BULAT OKUDZHAVA IS THE patriarch of Russian guitar poets. It was he who brought the form to prominence in Russian cultural life, and all the others have emerged from under Okudzhava’s guitar in a more real sense than the nineteenth-century Russian prose writers emerged, as the famous phrase has it, from under Gogol’s Overcoat. Okudzhava has the highest literary standing of any “bard,” and he is widely recognized as a major Russian poet without qualification, a status that literary opinion has not and probably will not grant to Galich or Vysotsky. And he has survived. In fact, he is one of a very small number of modern Russian writers who have managed to establish a high reputation both inside and outside the country, and with official and unofficial opinion alike. For twenty years his work appeared extensively in samizdat, tamizdat, and of course magnitizdat, but he has remained in more or less constant good standing with the Soviet literary establishment, continues to publish and record in the USSR, and has even been allowed to make visits abroad. He has now emerged into a state of seeming inviolability, “beyond the barriers.” But to account for his survival by seeing him as one of the many tokens of Soviet liberalism, a publicity exercise, is not enough.

The main facts of Okudzhava’s life are well known.¹ Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava had a Georgian father and an Armenian mother, but he was bom in Moscow in 1924. Despite his manifestly non-Russian names and parentage, Okudzhava is in fact a metropolitan Russian intellectual by language, upbringing, and culture. He has described himself as “a Georgian bottled in Moscow,” but that is something of a flight of fancy. Okudzhava’s father was a Party official who rose to be Secretary of the Town Soviet in Nizhnii Tagil in the Urals during the 1930s. He suffered the same fate as many of the Party functionaries of his level: he was arrested in 1937 during the Great Purge and shot as a German and Japanese spy, one of the most common of the absurd charges that were used as pretexts to do away with people at the time. His mother was also arrested and spent eighteen years, from 1937 to 1955. as an inmate of the GULag Archipelago. Okudzhava is the most prominent Russian writer with this kind of background, but he is by no means the only one; his close kinsman in this respect is Vasilii Aksenov. Unlike Aksenov, though, he has never used this part of his autobiography as a subject for his art. Okudzhava lived with his parents up to the time of their arrest, as they moved from assignment to assignment, from Moscow to Tbilisi, back to Moscow, then to the Urals. After the arrest of his parents he managed to remain in Moscow, finding refuge with his maternal grandmother. Then in 1939 he moved back to Tbilisi.

Bulat Okudzhava in the early 1960s.

Okudzhava’s life, therefore, began in a privileged environment. He then suddenly became an outlaw, the son of “enemies of the people,” living a clandestine life. This experience is not normally regarded as a formative factor in Okudzhava’s personality and literary work. It is customarily assumed to have been completely overshadowed by the next major event of his life, which was volunteering for the army in 1941—when he was still only seventeen years old—fighting through the entire war in the ranks of the infantry, and being wounded several times. If the number of references in Okudzhava’s literary works is a true guide to the importance of the various facets of his biography, though, his army service certainly is the most profound of them. After he was demobilized, Okudzhava attended the university of Tbilisi, graduating in 1950. He then spent four years as a village schoolmaster near Kaluga, a town in central Russia, not far southwest of Moscow. There he was poised to begin a metropolitan literary career as soon as circumstances permitted. The prime circumstance was the rehabilitation of his parents, which happened in 1955.

Okudzhava and his mother then received the right to settle in Moscow. With an alacrity that is quite incomprehensible to people outside the system, Okudzhava became a member of the Communist Party in the same year. He was soon able to transfer from his village school to the city of Kaluga, and it was not long after, in late 1956, that he moved back to the capital, where he has remained. At first he held down a series of literary jobs, including a spell as poetry editor on the newspaper controlled by the Union of Writers, the Literary Gazette (Literaturnaya gazeta).² He became a member of the Union of Writers in 1961, and since the following year he has been a full-time independent writer. It was at about the same time that he pioneered guitar poetry; he had been singing in private since the late 1950s, and he gave his first public recital—it was a disaster—in 1960.³

Okudzhava first achieved notice as a writer of prose, with a manifestly autobiographical story about his wartime experiences called “Good Luck, Schoolboy!” (“Bud’ zdorov, shkolyar!”). It was published in an almanac entitled Pages from Tarusa (Tarusskie Stranitsy), whose appearance was one of the most characteristic events of the Khrushchev thaw. The book, published in 1961, was edited and piloted into print by the senior liberal writer Konstantin Paustovsky (1892–1968).⁴ Okudzhava’s contribution was and has remained one of the most controversial items in the collection, for reasons that can easily be understood in the context of the “war theme” in official literature. Perhaps the most revealing description of the work is contained in these sneering lines from a Soviet history of literature dating from 1971. The story

. . . tells of a few days spent at the front by a youth who the day before had been a schoolboy, but who has been called up to fight. This kind of young man had already been portrayed in many works of literature . . . which had shown the strength of the hero, the humanistic exploit of his selfless struggle against Fascism. The hero of Okudzhava’s novella struggles, too, but more than anything else he is concerned with his own fate. When the hero says: “I don’t want to die. I can say that straight out and not feel ashamed,” he can of course be understood, but he goes on and on about his fear of death right through the entire work. As a result, the Motherland, the struggle against Fascism, and the heroism of the people are pushed back somewhere into the background; they become abstract and remote, and contrariwise the whining youth who is afraid of death and is in general a pretty pathetic character is given in close-up.⁵

This statement embodies the central accusation that offical criticism has continued to level at all of Okudzhava’s work, not only his writings on war. His work is said to lack ideological firmness, the most salient manifestation of this defect being the absence of a positive hero. Okudzhava, for his part, has steadily defended himself as an opponent of empty heroics, big words, and abstractions that lose the individual human scale.⁶ As we will see, this standpoint applies just as aptly to Okudzhava’s songs as to his prose works.

