Andrei Voznesensky was one of the best known, yet most controversial, of the poets of post-Stalinist Russia. His career as a writer of poetry began in Boris Pasternak’s circle after War War Two, when he was in his mid-teens, and as a published poet in the late 1950s. He was seen as one of the most characteristic liberal representatives of the post-Stalin “Thaw” (See separate entry), publicly insulted by Khrushchev in the Kremlin in 1963. Yet his oppositional credentials were disputed throughout his career by more thoroughgoing opponents of the Soviet regime, who saw him as an equivocating “official poet”. He once referred to himself as “a tightrope-walker without a safety-net”.
From the outset critics remarked on the contemporary and innovative qualities of his verse, its
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Citation: Pushkin, Michael. "Andrei Voznesensky". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 November 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=6026, accessed 21 November 2024.]
