Boucquey Thierry (General Editor). Encyclopedia Of World Writers. 3 volumes
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Other Works by Derek Walcott
The Bounty. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1997.
Tiepolo’s Hound. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
2000.
What the Twilight Says: Essays. New York: Farrar,
Straus, & Giroux, 1999.
Works about Derek Walcott
Breslin, Paul. Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Burnett, Paula. Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000.
Izevbaye, D. S. “The Exile and The Prodigal: Derek
Walcott as West Indian Poet.” Caribbean Quarterly
26 (March–June 1980).
King, Bruce. Derek Walcott, a Caribbean Life. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Walker, Kath
See NOONUCCAL, OODGEROO.
White, Patrick (1912–1990) poet, novelist
Patrick Victor Martindale White was born in
Knightsbridge, London, to Victor Martindale and
Ruth Withycombe. He came to Australia as an in-
fant and grew up in Kings Cross, Sydney. In 1925,
he went to England to attend Cheltenham College
and returned to Australia in 1929. White’s interest
in writing came early as a child, and he also wanted
to be an actor. His mother encouraged him to
write while in primary school, and when he was
nine, he was published in the children’s page of a
newspaper.
White’s collection of poems, The Ploughman
(1935), gained prominence, and other of his
poems were published in the London Mercury. He
rewrote his novel The Immigrants, which was pub-
lished as Happy Valley in 1939, for which he won
the Australian Literature Society’s gold medal. In
1939, he came to the United States and published
The Living and the Dead (1941).
White’s main themes are alienation, the Aus-
tralian landscape, the cultures of Europe and
Australia, and the Aborigines. His central theme is
the search for meaning and value in life. He was in-
fluenced by the French poet Charles
BAUDELAIRE
and came to be known as a symbolist (see SYMBOL-
ISM) writer. He uses symbolism to convey a sense of
the splendor of Australia, which to many people
seemed dull. White’s narrative techniques include
autobiographical elements, dramatization, sym-
bolism, merging of his self with his characters, and
flashbacks. For White, plot was not as important as
character development.
White was also known to be a transcendentalist
because of his portrayal of an Australia above the
ordinary. He wrote the novel The Tree of Man
(1955) with the goal of finding a secret core or
purpose of Australia. In the novel, Stan and Amy
long for a new beginning for their country, beyond
ordinary politics. In The Aunt’s Story (1948), White
writes about the national homelessness of
Theodora, who is placed between the two cultures
of Britain and Australia. He also expresses his
doubts about Europe because of nuclear arma-
ment and the Holocaust. Ellen in A Fringe of Leaves
(1976) feels ill at ease in Europe. The Australian
landscape is a major presence in this novel. As he
writes of his own reaction to Europe in his autobi-
ography, Flaws in the Glass (1981), “It was land-
scape that made me long to return to Australia.”
In Voss (1957), we see a primitive picture of the
Aborigines. Voss, the main character, communi-
cates with the Aborigines in a language of nature, as
if they were not human. In A Fringe of Leaves, we
also read of Eliza Fraser, who is stranded on an is-
land and is living with the Aborigines. She becomes
one with them, and her cannibalism is a metaphor
for European destruction of Aboriginal culture.
Patrick White won the Nobel Prize in literature
in 1973, the only Australian to have this honor. In
1965, he won the Australian Literature Society’s
gold medal for Riders in the Chariot (1961). He re-
ceived the Australia Day Councils’ Australian of
the Year Award for 1974. He is considered to be one
of the most intellectual, original, and preeminent
Australian novelists. White died in Sydney after a
long illness.
448 Walker, Kath
Other Works by Patrick White
Selected Writings. Edited by Alan Lawson. St. Lucia:
University of Queensland Press, 1994.
The Twyborn Affair. New York: Penguin, 1980.
Works about Patrick White
Marr, David. Patrick White: A Life. New York: Knopf,
1991.
Wolfe, Peter, ed. Critical Essays on Patrick White.
Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.