Okudzhava has made many public statements about his attitude toward his army experience. As one of the relatively small number of really talented writers who actually fought their way through the war as front-line soldiers rather than as correspondents or in another similar capacity, he is continually “on call” for discussions of the subject, and there are many of them. The most recent was an interview with the journal Theater (Teatr), one of a series of articles and interviews devoted to the subject of literature and war. Here, Okudzhava revealed that with one of his adolescent friends he had seriously intended to run away from home to fight in the Spanish Civil War, so that, as he put it, his “second and successful attempt to take up arms against fascism” should come as no surprise. He stressed the deliberate nature of his decision. He came from a very political generation, he said, and was very serious and realistic about these things. Once he got into it, though, the effect of the war upon him as a personality had been to dispel this “youthful romanticism.” It had left him not a pacifist, but with an organic hatred for war. He was not a pessimist, though, something he had often been accused of being; however, he did have plenty of objective reasons for being sad.⁷ The most far-reaching statement Okudzhava has made on this subject is the following:

For my melancholy and irony, which constitute my creative maturity, I am obliged principally to the war. . . . At the front I understood my own weakness, and became convinced that although a good deal depends on a man’s strivings and his will, he still depends on objective circumstances, which compel him to suffer and deprive him of happiness, sometimes of life . . . in war I learned the great art of forgiveness and understanding. War taught me not to take delight in parades. . . . For me the war hasn’t ended yet, because I can still see its victims. War helps politicians get out of their difficulties, but it destroys the thing people require more than anything else—stability in life; it threatens to break the ties that join the present with the past, ties that are the precondition of further progress.⁸

In the Soviet context, this statement is defiantly unorthodox. No adjectives of nationality or political allegiance are attached to the words politicians and people, which is more than enough to give evidence of political unreliability. But Okudzhava’s war record is well known, and he is a hard man to accuse of cowardice, lack of principle, or lack of understanding.

Since “Good Luck, Schoolboy!” Okudzhava has continued to publish prose works in steady succession. In 1964 he wrote a short novel called Zhora the Photographer (Fotograf Zhora), which has never been published in the USSR, perhaps mainly because it first appeared abroad, in the anti-Soviet journal Grani (Facets) in 1969. There have been several other shorter prose works, but Okudzhava has moved toward larger forms, and in particular toward the full-blown historical novel. The first was Poor Avrosimov (Bednyi Avrosimov) in 1969, followed by Merci, or The Adventures of Shipov (Mersi, ili pokhozhdeniya Shipova) in 1971. Poor Avrosimov is about the Decembrist insurgent Pavel Pestel; it has also been published and performed as a play under the title A Gulp of Freedom (Glotok svobody). The second novel concerns the character named in the title, who was a Tsarist police spy assigned to carry out surveillance on Leo Tolstoy. Journey of the Dilettantes (Puteshestvie diletantov) (1976) came next, and Okudzhava continues to devote most of his creative energy to prose,⁹ having written a number of film scripts in addition to the novels.

Okudzhava’s literary debut, in 1946, was as a poet, however, and he has continued to publish “normal” poems ever since. He has written more poems for reading than he has songs for singing, and even without his songs he would have a high reputation as a Soviet poet. In this respect he is unique among the three great guitar poets, but (as we have seen) he has a younger parallel in Novella Matveeva. Collections of Okudzhava’s poetry have appeared steadily, though with some interruptions. His first book, called Lyrics (Lirika), was published in Kaluga in 1956; it was followed by Islands (Ostrova) in 1959. These two books contain no texts that are identified as songs. The first book to contain Okudzhava’s songs was The Merry Drummer (Veselyi barabanshchik) in 1964; it includes about fifteen song texts, scattered among an equal number of other poems. It was followed by Magnanimous Month of March (Mart velikodushnyi) in 1967. This book has a special subsection entitled “My Songs” (“Moi pesenki”), containing seventeen texts, some of them repeated from the 1964 book. The next collection, Arbat, My Arbat (Arbat, moi Arbat), did not appear until 1976. This book, too, has a subsection, “My Songs,” including twenty-three texts, the biggest group of Okudzhava songs published in the USSR.

In the sixties Okudzhava also published two collections in Tbilisi, mainly made up of his translations of Georgian poets. Like most other prominent Russian poets, Okudzhava has devoted a good deal of effort to translation; it was through this means, as well as editorial jobs, that he established his material base when he first moved to Moscow and became a full-time writer. Like most Soviet poet-translators, he does not have a command of the languages he translates from (mainly Georgian and Polish) but works from a line-by-line crib (podstrochnik) prepared by a specialist in the required language.

There were a number of reasons for the nine-year gap (1967–1976) between the publication of Okudzhava’s collections in the Soviet Union. As we will see, during this period Okudzhava had almost stopped writing new songs. More important, however, difficulties had arisen as a result of the publication of his work in samizdat and tamizdat, and of its enormous, uncontrolled popularity in magnitizdat. In 1964 the anti-Soviet publisher Posev brought out a volume that was expanded into a two-volume collection in 1967 and has subsequently gone through many editions. Okudzhava made a record on a visit to Paris in 1968 that brought him considerable fame in Western Europe and the United States, and his songs began to be translated and published widely outside the Soviet bloc.¹⁰

Also, Okudzhava signed some of the most celebrated letters of protest emanating from the literary world in the heady dissident days of the 1960s, including one about the arrest of Sinyavsky and Daniel in 1966 and a letter sent by sixty-two writers to the Presidium of the XXIII Congress of the Communist Party of the RSFSR about the expulsion of Solzhenitsyn from the Union of Writers in 1969.

These signings, the foreign publications, and his fame as an underground singer brought Okudzhava’s career very close to disaster. In the spring of 1972 he was hauled up before his local section of the Union of Writers and required to sign a letter to the Literary Gazette protesting the unauthorized publication of his work abroad and declaring his loyalty to the Party line. However, there was some consolation: Okudzhava was permitted to complain in the letter about the difficulties he was having in publishing his work in the USSR. A more serious warning was to come. In June 1972 Okudzhava was expelled from the Communist Party for “anti-Party behaviour and refusing to condemn the publication of some of his works abroad.”¹¹ He was reinstated fairly quickly, though, and since that time he has not been subjected to really serious personal harassment by official bodies, despite continuing publication and publicity abroad. He visited the West in 1977 and again in 1981 and 1982.

