Little Orchestra of Hope: Selected Poetry of Bulat Okudzhava - Kindle edition by Bulat Okudzhava, Andrey Kneller. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava was a Soviet and Russian poet, writer, musician, novelist, and singer-songwriter of Georgian ancestry.
Background
Bulat Okudzhava was born on May 9, 1924 in Moscow, into a family of communists who had come from Tbilisi. The son of a Georgian father, Shalva Okudzhava, and an Armenian mother, Ashkhen Nalbandyan, Bulat Okudzhava spoke and wrote only in Russian. Okudzava's mother was the niece of a well-known Armenian poet, Vahan Terian. His father served as a political commissar during the Civil War and as a high-ranking Communist Party member under the protection of Sergo Ordzhonikidze. His uncle Vladimir Okudzhava was an anarchist and a terrorist who left The Russian Empire after a failed attempt to assassinate the Kutaisi governor.
Shalva Okudzhava was arrested in 1937 during the Great Terror, accused of trotskyism and wrecking and executed shortly after, along with his two brothers. His wife was also arrested in 1939 «for anti-Soviet deeds» and sent to a labor camp of Gulag. Bulat returned to Tbilisi to live with his relatives. His mother was released in 1946, but arrested for the second time in 1949, spending another five years in labor camps. She was fully released in 1954 and rehabilitated in 1956, along with her husband.
Education
In 1944 he returned to Tbilisi where he passed his high school graduation exams and enrolled at Tbilisi State University, graduating in 1950.
After graduating, he worked as a teacher, first in a rural school in the village of Shamordino in Kaluga district, and later in the city of Kaluga itself. In 1956, Okudzhava returned to Moscow, where he worked first as an editor in the publishing house "Young Guard", and later as the head of the poetry division at the most prominent national literary weekly in the former USSR, Literaturnaya Gazeta. It was then, in the middle of the 1950s, that he began to compose songs and to perform them, accompanying himself on a guitar.
Soon he was giving concerts. His songs were praised by his friends, and amateur recordings were made. These unofficial recordings were widely copied as magnitizdat, and spread across the USSR and Poland, 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 educated – mainly in the USSR at first, but soon among Russian-speakers in other countries as well. Okudzhava, however, regarded himself primarily as a poet and claimed that his musical recordings were insignificant. During the 1980s, he also published a great deal of prose. 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 were also published.
Okudzhava died in Paris on June 12, 1997, and is buried in the Vagankovo Cemetery in Moscow.
Okudzhava was expelled from the Communist Party in 1972.
Views
Quotations:
"The composers hated me. The singers detested me. The guitarists were terrified by me."
Connections
In 1926 Bulat married Galina Smolyaninova, but their marriage ended in 1965. They had two common children: Igor Okudzhava and a daughter, who died in infancy. Then he was married to Olga Vladimirovna Okudzhava, with whom he had a son Bulat (Anton) Bulatovich Okudzhava.