This poem begins with the observation that no marker preserves the memory of the Jews and others whom the Germans killed at Babi Yar, a ravine outside the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, on September 29, 1941. Yevtushenko’s words (and the part of Dmitry Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 based on them) have become that memorial.

The poem briefly describes in plain yet evocative language the landscape around the site but centers on the speaker’s identification with the Jews, who have suffered collectively and individually throughout history. The early part of the poem refers to the Jews’ flight from Egypt, the Passover—which in Russian Orthodox theology is integral to humankind’s salvation history—and to the Crucifixion, which suggests a link between Jewish and Christian suffering, as well as an echo of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s view of the artist as a Christ-like sufferer.

Other significant allusions name individual Jews—Alfred Dreyfus and Anne Frank—who are symbols of the world’s injustice to the Jews. This section of the poem also mentions a 1905 pogrom at Białystok, Poland, that typified attacks on the Jews in czarist Russia, but Babi Yar was different: the Jews defended themselves, and a young Russian student joined them and was killed.

Inauguration on July 2, 1976 of the monument to Soviet citizens and prisoners of war killed at Babi Yar, Kiev.

The speaker of the poem here identifies with an anonymous Jew, just as he has identified with Captain Alfred Dreyfus, scandalously convicted of treason, Anne Frank, and all the unnamed people who were shot at Babi Yar. He then addresses the greater part of the Russian people, whom he knows to be better than the anti-Semitic minority and who tarnish Russia’s reputation. They, he says, embrace the brotherhood of man.

The poem makes this point more explicitly at the end with an allusion to the anthem The Internationale, which also brings to mind Lenin’s condemnation, in a pamphlet, of the Białystok pogrom. Anne Frank is also a symbol of hope and love, and the imagery in the poem changes to that of renewal as the poem evokes the sounds of spring coming to a place where the trees stand like harsh judges to condemn the anti-Semites, as the Philistines earlier in the poem condemned the Jews.

The speaker is aware of the silent screams that fill Babi Yar, and the poem gives voice to the pain that permeates it and to the life of the Jewish people, as well as to the hope that others will follow his example: even though no Jewish blood mixes with his Russian blood, he is nevertheless an idealist like the Russian student in Białystok and hence the representative of all that is truly Russian.

Works Cited

Mass, Francis. A History of Russian Music from Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar. Translated by Arnold J. and Erica Pomerans, University of California Press, 2002.

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny. “Babi Yar.” Modern European Poetry, edited by Willis Barnstone, translated by George Reavey, Bantam Books, 1966, pp. 450–52.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Russian Literature, War Literature

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