Like all other Soviet writers who have some sense of personal integrity, Okudzhava has had persistent difficulty in publishing. The whole story is by no means known, but three particular instances have been documented. The first was described in the earliest serious discussion of Okudzhava’s songs to appear in print, the chapter in Mikhailo Mikhailov’s book about his journey to Moscow in 1964.¹² This very personal and frank account is clearly based on a private conversation between the author and Okudzhava that the poet thought either would go no further or would have no undesirable consequences in the relaxed atmosphere of those times. Mikhailov reported that The Merry Drummer had not been Okudzhava’s own choice of title for that collection; he had originally wanted it to be called The Midnight Trolleybus, which of course has a much more somber ring, but the book was then banned anyway, even after the poet had protested by letter to the high Party functionary Ilichev. Mikhailov also mentioned that by 1964, the date of his writing, Okudzhava had composed about ninety songs, but that he had written none for over a year.

We also know that in 1966 the editor of the journal Sel’skaya molodezh’ (Rural Youth) was fired for publishing some Okudzhava songs, including “The Black Cat” (“Chernyi kot”), an image that has been widely taken to refer to Stalin.¹³ The third known instance of Okudzhava’s problems with the censorship concerns an edition of his songs, including words and music, that was prepared for publication in the late 1960s by the Leningrad musicologist Vladimir Frumkin, who has since emigrated. The book was denied publication on the grounds that the music was incompetent. But the real reason was that the music was too competent, and popular, to be allowed to be published by an amateur composer. Frumkin tells this story as part of the introduction to an edition of Okudzhava’s songs that he prepared and published more than ten years later, this time an illustrated bilingual large-format volume. It was brought out in the United States in 1980 by Ardis, the principal publisher of Russian literature outside the USSR. This edition¹⁴ is the most authoritative publication of Okudzhava’s songs, and it is also the only really worthwhile edition of any guitar poet to have been published to date. It is fitting that the first worthwhile publication should concern the first of the guitar poets. And it is a reflection on the twilight status of the genre that it has taken something like twenty years from the time many of the songs in the book were composed for them to get into print, and that the publication occurred abroad.

Besides being a composer and performer of his own songs, Okudzhava has been active for more than twenty years as a writer of commissioned songs for plays and films. For many years more of his work was recorded through this means than in his own performance. Recordings of his own performances have been available outside the USSR since the mid-1960s, but it took another ten years before they began to be available on Soviet records. However, selections of Okudzhava’s songs have been steadily available to his home audience since the late 1970s, and although nothing like his entire repertoire has been officially sanctioned, and none of the Soviet editions does anything like justice to his stature, a great many of his songs have made the transition from the underground to official recognition and have been published both abroad and in the USSR. It may well be that they constitute the largest body of work by a single author of whom that can be said. It is certainly the case by comparison with the other guitar poets. Vysotsky’s work is significantly more than half underground, while Galich’s is completely so; and it is difficult to see how this situation could be radically changed. Okudzhava is certainly the Russian author who has the greatest amount of work simultaneously in print in Russian both inside and outside the USSR.

Some of the reasons for this situation involve the characters and biographies of the authors concerned. It is fairly obvious that Okudzhava has been determined to make himself a life’s career as a writer in Soviet Russia, and that at times he has had to pull in his sails in order to achieve this aim. By biding his time, avoiding last-ditch confrontation, keeping several kinds of literary activity going at the same time, and refusing to be intimidated, he has achieved remarkable results. His enormous popularity has also undoubtedly helped to keep him from persecution, as was the case with Vysotsky, too. Okudzhava has been a popular, even beloved, figure since the early 1960s. The tape recorder made it possible for his work to reach all corners of the country long before he was allowed official recordings and publications. But these are external matters; it is the songs themselves that hold the ultimate key to Okudzhava’s status.

Okudzhava was the pioneer guitar poet, and as such he established some of the genre’s essential features. Chief among them is the close interplay between text, tune, and voice. The three elements combine to individualize each song and stamp it as belonging to one particular poet. The guitar poets have avoided using one another’s repertoire. Whether this individualization is necessarily also a mark of ephemerality is a different matter, though.¹⁵ The tape recorder has brought the songs to a wider audience than the book-reading one, and there is nothing to say that it will not be an enduring audience. Besides individualization, Okudzhava introduced, and bore most of the critical brunt of introducing, the “amateur” ethos. Okudzhava freely admits, even boasts, that he has a mediocre guitar technique and an untrained voice. These things are an essential part of the style, and they function to differentiate it from the official professional song and as a token of sincerity, even when they are highly cultivated—as they are in the case of Galich and Vysotsky, both professionaly trained actors. With Okudzhava, though, they are not cultivated. His is the amateur voice par excellence. He sounds like somebody singing to himself. He has a voice that continually threatens not to be able to manage its owner’s own melodies; his pitching is precarious, and his tone is unsound, almost querulous. Here he is on his own, though the tentative, retiring approach is an essential part of his persona as a songwriter. But in terms of melody he is also on his own; unlike Galich and Vysotsky, he does not use a limited set of interchangeable motifs but creates genuine melodies for each song. He is one of the great musical primitives in this respect.¹⁶

The second edition of Okudzhava’s 65 Songs (Ann Arbor, 1982) is the only source published so far from which it is possible to date a major body of guitar poems. And that is especially important in the case of these particular poems, because of their significance in the history of the genre. Among the sixty-five poems there is one that stands chronologically apart from the others: “Burn, Fire, Burn” (“Gori, ogon’, gori”), which was Okudzhava’s very first song, written when he came out of the army in 1946. There is then a long hiatus until the period 1957–62, when no less than forty-three of the songs, almost exactly two-thirds of them, were written. The eleven years 1963–73 show a dramatic recession, with only a dozen songs composed. Then comes a slight intensification, with nine songs from the period 1975–79, the latter year being the latest represented in the collection.

The implications of these dates are unmistakable. They mean that Okudzhava created the guitar poem in an intense burst of energy that coincides in time exactly with the “Khrushchev thaw,” which was triggered by Khrushchev’s famous “Secret Speech” at the XX Party Congress in 1956 and both culminated and terminated with the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” in 1962, after which the stage was set for the long winter of the Brezhnev years.¹⁷ Unlike written and printed literature, though, sung poetry triumphantly ignored the freeze that began in Khrushchev’s last year, 1963. Magnitizdat recordings kept Okudzhava’s fame and popularity on the rise, and his work inspired others.

