Alternatively, Yevtushenko was much respected by others at the time both for his poetry and his political stance toward the Soviet government. "Dissident Pavel Litvinov had said that ' expressed what my generation felt. Then we left him behind.'" Between 1963 until 1965, for example, Yevtushenko, already an internationally recognised littérateur, was banned from traveling outside the Soviet Union. In 1963 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature for his poem "Babi Yar", concerning the 1941 massacres at Kyiv.