A message about the life and work of Okudzhav. Okudzhava Bulat - biography, facts from life, photographs, background information. Activities of a poet and writer
The article is devoted short biography Bulat Okudzhava is a famous poet, performer and screenwriter. Okudzhava was a representative of the real intelligentsia, who deeply felt and understood what was happening in the country. He rightfully enjoys great popular love.
Biography of Okudzhava: the first years
Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava was born in 1924 on Arbat. Born into an international party family (parents were Georgian and Armenian), the boy was supposed to receive the name Dorian. According to party tradition, children were often given the names of famous personalities and literary heroes(Dorian Gray is the hero of O. Wilde’s novel). However, my father insisted on a normal name. Bulat always remembered Arbat and his childhood years spent there with great love and warmth. The Arbat theme was often used in the poet's subsequent work. In 1937, Bulat’s family was repressed in connection with the beginning of the “Great Purge”: as a result, the father was shot, and the mother was sent to a camp. Since 1940 he lived in Tbilisi.
During the Great Patriotic War, Okudzhava volunteered for the front and was a mortarman in the Caucasus. In 1945 he was wounded. After the end of the war, Bulat Okudzhava settled in Tbilisi. The military theme is also reflected in his work. Okudzhava passed the exams as an external student and entered the Pedagogical University; for several years he was a teacher at a Kaluga school. At the same time he was a correspondent for several newspapers. Bulat tried to write poetry in his childhood and did not stop these attempts. Some of his poems were published during the war. In Kaluga, Okudzhava’s poems are already constantly appearing in newspapers. The first collection of poems - "Islands" - is published.
After Stalin's death, Okudzhava's parents were rehabilitated. He moves to the capital and works as a newspaper editor. In 1961 he quits his job and decides to concentrate entirely on creative activity.
Biography of Okudzhava: creative activity
During the “Khrushchev Thaw,” Okudzhava’s poems and songs began to enjoy popularity in certain circles. The songs were widely distributed among the people, copied and learned by heart. Okudzhava’s work was sharply criticized by official government agencies and it was semi-legal. However, no serious measures were taken against the poet. In the 60s Okudzhava wrote most of his songs. Later he moved away from this type of creativity and took up prose. He continued to write songs for cinema. Songs for films brought him real fame, official recognition and popularity among the people.
The first official record with recordings of Okudzhava’s songs was released in Paris, which caused a protest in the Soviet leadership. Subsequently, Okudzhava’s records began to be released in his homeland.
Okudzhava had no musical education and treated his songs ironically. However, the main thing in his work is not musical accompaniment, and deep philosophical meaning. For many, Okudzhava became a symbol of a free creative personality capable of resisting the totalitarian system. A person should always remain himself and not adapt to the prevailing living conditions. People perceived his work as a breath of freedom in the stuffy Soviet society, subject to regulations and censorship. His songs do not contain overt political appeals or propaganda, so the harsh government eye had nothing to find fault with the poet. But the non-standardism and liberalism of his work was obvious.
Since the late 60s. Okudzhava is actively engaged in prose. Most of his works are autobiographical in nature. Not receiving official recognition, Okudzhava turns to historical prose. He wrote stories about the Decembrist movement and novels about the times early XIX V.
Perestroika once again pushed the poet into active work. He makes public appearances and participates in political life countries. In 1993, he supported Yeltsin in the fight against the opposition, which he later regretted. Okudzhava played in the majority largest countries peace. His works have also been translated into many languages and are very popular.
Bulat Okudzhava died in 1997. He left behind over 200 songs and about 600 poems. The poet's poems were used not only in his own songs, many were set to music by famous composers.
Bulat Okudzhava is a bard, poet, writer and public figure.
Despite the war years and repression, during which he lost almost his entire family, he was able to live a bright and eventful life.
Childhood and young years
Bulat Okudzhava was born on a day that the whole country would later celebrate as Great Victory- May 9, 1924 in Moscow.
His parents were natives of Tiflis and arrived in the capital to study at the Academy of Communism.
Father - Shalva Stepanovich was a native Georgian. His great-grandfather received a plot of land in Kutaisi for 25 years of military service.
And his brother, Vladimir Okudzhava, became famous as an anarchist-terrorist who attempted the life of the governor of Kutaisi.
Mom - Ashkhen Stepanovna, an Armenian, was a relative of the famous poet V. Teryan in Armenia.
Bulat Okudzhava in childhood with his mother
The family had 8 children, including Bulat. Almost immediately after the birth of his son, the father was sent to serve in the Caucasus in the Georgian division.
And my mother got a job in the party apparatus in Moscow.
The parents decided that Bulat should study in their hometown- Tiflis. There he was accepted into a Russian-language class.
In addition, already in childhood Bulat Okudzhava showed a perfect ear for music.
At the same time, he began to study in 2 schools: general education and music. However music school I was never able to graduate due to the constant moving of my family.
His father, getting into conflict situation with Beria, turns to Ordzhonikidze with a request to transfer him to serve in Russia.
There the family ended up in the Urals, in Nizhny Tagil. Bulat transferred to school No. 32.
In 1937, misfortune came to the family. Bulat's father and his paternal uncles were arrested on charges of an assassination attempt in 1934 on Ordzhonikidze, the People's Commissar of Heavy Industry.
In August 1937 they were shot as supporters of Trotsky. Six months after the death of the father, the family returns to Moscow.
Now only his grandmother and mother were fully involved in raising Bulat. At first they lived in a communal apartment on Arbat.
A year later, in 1938, the mother was arrested and exiled to the Karlag forced labor camp. After the war, in 1947, she was released.
During this time, the grandmother, Maria Vartanovna, took care of the children. Bulat was already a teenager, and so that he would not get out of hand at all, he was sent to relatives in Tbilisi.
There he first studied, and then went to work at a factory as a turner's apprentice. At the same time, Bulat begins to write his first poems.
In 1941, Bulat’s sister Olga Okudzhava, by that time the wife of the poet G. Tabidze, was also shot.
The Great Patriotic War began when Bulat was not yet 18 years old, and he was not subject to conscription.
Nevertheless, he and his friend constantly came to the military registration and enlistment office with a request to send them to the front as volunteers.
Soon the military registration and enlistment office surrendered under their pressure, and in 1942 they were assigned to the 10th Mortar Division.
War years
Before being sent to the front, Bulat completed a 2-month course on the Transcaucasian front. He was assigned as a mortarman to the cavalry regiment of the 5th Cossack Corps.
However, he did not serve for long. In the winter of 1942 he was wounded near Mozdok and sent to the hospital. Having recovered, he decided not to return to active duty.
At first he served in Batumi in the reserve rifle regiment, after which he was a radio operator on the Transcaucasian Front.
According to some information, he then wrote poetry for his first song, “We couldn’t sleep in the cold heated cars.”
In 1944, Bulat, with the rank of guard private, left the army for health reasons. After the war, Bulat quickly received a certificate of secondary (complete) education.
In 1945 he became a student at the Faculty of Philology at the University of Tbilisi.
At the university, everyone looked at him as a front-line soldier, a war hero. He commanded respect and admiration from his fellow students.
Activities of a poet and writer
During his studies (1946), he wrote his second song with the logical title “Old Student Song.”
After receiving his diploma, he moved to the Kaluga region. There Bulat Okudzhava begins cooperation with the newspaper “Young Leninist”.
In 1956, his first collection of poems, Lyrics, was published.
In 1959 he returned to the capital. From that time on, he began to present his songs to the public, and acquired his first fans.
In the period from 1956 to 1967, Bulat Okudzhava wrote his most popular songs - “Not tramps, not drunkards”, “On Tverskoy Boulevard”, “Moscow Ant” and others.
At the same time, his activity as a writer developed. He is accepted into the All-Union Writers' Union, he actively participates in the activities of the literary organization "Magistral".
In 1962, he got a job as an editor at the Molodaya Gvardiya publishing house, and a little later headed the poetry department at Literaturnaya Gazeta.
Soon his songs begin to sound from the TV screen. In 1970, the film “Belorussky Station” was released, where for the first time a song written by B. Okudzhava was heard - “We need one victory.”
Songs based on his poems are heard in other fairly well-known films - “Straw Hat”, “Zhenya, Zhenechka, Katyusha”.
Bulat wrote lyrics for more than fifty films.
He was on a par with V.S. Vysotsky, Yu. Vizbor, A.A. Galich. In 1967 he left for France.
In a Paris studio, he records about 20 songs that will form the basis of his first album, “Le Soldat en Papier.” It will be released in 1968, also in France.
