Wit & Attitude Quote by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Yevtushenko writes like a man trying to drag sentimentality out of the room by its collar. "Sorrow happens, hardship happens" lands with the blunt cadence of weather reports: not tragic fate, not personal failure, just conditions of being alive. Then comes the pivot - "the hell with it" - a profanity as philosophy, refusing the Soviet-era habits of solemn endurance and officially sanctioned optimism alike. It reads less like consolation than a dare: stop romanticizing suffering, stop expecting exemption from it, stop waiting for a cleaner life.

The kicker is his final claim: "who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy". That line is doing more than endorsing grit. It frames happiness as something purchased, not granted - a moral economy where joy has a cost in experience, loss, risk, humiliation. The subtext is suspicious of effortless bliss, the kind sold by ideology, consumer fantasy, or even self-help: happiness without payment is counterfeit, or at least too thin to hold.

Context matters. Yevtushenko was a public poet in a culture where private pain was often politicized, and public feeling was monitored. His work frequently tried to keep the individual soul intact inside mass narratives. Here, he insists that happiness is not the absence of trouble but the earned capacity to recognize it anyway. It's a line that smuggles freedom into a single sentence: if sorrow is inevitable, then what matters is the stance you take toward it - defiant, unsentimental, alive.