20 years before.

I guess a poem about the Katyn Woods would have been a step to far.

~~~
lkrubner
Why put that on him, rather than Adam Zagajewski or Czesław Miłosz or Wisława
Szymborska? I'd rather see more commentary on the incident from Polish artists
(and less such commentary from deranged paranoid lunatics who somehow win
power despite being clearly insane).

~~~
gozur88
>Why put that on him, rather than Adam Zagajewski or Czesław Miłosz or Wisława
Szymborska?

Because by 1961 the Nazis had been destroyed, so it was very much beating a
dead horse, and because his country was the one that perpetrated the massacre
in Poland and never owned up to it.

~~~
idlewords
See the comment upthread about de facto Holocaust denial in the Soviet Union.
This was an act of moral courage that Yevtushenko is justly lauded for.

~~~
konart
This is not correct though. Holocaust was ignored or silenced due to ideology,
not denied.

Not trying to say this is somehow better, but this just different. In other
words Yevtushenko wasn't trying to bring to reason, but rather make sure
people won't forget.

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Mz
[Redacted]

I would have deleted this earlier when someone else posted a better
clarification than mine, but I couldn't because it had been replied to. And
now I am being smeared by someone apparently incapable of granting me an
assumption of good faith.

~~~
jacquesm
> I mistook this as criticism, as a cryptic statement that this man should not
> be mourned.

On the contrary, I don't think any kind of commentary could make the impact of
those links less or worse, if you do read them be prepared to be moved in a
way that you had not planned on for Sunday evening and that will likely be
with you for the rest of the week (or your life, depending on how such things
impact you).

The links are here for context, not as criticism or commentary, and they're in
the order that I intended them to be, which was no accident.

~~~
Mz
Redacted

~~~
jacquesm
FTLOG would you mind? You're putting words in my mouth and thoughts in the
heads of some imaginary others to justify your own interpretation. I don't
think this is the time and place to discuss whether or not I know the meaning
of the words 'on the contrary'. Think of this as a funeral and you as someone
that loudly disses the order in which someone places their flowers at the
headstone. Please stop.

~~~
emmelaich
FWIW, I did not read Mz's comment as being critical of you.

If anything it was a confession that she misinterpreted your comment.

