Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava (May 9, 1924 – June 12, 1997) was a Russian poet, writer, musician, novelist, and singer-songwriter of Georgian-Armenian origin. He was one of the founders of the Russian genre called "author song" (
авторская песня,
avtorskaya pesnya) and the author of about 200 songs, set to his own poetry. His songs are a mixture of Russian poetic and folksong traditions 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 recognition to Okudzhava.
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. Okudzava's mother was the niece of a well-known Armenian poet, Vahan Terian. His father, a high-ranking 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 he 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 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, three years after the death of Joseph Stalin, 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 ("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 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 claimed that his musical recordings were insignificant. During the 1980s, he also published a great deal of 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 were also published. In 1991, he was awarded the USSR State Prize. He supported the reform movement in the USSR and in October 1993, signed the Letter of Forty-Two.
Okudzhava died in Paris on June 12, 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 now a museum that is open to the public.
The german Pläne label released two albums with songs by Bulat Okudshawa. The label translated the song titels into german language, Bulat of course sings in russian language.
Tracklist
| A1 | Das Lied vom Heuschreck |
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| A2 | Das Lied von unserem Hof |
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| A3 | Pariser Phantasien |
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| A4 | Über Volodja Vissotski |
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| A5 | Das Omen |
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| A6 | Die Klugen und die Dummen – (Aus dem Film "Aus dem Leben des Chefs der Kripo") |
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| A7 | Ein kleines Lied, kurz wie das Leben |
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| A8 | Der Musiker |
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| B1 | Die Musik des Herzens |
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| B2 | Die liebe Sonne scheint, die Musik spielt auf ... |
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| B3 | Noch eine Romanze |
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| B4 | Klagelied um den Arbat |
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| B5 | Ein Geschenk zum Geburtstag |
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| B6 | Lied vom jungen Husar |
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| B7 | Zum ewigen Angedenken |
Bulat Okudshawa - Lieder 2 (Pläne)
(256 kbps, front cover included)
"Hootenanny with Pete Seeger" was released on Folkways Records and on Le Chant Du Monde in France. It features live recordings by Pete Seeger, accompanied by Big Bill Broonzy, Lightnin´ Hopkins, Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon.
