MOSCOW, May 9, Pavel Surkov. When the front-line “We will not stand behind the price” is heard again on radio and television on May 9, not everyone will remember who the author is – the song has become so popular. And it was written by a bard who himself was born on Victory Day, forever linking himself with the most important milestone in the history of the country. Today Bulat Okudzhava, the legendary sixties poet and writer, is 100 years old.
But songs don’t burn
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One day his son, a faithful “squire”, composer and accompanist at the last concerts, remarked about his father: “He could have become a great chansonnier, but poetry got in the way.” Okudzhava really broke out beyond the boundaries and brackets of pure song. Friends always called him exclusively by name: “These are lines from Bulat,” “Bulat sang this.” And so it’s clear who we’re talking about; there was no other Bulat in the literary world.
For many, the author's song actually began with Okudzhava, and not with his older comrades – for example, with Galich or Ancharov. Even Vysotsky always recognized the primacy of Bulat Shalvovich in his chosen genre. “He is my spiritual father,” said Vladimir Semenovich. The bard himself did not object, but did not boast of this status. Only after Vysotsky’s death he dedicated two compositions to him and wrote an article for the cover of one of the artist’s records. In the dedication he expressed his creative credo: “But songs don’t burn, they soar in the air, and the more they hurt, the stronger they are.”
And life is beautiful
Okudzhava fought and was wounded. At the front, I noticed older comrades, fellow soldiers, who sometimes treated the lop-eared recruit with irony. “Be healthy, schoolboy!” – this is what he will call one of his stories based on personal memories. But not the description of pure facts, but the transfer of sensations from life will become his main creative method. No pathos, only personal stories – a person’s life inside historical events, like Lenka Korolev’s, like his Arbat neighbors. And life is beautiful and fleeting, like a blue ball that will fly away and will definitely return, only into someone else’s hands.
It was for this apparent simplicity, spontaneity and naivety, behind which the deepest wisdom was hidden, that Okudzhava was loved. This is what delighted students, professors, workers, everyone who sat at his concerts, stood in line for his records and copied the lyrics of his songs by hand into notebooks. 
Cinema and prose
At the same time, Bulat Shalvovich quite quickly went beyond the scope of purely song creativity. At first I began to write compositions not for my own performance, but, for example, for cinema. And how can one now imagine “Belorussky Station” without that very song about “one Victory”? When Okudzhava showed it to director Andrei Smirnov, he praised the verses, but said doubtfully about the melody: “It’s some kind of… it turned out to be nonsense.” But Alfred Schnittke, the film’s composer, intervened: “No, no, not nonsense at all!” And then he composed an arrangement where the strumming of the guitar turned into a march of a military band.
His novel “The Journey of Amateurs” is imbued with a vivid romance, which is why this dashing text, full of adventure, intrigue and passion, was so loved by all the youth of the 70s and 80s. Well, the fairy tale “Lovely Adventures,” which Bulat Shalvovich created on the basis of oral stories for his son, is impossible to read without a kind smile. Moreover, add here the author’s own illustrations – generally a rare case: Okudzhava preferred to type on a typewriter rather than write by hand – and here there is both text and drawings!
Ivan Ivanovich
He always believed in the purity of human thoughts: maybe that’s why in the perestroika and post-perestroika years it was so often paid attention to human rights work, sincerely believing that any, even the strangest calls can be caused by the human desire for a better life.
Okudzhava tried several times to stop active concert activity, but still returned: his songs were needed in modern times. He also sought reconciliation with his own faith – having already become seriously ill, he was baptized right in the hospital room, taking the name Ivan in Orthodoxy. This is exactly what Ivan Ivanovich was often called the lyrical hero of his stories.
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The main monument to Bulat Shalvovich is not the bronze figure looking out at us from the alley, but the Arbat, which is still preserved, the streets of the Moscow center. By the way, he always stood up for the integrity and harmony of this world. When they suddenly installed new streetlights there, he remarked sarcastically: “The Arbat has gone crazy.” And even though the blue trolleybus no longer travels around Moscow, even if the simple and naive times of the 60s and 70s are gone, but when we listen to Okudzhava’s songs, it seems to us that an old friend sat down next to us and simply purrs something that has long been familiar to us:
When would love and hope be tied together,
What kind of picture would arise, it’s hard to believe!
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