Bulat Okudzhava

Though his songs were never overtly political, 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 him official recognition.

Bulat Okudzhava studied at Faculty of Philology, Tbilisi University. The recorded working language is Russian. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are bard song, poetry, prose and sketch story. Distinctions recorded are USSR State Prize, Order of the Patriotic War, 1st class, Order of Friendship of Peoples and Medal "For the Defence of the Caucasus".

Bulat Okudzhava was born in Moscow on May 9, 1924, into a family of communists who had come from Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, to study and to work for the Communist Party. The son of a Georgian father, Shalva Okudzhava, and an Armenian mother, Ashkhen Nalbandyan, Bulat Okudzhava spoke and wrote only in Russian. Okudzhava'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 thereafter, under the protection of Sergo Ordzhonikidze (1886-1937). His uncle Vladimir Okudzhava was an anarchist and terrorist who left the Russian Empire after a failed attempt to assassinate the Kutaisi governor. Vladimir was listed among the passengers of the infamous sealed train that delivered Vladimir Lenin, Grigory Zinoviev and other revolutionary leaders from Switzerland to Russia in 1917.

Shalva, Okudzhava's father, was arrested in February 1937 during the Great Purge, accused of Trotskyism and wrecking. He was shot on 4 August, along with his two brothers. His wife was arrested in 1939 "for anti-Soviet deeds" and sent to the 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 5 years in labor camps. She was fully released in 1954 and rehabilitated in 1956, along with her husband. In 1942, at the age of 17, 9th-grader Bulat Okudzhava volunteered for the Red Army infantry, and from 1942 he participated in the war against Nazi Germany. After his discharge from the service 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 the Kaluga Region, and later in the city of Kaluga itself.

In 1956, three years after the death of Joseph Stalin, Okudzhava returned to Moscow. Following his parents' rehabilitation and the 20th Party Congress at which Khrushchev denounced Stalin, Bulat Okudzhava was able to join the Communist Party, of which he remained a member until 1990. In the Soviet capital 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 Newspaper"). It was then, in the middle of the 1950s, that he began to compose songs and to perform them, accompanying himself on a Russian 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 as magnitizdat, and spread across the USSR and Poland, where other young people picked up guitars and started singing the songs for themselves. In 1970, his lyrics appeared in the classic Soviet film White Sun of the Desert.

Okudzhava, like most bards, did not come from a musical background. He learned basic guitar skills with the help of some friends. He also knew how to play basic chords on a piano. Okudzhava tuned his Russian guitar to the "Russian tuning" of D'-G'-C-D-g-b-d' (thickest to thinnest string), and often lowered it by one or two tones to better accommodate his voice. He played in a classical manner, usually finger picking the strings in an ascending/descending arpeggio or waltz pattern, with an alternating bass line picked by the thumb. Initially Okudzhava was taught three basic chords, and towards the end of his life he claimed to know a total of seven. Many of Okudzhava's songs are in the key of C minor (with downtuning B flat or A minor), centering on the C minor chord (X00X011, thickest to thinnest string), then progressing to a G 7 (00X0433), then either an E-flat minor (X55X566) or C major (55X5555). In addition to the aforementioned chords, the E-flat major chord (X55X567) was often featured in songs in a major key, usually C major (with downtuning B-flat or A major). By the nineties, Okudzhava adopted the increasingly popular six string guitar but retained the Russian tuning, subtracting the fourth string, which was convenient to his style of playing.

"The Art of Needles and Sins", (story), from The New Soviet Fiction, Abbeville Press, NY, 1989. "Good-bye, Schoolboy!" and "Promoxys", (stories), from Fifty Years of Russian Prose, Volume 2, M.I.T Press, MA, 1971. The Extraordinary Adventures of Secret Agent Shipov in Pursuit of Count Leo Tolstoy, in the year 1862, (novel), Abelard-Schuman, UK, 1973, translated by Heather Maisner. Nocturne: From the Notes of Lt. Amiran Amilakhvari, Retired, (novel), Harper and Row, NY, 1978. A Taste of Liberty, (novel), Ardis Publishers, 1986. "Girl of My Dreams", (story), from 50 Writers: An Anthology of 20th Century Russian Short Stories, Academic Studies Press, 2011.