Andrei Voznesensky, who as one of the Soviet Union’s boldest and most celebrated young poets of the 1950s and ’60s helped lift Russian literature out of its state of fear and virtual serfdom under Stalin, died Tuesday at his home in Moscow. He was 77.

His death was announced by Gennady Ivanov, the secretary of the Russian Writers Union. Mr. Ivanov did not give the cause of death, but Mr. Voznesensky had a stroke several years ago, and some Russian news reports said he suffered a second stroke earlier this year.

Mr. Voznesensky’s poetry epitomized the setbacks, gains and hopes of the post-Stalin decades in Russia. His hundreds of subtle, ironic and innovative verses reflected alternating periods of calm and stress as the Communist Party’s rule stabilized, weakened and then, in 1991, quickly disintegrated.

Mr. Voznesensky (pronounced Vahz-nuh-SEN-skee) was part of a group of daring poets like Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Bella Akhmadulina and Robert Rozhdestvensky who burst onto the stage in the cultural thaw that followed Stalin’s death in 1953. Rising to stardom in the 1960s, they filled stadiums for poetry readings and attracted worldwide attention as creators of powerful verse and symbols of youthful defiance.

Mr. Voznesensky traveled the world to read his poetry, serving as a sort of unofficial Kremlin cultural envoy, even though he was a critic of rough-handed Soviet policies like the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and the arrests of intellectual dissidents. Moscow, ever in search of approval at home and abroad, at times seemed to use Mr. Voznesensky’s independent voice for its own propaganda aims, as if to show the world that the authorities could, to a degree, tolerate criticism of the Communist leadership.

Whatever Mr. Voznesensky’s political opinions, his skill, experimentation and depth as a poet won respect around the world. His works were widely translated, and Mr. Voznesensky himself was hailed as a magnificent reader of his poetry. He once appeared in London on the same bill as Laurence Olivier and Paul Scofield and more than held his own.

“I Am Goya,” one of Mr. Voznesensky’s earliest and best-known poems, expressed the fear of war he experienced in childhood. It was inspired by a volume of Goya’s etchings given to him by his father. As translated by the American poet Stanley Kunitz, it reads in part:

I am Goya

of the bare field, by the enemy’s beak gouged

till the craters of my eyes gape

I am grief

I am the tongue

of war, the embers of cities

on the snows of the year 1941

I am hunger

I am the gullet

of a woman hanged whose body like a bell

tolled over a blank square

I am Goya

The poem creates its impressions of war and horror through a series of images and interrelated variations on the name of the painter, which echo throughout in a series of striking sound metaphors in Russian: Goya, glaz (eyes), gore (grief), golos (voice), gorod (cities), golod (hunger), gorlo (gullet).

The British critic John Bayley wrote that a recitation of the poem by Mr. Voznesensky in the 1960s “was electrifying.”

“Russian poetry has always inspired recitation and a rapt response from the reciter’s audience,” Mr. Bayley added, “but Mr. Voznesensky, and his contemporary Yevgeny Yevtushenko, are perhaps the first Russian poets to exploit this in the actual process of composition — to write poems specifically for performing, as pop songs are written for electronic transmission by singers and band.”

Andrei Andreyevich Voznesensky was born in Moscow on May 12, 1933. From 1941 to 1944 he and his mother, who read poetry to him, lived in the Urals while his father, an engineering professor, was engaged in war work, including the evacuation of factories during the siege of Leningrad.

Mr. Voznesensky first studied to be an architect at the Institute of Architecture in Moscow and received an engineering degree. One night in 1957 there was a fire there, and he wrote about it in an early poem called “Fire in the Architecture Institute.”

“I believe in symbols,” he remarked years later. “I understood that architecture was burned out in me. I became a poet.”

Architecture’s demands for structural harmony and contrast seemed to be present in his poetic design, which emphasized the exterior rather than the interior — form and sound above content. W. H. Auden, who translated some of his verses, said Mr. Voznesensky knew that a poem was “a verbal artifact” that had to be “as skillfully and solidly constructed as a table or a motorcycle.”

Mr. Voznesensky’s poetic and moral mentor and fellow critic of the Soviet system was Boris Pasternak, the author of “Doctor Zhivago.” Their friendship began when Mr. Voznesensky was still a student and sent his poems to Pasternak, who invited him to his home. Mr. Voznesensky later wrote in “I Am Fourteen”: “From that day on, my life took on a magical meaning and a sense of destiny; his new poetry, telephone conversations, Sunday chats at his house from 2 to 4, walks — years of happiness and childish adoration.”

