By: Khristina Narizhnaya, Associated Press Writer
PEREDELKINO (AP).- Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Russia’s most renowned living poet, has given his house along with an extensive art collection to the state as a museum. The two-story museum in the writer’s colony of Peredelkino, just outside Moscow, joins nearby house-museums, including those of Boris Pasternak and Bulat Okudjava. It contains paintings by Marc Chagall, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. The museum also exhibits Yevtushenko’s photographs from his travels in Siberia, China, Italy, the Middle East, and items collected during his life, among which is American writer Mark Twain’s cane. Yevtushenko, who opened the museum at a ceremony on Saturday, came to prominence during the Soviet Union’s so-called cultural “thaw” under Nikita Khrushchev. One of his best-known poems is 1961’s “Babi Yar,” which denounces anti-Semitism and the failure of Soviet authorities to build a monument commemorating the Nazi massacre of Jews