Bulat Okudzhava

Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava (May 9, 1924 – June 12, 1997) Poet, prose writer, screenwriter. Founder of the movement of the author’s song.

He was born in Moscow. His father was Georgian and worked in party service; in 1937 he fell under the wheel of repression and died. His mother was Armenian and went through the Gulag. In the mid-1930s he lived for a short time in Nizhny Tagil. When his parents were taken away, he stayed with his grandmother in Moscow. But at the age of 16 he moved to relatives in Tbilisi. In 1942, straight from the ninth grade, he volunteered for the front. At first he was a mortar man. He fought near Mozdok. In December 1942 he was wounded. As early as 1986 Okudzhava recalled how it happened: “A German spotter appeared above our positions. He was flying high. No one paid attention to his lazy bursts from the machine gun. The battle had just ended. Everyone relaxed. And then, of all things, one stray bullet hit me. One can imagine my resentment: how many difficult battles before that, where I was spared! And here, in complete calm, such a ridiculous wound.” Later he served as a radio operator in heavy artillery. As the regiment’s lead singer, in 1943 at the front he composed his first song, “We Couldn’t Sleep in the Cold Boxcars.” After demobilization, he passed his secondary-school exams externally. In 1950 he graduated from the philology faculty of Tbilisi University. As a student he met Aleksandr Tsybulevsky, who in many ways opened the world of Russian poetry to Okudzhava. After receiving his diploma, he took a job as a schoolteacher in the Kaluga village of Shamordino. He published his first book, Lyrics, in Kaluga in 1956.

After the 20th Party Congress, the writer’s mother was rehabilitated, and the two of them were again allowed to live in Moscow. In early 1957 he served as deputy editor for the literature department of Komsomolskaya Pravda. For some time he worked