The title of Frumkin’s edition, 65 Songs, makes one fundamental point about Okudzhava as a guitar poet, namely, that he has been frugal and exacting in his songwriting. The collection includes all his important songs up to 1979, and the standard of them is exceptionally uniform and high. Each is a polished individual work; there is remarkably little overlap between the songs in either words or music. That does not mean that they do not exhibit a number of areas of concentration. There are three thematic foci in particular to which Okudzhava continually returns: the Moscow streets, war, and love.¹⁸ That is not to say that his songs have “subjects” in any strict sense. As we will see, the absence of clear subject matter is one of the leading features in Okudzhava’s style.

Among the dozen or so songs set in the Moscow streets are three of Okudzhava’s most characteristic and successful pieces. The first of them, the most straightforward, is about the street he grew up on, “Song about the Arbat” (“Pesenka ob Arbate,” 1959). It provides an excellent introduction to some of the central elements of Okudzhava’s style.

Flowing on like a river, with your odd name,

Your asphalt transparent like river water;

Arbat, my Arbat, you are my vocation,

You’re my joy and my disaster too.

Your pedestrians are ordinary folk,

Their heels tap as they hurry about their affairs;

Arbat, my Arbat, you are my religion,

Your paving lies beneath me.

There’s no cure at all for love of you,

Even loving forty thousand other roads;

Arbat, my Arbat, you are my native land,

And I’ll never get to the end of you.

[65, 54]¹⁹

The name of this street is indeed “odd” to a Russian ear. It derives from Arabic rabad, “suburb,” and evolved because of the presence of a colony of Arab traders in the vicinity during the middle ages. Part of the song’s meaning for the Russian audience, and in particular for the Muscovite, derives from the fact that next to the old Arbat, which ran higgledy-piggledy and mazed with side streets southwest from near the middle of the city, a new Arbat has been constructed, a ruler-straight six-lane highway with high-rise blocks lining it on both sides. The song implicitly asserts the superiority of the old, with its human scale and its magic, in plumb contradiction to an official ethic which is reflected in uplift songs devoted to particular places. Okudzhava’s song also has a subtle melancholy that is the dominant tonality of all his work. This melancholy stems partly from the hint of personal unhappiness (“my disaster”). But it derives mainly from looking toward unknown or even unknowable dimensions—here made explicit in the song’s last line—with the idea that there is always something beyond the individual’s comprehension that prevents his feeling fulfilled or at ease. The song is also free from cliché, the key to the eternal freshness of Okudzhava’s work. Its use of repetition is judicious, creating just the right balance between expectation and innovation.

The second Moscow song is the one Okudzhava wanted to refer to in the title of a collection, “The Last Trolleybus” (“Poslednii trolleibus,” 1957):

When I haven’t the strength to overcome my troubles,

When despair’s creeping up,

I get on a blue trolleybus as it passes,

The last one, a chance one.

Midnight trolleybus, sweep through the streets,

Make your circuits round the boulevards,

Picking up everyone who in the night has suffered

Disaster, disaster.

Midnight trolleybus, open your door for me!

For I know that this freezing midnight

Your passengers, your crew,

Will come to my aid.

It’s not the first time I’ve left trouble behind

Riding shoulder to shoulder with them. . .

You wouldn’t think there is so much goodness

In silence, in silence.

The midnight trolleybus sails through Moscow,

The roadway flows away into dawn. . .

And the pain that pecked like a starling in my temple

Grows quiet.

[65, 38]²⁰

The troubled hero finds some relief in the city, but he does so through a private, uncommunicating act. There is the same unspecified “disaster” (beda) as in the Arbat song, and the mood is that same quiet melancholy. Also using a first-person speaker is a third Moscow song, “The Moscow Ant” (“Moskovskii muravei,” 1956–58):

Not thirty years but three hundred—just imagine that—

Have I been walking these ancient squares and blue paving blocks;

My city bears the highest rank and title, “Moscow,”

But she comes out herself to greet every one of her guests.

I walk along her thoroughfares in the quiet of dawn,

I run along her crooked streets (forgive me, other towns). . .

For it’s a Moscow ant I am, and I can never rest,

Three hundred years ago it was the same, and always will be.

I’ll tell you what this city’s like: it’s just the same as I—

Sometimes sad and sometimes glad, but always dignified,

Is this a little girl carrying a piece of the day in her hand?

As if she’s bringing lunch to me, the Moscow ant.

[65, 48]

That is about as light as the tonality of Okudzhava’s songs ever becomes. It shares with the Arbat song the emphasis on historical continuity and the absence of twentieth-century accessories. The hero, as in all three Moscow songs, is an individual, but one of the crowd, an ordinary person without any special claim to fame or attention.

The capital appears as setting in several other songs. The famous old thoroughfares of the center (the Volkhonka, the Neglinnaya, the Arbat again, the Nikitsky Gate, and Smolensk Square) are imagined as patrolled by “love’s sentinels,” “the only soldiers I acknowledge,” whose tour of duty is eternal (“Chasovye lyubvi,” 1957, 36–37). There is the famous character of the Arbat backstreets Lenka “the King,” who went off to war, did not return, but still might do so at any time, because

I’m sorry, but I can’t imagine Moscow

Without a king like him.

[1957; 65, 41]²¹

There is the phantom drummer who marches along the streets—but can be heard only by the poet himself (“The Merry Drummer”; “Veselyi barabanshchik,” 1960). Painters are urged to dip their brushes “into the bustle of Arbat courtyards and the sunset,” and into—

. . . the sky blue

Of the forgotten urban tradition;

Carefully and lovingly, paint us

Walking lovingly along the Tverskoi Boulevard.

[“Painters” (“Zhivopistsy,” 1958–61); 65, 100–101]

The only mention ever made of Okudzhava’s father and his fate occurs in a song called “The Arbat Kids” (“Arbatskie rebyata,” 1962):

What did you manage to think about, my executed father,

When I strode forward with my guitar, hysterical but alive?

As if I were stepping down from the stage into the comfortable Moscow midnight

Where a fate is passed out free to old Arbat kids.