Creating poetry at a troubled time in Russian history, Mr. Voznesensky, like Pasternak, became a persistent foe of literary censorship, and he urged the Soviet leadership to end all controls over fiction. But he endeavored to avoid a public collision with the authorities that might have forced him into exile or even doomed him to a prison camp.

Mostly, Mr. Voznesensky complied with the literary bureaucracy’s rules even while denouncing its tight grip on writers. One rule was that a writer should not bypass official censorship by offering manuscripts directly to publishers abroad.

On one occasion Mr. Voznesensky had hurriedly written a poem about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and gave the text to an American journalist but insisted that it not be reported or quoted from until after he had succeeded in having the poem printed in a Moscow newspaper. That reduced any possibility, he explained, that he might be accused of evading censorship or of unauthorized contact with a foreigner.

Mr. Voznesensky had been criticized enough in his youth to be wary. When Nikita S. Khrushchev took over as Soviet leader in the 1950s, his de-Stalinization campaign led Mr. Voznesensky and other young poets to believe that honesty, experimentation and frankness would be encouraged. But that was not to be.

In 1963, during a crackdown on writers and artists, Mr. Voznesensky was reprimanded by Khrushchev for “formalism,” which ostensibly violated the uplifting style of socialist realism. After the Union of Soviet Writers also rebuked him, he replied with what is regarded as a classic nonconfessional confession: “It has been said that I must not forget the strict and severe words of Nikita Sergeyevich. I will never forget them. He said ‘work.’ This word is my program.”

He added, “What my attitude is to Communism — what I am myself — this work will show.”

In 1967, the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Moscow authorities, acting through the Union of Soviet Writers, decided after some waffling to deny Mr. Voznesensky an exit visa to go to New York for a poetry reading at Lincoln Center.

The apparent reason was that he had made pro-American remarks during an earlier visit to the United States. But the union claimed that he was too ill to travel.

The usually self-controlled poet exploded. He wrote a blistering letter to Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, accusing the powerful literary union of “lies, lies, lies, bad manners and lies.” He charged the organization with treating writers in a degrading manner.

To no one’s surprise, Pravda did not print the letter. But copies quickly circulated among literary circles in Moscow.

On July 2, 1967, Mr. Voznesensky went public with his criticism during a reading at the Taganka Theater in Moscow, reciting a stinging poem that denounced literary bureaucrats. The board of the union promptly summoned him to a disciplinary meeting and demanded that he retract the charges or face expulsion. He refused.

The issue was ultimately smoothed over, but it alerted the literary authorities that they could push the usually low-key Mr. Voznesensky only so far. Almost 20 years later, he was elected to a seat on the union’s board.

Mr. Voznesensky is survived by his wife, Zoya Boguslavskaya, a fellow writer.

During the cultural ferment that was to seize his homeland under the banner of glasnost, Mr. Voznesensky was appointed to lead a commission charged with restoring Pasternak to his place among the great Russian poets.

After the collapse of Communism, Mr. Voznesensky the rebel became Mr. Voznesensky the writer for the Russian version of Playboy magazine and the organizer of provincial poetry festivals.

In 1986 he published “The Ditch: A Spiritual Trial,” a work of prose and poems that centered on a German massacre of Russians in the Crimea in 1941 and the plundering in the 1980s of their mass graves by Soviet citizens. Mr. Voznesensky, tackling a subject long suppressed by the authorities, made clear that most of the 12,000 victims were Jews and implied that the looting of their bodies was tolerated for that reason.

At a poetry reading two years later, he took written questions from the audience. “All of you are Jews or sold out to Jews,” one note said. Another said, simply, “We will kill you.” Mr. Voznesensky read the unsigned notes aloud and demanded that the authors identify themselves. His challenge was met with silence.

In the 1990s Mr. Voznesensky disclosed a reluctance to go abroad. “I cannot leave the country,” he said in an interview with The International Herald Tribune in 1996. “I belong to the people. Now that they are in terrible trouble, they need me.”

“Poetry is the only hope,” he added. “Even if you do not believe it, you have to do it.”