Colours by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Colours

When your face appeared over my crumpled life

at first I understood only the poverty of what I have.

Then its particular light on woods

on rivers, on the sea

became my beginning in the coloured world

in which I had not yet had my beginning.

I am so frightened, I am so frigthened

of the unexpected sunrise finishing, of revelations

and fears and the excitement finishing.

I don't fight it, my love is this fear,

I nourish it who nourish can nothing,

love's slipshod watchman.

Fear hems me in.

I am conscious that these mistakes are short

and that the colours in my eyes will vanish 

When your face sets.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko was one of the most successful poets of the latter decades of the Soviet Union. He published as recently as 2006. He is now a professor of  poetry and divides his time between Russia and the USA.

He was born on July 18th (also my birthday) 1933 (not my birth year) in Zima, Irkutsk Oblast near the Oka River of South-eastern Siberia. 

Yevtushenko is vocal in his demands for greater artistic freedom, as well as ferocious in his attacks on the USSR's bureaucratic system. He became an iconic figure for the anti-Stalinist Soviet youth of the 60s. 

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s, Yevtushenko played a big part in persuading the new regime to build a monument to victims of Stalinist repression. This monument, the Solovetsky Stone, consists of large granite stone transported to Moscow from the former Solovki prison camp, which was part of the Soviet gulag system. It stands to this day in Lubyanka Square, the location of KGB Headquarters. 

 The Solovetsky Stone monument outside KGB HQ