Russian poet (and a rather good one) best known internationally for
Babi Yar, which Shostakovich set to music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMALXEP_GYAMajor public intellectual during the last decades of the Soviet Union, with a complex relationship with it (i.e. he was opposed but made accommodations). Quite a character in many other ways as well. He briefly tried politics in the New Russia but things... er... didn't work out. Still, the out of that came an excellent quote:
Of interest to the forum (I guess) is also that spent his last years in the great state of Oklahoma.