Wicomb, Zoë (1948– ) short-story writer,
novelist
Born near Cape Town, Wicomb was educated at
universities in South Africa and in Great Britain.Al-
though everyone in the rural town in which she was
raised spoke Afrikaans, the dialect spoken by the
Afrikaner descendants of South Africa’s Dutch set-
tlers, she taught herself to speak English by “copying
the radio.” She wanted to be a writer of English sto-
ries and, encouraged especially by her father,
Robert, she wrote “horrible little poems.” The dis-
mantling of apartheid and the first truly free
elections in South Africa’s history (in 1992) have
meant that the country’s writers must look beyond
apartheid for subjects. Wicomb is one of a wave of
“new” South African authors whose work does not
revolve around colonialism, in general, or apartheid
issues, in particular. She writes feelingly and lyrically
about personal identity and the connectedness, or
lack of it, between and among people of color.
Wicomb has written two books. The first, You
Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), is a series of
related short stories set in and around the strik-
ingly beautiful Cape Province. The central charac-
ter of this “novel in parts” is an educated, young,
mixed-race (“coloured”) woman. In the closing
story in the collection, “A Trip to the Gifberg,”
Wicomb’s first-person narrator details the occa-
sionally difficult interaction with her Griqua
(tribal African) mother as they journey to a moun-
tain that her mother had always meant to visit. The
older woman, uneducated and accustomed only
to the old ways, had often looked up at the “unat-
tainable blue of the mountain” from a seat on her
porch. The personal relationship, especially when
her mother is “genuinely surprised that our wishes
do not coincide,” speaks to the political and public
lack of any real connection between even those
whose “color”had previously defined them as a co-
herent group.
In both this work and in her second novel,
David’s Story (2001), Wicomb explores the
various landscapes, physical and emotional, of
her characters’ existence as neither black nor
white in the “new,” postapartheid Africa. Like
many other writers of contemporary South
Africa, the overthrow of the racially based segre-
gation policies of the apartheid-era government
has compelled and allowed Wicomb to deal with
increasingly difficult issues of personal identity.
For example, the protagonist of David’s Story has
to come to grips with his self-identification as a
political activist when his opponent, apartheid,
has been defeated. David confronts the power of
an unpleasant past in a present where all is sup-
posed to be “better.”
As of July 2002, Wicomb was a finalist for a new
and prestigious fiction award sponsored by the
South Africa Times. She is one of a group of South
African writers who speaks to issues beyond the
sociological and the political, and her growing sta-
tus among critics and writers outside of South
Africa attests to her power and reach.
Another Work by Zoë Wicomb
“Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in
South Africa” (pp. 91–107). Writing South Africa:
Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995.
Edited by Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press,
1998.
Wiesel, Elie (1928– ) novelist, nonfiction
writer
Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet, Transylvania. When
he was 15, his family was sent to Auschwitz, a Nazi
death camp. His mother and younger sister died
Wiesel, Elie 449
there, but his two older sisters survived, and Wiesel
and his father were transferred to Buchenwald,
where his father perished shortly before the liber-
ation of the camps in 1945.
When World War II was over, Wiesel lived in a
French orphanage until 1948 when he began to
study journalism at the Sorbonne in Paris. The
French writer and Nobel laureate François Mau-
riac persuaded Wiesel to break his silence and
write about his time in the concentration camps.
The resulting memoir, Night (1958), established
Wiesel as a writer. A passage from the book recalls
his shattered childhood: “Never shall I forget the
little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw
turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue
sky. Never shall I forget those flames which con-
sumed my faith forever.”
Wiesel has written more than 40 works on the
Holocaust and humanity’s responsibility to fight
racism and genocide. These works include several
novels and two additional volumes of memoirs.
Wiesel became an American citizen in 1963
and, in 1978, was appointed chairman of the Pres-
ident’s Commission on the Holocaust. He has
since founded the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Coun-
cil, received more than 100 honorary degrees, and
defended causes ranging from those of the Soviet
Jews to Cambodian refugees, famine and apartheid
victims in Africa, and victims of war in Yugoslavia.
He has received numerous awards for his literary
and human-rights activities, including the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1986.
Other Works by Elie Wiesel
And the Sea Is Never Full: Memoirs. Translated by
Marion Wiesel. New York: Knopf, 1999.