Everything’s just fine, if you ask me, and there’s no cause to be glum,

Those sad commissars walk around Moscow like one man.

And there really are no dead among the old Arbat kids,

Just the ones who needed to have fallen asleep,

But the ones who didn’t are not sleeping.

Perhaps memory is a difficult duty, but Moscow has seen everything,

And words of consolation are absurd to old Arbat kids.

[1962; 65, 114–15]

Two other songs that would appear to be specifically about Moscow, “Song about Moscow at Night” (“Pesenka o nochnoi Moskve,” 1966–67) and “Arbat Romance” (“Arbatskii romans,” 1975), in fact contain nothing to connect them with the city, which is in keeping with the generally oblique, almost evasive attitude toward material reality in Okudzhava’s writing. The city, if anything, is not the metropolis of the twentieth century, but rather its village-like core formed by the backstreets and courtyards off the older central thoroughfares, which are always referred to by their pre-Soviet names.

There is nothing that identifies Okudzhava’s city as the capital of the USSR in the twentieth century. The major addition the twentieth century and Soviet power have made to the central Moscow scene is the construction of the underground railway, one of the great “achievements” of Stalin’s 1930s. Okudzhava makes the Metro the pretext for a wry two-stanza parable (1956–64):

It’s never crowded in my underground,

Because since I was a child it’s been like a song

That says, instead of a refrain:

“Stand on the right, pass on the left!”

The custom’s eternal, the custom is sacred:

The ones on the right just stand there,

But the ones on the move must always

Keep to the left!

[65, 110–11]

The most profound of all Okudzhava’s songs with a Moscow setting is one in which the themes associated with the city—the anonymous individual in the crowd, the consolations of historical awareness, the depressing brashness of the present—all come together to make the nearest thing there is in his work to a clear statement of a position. But then, characteristically, the last line opens up another vista into the unknown:

You never can bring back the past, it’s pointless to rue it.

Every age has its own forest growing up.

But it’s a pity all the same that one can’t have dinner with Pushkin,

Even drop in to the Yar Café for fifteen minutes.

Today we don’t have to grope our way along the streets,

There are cars waiting for us, and rockets to speed us into the distance.

But it’s a pity all the same that there’re no hansom cabs in Moscow any longer,

Not even one, and there won’t ever be, more’s the pity.

I bow down before the unbounded sea of knowledge,

I’m fond of my rational, highly experienced age.

But it’s a pity all the same that we still dream of idols as we did before,

And we still sometimes count ourselves slaves.

Not in vain have we forged and nurtured our victories.

We’ve acquired everything—a safe harbor, and light;

But it’s a pity all the same that sometimes over our victories

Rise pedestals higher than the victories themselves.

You never can bring back the past. I go out onto the street—

And suddenly notice that right by the Nikitsky Gate

Stands a hansom. And there’s Pushkin taking a walk.

Ah, tomorrow, probably, something will come to pass.

[1967; 65, 130–31]

As might be expected, this song does not appear on any of Okudzhava’s Soviet records or in any of his published collections. Compared with the specificity of some of the dissatisfaction expressed in the songs of Galich and Vysotsky, this song would seem to be vague enough to be permissible, but it evidently is not. Its nostalgia for the past, its guarded attitude toward the achievements of the present, make it a distinctly uncomfortable piece that comes close to a direct polemic with Soviet hymns about national pride and achievements.

Okudzhava’s status as a veteran gives him a unique personal authority as a writer of songs about war, but that does not obliterate the heavy weight of the massive official hymnology on the subject and give him a free hand. This pressure makes it impossible to perceive his songs on the subject in an unprejudiced way. It is not at all difficult to define the main characteristics of the Okudzhava war song: it is unheroic, understated, wry, ironic. Despite what is often thought, it is also completely lacking in historical specificity. In this respect it contrasts strongly with the war songs of Galich and Vysotsky. Okudzhava is the only front-line veteran of the three, and his songs on the subject are much milder and tentative than theirs.

Despite the impression that a superficial survey could easily give about war as a principal topic of Okudzhava’s songs, there are actually only about eight specifically devoted to it. Two of them are among the poet’s crowning achievements. First, there is “The Paper Soldier” (“Bumazhnyi soldat,” 1959):

But once there was a soldier boy,

And he was bold and handsome,

But he was just a children’s toy,

He was a paper soldier.

He wanted to remake the world,

So everyone would be happy,

But he was hanging on a string,

He was a paper soldier.

For you he would be glad to die

In fire and smoke twice over,

But all you did was play with him—

He was a paper soldier.

And you would never share with him

Your most important secrets,

And why was that? It was because

He was a paper soldier.

And he would keep cursing his fate,

No quiet life he wanted,

And he kept asking: Fire, fire!

Forgetting he was paper.

Fire? I don’t mind. Go on! You’ll go?

And one day he went marching.

And then he died for nothing, for

He was a paper soldier.

[65, 53]

Okudzhava’s songs sometimes do present a clear moral—but usually one that has an oblique relationship to the ostensible subject matter. The song about the paper soldier gives a warning about not bringing oneself harm through rash idealism; and it is also a parable about the fragility of human creatures. But there is no direct reflection of Okudzhava’s own experience.

Secondly, there is the “Song of the ‘American’ Soldier” (“Pesnya ‘amerikanskogo’ soldata,” 1961). The quotation marks are used because it is an open secret that the adjective within them is not part of Okudzhava’s intention but a concession to the demands of official opinion. The black humor of this song is not typical of Okudzhava’s style in general, and its message also is uncharacteristically straightforward:

I’ll get my greatcoat, kitbag, and helmet,

All of them camouflage-colored,

And off I’ll stride along the humpbacked streets;

How simple it is to be a soldier, a soldier!

I’ll forget all my domestic cares,

I need no wages and no work.

Along I go, playing with my gun,

How simple it is to be a soldier!

If anything’s not right, it’s not our business,

As the saying goes, “The Motherland commanded!”

How great to be not to blame for anything,

Nothing but a simple soldier, a soldier!