At the same time, these songs will be released in Poland performed by Polish singers. Only the composition “Farewell to Poland” will be performed by Bulat Okudzhava himself.
The return to the Russian capital occurred in the early 90s. Bulat settles in a country house.
He gives concerts both in Russia and abroad - Germany, the USA, Canada and Israel. In the summer of 1995, he gave his last concert at UNESCO in Paris.
In addition, Bulat Okudzhava was a member of the editorial board of the Evening Club newspaper and was on the board of founders of such publications as Moscow News and Obshchaya Gazeta.
Most of his works were published in numerous languages, and were also published in Russian abroad.
Personal life
Bulat Okudzhava entered into his first marriage at the age of 23. While studying at the university, he met a girl, Galya, who was a little younger than him.
In 1947, they got married, especially since by that time Bulat was already renting separate housing in a communal apartment.
Bulat Okudzhava with his son Igor
Upon completion of their studies, young distribution specialists leave for Kaluga, where they get a job in a secondary school.
Bulat does not like to remember these years. He says that they lived on the outskirts of the village, and the children did not love him, in fact, just as he did not reciprocate their feelings.
However, it was here that the first-born, Igor, appeared in the family.
Officially, the marriage would last until 1965, but already in 1962 he met his second wife, Olga Artsimovich.
He will go with her to Leningrad, where in 1964 she will give birth to another son, named Bulat after his father.
His father, Shalva Okudzhava, was Georgian by nationality, and his mother, Ashkhen Nalbandyan, was Armenian.
In 1934, he moved with his parents to Nizhny Tagil, where his father was appointed first secretary of the city party committee, and his mother was appointed secretary of the district committee.
In 1937, Okudzhava's parents were arrested. On August 4, 1937, Shalva Okudzhava was shot on false charges, Ashkhen Nalbandyan was exiled to the Karaganda camp, from where she returned only in 1955.
After the arrest of his parents, Bulat lived with his grandmother in Moscow. In 1940 he moved to relatives in Tbilisi.
Since 1941, since the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, he worked as a turner at a defense plant.
In 1942, after finishing ninth grade, he volunteered for the front. He served on the North Caucasus Front as a mortar operator, then as a radio operator. He was wounded near Mozdok.
“In 1942, after ninth grade, at the age of seventeen, I voluntarily went to the front. He fought, was a mortarman, a private, a soldier. Mainly the North Caucasus Front. Wounded near Mozdok from German plane. And after recovery - heavy artillery of the reserve of the High Command...
That's all I managed to see.
I didn't make it to Berlin.
I was a very funny soldier. And, probably, I was of little use. But I tried very hard to make everyone happy. I shot when I had to shoot. Although I’ll tell you honestly that I didn’t shoot with great love, because killing people is not a very pleasant thing. Then I was very afraid of the front.
The first day I got to the front line. Both I and several of my comrades, seventeen years old like me, looked very cheerful and happy. And we had machine guns hanging on our chests. And we walked forward to the location of our battery. And everyone already imagined in their imagination how we would now fight and fight wonderfully.
And at the very moment when our fantasies reached their climax, a mine suddenly exploded, and we all fell to the ground, because we were supposed to fall. But we fell as expected, and the mine fell half a kilometer away from us.
Then everyone who was nearby walked past us, and we lay there. Everyone went about their business, and we lay there. Then we heard ourselves laughing. They raised their heads. We realized that it was time to get up. They got up and went too.
This was our first baptism of fire. That was the first time I learned that I was a coward. First time. By the way, I must tell you that before this I considered myself a very brave person, and everyone who was with me considered themselves the bravest.
And then there was a war. I learned and saw a lot... And I also learned that everyone who was with me was also afraid. Some showed the view, others did not. Everyone was afraid. This consoled me a little.
The impression from the front was very strong, because I was a boy. And then, later, when I began to write poetry, my first poems were on military theme. There were many poems. They turned into songs. Of some. These were mostly sad songs. Well, because, I’ll tell you, there’s nothing fun about war.”
As a regimental singer, in 1943 at the front he composed his first song, “We couldn’t sleep in the cold heated vehicles...”, the text of which has not survived.
Okudzhava: “There is nothing fun in war.”
In 1945, Okudzhava was demobilized and returned to Tbilisi, where he passed his high school exams as an external student.
In 1950 he graduated from the philological faculty of Tbilisi state university, worked as a teacher - first in a rural school in the village of Shamordino Kaluga region and in the regional center of Vysokinichi, then in Kaluga.
He worked as a correspondent and literary employee for the Kaluga regional newspapers “Znamya” and “Young Leninist”.
Okudzhava’s first poem was published in 1945 in the newspaper of the Transcaucasian Military District “Fighter of the Red Army”. Then the poet's poems were regularly published in other newspapers.
In 1946, Okudzhava wrote the first surviving song, “Furious and Stubborn.”
In 1956, after the publication of the first collection of poems “Lyrics” in Kaluga, Bulat Okudzhava returned to Moscow, worked as deputy editor for the literature department in the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, editor at the Molodaya Gvardiya publishing house, then head of the poetry department at Literaturnaya Gazeta " He took part in the work of the Magistral literary association.
In 1959, the poet’s second collection of poetry, “Islands,” was published in Moscow.
In 1962, having become a member of the USSR Writers' Union, Okudzhava left service and devoted himself entirely to creative activity.
Author of collections of lyrics “The Cheerful Drummer” (1964), “On the Road to Tinatin” (1964), “Magnanimous March” (1967), “Arbat, my Arbat” (1976) and others.
In 1996, Okudzhava’s last collection of poetry, “Tea Party on the Arbat,” was published.
Since the 1960s, Okudzhava has worked a lot in the prose genre. In 1961, his autobiographical story “Be Healthy, Schoolboy” (published as a separate edition in 1987), dedicated to yesterday’s schoolchildren who had to defend the country from fascism, was published in the almanac “Tarussky Pages”. I received the story negative rating official criticism, accusing Okudzhava of pacifism.
In 1965, Vladimir Motyl managed to film this story, giving the film the title “Zhenya, Zhenechka and Katyusha.” In subsequent years, Okudzhava wrote autobiographical prose, compiling the collections of stories “The Girl of My Dreams” and “ Visiting musician", as well as the novel "The Abolished Theater" (1993).
At the end of the 1960s, Okudzhava turned to historical prose. The stories “Poor Avrosimov” (1969) about the tragic pages in the history of the Decembrist movement, “The Adventures of Shipov, or Ancient Vaudeville” (1971) and written in historical material the beginning of the 19th century, the novels “The Journey of Amateurs” (1976 - the first part; 1978 - the second part) and “A Date with Bonaparte” (1983).
Okudzhava’s poetic and prose works have been translated into many languages and published in many countries around the world.
Since the second half of the 1950s, Bulat Okudzhava began to act as the author of poetry and music, songs and their performer, becoming one of the generally recognized founders of the art song.
Okudzhava is the author of more than 200 songs
The earliest known songs of Okudzhava date back to 1957−1967 (“On Tverskoy Boulevard”, “Song about Lyonka Korolev”, “Song about the Blue Ball”, “Sentimental March”, “Song about the Midnight Trolleybus”, “Not tramps, not drunkards”, “Moscow Ant”, “Song about the Komsomol goddess”, etc.). Tape recordings of his performances instantly spread throughout the country. Okudzhava’s songs were heard on radio, television, films and performances.
Okudzhava's concerts took place in Bulgaria, Austria, Great Britain, Hungary, Australia, Israel, Spain, Italy, Canada, France, Germany, Poland, USA, Finland, Sweden, Yugoslavia and Japan.
In 1968, the first disc with Okudzhava’s songs was released in Paris. Since the mid-1970s, his discs have also been released in the USSR. In addition to songs based on his own poems, Okudzhava wrote a number of songs based on poems by the Polish poetess Agnieszka Osiecka, which he himself translated into Russian.
Okudzhava's concerts took place in Europe, the USA, Canada and Japan
The performer gained nationwide fame from Andrei Smirnov’s film “Belorussky Station” (1970), in which the song was sung to the words of the poet “Birds don’t sing here...”.
Okudzhava is the author of other popular songs for such films as “Straw Hat” (1975), “Zhenya, Zhenechka and Katyusha” (1967), “White Sun of the Desert” (1970), “Star of Captivating Happiness” (1975). In total, Okudzhava’s songs and his poems are heard in more than 80 films.
In 1994, Okudzhava wrote his last song, “Departure.”
In the second half of the 1960s, Bulat Okudzhava acted as a co-author of the script for the films “Loyalty” (1965) and “Zhenya, Zhenechka and Katyusha” (1967).