The Fifth Son. Translated by Marion Wiesel. New
York: Schocken Books, 1998.
The Testament. Translated by Marion Wiesel. New
York: Schocken Books, 1981.
A Work about Elie Wiesel
Kolbert, Jack. The Worlds of Elie Wiesel: An Overview
of his Career and Major Themes. Selinsgrove, Pa.:
Susquehanna University Press, 2001.
Williams, Ella Gwendolyn Rees
See RHYS, JEAN.
Wittig, Monique (1935–2003) poet,
novelist, essayist
A prominent name in feminist and lesbian litera-
ture, Monique Wittig was born in France. She
earned a degree in languages from the University
of Paris and published her first novel, L’opopomax
(1964) shortly thereafter. In the late 1960s, she be-
came increasingly outspoken about women’s
rights, helping to organize the separatist group
Féministes Révolutionaires, for which she became
the spokeswoman in 1970. She also took part in
numerous organized protests and published a sec-
ond novel, Les Guérillères (1970).
In 1973, Wittig became increasingly unable to
reconcile her own goals as a writer with the idea of
separatism. Although she understood its impor-
tance for some women, she also felt that oppres-
sion, whether based on gender differences or
sexual orientation, exists primarily as a result of
the preconceived concept that heterosexuality is
inherently at the foundation of society. The way to
negate discrimination, therefore, is to negate this
belief, an idea that became major theme in Wit-
tig’s writing.
In 1976, Wittig moved to the United States and
began working on the journal Questions Féministes
with Simone de BEAUVOIR. She received her Ph.D.
in 1986 and took a position on the faculty at the
University of Arizona at Tucson in 1990.
Wittig’s works, including the well-known pieces
One Is Not a Woman Born (1981) and The Lesbian
Body (1973), speak of gender equality and rights
for women. She believed in expressing her views
in her works as a means of abolishing gender dis-
tinctions in society.
Other Works by Monique Wittig
Lesbian People: Material for a Dictionary. New York:
Avon Books, 1979.
The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1992.
450 Williams, Ella Gwendolyn Rees
A Work about Monique Wittig
Gray, Nancy. Language Unbound: On Experimental
Writing by Women. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1992.
Wolf, Christa (Christa Ihenfeld)
(1929– ) novelist, short-story writer, essayist
Christa Wolf was born in Landsberg an der
Warthe, Germany (today Gorzów Wielkopolski,
Poland). During World War II, her father Otto Ihe-
lenfeld, a salesman, was forced to move the family
to Mecklenburg. After completing grammar school
in 1949, Wolf studied literature at the Universities
of Leipzig and Jena. She joined East Germany’s So-
cialist Unity Party (SED) and worked as a journal
editor and reader for publishing houses. In 1951,
she married essayist Gerhard Wolf.
In the 1950s, Wolf began to write essays and
coedited two anthologies on East German litera-
ture with her husband. Her first major literary suc-
cess Der Geteilte Himmel (The Divided Heaven,
1963) dealt with the issue of divided Germany and
made her the best-known writer in East Germany.
Wolf followed the SED’s call for writers to work in
factories and incorporate working themes into
their books. However, she later wrote novels that
were critical of East Germany. In 1976, Wolf lost
her membership in the East German Writers’
Union for protesting the revocation of singer Wolf
Biermann’s citizenship. Wolf continued writing
and, in 1980, won the prestigious Büchner Prize.
She frequently addressed political topics in her nu-
merous essays and, in 1989, joined writer Volker
BRAUN in opposing German reunification.
Wolf ’s important influences include Anna
Seghers and Ingeborg BACHMANN. She writes with
frankness and believes that literature should help
the reader grow personally. Wolf combines ele-
ments of pessimism with resourceful approaches
to feminism and individualism. She addresses
contemporary concerns but does not allow East
Germans to escape dealing with their Nazi past.
In 1997, scholar Marit Resch wrote in Under-
standing Christa Wolf (1997) that “one of Wolf ’s
most important messages to all German citizens
today is that it is imperative to discuss and hon-
estly examine the totality of GDR [East German]
history, not just politically expedient excerpts
of it.”