[65, 106–107]

This carefree, irresponsible “American” appears here only; and the kind of irony with which he is presented is, as we said, quite unusual in Okudzhava’s work. The remaining songs about soldiers and war are more straightforward. Soldiers march off into the mist, leaving their women behind to deceive them: “A Song about Soldiers’ Boots” (“Pesnya o soldatskikh sapogakh,” 1956–58). There is a somber lament for the deprivations of all kinds that war brings with it in “Goodbye, Lads” (“Do svidaniya, mal’chiki,” 1958). The mysterious “Forgive the Infantry” (“Prostite pekhote,” 1961) opens up a much broader perspective than is offered by the infantry alone:

Times have taught us

To live as if bivouacked, the door open.

Comrade Man, your duty is still tempting:

You’re always on campaign

And there’s only one thing keeps you from sleep:

Why do we go away,

When over the earth

spring

is storming?

[65, 104]

The two remaining songs explicitly about the military are connected with Okudzhava’s delving into the historical past as a novelist. “Saying Goodbye to the Cadets” (“Provody yunkerov,” 1977), about the period of World War I, is a very slight piece; and “A Battle Painting” (“Batal’noe polotno,” 1973) describes what appears to be a canvas depicting Napoleonic times. Behind a straightforward description of the emperor’s suite on the field of battle is the familiar Okudzhava turn into the unknown:

Somewhere under their feet and above their heads are nothing but earth and sky,

Nothing but earth and sky, earth and sky.

[65, 140–41]

The third main thematic group comprises Okudzhava’s love songs. Again, there are only about half a dozen of them; and only a couple belong to the very best of Okudzhava’s creations. The most charming and original of them is “Oh, Nadya, Nadenka” (“Akh, Nadya, Nadenka,” 1960), an appeal against unrequited love addressed to a proud lady bus driver, who

. . . wears overalls, such greasy ones,

And an impossible beret.

The first two lines of the song contain one of Okudzhava’s most evocative city scenes, achieved with just two details:

From windows comes the scent of toasted crusts,

Hands flicker behind curtains . . .

[65, 87]

In its everyday immediacy and proletarian setting, “Oh, Nadya, Nadenka” is the most Vysotsky-like of Okudzhava’s love songs. But it has a touching innocence foreign to the younger poet, an innocence that is one of the most appealing aspects of Okudzhava’s writing.

One of Okudzhava’s most subtle love songs is called, unpromisingly, “The Old Jacket” (“Staryi pidzhak,” 1960).²² It has five stanzas. A man has been wearing the same jacket for many years, and he decides to call the tailor in and have it remade; he jokes that this act will renew his life. But the tailor takes him seriously and goes to work with a will. The song becomes a love song only in the last stanza:

What he thinks is this:

I’ll only have to try my jacket on

And I’ll believe in your love again . . .

Not likely! What a silly he is.

[65, 77]

Here, Okudzhava’s oblique approach and his penchant for the unexpected turn at the end of a text really pay off; he manages the elusive achievement of permanent surprise no matter how many times the text has been heard before.

A characteristic example of Okudzhava’s use of compositional devices reminiscent of folklore is the love song “Along the Smolensk Road” (“Po smolenskoi doroge,” 1960), which, incidentally, according to Okudzhava himself, is the only one of his songs whose melody was conceived before the words. It uses a system of triple repetitions:

Along the Smolensk road there are forests, forests, forests,

Along the Smolensk road there are posts, posts, posts.

Above the Smolensk road, just like your eyes,

Are two evening stars, the sky-blue stars of my fate.

Along the Smolensk road the snow’s in your face, your face,

We keep being driven from home by cares, cares, cares.

Perhaps if the ring of your arms were more sure

My road would probably be a shorter one.

Along the Smolensk road are forests, forests, forests,

Along the Smolensk road the posts drone and drone,

At the Smolensk road, like your eyes,

Two cold sky-blue stars look down, look down.

[65, 75]

This song is a very good example of the pure lyricism of Okudzhava’s style. There is no narrative element; the important things are atmosphere and mood. And the mood is a melancholy one, as is almost always the case in Okudzhava’s work. The exceptional feature of this song, which makes it unique in Okudzhava’s repertoire and also one of a small group of texts within the guitar poem as a whole, is its setting: for once we are far away from the narrow Arbat streets, and there is an expansive landscape of trees and sky.

Perhaps the most revealing of all Okudzhava’s love songs is one whose title suggests the general attitude toward sexual relations that is found in his songs as a whole: “Your Majesty, Woman” (“Vashe velichestvo, zhenshchina,” 1959). It is an expression of wonder on the part of the song’s first-person persona that such a divine, majestic thing as a woman would pay any attention to such an insignificant mite as himself. The first two verses of the song set a scene of gloom and discomfort; the last two express the attitude that has just been described:

When you come to me it’s like a fire.

Smoky and hard to breathe . . .

But please do come in.

Why stand on the threshold?

Who are you? Where are you from?

What a pathetic person I am. . .

I think you’ve just got the wrong door,

The wrong street, city, and age.

[65. 51]

This courtly, self-deprecating stance is consistent with the general attitude toward the self and the individual in Okudzhava’s work. He has made himself almost embarrassingly explicit on this point:

The theme of very many of my poem-songs is love. For a long time in this country we hardly sang about love, and in the very word “woman” there was something dubious. In protest against this falsity and puritanical sanctimoniousness, I took it upon myself for the first time in many years to sing hymns in the Russian language to woman as something sacred, to go down on my knees before her. I have to confess that my irony wouldn’t work here. If I have said something in jest, then it’s directed at myself as the hero of these songs, which portrayed the helplessness and failure of men. . . .

[65, 51]

Whether Okudzhava always succeeds in avoiding sanctimoniousness in his love songs is a moot point. In fact, the only woman in Okudzhava’s songs who gets anything but adoration is Nurse Maria:

What was it I said to Nurse Maria

When I embraced her?

“You know, officers’ daughters

Never look at us soldiers.”

A field of clover beneath us,

Quiet as a river,

Waves of clover approached

And we rocked upon them.

