Bulat Okudzhava.Biography.

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Bulat Shalovich Okudzhava (1924 - 1997)

Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava was a Soviet and Russian poet, writer, musician, novelist, and singer-songwriter. He was one of the founders of the Russian genre called "author song" He was born in Moscow and died in Paris. He was the author of about 200 songs, set to his own poetry.

Bulat Okudzhava was born in Moscow on May 9, 1924 into a family of communists who had come from Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, for study and work connected with 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. 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 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 tests and enrolled at Tbilisi State University, graduating in 1950. After graduating, he worked as a teacher In 1956, three years after the death of Joseph Stalin, Okudzhava returned to Moscow. In the middle of the 1950s, he began to compose songs and to perform them, accompanying himself on a Russian guitar.

Soon he was giving concerts. . His songs were praised by his friends, and amateur recordings were made. These unofficial recordings were widely copied and spread across the USSR and Poland, where other young people picked up guitars and started singing the songs for themselves. 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 appeared separately. In 1991, he was awarded the USSR State Prize.

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.

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