Tuesday, December 18, 2007

News at Eleven: In December that year, in a fam-ous

public confrontation, [Yevgeny] Yevtushenko directly challenged Khrushchev. At a meeting with artists and writers, the Soviet leader reprimanded cultural deviants, crudely citing an old Russian proverb, "Only the grave can correct a hunchback," whereupon Yevtushenko retorted, "Really Nikita Sergeievich, we thought the time was past when the grave was used as a means of correction." Yevtushenko's telegram about Czechoslovakia was leaked to the western press at the end of September 1968.

from Prospect: Oxford's Poetry Revolution

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