[65, 65]

Once again there is a strong contrast with the songs of Galich and Vysotsky, both observers of women in the specific situations that Soviet society calls upon them to endure. In his treatment of women, Okudzhava is at the extreme of the romantic abstraction that is a fundamental tendency of his work. As we have seen, the official song, if anything, tends to put woman on a pedestal and sing idolatrous hymns to her, often from the point of view of a man who has betrayed her or has not been quite up to the absurdly idealistic standards he sets for himself as he goes about the nation’s work and remains dutifully conscious of his responsibility to his destiny as the proletariat of the world’s first socialist state. Compared with this self-image, Okudzhava’s first-person male heroes are indeed backsliders and smallerthan-thou “ants.” But it is not primarily in their attitude toward women that they are so remarkably different from the officially approved positive heroes that preceded them in Soviet literature, as Okudzhava is at pains to plead. In this respect they are similar to their officially approved brothers.

We can also find sentiments like the following:

Love is that kind of thing: you can easily get lost in it,

Get buried, spin, get lost . . .

We all know this fatal passion,

So there’s no point in talking about it again.

[“Arbatskii romans”; 65, 149]

And there is Okudzhava’s precarious anthem to love as the everpresent source of hope, even in life’s worst crises; it is one of many songs in which he dares to use personified abstractions in a way that modern poets have universally avoided:

When the distant voice of trumpets suddenly starts up,

And words, like hawks in the night, burst from burning lips,

When melody thunders, like a passing shower; among people wanders

Hope’s little orchestra, conducted by Love.

In the years of separation and confusion, when leaden rains

Thrashed our backs so hard there was no pity to hope for,

And the commanders were all hoarse . . .

then, people were commanded by

Hope’s little orchestra, conducted by Love.

[65, 127]

It may be seen from the last two quotations that the three themes we have distinguished so far—the Moscow streets, war, and love—interpenetrate in Okudzhava’s work. In fact, it is one of the most important aspects of his style that the songs are not specifically “about” certain given subjects, with reference being limited within each text to one specific area. The broad themes of the city, war, and love are only reference points that float to the surface more often than others. There is certainly no portrayal of a recognizable social order or a particular historical period, and no developed account of particular human relationships. This vagueness of reference has led many critics to categorize Okudzhava as an impressionist. In the best of the articles arguing this point, Violetta Iverni has asserted (admittedly with reference to Okudzhava’s prose) that not only are there no “subjects” in Okudzhava, but there is no authorial point of view, either:

I’m convinced that Okudzhava asserts nothing at all; by the nature of his talent and by his own nature he lacks any kind of tendentiousness. He is simply incapable of it. He is perhaps the most spontaneous, the most elemental of all writers who exist at the moment. And if the concept “impressionism” is capable of reflecting a combination made up of the spontaneity of the image as it arises in the author’s imagination and an equally elemental, almost animal-like, organic feeling for rhythm, measure, purity of sound, and its lyric depth and fullness—then Okudzhava is an impressionist more than anyone at any time.²³

Okudzhava himself is reported to have said:

The work should not be tendentious, but the artist should. I certainly do have a deposit of tendentiousness inside me; it’s connected with my philosophy, my position in life. I am a member of the Communist Party.²⁴

Like Iverni’s, this statement is too categorical when applied to Okudzhava’s songs. It may be that the songs are subtle and evasive, and it may be that there is a complete discontinuity between the creative artist and the political man. But it is also certain that Okudzhava’s songs do “make assertions,” sometimes quite openly. Even among the few songs we have examined here, we have found Okudzhava asserting “the goodness of silence” in the trolleybus song; “Painters” is one long exhortation; “You Never Can Bring Back the Past” is full of tendentious statements about the nature of history. Admittedly metaphorical rather than explicit, but nevertheless quite transparent as a politically tendentious assertion, is the song for which the responsible editor got fired:

Off the yard leads a doorway

That we call the back way in,

In that doorway, like country gentry

There lives a black cat.

He hides his grin in his whiskers,

The darkness is his shield,

Other cats all sing and weep,

The black cat says nothing.

Hasn’t hunted mice for ages,

He grins into his mustache,

It’s us he’s after, believe me,

Setting little bits of sausage.

He makes no demands or requests,

His yellow eye burns,

Everyone makes willing presents

And says thank you.

He doesn’t utter a sound,

All he does is eat and drink.

If his claws touch the staircase

It’s like a scratch across the throat.

And that’s why it’s not happy,

This house we live in. . .

We should get a light fitted,

But we can’t seem to collect the cash.

[65, 89]

This statement is one of the most memorable by a Russian author about the atmosphere of the country under Stalin; its apparently throwaway final line is in fact a grim assertion of popular connivance. And in a very recent song (1983) Okudzhava has made his own comment on the arms race. It is characteristic that archaic, folkloristic images are used; the style of the original is more colloquial than is normal for Okudzhava:

The Sign

If there’s a raven high above,

Things must be heading for war.

If we don’t stop him circling,

If we don’t stop him circling,

We’ll have to go to the front.

So as there won’t be war,

The raven must be killed.

So as to kill the raven,

So as to kill the raven,

A gun has to be loaded.

But if we go ahead and load the gun,

Everyone will want to shoot it,

Then as soon as the shooting starts,

Then as soon as the shooting starts,

Bullets will find holes.

Bullets pity nobody,

They don’t care who they hit;

One of theirs or one of ours,

As long as they get every last one,

That’s it, there’s nothing left.

That’s it, there’s nothing left,

That’s it, there’s no-one left,

That’s it, there’s no-one left,

Except for that raven,

—And there’s no-one left to shoot him,

No-one left to shoot him.

The point of view in this quietly despairing fable, as always with Okudzhava, is that of the private individual, who is doomed to act and suffer as part of a collective. The ominous raven of Russian folklore is not identified with any particular political entity; he is apparently an eternal attribute of the human situation who brings out man’s worst instincts. The song presents a dilemma rather than urging a specific political course of action; but it certainly does engage a current political issue—obviously, nuclear disarmament.

So, rather than saying that Okudzhava’s work is a spontaneous effusion of images, or that he avoids making statements because he feels that to do so is not a proper end of art, it is better to say that he puts together impressions of the world in order both to express subjective moods and to assert moral attitudes. Here is a very good example, the song “March Snow” (“Martovskii sneg,” 1958):

In the Arbat courtyard there’s gaiety and laughter.

And the pavements are already getting wet.