In 1966, he wrote the play “A Breath of Freedom,” which a year later was staged in several theaters.
IN last years life Bulat Okudzhava was a member of the founding council of the newspaper “Moscow News”, “Obshchaya Gazeta”, a member of the editorial board of the newspaper “Evening Club”, a member of the Council of the “Memorial” society, vice president of the Russian PEN center, a member of the pardons commission under the President of the Russian Federation (since 1992 ), member of the commission for State Prizes of the Russian Federation (since 1994).
On June 23, 1995, Okudzhava’s last concert took place at UNESCO headquarters in Paris.
On June 12, 1997, Bulat Okudzhava died in a clinic in Paris. According to the will, he was buried at Vagankovskoe cemetery in Moscow.
Okudzhava was married twice.
From his first marriage to Galina Smolyaninova, the poet had a son, Igor Okudzhava (1954−1997).
In 1961, he met his second wife - the niece of the famous physicist Lev Artsimovich - Olga Artsimovich. The son from his second marriage, Anton Okudzhava (born in 1965), is a composer and his father’s accompanist at creative evenings in recent years.
In 1997, in memory of the poet, a decree of the President of the Russian Federation approved the regulations on the Bulat Okudzhava Prize, awarded for the creation of works in the genre of art songs and poetry that contribute to Russian culture.
In October 1999, the State Memorial Museum of Bulat Okudzhava opened in Peredelkino.
In May 2002, the first and most famous monument to Bulat Okudzhava was unveiled in Moscow near house 43 on Arbat.
The Bulat Okudzhava Foundation annually holds the “Visiting Musician” evening at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow. Festivals named after Bulat Okudzhava are held in Kolontaevo (Moscow region), on Lake Baikal, in Poland and in Israel.
A master of poetic language, master of the feelings of several generations, who gave us an amazing song word of great confidence and naturalness Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava was born in Moscow on May 9, 1924 in a family of Bolsheviks who came from Tiflis for party studies in Moscow. His father Shalva Stepanovich was Georgian, and his mother Ashkhen Stepanovna Nalbandyan was Armenian, and a relative of the famous Armenian poet Vahan Teryan. Soon after Bulat's birth, his father was sent to the Caucasus as a commissar of the Georgian division, and his mother remained in Moscow and worked in the party apparatus. Therefore, Bulat spent his childhood in Moscow, where his family was allocated two rooms in a communal apartment at house 43 on Arbat. The attitude towards Moscow was later reflected in Okudzhava’s poems.
My city bears the highest rank and title of Moscow,
But he always comes out to meet all the guests himself.
Okudzhava also described how, in the small courtyards of the quiet Arbat alleys, the children came up with a game of “Arbatism” and a ritual of initiation into their “class.”
Even though my love is as old as the world,
He served and trusted only her alone,
I, a nobleman from the Arbat courtyard,
Inducted into the nobility by his court.
Bulat was the eldest of two sons. At home, the parents spoke Russian with their sons, often took them to the opera and concerts, Bulat and youth knew the repertoire of the opera house, and early began to write poetry and prose himself. Bulat Okudzhava later said: “This was long before the war. In the summer I lived with my aunt in Tbilisi. I was twelve years old. Like almost everyone else in childhood and adolescence, I wrote poetry. Every poem seemed wonderful to me. Each time I read what I had written again to my uncle and aunt. They were not very knowledgeable in poetry, to say the least. My uncle worked as an accountant, my aunt was an enlightened housewife. But they loved me very much and every time they listened to a new poem, they enthusiastically exclaimed: “Brilliant!” Aunt shouted to uncle: “He’s a genius!” The uncle happily agreed: “Of course, dear. A true genius!" And this was all in my presence, and I felt dizzy. And then one day my uncle asked me: “Why don’t you have a single book of your poems? Pushkin had so many of them... and Bezymensky... And you didn’t have one...” Indeed, I thought, not one, but why? And this sad injustice excited me so much that I went to the Writers' Union, on Machabeli Street. It was monstrously hot, there was no one in the Writers' Union, and only one of the most important secretary, fortunately for me, showed up in his office. He stopped by for a minute to pick up some papers, and at that moment I entered. “Hello,” I said. “Oh, hello, hello,” he said, smiling widely, “Are you coming to see me?” I nodded. “Oh, sit down, please, sit down, I’m listening to you...” I was not surprised either by his friendly smile or his exclamations and said: “You know, the fact is that I write poetry...” - “Oh! » - he whispered, “And I want... I thought: why don’t I publish a collection of poems? Like Pushkin or Bezymensky...” He looked at me strangely. Now, after so many years, I perfectly understand the nature of this look and what he was thinking about, but then... He stood motionless, and some strange smile twisted his face. Then he shook his head slightly and exclaimed: “A book?!” Yours?! Oh, that’s wonderful!.. That would be wonderful!” Then he paused, the smile disappeared, and he said sadly: “But, you see, we have difficulties with this... with paper... that's the very thing... we've run out of paper... well, it's just not there. .. finita...” “Ah-ah,” I drawled, not really understanding, “Maybe I’ll consult with my uncle?” He walked me to the door. At home at the dinner table, I said casually: “And I was in the Writers’ Union. They were all very happy there and said that they would be happy to publish my book... but they had difficulties with paper. .. she’s just not there...” “Idlers,” said the aunt. “How much of this paper do you need?” - Uncle asked in a businesslike manner. “I don’t know,” I said, “I don’t know that.” “Well,” he said, “I have about one and a half kilograms. Well, maybe two...” I shrugged. The next day I ran to the Writers' Union, but there was no one there. And that same chief secretary, fortunately for him, was also absent.”
When Okudzhava’s father, who by that time had become the secretary of the Tbilisi City Committee, had a conflict with Lavrentiy Beria, Shalva Okudzhava turned to Sergo Ordzhonikidze with a request to be transferred to party work in Russia, and was sent to the Urals as a party organizer for the construction of a carriage factory in Nizhny Tagil, where he became the first secretary of the Nizhny Tagil city party committee. He sent the family to live with him in the Urals, but in 1937 Bulat’s parents were arrested, his father was shot on false charges, and his mother was exiled to the Karaganda camp, from where she returned only in 1955. After the arrest of his parents, Bulat and his grandmother returned to Moscow, and rarely spoke about the fate of his parents, only towards the end of his life did he describe the events that befell his family in the autobiographical novel “The Abolished Theater”. Later, Bulat Shalvovich always kept in his desk drawer a copy of his father’s file, issued to him in Sverdlovsk in 1989.
The orphaned brothers began to live in Moscow with their grandmother, and from the age of 14 Bulat worked as an extra and stagehand in the theater, and also worked as a mechanic, but in 1940 his relatives took him to Tbilisi. At the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, Bulat worked as a turner at a defense plant, and in the spring of 1942, after finishing ninth grade, Bulat volunteered for the army, where he was sent to the North Caucasus Front and served in a mortar division. Later he became a radio operator and was wounded near Mozdok. Bulat Okudzhava later wrote: “I finished ninth grade when the war began. Like many of his peers, he was desperately eager to go to the front. My friend and I visited the military registration and enlistment office every day. They handed us summonses and said: “You take them home, and tomorrow we will send you away.” This went on for six months... Finally, broken by our stubbornness, the captain could not stand it and said: “Write your agendas yourself, I don’t have the courage to do it.” We filled out the forms and took them home: he to me, I to him. It’s somehow funny for me to remember myself and see myself - in bandages, with bow legs, with a thin neck, with a large cap on my head, who dreamed throughout the war of having boots and never received them... When I got to the front line on the first day, both I and several of my comrades - seventeen years old like me - looked very cheerful and happy. We had machine guns hanging on our chests, and we walked forward to the location of our battery, and each of us already imagined in our imagination how we would now fight and fight wonderfully. And at that very moment, when our fantasies reached their climax, a mine suddenly exploded, and we all fell to the ground, because we were supposed to fall. Well, we fell as expected, but the mine fell half a kilometer away from us. Everyone who was nearby walked past us, and we lay there. Then we heard ourselves laughing. They got up and went too. This was our first baptism of fire... War is an unnatural thing, depriving a person of his natural right to life. I am wounded by it for life and still often see in my dreams dead comrades, ashes of houses, the earth torn up by craters... I hate war... Then, later, when I began to write poetry, my first poems were about the war topic. There were many poems - From them songs were made... From some. These were mostly sad songs. Because, I’ll tell you, there’s nothing fun about war.”