Other Works by Christa Wolf
Accident: A Day’s News. Translated by Heike
Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian. London: Vi-
rago, 1989.
Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays. Translated by Jan
van der Heurck. New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1984.
A Work about Christa Wolf
Resch, Margit. Understanding Christa Wolf: Return-
ing Home to a Foreign Land. Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press, 1997.
Wolff, Kurt
See BENN, GOTTFRIED.
Woruk, Kona
See HARRIS, WILSON.
Wright, Judith (1915–2000) poet
Judith Wright was born to Philip Arundel Wright
and Ethel Wright in Thalgarrah Station in Aus-
tralia. Wright’s mother died in 1927, and a gov-
erness educated Wright. From 1929 to 1933, she
attended the New England Girls’ School in Armi-
dale. She started writing poems when she was very
young, and her first poems appeared in 1933. In
1934, she attended the University of Sydney.
Many of Wright’s poems appeared in leading
journals including the Sydney Morning Herald,
Bulletin, and Meanjin Papers. Significant themes of
her poetry include relationships with nature, Aus-
tralian culture, Aboriginal culture, human rights,
and reverence for life. The Moving Image (1946),
her first collection of poems written during World
War II, considers death and evil.
Wright, Judith 451
Wright writes in lyric form, as in Woman to
Man (1949), which compares poetic imagination
to the love between a man and woman: “Then all
worlds I made in me: / all the world you hear and
see.” The Two Fires contains poems on the threat
to humanity by humanity itself by means of nu-
clear weapons. There is also an emphasis on the ex-
ploration of language and the importance of myth.
Her poetry is influenced by T. S. Eliot, Wallace
Stevens, and W. B. Yeats, as can be seen in the
wasteland images and prosaic language of Phan-
tom Dwelling (1985).
Wright is renowned as poet, short-story writer,
environmentalist, and children’s writer. Going-on
Talking: Tales of a Great Aunt (1998), her last
book, was for children. She has received several
honors: In 1949 she won the Grace Leven Prize
for Poetry; she was elected to the Australian Lit-
erature Council; she won the Robert Frost
Memorial award in 1976; she won the World Prize
for Poetry in 1984; and, her greatest honor, she
received the Queen’s gold medal for poetry.
Wright has published more than 56 volumes of
poetry and short stories. She is acclaimed as one
of Australia’s greatest writers.
Another Work by Judith Wright
Collected Poems, 1942–1985. Sydney: Angus &
Robertson, 1994.
Works about Judith Wright
Strauss, J. Judith Wright. Melbourne: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1995.
Walker,S.P.Flame and Shadow: A Study of Judith
Wright’s Poetry. St. Lucia, B.W.I.: University of
Queensland Press, 1991.
452 Wright, Judith
453
X
Xie Wanying
See BING XIN.
454
Y
Yacine, Kateb (1929–1989) novelist, poet,
playwright
Kateb Yacine was born in Condé-Smendou, near
Constantine, Algeria. Kateb means “writer” in Ara-
bic, which designates Yacine’s family as highly lit-
erate. Yacine was raised on both tales of Arab
achievements and Algerian legends. These child-
hood memories had an important influence on his
writings. Yacine’s father sent him to a French high
school rather than a Qur’anic school when he was
a young boy. In 1945, he participated in a national-
ist demonstration in Sétif, which led to his expul-
sion from the Collège de Sétif. He was sent to
prison without trial for a few months. During this
time, he discovered his love for poetry and revolu-
tion. In 1950, he moved to France after paying sev-
eral short visits to the country. His involvement in
the Algerian revolution forced him to leave France
in 1955, shortly after he had been offered a job at a
publishing company. Yacine lived in many coun-
tries including Germany, the Soviet Union,
Tunisia, and Vietnam, before returning finally to
Algeria in 1970. He formed a theatrical company
after his return and began to write plays. Yacine
died in Grenoble, France.
At age 17, Kateb published his first book, Solil-
oques (1946), a collection of poems, and in 1948,
he published the long poem “Nedjma ou le poème
ou le couteau,” in which the character of Nedjma
(the name means “star”), a mysterious woman,
first appears. Kateb used the figure of Nedjma in
many later poems and plays.
