Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “Do the Russians want war?”
Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko was born in Siberia in 1932 and died in 2017. He grew up in a creative family: his father was an amateur poet and his mother an actress; they instilled a love of books in him, reading aloud and telling interesting facts from history. In 1944 the family moved to Moscow; Yevgeny attended a poetry studio, went with his father to poetry evenings, and was present at evenings of Akhmatova, Tvardovsky and Pasternak. His first book is «Разведчики грядущего». In 1952 he joined the Writers' Union as its youngest member. The collections «Третий снег», «Шоссе энтузиастов», «Обещание», «Стихи разных лет», «Яблоко» brought him fame. Many of his poems became songs. In «Хотят ли русские войны?..» (1961) the poet suggests asking this question of the silence of the fields, of the birches and poplars, of the soldiers who lie forever under birches and of their sons. The soldiers fell not only for their own country but so that people all over the earth could dream in peace; the poet turns to New York and Paris too: ask your own dreams. In one stanza: «yes, we know how to fight, but we do not want soldiers to fall again on their own sad land». At the end he suggests asking mothers and the poet's wife. Structure: the question in each stanza does not say yes or no, but the answer is clear: no. Devices: rhetorical question, repetition («Спросите вы…»), address, paired rhymes.
“The witnesses”. Each student picks three “witnesses” from the poem (silence, soldiers, mothers), writes their answer in one sentence and reads it to the class.