In the spring of 1944, Okudzhava was demobilized after being wounded and settled in Tbilisi with his aunt. He graduated from school as an external student, entered the philological department of Tbilisi University, wrote a lot and read his lyrics in literary circle, which developed around the poet Georgiy Kreitan. In 1945, Okudzhava’s military-patriotic poems were published in the newspaper of the Transcaucasian Front, and he wrote his first song, “We couldn’t sleep in the cold train cars,” back in 1943 at the front, but apart from the first line, the text of this song has not been preserved. In 1946 he composed “Student Song” in assembly hall Tbilisi University, where Bulat was selecting a melody on the piano for a recently written poem.
Fierce and stubborn
Burn, fire, burn.
To replace December
Januarys are coming.
Everything has been given to us in full -
And joy and laughter.
One moon for all,
Spring is the same for everyone.
Live through the summer
And let them lead there
For all your deeds
To the worst judgment...
The shock of the war was later described by Okudzhava in the story “Be Healthy, Schoolboy,” written by him in 1960-1961, and military service after the hospital was described in the story “The Adventures of the Secret Baptist” in 1984. After graduating from the university, from 1950 to 1955, Bulat Okudzhava worked as an assigned teacher in the village of Shamordino and the regional center of Vysokinichi, Kaluga region, then in one of the secondary schools in the city of Kaluga. There, in Kaluga, he was a correspondent and literary contributor to the regional newspapers “Znamya” and “Young Leninist”. In 1955, Bulat Shalvovich’s parents were rehabilitated, and in 1956 he returned to Moscow, where he became a member of the Magistral literary association, worked as an editor at the Molodaya Gvardiya publishing house, and then as head of the poetry department at Literaturnaya Gazeta. Bulat Okudzhava said: “My friend Boris Balter then worked as a consultant at Literaturnaya Gazeta.” One day he said: “Listen, I want to show your work to the Old Man.” That’s what we called Konstantin Georgievich Paustovsky. “Show me,” I say, “if you want, it’s just scary.” And indeed, it was scary. K.G. I always considered Paustovsky a master and tried to look through his eyes at what was intended only for close people. But Balter left with the manuscript for Tarusa. He returned and said: “The old man asked me to bring you.” We spent three days visiting Konstantin Georgievich. He was already ill then, and his relatives, naturally, tried to protect him from unnecessary meetings and conversations. There were a lot of young people around him anyway. He was ready to support everyone who was looking for their path in art. I remember a barn, a guitar that came from somewhere, hastily cut sandwiches. Konstantin Georgievich secretly ran away from home... I can’t remember what I sang then, but the very atmosphere of goodwill and kindness gave birth to songs.”
At the end of the 1950s, Okudzhava’s songs gained wide popularity due to their unique language, musicality, trust and lack of falsehood. Having become a cult sign of the times, the original song rallied people around it. During these years, Okudzhava wrote the songs “About Lenka the Queen”, “The girl is crying - the ball has flown away”, “The last trolleybus”, “Goodbye, boys” and other works.
You flow like a river. Strange name!
And the asphalt is transparent, like water in a river.
Ah, Arbat, my Arbat, you are my calling.
You are both my joy and my misfortune.
Only knowing the truth about the years of separation and turmoil, “when the lead rains beat so hard on our backs that we couldn’t expect any mercy,” can one understand why Arbat is both joy and misfortune for Okudzhava. And understand why he wrote a different “Arbat” song, less enthusiastic, but more biographical.
What did you change your mind about, my father, who was shot,
When I walked out with the guitar, confused but alive?
It’s as if I stepped from the stage into the midnight comfort of Moscow,
Where the old Arbat boys are given their fate for free...
Okudzhava himself did not consider such a unique phenomenon in modern poetry as a poet with a guitar to be something special. He never wrote poems “to order.” Okudzhava’s quiet, sincere voice attracted and forced listeners to listen, because his soul and heart unmistakably defined important topics for his contemporaries.
In our life, beautiful and strange and short,
like the stroke of a pen over a smoking fresh wound
it’s time to think about it, really...
Playwright Alexander Volodin wrote: “I saw him at the Oktyabrskaya Hotel in the company of Moscow poets. He put his foot on the chair, the guitar on his knee, tightened the strings and began. What did you start? Then they began to call it Okudzhava’s songs. And then it was still unclear what it was. How to name? How to tell about this, what happened at the Oktyabrskaya Hotel? Okudzhava left for Moscow. And I talked and talked about it until the director of the House of Arts became curious about what kind of songs they were. I have put them in my own words. And soon Okudzhava’s first public evening was planned in the Leningrad House of Arts. I called everyone, persuading them to come. “What, good voice?” - they asked me. “That’s not the point, he makes up the words himself!” - “Are they good poems?” “That’s not the point, he composes the music himself!” - “Good melodies?” - “That’s not the point!..” Before I had to introduce him to the listeners, he asked: “Just don’t say that these are songs. It's a poetry". Apparently he wasn't sure of the musical merits of what he was doing. At Okudzhava’s next evening there was a crowd at the House of Arts. “What’s wrong here?” - asked passers-by. “Adzhubey has arrived,” they answered.”
In 1961, Okudzhava’s story “Be Healthy, Schoolboy” was included by Paustovsky in the almanac “Tarussky Pages”, but official criticism did not accept this story for pacifist motives in assessing experiences young man at war. And in 1965, director Vladimir Motyl filmed it, giving the film a different name - “Zhenya, Zhenechka and Katyusha.” At the same time, in 1961 - 1962, official criticism condemned many of Okudzhava’s songs. According to the leadership of the Writers' Union of Russia, “most of these songs did not express the moods, thoughts, and aspirations of our heroic youth.” In the mid and late 1960s, the writer more than once flaunted his independence, signed letters in defense of Yu. Daniel and A. Sinyavsky, and published abroad. Okudzhava, in collaboration with Pyotr Todorovsky, wrote the script for the film “Loyalty”, and two scripts with Olga Artsimovich for the films “ Private life Alexander Sergeich, or Pushkin in Odessa” and “We loved Melpomene...”, but both of these films were never staged.
Okudzhava's songs began to be heard in films. Professional composers wrote music to his poems. The song based on Okudzhava’s poems “Take your overcoat, let’s go home” quickly became incredibly popular. And the most fruitful was Okudzhava’s collaboration with Isaac Schwartz, which resulted in the songs “Drops of the Danish King”, “Your Honor”, “Song of the Cavalry Guard”, “Road Song”, songs for the television film “Straw Hat” and many other works.
In the 1960s, Okudzhava worked a lot in the prose genre. He said: “I express myself in prose and poetry. In poetry - using rhyme and rhythm, in prose - differently. The only difference is in the form...” In total, during Bulat Okudzhava’s work in cinema, more than 70 of his songs were performed in 50 films, of which more than 40 songs were based on his music.
At the end of the 1960s, Okudzhava turned to historical prose. In 1970-1980, his stories “Poor Avrosimov” about the tragic pages in the history of the Decembrist movement, “The Adventures of Shilov, or Ancient Vaudeville” and the novels “The Journey of Amateurs” and “A Date with Bonaparte”, written on historical material of the early 19th century, were published in separate editions. Okudzhava continued to write autobiographical prose, included in the collections “The Girl of My Dreams” and “The Visiting Musician,” as well as the novel “The Abolished Theater,” which received the International Booker Prize in 1994 as the best novel of the year in Russian.
Okudzhava always kept himself aloof from the literary and bard circles and, as a matter of principle, did not attend PCB meetings, despite numerous invitations. Very rarely, in exceptional cases, he agreed to be chairman or member of the jury. At art song rallies, he was extremely upset by the “secondary nature, plagiarism, drunken choral songs and cries like: “Come on Vysotsky!” Bulat Okudzhava said: “Now I don’t think much about the original song: in my opinion, today it no longer exists. There is a mass phenomenon that has lost the main attractive features that made it at one time the “ruler of the thoughts” of so many people. Nowadays everyone plays guitars, writes poetry (mostly bad), and sings them. The public has already become accustomed to a man with a guitar. And everyone who picks up a guitar is called a bard, and I like that name too. I personally have no interest in all this. I think the genre is dead. He left behind a good memory, left behind the names and works of several true poets; as it always happens, the weak is gone, the strong remains, well, we must appreciate and remember what was born and existed within the framework of a given genre... For me, the Poet is, first of all, important. A poet who performs some of his poems to his own melody. That is why I am ignorant of what was previously called the KSP, and now the art song movement. Ninety percent of them are just performers (very good ones, by the way); there are people who write music based on other people’s poems; there are those who write poetry, but, in my opinion, more often they are weak (because there is never too much good). I have never been particularly associated with this movement, although I have always respected people who sing... I don’t know what a bard is. For me, anyway, first of all, there are poems, and I can only talk about poetry only then - about everything else... I repeat, for me there is a Poet who reads his poems and sings them...”