Revolution constitutes an important theme in
Yacine’s works. His visits to different countries
greatly enhanced his determination to spearhead
the Algerian nationalist struggle for independence.
In the love story, Nedjma (1956), which recounts a
tale of intraclan struggle set against the back-
ground of French colonial Algeria, the main pro-
tagonist Nedjma is loved by four revolutionaries.
Nedjma, the name of the cousin with whom Yacine
fell in love, is a mysterious character, obviously in-
fluenced by early childhood fantasies that were res-
urrected from his memories of Algerian legends.
Yacine’s writings explore other important
themes as well, such as change and the resilience
of Algerian traditional values. Yacine’s heroes are
often Marxist revolutionaries, including historical
characters in other cultures and societies, such as
Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong. Ho Chi Minh is
featured in Yacine’s play, L’ Homme aux sandales
de caoutchouc (The Man in the Rubber Sandals)
(1970).
Until his death, Yacine believed it was the re-
sponsibility of the writer to educate the public that
the constant struggle between the proletariat (the
working class) and the bourgeoisie (the upper and
middle classes) was unceasing. Yacine wrote all his
works in French.
A Work about Kateb Yacine
Salhi, Gamal. The Politics and Aesthetics of Kateb
Yacine: From Francophone Literature to Popular
Theatre in Algeria and Outside. Lewiston, N.Y.:
Edwin Mellen Press, 1999.
Yamada Eimi (Yamada Futaba)
(1959– ) novelist, short-story writer,
cartoonist
Yamada Eimi was born in Tokyo. As a high school
student, she became a devoted reader and chose
Japanese literature as her area of study when she
attended Meiji University in 1978. However, she
never graduated, having already begun writing in
her junior year manga (narrative comics) for high-
school girls. Yamada soon tired of producing
manga and decided to take up fiction writing. She
adopted a sensational lifestyle as a bar hostess, a
nude model, and a “queen” of a sado-masochists’
club. She began to write seriously when her rela-
tionship soured with an African-American soldier
based in Japan.
Her first work, the autobiographical novella
Bedtime Eyes, published in 1985, was about a rela-
tionship between a Japanese woman and an
African-American soldier based in Japan. A year
later, Yamada produced eight stories, including
“Jessie’s Spine,” about a Japanese woman’s difficult
relationship with her African-American lover’s
son. Increasing her rate of production even more,
she published another eight short stories and three
novels in 1987. One of the novels, A Foot-bound
Butterfly, is a story about the experiences of a
young girl as she navigates adolescent pressures.
Yamada is a prolific writer whose stories revel in
the exotic. Her characters are generally young
women living on the edge and often involved in re-
lationships with African Americans. She incorpo-
rates an unusually large amount of slang English
into her stories to evoke vivid imagery. As such,
Yamada’s stories represent a new voice in Japanese
literature. She has won the Bungei Award and the
Naoki Prize and been nominated for the Akuta-
gawa Prize.
Other Works by Yamada Eimi
“Kneel Down and Lick My Feet.” Translated by Terry
Gallaher. In Alfred Birnbaum and Elmer Luke,
eds., Monkey Brain Sushi: New Tastes in Japanese
Fiction. New York: Kodansha International, 1993.
Trash. Translated by Sonya L. Johnson. New York: Ko-
dansha International, 1995.
A Work about Yamada Eimi
Cornyetz, Nina.“Power and Gender in the Narratives
of Yamada Eimi.” In Paul Gordon Schalow and
Janet A. Walker, eds., The Woman’s Hand: Gender
and Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing. Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Yáñez, Mirta (1947– ) poet, screenwriter,
critic
Mirta Yáñez was born in Havana, Cuba, and at-
tended the University of Havana, where she later
taught. Considered to be one of Cuba’s best con-
temporary poets who has written for Cuban film
and television, she is also one of Cuba’s foremost
literary critics and has written extensively about
feminism in Cuban literature.
