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Body of iconic Soviet-era Russian poet Yevtushenko to be taken to Moscow on April 8

The burial service and the farewell ceremony took place on Wednesday evening at the University church of Tulsa city (Oklahoma State), where he had been a lecturer for the past 25 years

NEW YORK, April 6. /TASS/. The body of iconic Soviet-era Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko who died in the United States on April 1 will be taken to Moscow probably on Saturday, a source in the Russian consulate general in Houston helping the Yevtushenko family to organize the flight told TASS on Thursday.

"Currently, we are doing the necessary paperwork. We have not yet booked tickets but most likely the plane will take off on Friday to arrive in Moscow on Saturday," the source said, adding that more exact information will be available later.

The burial service and the farewell ceremony took place on Wednesday evening at the University church of Tulsa city (Oklahoma State), where he had been a lecturer for the past 25 years.

Yevtushenko who, apart from being a poet, was also an essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, and director, was born in 1933 in a township adjoining Zima railway station in the Irkutsk region, eastern Siberia. His father, Alexander Gangnus, was a geologist and amateur poet.

He published his first short poem in the Sovetsky Sport newspaper. His first collection of poetry, 'The Prospectors of the Future' came out of print in 1952 and the Association (Union) of Writers of the USSR extended membership to him in the same year, to make him the youngest member at the time.

Yevtushenko was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1963. All in all, he has authored more than 150, some of them translated into dozens of foreign languages.

He died in the United States on April 1, aged 84.

In Russia, the farewell ceremony will be held on April 11 at the House of Writers in Moscow. Yevtushenko will be buried in Peredelkino, a writers’ village near Moscow, as was his last will.

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