In 1970, Okudzhava completed work on two novels, “Mercy, or the Adventures of Shilov” and “Old Vaudeville.” In the same year, the film “White Sun of the Desert” was released, in which the song “Your Honor, Lady Separation” was written to Okudzhava’s poems. And in 1971, the film “Belorussky Station” was released, in which another of Bulat Shalvovich’s famous songs “We will not stand for the price” was performed. Okudzhava “forgot” some of his songs, never performed them, and forbade them to include them in collections. One such comic song was written by him in 1957: “Marya Petrovna goes for a herring, lives near the market, and a brand new satellite floats above Moscow like a silver boat.” Another song “What is your fault?” Bulat Okudzhava wrote after separating from his first wife Galina Smolyaninova in 1964. Exactly a year after the divorce, to the day, she died at 39 from a broken heart. For Okudzhava, this was one of the hardest blows in his life. His second wife Olga Artsimovich became his caring and true friend on long years their difficult life together.
In 1976, a collection of Okudzhava’s poems entitled “Arbat, my Arbat” was published, in 1977 he wrote the novel “The Journey of an Amateur”, in 1983 the novel “A Date with Bonaparte”, and since the mid-1980s, Okudzhava’s work has become extremely popular. During the years of perestroika, the authorities did not persecute his work, but, on the contrary, encouraged it in every possible way. Okudzhava joined the Presidential Pardon Commission Russian Federation, in 1984 he became a Knight of the Order of Friendship of Peoples. About Okudzhava’s 60th anniversary, Yuliy Kim wrote: “In May 1984, Bulat turned 60. As usual, not wanting any boom, he disappeared into the wilds of the Kaluga province, but guests still came to him - and how many! And How! Armed with a video camera, Olga, his wife, together with Bulat Jr., secretly from the hero of the day, visited about a hundred friends and acquaintances, asking everyone to raise a glass in honor of the birthday boy with a short monologue appropriate to the occasion. It turned out to be a three-hour congratulation, and thus no one came to Bulat in his Kaluga wilderness. Venya Smekhov, for example, spoke his monologue with his legs dangling from the stage of the old Taganka. Two of Yuri's sidekicks - Karyakin and Davydov - raised their glasses of vodka, spreading a newspaper with sausage on a park bench. Alla Borisovna, in a golden jacket, at home at the white piano, sang something about autumn to Bulat, beautifully and simply. It was a wonderful celebration. But it turned out even more remarkable a month and a half later in the hall of the Gorbunov House of Culture in Fili - the only place where Bulat agreed to meet, so to speak, with the people in the form of Moscow cadet soldiers, with whom he had long been friends. The thousand-seat hall with a balcony was packed. Bulat was sitting in the second row. He showed up, despite the temperature of 38 degrees, and heroically spent the entire evening - both the concert part and the feast backstage for about 80 people. And there was such a spontaneous action there, at the finale of the concert. The hero of the occasion himself had already sung the funeral service on stage, the final applause had already thundered - and then people reached out to Bulat with flowers. He stood and accepted bouquet after bouquet, putting them on a chair, and they no longer fit, another chair was needed, and this mountain of flowers grew and grew... Zhvanetsky - later, at the table - still could not stand it and, standing up, raised his glass. - Dear Bulat, I drink to the fact that you received all this during your lifetime. But one special gift was dearer to him than all the flowers. Suddenly, a man came out onto the stage from behind the scenes, leaning back under the weight of a whole column of books, which he carried in front of him: 11 volumes of samizdat - beautifully bound, a printed complete collection of works, and not only works, but also all criticism , including the evil one! The only multi-volume work of his lifetime, “The Soul in the Treasured Lyre...” 160 years ago, his beloved Pushkin already wrote about him, immediately in the first person:
And for a long time I will be so kind to the people,
That I awakened good feelings with my lyre,
That in my cruel age I glorified freedom
And he called for mercy for the fallen.
The genius guessed everything: the song, the guitar, and even participation in the Pardon Commission.” And on May 9, 1994, Okudzhava celebrated his 70th birthday - in a small cozy hall, surrounded by fans and friends, and in the presence of some government members sympathetic to Bulat. Greetings, speeches and songs sounded natural for such an occasion. At the end, Okudzhava took the stage. He looked confused, tired and sick. After waiting for silence, he quietly thanked the audience and added, guiltily: “Forgive me, but all this is deeply alien to me...”
In the 1990s, Okudzhava’s work was noted big amount prizes and awards. In 1990, Norwich University in the USA awarded Okudzhava the honorary degree of Doctor of Humanities, in 1991 he was awarded the USSR State Prize, and in the same year he received the Sakharov Award for Courage in Literature from the independent writers' association "April". In 1994, for the biographical novel “The Abolished Theater,” written a year earlier, Bulat Shalvovich received the Booker Prize in the category “ Best Novel year in Russian." In the same year, Okudzhava himself joined the Commission on State Prizes of the Russian Federation. During these years, Bulat Shalvovich often gave concerts in Moscow, St. Petersburg, the USA, Germany and Israel. In 1997 in the magazine " New world"Bulat Okudzhava's "Autobiographical Anecdotes" were published, and this was his last lifetime publication of prose. A few months before his death, Okudzhava experienced the tragic death of his eldest son Igor, before whom he felt guilty all his life and about whom he wrote the following lines in the poem “Results”:
My son was born in the fifties,
my sad eldest,
tired early, fallen into the ground...
And don't pick it up...
After the death of his son, Okudzhava’s health deteriorated sharply. On June 25, 1995, his last concert took place at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. While in Paris on a private visit to visit Anatoly Gladilin, Bulat Okudzhava fell ill with the flu and was admitted to the hospital. Complications caused by asthma and stomach diseases, later kidney failure began to develop, and doctors said that it was impossible to expect improvement, since Okudzhava had a very weakened immune system. Although Bulat Shalvovich was not a religious person, he was baptized in Paris just a few hours before his death, and received the blessing of one of the elders of the Pskov-Pechora Lavra, receiving the name John at baptism. By a strange coincidence, in his autobiographical prose he preferred to call himself Ivan Ivanovich. Bulat Okudzhava died on June 12, 1997 in a Paris military hospital and was buried at the Vagankovskoye cemetery in Moscow.
On the third day after Okudzhava’s death, in the studio of the Ekho Moskvy radio station, Ilya Milstein said: “For at least three generations of Russian people, he was their poet, an exponent of the most cherished feelings and the most hard-fought convictions. His death - for those who lived to see this death - became a personal loss. Irreplaceable, heavy and sorrowful... He had an amazing face: childishly trusting eyes, contemptuous, mocking lips. The eyes reflected the poet as he was intended, pure, sublime and romantic. People and years have worked on the hard folds around the mouth. Thus, in his poems and melodies, the unique intonations of his voice and those incompatible features were combined: carelessness and suffering, naivety and melancholy, defenselessness and wisdom... Okudzhava’s very presence in the city, in the country, on the planet, slightly ennobled reality. Not much, per milligram. But for now it was enough. With Okudzhava’s departure, now without any doubt, real, adult life begins in Russia. Without Paper Soldiers, Merciful Sisters and Green-Eyed God. Without pity, without hope and without mercy. And our simple wisdom, childish gullibility and mocking love died on the 12th... in a French military hospital...”
Several documentaries have been made about the life and work of Bulat Okudzhava.
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Text prepared by Tatyana Halina
Used materials:
Text of the article by Vitaly Orlov
Materials from the Wikipedia site
Text of the article “Bulat Okudzhava in cinema and in life” on the website www.bokudjava.ru
Materials from the site www.megabook.ru
Materials from the site www.museum.ru
Materials from the site www.belopolye.narod.ru
Name: Bulat Okudgava
Age: 73 years old
Place of Birth: Moscow, USSR
A place of death: Clamart, France
Activity: poet, bard, composer
Family status: was married
Bulat Okudzhava - biography
The people's favorite poet, bard, writer, screenwriter and translator Bulat Okudzhava would have turned 92 years old in May of this year. Born in post-revolutionary Russia and living in post-perestroika Russia, Okudzhava fully experienced all the hardships of this difficult path. Semi-banned, more than once subjected to unfair criticism, Okudzhava lived and worked as he breathed. Few people believed that everyone lives like this: “As he breathes, so he writes, without trying to please.” And he was always heard by everyone.