In 1996, she assembled a collection of writing
by Cuban women, and in 1998, it was released in
the United States with the title Cubana. This col-
lection of 16 stories and an introductory essay by
Yáñez gives the reader a moving glimpse into the
difficult social situation of Cuban woman today.
Yáñez lives in Havana where she writes and lec-
tures.
Yathay Pin (1944– ) novelist
Yathay Pin was born in Oudong, a village about
25 miles north of Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Yathay’s father, Chhor, was a small trader, and his
family, though not impoverished, was poor.
Yathay Pin 455
Yathay was the eldest of five children. His father
had high expectations of him: Knowing that
Yathay was an excellent student, Chhor sent him
to a good high school in Phnom Penh. Yathay re-
ceived a government scholarship after completing
high school, and he went to Canada to further his
studies. In 1965, Yathay graduated from the Poly-
technic Institute in Montreal with a diploma in
civil engineering. He went back to Cambodia and
joined the Ministry of Public Works. He married
his first wife soon after, and they had one son. His
first wife and second baby died in childbirth in
1969. Afterward, Yathay married his wife’s sister,
Any, and they had two sons. In 1975, the Khmer
Rouge overthrew the Lon Nol government in
Phnom Penh and began a regime of terror. The
communist Khmer Rouge persecuted educated
professionals and intellectuals and accused them
of being bourgeois capitalists. Yathay and his fam-
ily, consisting of eight members, were sent to
work as unpaid agricultural workers in the coun-
tryside. By 1977, most of his family members had
perished from malnutrition, overwork, or sick-
ness. Yathay, who had managed to disguise his ed-
ucated background for a few years, was finally
betrayed by an acquaintance. Fearing execution,
he made a run for freedom by walking over the
mountains that separated Cambodia from Thai-
land. Yathay safely reached Thailand two months
later; he had, however, lost his wife in a forest fire.
From his Cambodian past, Yathay has one sur-
viving son whom he fears is already dead. Yathay
now works as a project engineer in the French
Development Agency in Paris. He has also remar-
ried and now has three sons.
Yathay’s best and only known work is Stay Alive,
My Son (1987), which is an acrid account of his
hellish experience in Cambodia under the terror of
the Khmer Rouge regime. His harrowing tale of
anguish and distress is one among many voices
that have since emerged from the writings of Cam-
bodian refugees who have lived to tell about the
horrors. Stay Alive, My Son is a remarkable book
not merely because it is a moving tale but also be-
cause it is a true story. Only the late Haing Ngor’s
memoir, A Cambodian Odyssey (1987), can rival its
poignant reality.
Yesenin, Sergey (Esenin, Sergei)
(1895–1925) poet
Born in Konstantinovo, Russia, in a peasant family,
Sergey Aleksandrovich Yesenin was raised by his
maternal grandparents. He vigorously engaged in
all the physical activities afforded by the country-
side, such as swimming, hunting, and riding
horses. He began to compose verse when he was
only nine. After finishing grammar school in 1909,
he was sent to a seminary to be trained as a teacher.
While in seminary, he became serious about writ-
ing poetry and, upon the advice of a teacher, left
for Moscow to pursue writing as a career.
After an unsuccessful marriage that lasted only
a year, Yesenin moved to St. Petersburg in 1914.
His first poetry collection, Radunitsa (Mourning
for the Dead) was published in 1916. The poems
were composed in the traditional lyrical style, em-
phasizing rhyme, meter, and metaphor. Yesenin
focused on his personal experience with nature,
family relationships, and love. To the disapproval
of the exponents of SOCIALIST REALISM, Yesenin’s
poetry continued to stress image rather than mes-
sage. His fame spread quickly, and he even read his
poetry for the empress and her daughters.
Nonetheless, he welcomed the October Revolu-
tion of 1917, seeing it as a vindication of the peas-
ant values he celebrated in his collection Inoyiya
(Otherland, 1918). But before long he was disillu-
sioned with Bolsheviks, criticizing them in poems
such as “The Stern October Has Deceived Me.”
Yesenin’s application to join the Communist Party
was rejected in 1919, supposedly due to his lack
of political discipline.
