Baby Yar

His poem Baby Yar (1961), mourning the Nazi massacre of an estimated 34,000 Ukrainian Jews, was an attack on lingering Soviet anti-Semitism.

…difficulty over the texts (Baby Yar) by the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko on which he based his Symphony No. 13 (1962), and the work was suppressed after its first performance. Yet he was undeterred by this, and his deeply impressive Symphony No. 14 (1969), cast as a cycle of 11…