Honorary doctor of the Faculty of Humanities, University of Pécs since 7 May 2009.
Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko is a Russian poet, and also a novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, actor, editor and teacher. He was born on 18 July 1933 in Zima, Siberia. His first book of poems, The Prospects of the Future was published when he was nineteen years old, but he had been writing poems since age ten.
After the Second World War he moved to Moscow and studied at the Gorky Institute of Literature from 1951 to 1954. In 1952 he joined the Union of Soviet Writers. His poems were not welcomed by the Soviet Government because of the harsh criticism he expressed towards the regime, but due to the underground samizdat press they gained him great recognition among the people. As part of the Soviet new wave, he made great efforts to make poetry democratic. In 1989 Yevtushenko was elected as a representative in the Soviet Parliament (Congress of Peoples Deputies), where he was a member of the pro-democratic group supporting Mikhail Gorbachev.
Yevtushenko became one of the best known poets of the 1950s and 1960s in the Soviet Union. In 1961, he was featured on the cover of Time magazine. In 1991 he received the American Liberties Medallion, the highest honour conferred by the American Jewish Committee. In 1993, he received a medal of 'Defender of Free Russia,' which was awarded for acts in support of democracy to those who took part in resisting the hard-line Communist coup in August 1991. In July 2000 the Russian Academy of Sciences named a star in his honour. One year later, in 2001 his childhood home in Zima Junction, Siberia, was restored and opened as a permanent museum of poetry. Today he divides his time between Russia and the United States, where he teaches Russian and European poetry and European cinema history.
Promoter: Dr. Endre Lendvai, professor of the Department of Slavic Studies, Head of the Research Centre for Translation Studies at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Pécs.