Bulat Okudzhava was born on May 9, 1924 in Moscow, in the famous Grauerman maternity hospital, where many famous personalities were born in their time. His father, Georgian party worker Shalva Okudzhava, was sent from Tiflis to Moscow for party training. Okudzhava’s family was given two rooms in a five-room apartment in one of the Arbat houses. Before the revolution, this apartment belonged to the manufacturer Kanevsky, who after the “densification” occupied one room with his family.
At the end of 1924, Shalva Okudzhava was recalled back to Georgia for party work. Little Bulat remained with his mother Ashkhen and a nanny, who was mainly involved in his upbringing. In the autobiographical novel “The Abolished Theater,” written by Okudzhava in the third person, he recalled those times in his biography: “The distant dad seemed drawn out and implausible. The ghostly mother appeared for a moment, occasionally, in the evenings, if he had not yet fallen asleep, and, tired after an inspired day of work, hugged him to her, but somehow detached, frantically, from another world, continuing to think about something his own."
In 1929, his father returned to Moscow for a short time, but a year later he was appointed to the post of first secretary of the city party committee in Tiflis, and the family moved to Georgia. A year later, Bulat went to first grade at a Russian school. In addition to general education, the boy was also sent to a music school, since he was found to have perfect pitch, but Bulat was unable to graduate from it, since the family was constantly moving.
In 1932, Shalva Stepanovich was transferred to work in Nizhny Tagil, where he headed the organization of the construction of the famous Uralvagonzavod. In 1934, the couple had a second son, Victor.
Starting this year, when he was killed in Leningrad, the wheel of political terror began to gain momentum. It reached Nizhny Tagil in February 1937, and Shalva Okudzhava, who at that time headed the city committee of the party, was one of the first to be arrested. Ashkhen and her children urgently returned to Moscow. She was expelled from the party, suspended from party work, and she, having got a job as a cashier in some artel, tried to get an appointment with Beria, whom she had known from party work in Tiflis.
But he didn’t accept her, and one night they simply “came” for her. The children remained in the care of their grandmother Maria Vartanovna, Ashkhen’s mother. “We were afraid all the time,” Bulat Shalvovich later recalled, “that my brother and I would be taken to an orphanage.” But everything worked out. Or perhaps they were simply forgotten.
Georgian relatives helped the orphaned children as best they could, but they still lived hungry. The grandmother gave all her strength to little Vita, and thirteen-year-old Bulat was left to his own devices. In his autobiographical prose, Okudzhava wrote: “At the age of thirteen, I imagined myself in black trousers, a white apache shirt and with a Leika camera over my shoulder,” this is another echo of a prosperous life with my parents. And two years later, his role model was already “a Moscow-Arbat swindler, a criminal.
Accordion boots, vest, jacket, cap, bangs and gold hair fixation.” But there were other examples: a portrait of the Spanish communist leader Dolores Ibarruri hung above his bed. There was a civil war in Spain, and, like any soviet boy, he dreamed of running away to this war to distinguish himself. Bulat idolized the test pilot. Hero Soviet Union Valery Chkalov, who made the first non-stop flight across North Pole from Moscow to Vancouver.
He raved about the Papaninites and Chelyuskinites, the heroes of the Arctic, in general, he was the same as his peers, the “red boy,” as he later once called himself. Bulat did not yet know that his father had been shot. Radio and newspapers tirelessly reported on the successes of socialism, on the great construction projects of the Five-Year Plan, on internationalism and the future happiness of all mankind. The youth were confident that they lived in the best, most advanced country in the world.
To prevent Bulat from completely getting out of hand, one of his mother’s sisters, Sylvia, a housewife, offered to send her nephew to her in Tbilisi. Summer holidays Bulat spent his childhood there, and in the summer of 1940 he moved to live with her. In the fall he was enrolled in school. By that time, Bulat had already begun to write poetry. Later, in the story “Genius,” he will describe a curious incident when, taking the word of his uncle, who said that it was time for him to be published, like Pushkin, he went to the Writers’ Union on Machabeli Street.
The Secretary of the Union was quite surprised by his visit, but found himself and answered the boy that he would be happy to publish his works, but the trouble was, he had run out of paper. Bulat was not at all embarrassed by this. And in the evening at dinner, he told his uncle that he had been to the Writers' Union and that they had promised to publish his poems, but there was no paper. His uncle made fun of him, promising to get the paper. And Bulat, inspired, went there again the next day, but did not find anyone, since it was summer, vacation time. But whether it really was so, as Okudzhava amusingly described this episode of the biography of his youth in the story, is not known for certain.
A year later the Great War began Patriotic War, for which the minor Bulat volunteered. At first, he and his friend were kicked out of the military registration and enlistment office, but they asked to go to the front again and again. Then they were instructed to deliver the summons door to door. They were not received with joy everywhere; sometimes they were beaten and thrown down the stairs. In the end, the boys were so tired of the military commissar that he gave them summons forms and said: “You will fill them out yourself! My hand is not to blame, remember.” So, in April 1942, Bulat Okudzhava was sent to a reserve mortar division. But everything turned out to be completely different from what the boys dreamed of. They imagined that they would fight on the front lines, perhaps becoming heroes.
In fact, they were not sworn in for a long time, they were transported several times from one base to another, and they were not immediately put on pay. Everyone was starving, begging for food in the surrounding villages, exchanging uniforms for bread. The soldiers and commanders arrived at the scene undressed, barefoot, dirty and hungry. Bulat Okudzhava spoke very sparingly about this to Yuri Rost in one of his interviews: “... the war taught courage and hardening, but they also received hardening in the camp. But mostly it was horror and corruption of souls.”
Some time later, near Mozdok, Bulat was wounded: a German reconnaissance plane fired at our positions. After the hospital, Bulat returned to the front, served as a radio operator in heavy artillery, but the wound constantly made itself felt, and in April 1944 he was demobilized. At the front, he composed his first song, “We Couldn’t Sleep in the Cold Warehouses,” but its text, unfortunately, has not been preserved.
Returning home, Bulat passed the exams for the tenth grade of high school as an external student and in 1945 entered Tbilisi University at the Faculty of Philology. At the university, young people looked at him with respect: of course, a front-line soldier, a hero. “A quiet, delighted “hurray” accompanied me along the university corridors. Smiles and compliments enveloped me and lulled me to sleep,” he later wrote.
Bulat Okudzhava - biography of personal life
Recalling the biography of his youth, Okudzhava admitted that he was terribly amorous. The girls also liked Bulat. Medium height, handsome, dark brown eyes and a mop of black curls. Incredibly charming and relatable opposite sex with extraordinary reverence, which, naturally, immediately captivated. But, probably, the most important thing is that he sang very well with the guitar. Therefore, it is not surprising that at the age of 23 Bulat found himself married. The Smolyaninov sisters - Ira and Galya - studied with him at the same faculty. He began an affair with Galya, who was two years younger than him. By that time, Okudzhava was already living independently, renting a corner room in a communal apartment. In 1947, Bulat and Galya got married.
Besides this, one more thing an important event happened in Bulat’s life: his mother returned from the camp. In 1948, in Tiflis, a poetry circle organized by Okudzhava’s friends was destroyed, and some of Bulat’s friends were arrested. They were accused of participating in an organization that was allegedly preparing an assassination attempt. Bulat was not touched, but he received a warning. And a year later, on a new wave of political terror, my mother was arrested again and exiled to Siberia for eternal settlement.
In 1950, young specialists Bulat and Galina Okudzhava were assigned to a secondary school in the Kaluga region, in the village of Shamordino. Almost nothing is known about this period in the biography of Bulat’s personal life. But. for example, in the autobiographical story “Isolated Failures Among Continuous Successes,” he writes: “It was a long time ago. I was young. I was transferred from a rural school to a city one, and then my life suddenly went downhill... I rented a corner in a house on the outskirts. It was a rotten autumn. The students did not like me, and they poisoned my existence.
There were no friends yet. I didn’t want to live.” And then the story goes about how he almost broke down and started drinking with a random friend. And this went on for many months. But a miracle happened, and he “returned to himself.” From a rural school, Okudzhava received a transfer to Kaluga. There he first worked as a teacher, and then he was invited to work for the city newspaper. In 1954, the couple had a son, Igor.
The turning point in the biography of Bulat Okudzhava was 1956. Three years have passed since Stalin's death, Beria was arrested and executed, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev came to power. In February 1956, the next 20th Congress of the CPSU took place, at which the resolution “On the cult of personality and its consequences” was adopted. This is how the famous Khrushchev “thaw” began. Many repressed people returned from the camps ahead of schedule. Those executed were rehabilitated, including Shalva Okudzhava. Ashkhen’s mother also returned to Moscow. She was given a two-room apartment on Krasnopresnenskaya embankment, and soon Bulat with his family and brother Victor moved to the capital.
