Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Russian poet who was forced under official Soviet pressures to revise his poem “Babi Yar,” confessed his “errors” at a meeting yesterday in Moscow of the Soviet Writers Union, it was reported here today from the Soviet capital.
“Babi Yar,” which relates the tragedy of the Nazi murder of more than 80, 000 Jewish men, women and children in a ravine by that name near Kiev during the German occupation of Russia, was widely interpreted in the West as a denunciation of continuing anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. On a visit to Paris last month, the poet admitted he had made changes in the poem. He said he had done so because the West had used the original version for a propaganda effort to “pretend” that anti-Semitism was still widespread in the Soviet Union. The effect of the changes was to diminish the centrality of the Jewish victims in the atrocity.
Yevtushenko told the Soviet writers in Moscow yesterday that publication of portions of his autobiography in the French newspaper “Express,” which contained some general comments on Russian life and literature was a “major error” prompted by “thoughtlessness.” He also said that his aim in writing his autobiography was to refute “the reputation of an anti-Soviet rebel which the Western press has ascribed to me.”
It was recalled that Premier Khrushchev had publicly criticized the poet for his treatment of the theme of “Babi Yar.” The Premier claimed that the victims of the tragedy were not all Jews.
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