Biography Bulat Okudzhava

Bulat Shalovich Okudzhava (1924 – 1997) is a poet-bard and a writer, one of the founders of the Russian genre called author’s song or an underground Guitar-Poetry movement. The son of Georgian father and Armenian mother, he was born in Moscow. In 1937, his father was murdered in prison, and his mother was arrested the same year and spent a decade in labor camps. In 1941, at the age of 17, Okudzhava volunteered for the Red Army infantry and from 1942 participated in the war World War II. After his discharge from the service in 1945, he graduated from the Tbilisi University to become a teacher. For the five years, he taught in a village school in the Kaluga area, where his first volume, Lyrics (1956) appeared. Although he had no formal training in music, he performed his verses self-accompanied by a seven-string guitar.

By the 1960s Okudzhava gained widespread popularity within Russia as a poet-performer. He was among the first to perform poetic compositions with messages perceived as unofficial — even though the lyrics dealt with love or such simple things as a Moscow street or the last trolley home. His songs often described contemporary urban life, but were wryly satirical of the official version, written in the best tradition of Aesop language, imbued with a sense of mystery and irony, deviating from the typical Soviet music. Okudzhava was never treated as a political dissident as the messages of his songs conveyed no open resistance but kept a certain reticence (nedogovorennost’) (Terras 1985).

His songs about the war formed an important part of his repertoire. The main topics of his war songs were brutality of war, human frailty, the enduring presence of hope. He expressed his personal attitude to the war by focusing on human sacrifice, the futility of war as, for example in his song The Paper Soldier. He possessed an exceptional melodic gift, and the intelligent lyrics of his songs blended perfectly with his music and his voice.

From the early 60s on, his songs recorded and sung by urban youth and in Russian intellectual circles during hiking trips, in student’s hostels, in the apartments. Intelligentsia widely distributed his recordings in magnitizd.

Okudzhava was a member of the Writer’s Union and famous as a historic writer. His debut un-heroic war story Goodbye, Schoolboy (1961) followed by a non-conventional historical play about Decembrists A Taste of Freedom (1966). According to Bykov, a biographer of Bulat Okudzhava, Decembrists attracted Okudzhava not only for their “noble”and “selfless” political action, but also for their fearless resistance to autocrats that reinforced the growth of liberalism in Russia. In 1969, Okudzhava published his first historical novel Poor Avrosimov set in 1820. One of his the most popular historical novels, Dillettantes’ Journey (1978), portrays a classical character mid-19cntury’s “superfluous man” (Bykov 2009).

Bykov also argues that Okudzhava conducted no systematic research for his popular historical works, instead relaying on the imaginative and independent streak of a dissident who has his own approach to the history. As Okudzhava put it in his song I am writing a historical novel (1975), “Each writes as he hears, Each hears as he breathes, As he breathes, so he writes…”

Bulat Okudzhava died in France, where he had come on a private visit. 

Sources

Bykov, Dmitry. Bulat Okudzhava. Molodaya Gvardiya, 2009.

Smith, Gerald Stanton. Songs to Seven Strings: Russian Guitar Poetry and Soviet “Mass Song.” Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Terras, Victor. Handbook of Russian Literature. 1985