Everything about Bulat Okudjava totally explained
Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava (also transliterated as
Boulat Okudjava/
Okoudjava/
Okoudzhava; ,
Georgian: ბულატ ოკუჯავა) (
May 9,
1924 –
June 12,
1997) was one of the founders of the Russian genre called "
author's song" (
авторская песня,
avtorskaya pesnya). He was of
Georgian origin, born in
Moscow and died in
Paris. He was 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 sanction to Okudzhava as a singer-songwriter.
Life
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 and an
Armenian mother, Bulat Okudzhava spoke and wrote only in
Russian. This was because his mother, who spoke
Armenian, Georgian and
Azerbaijani, had always requested everyone who came to visit her house: "Please, speak the language of
Lenin - Russian." His father, a high
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 in
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
Stalin, Okudzhava returned to Moscow, where 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 so-called
magnitizdat) and spread across the USSR (and in
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 .
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 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. His
dacha in
Peredelkino is open to the public as a
museum.
A
minor planet 3149 Okudzhava discovered by Czech astronomer
Zdeňka Vávrová in 1981 is named after him.
-
Bulat Okudzhava
MOZART
Translated from the Russian by Alec vagapov
To I.B.
Am F G7 C
Mozart is playing the old little violin,
Dm E7
Mozart is playing while his violin sings.
Dm G7 C
Mozart doesn't choose, for living, a motherland,
Dm E7 Am
simply, he plays all his life, as it is.
G C
Well, never mind, that's the way we're destined,
H7 E7
such is our fate: now we feast, now we fight...
Am Dm
Keep up your diligent efforts, maestro,
E7 Am
keep meditating and feeling inspired.
Somewhere around our last destination,
maybe, we'll thank our fate anyway,
only I wish that our homeland's transgression
wouldn't be turned to an idol some day.
Well, never mind, that's the way we're destined,
such is our fate: now we feast, now we fight...
Don't give up hope, hold it out, maestro,
keep meditating and feeling inspired.
Short are the years of our blithe adolescence,
off that'll fly and disperse, in a flash...
Camisoles, cuffs, golden shoes, silver laces,
snow-white perukes, and a colorful splash.
Well, never mind, that's the way we're destined,
such is our fate: now we feast, now we fight...
Well, let it be, don't pay any attention, maestro,
keep meditating and feeling inspired.
1969
Music
Okudzhava, like most bards, didn't 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 seven.
Many of Okudzhava's songs are in the key of C minor (with downtuning B flat or A minor), centering around the C minor chord (X00X011, thickest to thinnest string), then progressing to a D 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.
Quotes
"The composers hated me. The singers detested me. The guitarists were terrified by me." -- Bulat Okudzhava
Further Information
Get more info on 'Bulat Okudjava'.
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