Songs by Bulat Okudzhava

About Okudzhava

Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava, a contemporary Soviet writer, poet and poet-singer (chansonnier), was born on May 9, 1924 in Moscow. His father, a Georgian, was a high-ranking party official, was accused of being a "Japanese and German spy" and was subsequently executed during the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s. His mother, an Armenian, spent seventeen years in prisons and camps. In 1942 Okudzhava, who was seventeen years old, volunteered for the army and was sent to the front, where he was wounded many times. After the war, in the fall of 1945, he entered the College of Philology at the University of Tbilisi. In 1946 he composed his first son, "Burn, Fire, Burn." After graduating in 1950 he worked in a village in the Kaluga region and in the city of Kaluga as a school-teacher, and later as a journalist.

...I will begin with a very distant time, with my first song, which came to me completely by chance in 1946. Then I was in my first year at the university. I was very proud of my new standing, and - since I was writing verses - definitely decided to write a student song. According to my notions, a student song had to be very dreary, of the sort as "Swift as the waves are the days of our lives," or anything of that kind... -- B. S. Okudzhava