The “Thaw” affected everything: new magazines were opened - “Youth”, “Literary Moscow”, “Our Contemporary”, new names appeared in literature: Vasily Aksenov. Modernist artists and the first dissidents appeared. “We were the first dissident dissidents, at a time when Sakharov was a privileged secret specialist, Solzhenitsyn was an unknown teacher, a former prisoner, and a schoolboy,” recalled Yevgeny Yevtushenko in the book “Meetings in the Waiting Room. Memories of Bulat."
Impressed by his mother’s return from the camp and in the wake of the “thaw,” Bulat Okudzhava joined the ranks of the CPSU. Within six months he realized that he had probably made a mistake, but there was no turning back.
In Moscow, Okudzhava got a job at the Molodaya Gvardiya publishing house, and from there he moved to Literaturnaya Gazeta, to the position of head of the poetry department. In Literaturka Bulat met and became close friends with Stanislav Rassadin and other young writers. It was Rassadin who became the first to highly appreciate Bulat’s songs when he once sang to him with a guitar. Indeed, after Alexander Vertinsky there was nothing like this in Russia, so Rassadin was immediately captivated by “Vanka Morozov”, “The Blue Ball”, and “Nadya-Nadenka”. He began to persuade his friend to perform this in a close circle, but Okudzhava refused, not giving his song creativity of great importance. One day he did sing to his friends in Literaturka. Everyone liked it. and someone joked: “Well, you’ll be famous.” He. Of course, I didn’t believe it.
His first “public” concerts took place at a state-owned dacha in Sheremetyevo, which Okudzhava was allocated from the editorial office of Literaturka. He lived there with his family, and in the evenings colleagues and neighbors gathered to listen to Bulat’s songs. It has already become a kind of ritual - spending evenings either on the country terrace or in the forest around the fire.
The Moscow intelligentsia began vying with each other to invite Bulat to their homes. He sang, he was recorded on a tape recorder, and then the songs “went to the people.” No one really knew who Okudzhava was yet, but he was already popular. Every house that had a tape recorder always had recordings of Okudzhava’s songs. And since such luxury was not available to everyone, the happy owners of a tape recorder opened the window, placed it on the windowsill, turned it on at full volume, and the whole street heard “Can you hear the boots rattling”, “Prayer”, “Grape seed”.
Composer Isaac Schwartz, in his memoirs about Bulat, explained the interest in his songs by the fact that they contained “nostalgia for freedom.” Later, Okudzhava and Schwartz collaborated extensively and fruitfully, and Isaac Iosifovich described his first impressions of meeting Bulat as follows: “He literally captivated me: he had impeccable taste in everything he did. And in communication he was simple, even seemingly shy... But this quiet, laconic, soft-looking person, as it turned out later, could be very firm.”
Okudzhava's first official concert, held in Leningrad in 1961, was held with a packed hall. The authorities immediately moved. On command from Moscow, a feuilleton “On the Price of Noisy Success” appeared in the Leningrad newspaper “Smena.” The next day this publication appeared in “ Komsomolskaya Pravda" And at a concert in the Moscow House of Cinema, Okudzhava was booed and he was forced to leave the stage.
The "thaw" was ending. The magazine “Literary Moscow” had already been banned, literary associations began to close everywhere, newspapers increasingly began to switch from free style to officialdom In 1961, Okudzhava was admitted to the Writers' Union. At the same time, his story about the war, “Be Healthy, Student,” was published in the almanac “Tarussky Pages,” which was immediately recognized as harmful due to the lack of heroic pathos in it. Most of the almanac's circulation was destroyed, and Okudzhava was not published anywhere after that. In the same 1961, he was forced to leave " Literary newspaper" and became a "free artist".
He collaborated with film directors Marlen Khutsiev and Pyotr Todorovsky, wrote poetry and prose, and gave concerts. Famous evenings at the Polytechnic Museum were rarely complete without his participation.
Great changes also took place in Okudzhava’s personal life. Bulat met Olga Artsimovich by chance. She was twenty-two at the time. and he is thirty-eight. This is how Olga Vladimirovna herself recalls this: “By the day of our first meeting, I had not even heard his name. When Okudzhava was just beginning to become famous, my uncle, the famous physicist Lev Andreevich Artsimovich. invited him to visit and sing... That’s when I saw Bulat for the first time.” They began to live in Leningrad, and two years later, in the fall of 1964, Olga gave birth to a son, who was named Bulat in honor of his father.
Life was difficult financially. Okudzhava went to Moscow to work. He gave most of the money to Galina for his son Igor. Didn't get divorced. because he considered it his duty to provide his son with an apartment, and for this he had to wait until the completion of the construction of the cooperative writers' house near the Airport metro station. As soon as the apartment was received and Galina Vasilievna registered there, they divorced. Much to his regret, after the divorce he lost contact with Igor. Galina did not want him to see her son, she was getting ready to get married, and a year later she died suddenly.
Olga immediately told Bulat to take the child, but he hesitated: after all, he was the youngest. Bulat was still very small, can Olya cope with two? But when he decided to go after Igor, the former relatives did not give up their son, citing the fact that the boy did not yet know about his mother’s death and he could not be traumatized. Later, when Igor becomes a difficult teenager, his grandfather himself will send him to his father.
In 1965, a large album with Okudzhava’s songs was released, published in London, transcribed from an amateur tape recording. In the same year, Okudzhava, along with others, signed a letter in defense of convicted writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuliy Daniel, and his reputation as unreliable was finally established. Subsequently, he helped Daniel, who made money by translating Apollinaire's poetry, signing his publications with his name. In 1965, Okudzhava, his wife and son moved to Moscow.
Bulat’s mother contributed greatly to this. All former camp inmates communicated closely with each other and helped each other. Ashkhen Stepanovna had great authority among her friends. They all set out together to “drag” Bulat back to the capital, because his work was in Moscow. We found a cooperative with a vacant apartment, collected money for the down payment, and Bulat and Olga celebrated a housewarming party in a three-room apartment near the Rechnoy Vokzal metro station.
In 1967, in Yugoslavia, at the international poetry festival in the city of Struga, Okudzhava was awarded the highest award - the Golden Crown - for the poem “My Son’s Tin Soldier”. This poem was published in Russia only 20 years later in Moskovsky Komsomolets. That same year, Okudzhava performed successfully in Paris, and the next year in West Germany. In Moscow, his official concerts were rare and always took a very long time to agree “from above”: they would not allow it. He sang in small houses of culture, in libraries, in institutes - and everywhere with a full house.
In 1967, Vladimir Motyl’s film “Zhenya, Zhenechka and Katyusha,” based on Okudzhava’s story “Be Healthy, Schoolboy,” was released. Bulat Shalvovich took an active part in writing the script - he composed all the dialogues, although Vladimir Motyl was repeatedly hinted that Okudzhava should not be taken as a co-author because of his unreliability. The film was received with a bang by the mass audience, and the song “Drink the drops of the Danish king, gentlemen” went to the people.
In the late sixties, Bulat Shalvovich began working on the theme of the Decembrists. “I became interested in historical prose. It was amazing to be immersed in bygone times, reincarnate! .. Of course, I deluded myself while I was composing. As soon as I put an end to it and re-read it, I began to understand with chagrin how weak it was. But I was consoled, warmed, provoked by the belief that the next thing, it would be wonderful,” he wrote in the “Preface of a Literary Egoist” to his book “The Visiting Musician.” He dreamed of making a film about the Decembrist Mikhail Bestuzhev, but nothing came of it: at the studio, with Okudzhava’s name, everyone immediately began to panic - what if there were troubles? He still remained in the rank of “unreliable”, and most government organizations preferred not to have anything to do with him.
In 1970, Andrei Smirnov’s film “Belorussky Station” was released. It was an unusually truthful film about the war, which veterans received as if they had been waiting for a long time. The picture had a huge public response, and it brought Okudzhava all-Union fame and popular love thanks to the song “The birds don’t sing here...”.
At this time, the persecution of Okudzhava as a writer begins again. Critics are intolerant of his new novels: “Mercy, or the Adventures of Shilov” and “The Journey of Amateurs.” Attacks on his songs continue. In June 1972, the party organization of the Writers' Union expelled Okudzhava from the ranks of the CPSU. The reason was that circumstance. that the New York Times published an article saying that there is no freedom of creativity in the USSR and an example of this is the fate of Bulat Okudzhava.
