Venturesome Poet Andrei Voznesensky Dead at 77

Poet Andrei Voznesensky, who rose to prominence during the thaw that followed Josef Stalin's death and never bowed to the Kremlin, died in Moscow on Tuesday. He was 77.

Voznesensky died at his home, said Gennady Ivanov, secretary of Russia’s Writers Union. He wouldn’t give the cause of death, but some Russian media reports said the poet had had a second stroke earlier this year.

President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin sent letters of condolences to Voznesensky's widow, with Putin saying the much-loved poet had "truly become a person of dominant influence."

"His poetry and prose became a hymn to freedom, love, nobility and sincere feelings," Putin said.

Voznesensky, an architect by education with a passion for painting, finally chose to become a poet, and his works — first published in 1958 — quickly made him famous in the Soviet Union.

"Your entrance into literature was swift and turbulent. I am glad I've lived to see it," poet and novelist Boris Pasternak, a future Nobel Prize winner who was oppressed in his own country, wrote to Voznesensky when he was 14. The teenage poet had sent him early verses asking for his opinion.

Voznesensky, like many other talented young writers, poets and painters from the so-called "generation of the 1960s," enjoyed a whiff of freedom amid the political thaw after three decades of Stalin's brutal rule.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev released hundreds of thousands of political prisoners from the gulag, and in 1956 he denounced Stalin's personality cult during a party congress.

But by the early 1960s, the official line had hardened again.

In December 1962, Voznesensky was among a group of young Russian intellectuals invited by Khrushchev to a Communist Party reception hall for what effectively became their public flogging in front of the gloating party elite.

Gruff and poorly educated, Khrushchev made no effort to understand new trends in Soviet art, choosing instead to threaten intellectuals with persecution and exile.

Berating Voznesensky — who stood pale during the tirade — as a capitalist agent, a fiery Khrushchev shouted: "Just look at this new Pasternak!"

"You want to get a [foreign] passport tomorrow? You want it? And then go away, go to the dogs! Go, go there," the party boss shouted to rapturous applause from his communist retinue.

"I am a Russian," Voznesensky whispered.

But despite periods of disgrace, his poems were published in huge volumes in Soviet days and were invariably a success.

Public and critics alike treated him as a living classic who fearlessly experimented with eccentric metaphors, intricate rhythmical systems and audio effects.

His books of poems included "The Triangular Pear," "Antiworlds," "Stained-Glass Master," "Violoncello Oakleaf," "Videoms and Fortunetelling by the Book."

Some of his works were turned into theater productions, like "Antiworlds" and "Save your Faces" at the Taganka Theater, "Juno and Avos" at the Lenkom Theater and others both in Russia and abroad.

Voznesensky quickly won admirers abroad when he was allowed to travel to Europe and the United States in the 1960s, meeting Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe and Robert Kennedy.

Like fellow poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Voznesensky's readings once filled stadiums, but his popularity flagged with the increasing freedom of the glasnost era in the late 1980s.

Voznesensky is survived by his wife, Zoya Boguslavskaya. He will be buried Friday in Peredelkino outside Moscow where he lived.

(Reuters, AP)