Bulat Okudzhava
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Russian bard Bulat Okudzhava |
Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava (or
Boulat Okudjava/
Okoudjava/
Okoudzhava; ,
Georgian: ბულატ ოკუჯავას) (
May 9,
1924 -
June 12,
1997) was one of the founders of the Russian genre called "author's song" (
авторская песня,
avtorskaya pesnya). He was born in
Moscow and died in
Paris. He was the creator of about 200 songs, set to his own poetry. His songs are a mixture of Russian poetic and folksong tradition and the French
chansonnier style represented by such contemporaries of Okudzhava as
Georges Brassens. Though his songs were never overtly political (in contrast to those of some of his fellow "
bards"), the freshness and independence of Okudzhava's artistic voice presented a subtle challenge to Soviet cultural authorities, who were thus hesitant for many years to give official sanction to Okudzhava as a singer-songwriter.
Bulat Okudzhava was born in
Moscow on
9 May 1924 into a family of communists who had come from
Tbilisi, the capital of
Georgia, for study and work connected with the
Communist Party. Son of a
Georgian father and an
Armenian mother, Bulat Okudzhava spoke and wrote only in
Russian. This was because his mother, who spoke Georgian, Azeri, and of course Armenian, had always requested that everyone who came to visit her house "Please, speak the language of
Lenin - Russian". His father, a high
Communist Party member from Georgia, was arrested in
1937 during the
Great Purge and executed as a
German spy on the basis of a false accusation. His mother was also arrested and spent 18 years in the prison camps of the
Gulag (
1937-
1955). Bulat Okudzhava returned to Tbilisi and lived there with relatives.
In
1941, at the age of 17, one year before his scheduled school graduation, he volunteered for the
Red Army infantry and from
1942 participated in the
war with Nazi Germany. With the end of the
Second World War, after his discharge from the service in
1945, he returned to Tbilisi where he passed his high school graduation tests and enrolled in
Tbilisi State University, graduating in
1950. After graduating the university he worked as a teacher - first in a rural school in the village of
Shamordino in
Kaluga district, later in the city of
Kaluga itself.
In
1956, after the death of Stalin, Okudzhava returned to Moscow, where he worked first as an editor in the publishing house
Molodaya Gvardiya ("Young Guard"), and later as the head of the poetry division at the most prominent national literary weekly in the former USSR,
Literaturnaya Gazeta ("Literary Gazette"). It was then, in the middle of the 1950s, that he began to compose songs and to perform them, accompanying himself on the guitar.
Soon he was giving concerts. He only employed a few
chords and had no formal training in music, but he possessed an exceptional melodic gift, and the intelligent lyrics of his songs blended perfectly with his music and his voice. His songs were praised by his friends and amateur recordings were made. These unofficial recordings were widely copied and spread across the country, where other young people picked up guitars and started singing the songs for themselves. In
1969 his lyrics appeared in the classic Soviet film
White Sun of the Desert.
Though Okudzhava's songs were not published by any official media organization until the late 1970s, they quickly achieved enormous popularity (especially among the
intelligentsia) - mainly in the USSR at first, but soon among Russian-speakers in other countries as well.
Vladimir Nabokov, for example, cited his
Sentimental March in the novel
Ada or Ardor.
Okudzhava, however, regarded himself primarily as a poet and treated his musical recordings as insignificant. During the 1980s, he also published much prose (his novel
The Show is Over won him the
Russian Booker Prize in
1994 ). By the 1980s, recordings of Okudzhava performing his songs finally began to be officially released in the Soviet Union, and many volumes of his poetry appeared separately. In 1991, he was awarded the
USSR State Prize.
Okudzhava died in Paris on
12 June 1997, and is buried in the
Vagankovo Cemetery in Moscow. A monument marks the building at 43
Arbat Street where he lived. His
dacha in
Peredelkino is open to the public as a museum.
"The composers hated me. The singers detested me. The guitarists were terrified by me." -- Bulat Okudzhava
*
Audio files of his most famous songs*
Longer biography*
The First Rendezvous, translations by Maya Jouravel. Page for Bulat Okudzhava*
Yevgeny Bonver's Translations of Poetry by Bulat Okudjava*
Rare photos of Bulat Okudzhava by Mihail Pazij*
Another biography of Bulat Okudjava
