Though it was more than 30 years ago, Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko remembers well his first visit to Babi Yar, a ravine outside Kiev where large numbers of Jews and others were massacred during World War II.
“When I came there, I absolutely was sure there would be some kind of monument,” he said. “I didn’t find anything. It was just a dump. I was shocked.”
Shock translated quickly into art. The same evening in 1961, in a matter of four or five hours, Yevtushenko dashed off “Babi Yar,” the daring poem for which Nikita Khrushchev denounced the poet and that would in its own way become a monument to the evil that happened at that site 45 years ago: