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, , 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.
Terror and war 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.
Return to Moscow 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.
Songwriter, poet and novelist 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. A
minor planet,
3149 Okudzhava, discovered by Czech astronomer
Zdeňka Vávrová in 1981 is named after him. His songs remain very popular and frequently performed. ==Music==