In 1922, Yesenin published Pugachev, a tragic
epic poem about an 18th-century peasant rebel-
lion. The same year, he married American dancer
Isadora Duncan, who had opened a ballet school
in Moscow. Duncan and Yesenin traveled together
in Europe and the United States and had spectac-
ular public quarrels. After their 1923 separation,
456 Yesenin, Sergey
Yesenin returned to Moscow where he gave poetry
recitals in cafes and drank heavily, sober only when
he was actually composing verse.
The collections published in 1924 and 1925
demonstrate a major shift in Yesenin’s poetry.
Moscow of the Taverns (1924) and Soviet Rus (1925)
comment on social and cultural changes in Com-
munist Russia. Although Yesenin’s diction remains
lyrical and imaginative, he has moved away from
the solipsistic study of the individual.
Subdued by alcoholism, Yesenin developed
major psychological problems during the last year
of his life. His marriage to Sofia Tolstoy, grand-
daughter of Leo TOLSTOY, was essentially unsuc-
cessful. Yesenin committed suicide by hanging
himself. His suicide note was a poem written in
his own blood. His works, popular though they
were, were banned under Stalin but were repub-
lished in Russia in 1966.
Other Works by Sergey Yesenin
Confessions of a Hooligan: Fifty Poems. Translated by
Geoffrey Thurley. Manchester, U.K.: Carcanet
Press, 1973.
The Collected Poems of Yesenin. Translated by Gre-
gory Brengauz. Tallahassee: Floridian Publisher,
2000.
Works about Sergey Yesenin
McVay, Gordon. Isadora and Esenin: The Story of
Isadora Duncan and Sergei Esenin. Ann Arbor,
Mich.: Ardis, 1978.
Visson, Lynn. Sergei Esenin, Poet of the Crossroads.
Wurzburg: Jal-Verlag, 1980.
Yevtushenko, Yevgeny (1933– ) poet,
dramatist
Yevgeny Yevtushenko was born in Irkutsk, Russia.
When he was 11, his family moved to Moscow.
From an early age, he loved literature and decided
to pursue a career in a literary field. He studied at
the Gorky Institute of Literature from 1951 to
1954. He was closely attached to his father and
sometimes accompanied him on geological expe-
ditions. In 1948, they traveled to distant regions of
Kazakhstan and Altai. The experiences of this trip
appear in Yevtushenko’s first published collection
of verse, Zima Junction (1956).
Yevtushenko became internationally renowned
with the publication of Babi Yar, a long narrative
poem that denounces Nazi anti-Semitism and
memorializes victims of the Holocaust. The poem
also criticizes actions of the Russian people toward
the Jews. For this reason, the poem did not appear
in Russia until 1984. Yevtushenko proceeded to
publish verse of a more political nature. In Heirs
of Stalin (1961), he warns readers about the dan-
gers that Stalinism poses even after Stalin’s death.
In 1963,Yevtushenko published A Precocious Auto-
biography in English. The work was criticized by
the government for its open criticism of Soviet
policies, and he was not allowed to leave the coun-
try for two years.
In 1972, Yevtushenko shifted his artistic inter-
ests from poetry and produced a hugely successful
play, Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty. Ye v -
tushenko is a prolific artist and expanded his artis-
tic scope to directing, acting, and photography. He
also edited poetry for Ogonek, a journal that pub-
lished many previously repressed writers and
poets.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko has achieved enormous
success during his lifetime. He was appointed as an
honorary member of American Academy of Arts
and Sciences in 1987. In 1989, he was elected as a
member of the Congress of People’s Deputies, and
he has served as vice president of an organization
of Russian writers (PEN). After the collapse of the
Soviet Union, Yevtushenko played a central role in
the erection near the former KGB headquarters of
a monument to the victims of Stalinism.
Other Works by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Don’t Die Before You’re Dead. Translated by Antonina
W. Bouis. New York: Random House, 1995.
The Collected Poems, 1952–1990. Translated by James
Ragan. New York: Henry Holt, 1991.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko: Early Poems. Translated by
George Reavey. New York: Marion Boyars, 1989.
Yevtushenko, Yevgeny 457