Okudzhava was summoned to the Central Committee and demanded that Bulat Shalvovich write a refutation. Okudzhava flatly refused: “I have to live with myself until the end of my days, but I don’t know if I’ll see you again.” The City Committee did not approve the decision of the primary party organization to expel Okudzhava from the ranks of the CPSU: they did not inflate the scandal further, so as not to give unnecessary reason to Western newspapers and radio stations.
In 1976, Okudzhava’s first big record was finally released by Melodiya. There is a rush in the stores. Art critic Lev Shilov recalled it this way: “...people with records kept coming out of the doors, and since the wrapping paper had long since run out, they carried the records unwrapped, and they all had these large portraits of Okudzhava on them. People dispersed to the right and left along the Bolshoi Arbat. and it looked almost like some kind of demonstration, with every fifth or tenth person carrying a portrait of the same person. I thought that if they had ever told me that I would live to see this, I would never have believed it” (from the book “Meetings in the Waiting Room. Memories of Bulat”).
In the eighties, Okudzhava began performing his songs together with his grown-up son Bulat. He helped his father, arranged his songs and accompanied him on the piano during the concert, although he never came out to bow. Their joint concerts were well received by the public. Even fanatical fans who opposed “adding” anything to Okudzhava and believed that no decorations were needed - just a voice and a guitar - were captivated by this creative union. Several times Okudzhava performed with the aspiring singer Natalya Gorlenko, wanting to help her in her career, just as he once promoted young art song performers Veronica Dolina, Elena Kamburova and Zhanna Bichevskaya.
Since the late eighties, Bulat Shalvovich mostly lived at his dacha in Peredelkino. Olga Okudzhava, in her interview with Ogonyok magazine, recalls those times: “He was busy in Peredelkino in the morning while I was still lying in bed: chopping wood, fixing the lighting in the garage, checking how the potatoes were stored in the barn...” That’s all, Those who knew Okudzhava throughout his life remember that he was very hospitable, an excellent conversationalist, a very attentive friend, and in people he valued, above all, not status, but decency.
But. as one of his associates, film director Vladimir Motyl, recalls, Okudzhava most time was closed to everyone. And Olga notes in her interview that he was always happy to have guests, but most of all he loved to spend time with a book on the sofa: “... there was a Caucasian cult of hospitality and cooking, gourmetism, witchcraft with herbs in the kitchen. Guests were welcomed, but only the opening of the door gave true pleasure. Oh who has come! - hugs, greetings, table setting. An hour later I saw that he was already bored, he wanted to sit on the sofa with a book.”
Bulat Shalvovich said about himself that he was never a widely sociable person. He was politely reserved with people he didn’t know well, and about himself he was invariably ironic. Didn't like compliments. but I always read new things to my wife and friends and was very interested in whether they liked it or not. It is interesting that, according to Olga, Okudzhava did not personally dedicate poems or songs to any of his friends: “He did not dedicate, like everyone else, when he wrote, he simply gave away what he had written. Normal person goes to visit with a bottle, with a bouquet - Okudzhava came with a poem.”
Isaac Schwartz, with whom they first met in the film “Zhenya, Zhenechka and Katyusha” and with whom they wrote about 30 songs for films (among them “Lady Luck” - “White Sun of the Desert”, “The Cavalry Guard’s Age is Not Long” - “ Star of Captivating Happiness") indicates that Okudzhava was modest, did not wear ties, was even shy in communication and did not change from fame. In everyday life he was unpretentious. although he really loved the comfort and Tasty food, and he cooked perfectly. In his office there were many books, on the wall there were photographs, paintings, portraits of Pasternak, Nabokov, Severyanin, Pushkin.
His first car was a Zaporozhets, which he received thanks to the efforts of his friends. Okudzhava published a lot in the West, but it was not possible to receive royalties from there. Therefore, friends, having collected his money from the publishing houses, transferred the amount to the account of the Berezka currency store in Moscow. One fine day, Okudzhava received a call and was told that a Zaporozhets car had been purchased in his name. gray. By the way, at that time Bulat Shalvovich did not even know how to drive a car, and therefore he went with his friend Vasily Aksenov to pick up the car. Many years later, he bought a Zhiguli and drove only them, and was indifferent to foreign cars.
In 1983, Bulat's mother, Ashkhen Stepanovna Nalbandyan, died. Towards the end of her life, she finally abandoned all her communist ideals. When revealing materials about Stalin, about repressions, about unknown pages Great Patriotic War, about terror in Civil War, she once said bitterly: “What have we done!” Okudzhava loved and pitied his mother very much. She was the only one, besides his wife, to whom he dedicated his poems.
In an interview, Olga recalls Ashkhen Stepanovna: “At first, she and I looked closely at each other. There was terrible jealousy - who loves Bulat more correctly. She was strict. Very honest. Very closed. With a passionate thirst to anonymously help everyone, sometimes complete strangers.”
Okudzhava accepted perestroika with all his heart. He began to spend a lot of time public affairs, which was previously unusual for him: he became a member of the founding council of Yegor Yakovlev’s Obshchaya Gazeta, worked on the pardon commission with Anatoly Pristavkin, on the commission on literary heritage and Vysotsky. In 1990, Okudzhava left the CPSU. He rethought everything a long time ago. Back in 1981, he wrote the following lines: “I don’t keep track of past losses, but even if I am moderate in my retribution, I do not forgive, remembering the past,” and in another poem he admitted: “I was ready for anything, my terrible age Almost got me..."
When the opposition came out against President Boris Yeltsin in 1993, Okudzhava signed the “Letter of the 42,” in which famous Russian writers called for tougher measures “for promoting fascism, chauvinism, racial hatred,” and demanded the closure of some newspapers, magazines and television programs. Many then condemned him for this position. In Minsk, before the start of the concert, a picket lined up at the doors of the theater with posters “Shame on the fascist Okudzhava!”
Before the start of the concert, there was a somewhat alarming state in the hall, and after the first song a man came on stage and threw two carnations at Okudzhava’s feet: “Here’s to your grave!” What started here! The audience stood up, everyone screamed, a little girl jumped onto the stage with a bouquet, notes were sent with the words: “Forgive us! This is not us. We don't know who these people are, don't believe it. Minsk loves you, Belarus loves you!”
Subsequently, Okudzhava realized that nothing would come true that was hoped for, that this “thaw”, like the previous one in 1956, would end in nothing. A little later he will write to a friend abroad: “It’s autumn in Peredelkino. Russia is a mess."
In the early nineties, Bulat Shalvovich was in great demand abroad. Our emigration constantly invited him to perform. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Norwich University, USA. and in 1991 - the USSR State Prize. That same year, Okudzhava spent several months in the United States. He intended to stay with friends there and finish his new novel-family chronicle, “The Abolished Theater,” without fuss.
But it so happened that in the USA he underwent heart surgery. Bulat Shalvovich had been complaining of angina for a long time, and when he was examined, the doctor said that he needed to have surgery immediately. It was necessary to find 65 thousand dollars for the operation. Many Americans, Russian emigrants, and friends responded, but the amount was too large and was needed immediately. The writer and friend Lev Kopelev, who lived in Germany, helped and agreed on a loan, which Okudzhava had to repay in full. Part of the amount was paid by the US government. The operation was successful, and the next year, Bulat Shashovich, who had recovered, performed with his son in Israel.
In January 1997, Bulat Shalvovich suffered a heavy loss: the untimely death of his eldest son Igor, who in his youth could not find his path in life, despite his father’s care.
In the spring, Okudzhava and his wife got ready for a trip abroad. He always tried to be away from home on his birthday - he didn’t like celebrations. For the first time, we decided to just travel, without any obligatory meetings or performances. First we visited Germany, then we were supposed to go to visit friends in Paris. They called Lev Kopelev from Marburg, who had recently had the flu. Bulat Shalvovich, hanging up the phone, said: “How I miss Lyovochka!” And they went to see him in Cologne. No signs of trouble.
Moreover, Olga Vladimirovna previously received permission from the attending doctors for this trip and in Germany showed her husband to a doctor who found Bulat Shalvovich’s condition to be good and said that he still had at least ten years ahead of him. From Cologne they moved to Paris, and there Bulat Shalvovich soon fell ill with the flu. Mutual friends asked him to speak at UNESCO Headquarters in a close circle. He said: “Maybe...”, but this was not destined to happen.
On June 12, 1997, Bulat Okudzhava died in a Paris hospital. Lev Kopelev survived him by a week. They say that Okudzhava was afraid of death like any non-believer; he said about himself that he was a fatalist and a sad optimist. “So I’m swinging on the very edge and blowing on an unburnt candle... Soon I’ll see my slim mother. proud and young."