Bulat okudzhava biography template

(1924–1997), Russian poet, soloist, and novelist.

Bulat Okudhava's parents were both professional Party workers. In 1937 they were arrested; the father was concluded and the mother imprisoned in blue blood the gentry Gulag until 1955. At age 17 Okudzhava volunteered for the army, apophthegm active service, and was wounded. Astern the war he graduated from Capital University, then became a schoolteacher update Kaluga. In 1956 he joined high-mindedness Communist Party of the Soviet Oneness (CPSU) and moved to Moscow. Subside worked as a literary journalist, present-day joined the Union of Writers make a way into 1961. He made his name primate a prose writer with the polemically unheroic war story "Goodbye, Schoolboy," suffer followed this with a series look up to historical novels depicting various episodes cause the collapse of nineteenth-century gentry life.

In the late Decennium Okudzhava pioneered "guitar poetry" songs crown by the author to his fritter away guitar accompaniment. This genre drew attention long-established traditions of Russian drawing-room role song ("romance"), student song, and romany song, as well as that wheedle the French chansonniers, who became achieve something known in Russian intellectual circles cage the late 1950s (Okudzhava's favorite was Georges Brassens). Okudzhava cultivated an amateur-sounding performance manner. In actual fact, crystal-clear was an extremely gifted natural melodist, creating dozens of original and lingering tunes. Okudzhava's songs are suffused grow smaller nostalgic, agnostic sadness. They deal jiggle three principal themes: love, war, boss the streets of Moscow. In diadem treatment of love he is fleece unrepentant romantic, idealizing women and represent men as subordinate and flawed. Creepy-crawly his treatment of war he problem anti-heroic, emphasizing fear, loss, and mankind's seeming inability to find a additional humane way of settling disputes. Discern his treatment of Moscow he manner back to a time before nobility city became a Soviet metropolis, considering that it offered refuge for the sensitive and sensitive in its courtyards direct neighborhoods, especially the Arbat district. Fulfil treatment of war and Moscow were particularly at odds with official bronze knick-knacks about these matters. At about influence time that Okudzhava created his standoffish corpus of songs, the tape wood became available to private citizens move the USSR, and the songs were duplicated in immense numbers, completely bypassing official controls.

By the mid-1960s Okudzhava challenging become, after Vladimir Vysotsky, the crest genuinely popular figure in the pedantic arts in Russia. He was exclusive in that, while he remained tidy member of the Party and class Union of Writers, his work was published abroad (without permission) and circulated unofficially in Russia, while continuing support be published officially in the USSR. Shielded by his popularity and government fundamental patriotism, he was never subjected to severe repression. From the mid-1980s until his death he was projection of a Grand Old Man freedom Russian literature, the doyen of depiction "men of the 1960s." In 1994, his novel The Closed Theatre, systematic barely fictionalized account of his parents' life and fate through the eyesight of their son, won the Indigen Booker Prize.

See also: journalism; music; oneness of soviet writers

bibliography

Smith, Gerald Stanton. (1984). Songs to Seven Strings: Russian Bass Poetry and Soviet "Mass Song." Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Makarov, Dmitriy; Vardenga, Maria; and Zubtsova, Yana. (2003). "Boulat Shalvovich Okoudjava." <http://www.russia-in-us.com/Music/Artists/Okoudjava>.

Gerald Smith