Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a Russian poet, novelist, actor, and director, who through his work famously protested Stalinism before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, has died, The New York Times reports. Yevtushenko, who was eighty-four and suffering from stage four cancer, passed away due to heart failure in a hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma on Saturday, April 1.

Raymond H. Anderson, writing for the Times, describes Yevtushenko as one whose poems in the 1960s “captured the tangled emotions of Russia’s young—hope, fear, anger and euphoric anticipation—as the country struggled to free itself from repression during the tense, confused years after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953.” Like fellow “rebel poets” at the time—including Bella Akhmadulina, Yevtushenko’s first wife, Robert Rozhdestvensky, and Andrei Voznesensky—Yevtushenko “took on totalitarian leaders, ideological zealots, and timid bureaucrats.”

“I don’t call it political poetry,” Yevtushenko said during a 2007 interview with the Associated Press, “I call it human rights poetry; the poetry which defends human conscience as the greatest spiritual value.”

Yevtushenko’s long poem, “Babi Yar”—a controversial work about the Soviet Union’s refusal to acknowledge the two-day Nazi massacre of over 34,000 Jewish citizens in Kiev—brought him international acclaim. The poem inspired the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich to compose “Symphony 13,” and Yevtushenko appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1962. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in the following year; he was nominated again in 2008.

But despite his fame and activism, Yevtushenko received a good deal of criticism from fellow dissidents who felt that he did not go far enough in opposing the Stalin legacy. As Joseph Brodsky—who claimed to have memorized several hundred lines of Yevtushenko’s work—once said of him: “He throws stones only in directions that are officially sanctioned and approved.”

Still, Yevtushenko held undeniable power in the political sphere: in 1989, he became a member of the Parliament for Kharkov, a region in northern Ukraine, where he advocated for women’s rights and the need for a monument to Stalin’s victims at Lubyanka. During the 1990s, he had his feet planted in America as well, where he taught at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma for several years.

Yevtushenko was born on July 18, 1933, in Zima Junction, located in the Irkutsk region of Siberia. Both of his parents—his father, Aleksandr Rudolfovich Gangnus, and his mother, Zinaida Ermolaevna Evtushenko—were geologists, although his mother later became a singer. When they divorced, Yevtushenko took his mother’s name, and spent his childhood with his mother in Moscow. In 1941, the family was evacuated to Zima.

After Yevtushenko divorced Akhmadulina in 1955, he married Galina Sokol in 1962; the English translator Jan Butler in 1978; and Maria Novikova, in 1986, who survives him. Five sons also survive Yevtushenko.

The “farewell ceremony” and burial for Yevtushenko will take place on Tuesday, April 9, Russia Beyond the Headlines reports.

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