Weep, children! The March show is dying.

We’ll give it a happy funeral.

In dark cupboards skates will rust,

Skis, forgotten, will warp in comers. . .

Weep, children! From over the white river

Very soon the grasshoppers will hurry to you.

There’ll be lots of grasshoppers. Enough for everybody.

Children, you won’t be playing alone. . .

Weep, children! The March snow is dying.

We’ll pay it a general’s honors.

Rooks will be still over its head,

The river ice will thunder into lilac crevasses. . .

But the snow woman will be left a widow . . .

Children, be good and attentive to women.

[65, 47]

The change of seasons, especially from winter to spring, is a well-worn subject in Russian writing, and Okudzhava here finds some appealing and homely images on which to focus the customary mixture of regret and exaltation. A net of repetitions holds the piece delicately together. The end of the song has the now-familiar turn into the unknown. It is keyed by a linguistic feature. Russian has snezhnaya baba, literally “snow woman,” where English has “snowman,” and the slightly derogatory baba leads Okudzhava into a sententious exhortation at the end that is completely consistent with his romantic exaltation of the sex in other songs. So the children get a fresh message instead of being instructed once more to weep.

But it remains true that Okudzhava avoids commitment to some kinds of tendentious position. There are no political positions in his work, and, most refreshingly, there are none that are tub-thumped all the way through a text in such a way as to make the moral lesson the point of the exercise.

Okudzhava’s greatest achievement consists of a small number of songs which distill the essence of his nonnarrative approach. What they do is to take an image—and a great part of the achievement is that the images concerned are completely fresh and original—and sketch its emotional significance for the author’s individual sensibility. Some of these songs are explicitly autobiographical, others are “objective”; some of them are sententious, others simply present the image and leave matters there. The objective and inexplicit songs are undoubtedly the finer.

However, there are no absolute boundaries between these various types. As an example, here is a completely “objective” song. Its vocabulary and phraseology, to say nothing of the pervasive triple parallelism of its structure, all relate to the conventions of the Russian folk lyric:

As for the first love—it bums the heart,

And the second comes fast after the first.

But the third love is a key trembling in the lock,

Key trembling in lock, suitcase in hand.

As for the first war—it’s nobody’s fault,

And the second is someone’s fault.

But the third war is my fault alone,

And my fault everyone can see.

As for the first deceit—it’s mist at sunrise,

And the second is reeling drunk.

But the third deceit is blacker than night,

Blacker than night, and more frightening than war.

[65, 117]

This song acquires a completely new—and surprising—dimension when its title is put with it: “Song of My Life” (“Pesenka o moei zhizni,” 1962). What autobiographical facts, from Okudzhava’s life as we know it, could underlie this lyric? Does it refer to an actually experienced third love, third war, and third deceit, or is it issuing a terrible warning against them? Once again, Okudzhava is elusive and enigmatic, even when he appears to be categorical and explicit.

There are three songs which are explicitly autobiographical in their texts and which also concern the creative process. The first is almost a caricature of the extreme Romantic position in poetics, a declaration of the superiority of the unuttered word. Its first verse goes:

I’m walking along and listening

To what is probably the very best song

This side of heaven,

It’s quickened inside me.

The song is described as “very unsung” (ochen’ nespetaya), “green as grass,” and to contain a melody played by “some trumpeter yet to come.” The last verse again leads away into the unknown:

Lightly, uncommonly, merrily

Above the crossroads whirls

That most important song,

The one I was unable to sing.

[65, 81]

The third line of the last stanza gives this song its title, “The Important Song” (“Glavnaya pesenka,” 1960). This epiphany stands at the very beginning of Okudzhava’s public career as a guitar poet.

Long after the most intensive period of songwriting and performing was past, he again looked into his own creative self, but this time, ostensibly, as a historical novelist. The three verses of the resulting song tell how Okudzhava painstakingly put together a historical novel. He imagines himself to be a retired lieutenant in the process of immersing himself in the past, and he appeals to be allowed to go on writing while the red rose—the song’s transparent symbol for creative imagination—goes on blooming in its brown bottle that once held imported beer. The song’s refrain is a splendid notion:

Everyone writes what he hears.

Everyone can hear himself breathing.

The way he breathes is the way he writes

Without trying to do favors.

That’s how nature wanted it.

Why—that’s none of our business,

What for is not for us to judge.

[65, 160]

This song is one of the few by Okudzhava that he has “explained”:

Once, a Moscow critical journal asked me and a group of writers to put down our opinion of the nature of our creative work, the psychology of creation, what we write for, for whom, and why. Since I don’t know how to write articles and didn’t much like analyzing myself, I turned them down. . . . The others wrote very serious analyses of their own work. As for me, I wrote a poem and thought up some music for it. . . the result was a song . . . and I sent this song to the journal. They didn’t print the poem, even though it was a direct answer to their question. . . .

[65, 161]

This story turns out to be somewhat disingenuous, because Okudzhava’s poem, with a dedication to Vasily Aksenov, was in fact published early in 1977.²⁵ It has also been released in the USSR as a song in Okudzhava’s own performance.²⁶ What gives the piece an inescapably ironic edge in the context of Soviet literature is the fact that when Soviet writers speak about their situation, they most often use the metaphor of breathing to express their sense of the difficulties that surround them: “There’s no air. . . ,” “We’re choking. . . ,” and so on.

One of the very small number of songs that Okudzhava has written since 1980 deals even more explicitly with his attitude towards the problem of the relationship between art and “historical reality.” The second stanza, with the appropriate modifications, serves as a refrain:

The Roman Empire in its period of decline

Retained the appearance of firm order.

The leader was in place, his comrades at his side,

And life was fine, to judge by the rates of pay.

The critics will say, though, that the word “comrade” isn’t a Roman item,

And this mistake makes the whole song meaningless.

Maybe, maybe, maybe it isn’t Roman, I don’t regret it,

It doesn’t bother me at all, it even uplifts me.

The young men of the Empire in its period of decline

Dreamed all the time of rolled-up greatcoats [skatkt] and skirmishes [skhvatki].

Sometimes on the attack, sometimes in their trenches,

All at once they’d be in the Pamirs and then they’d be in Europe.

The critics will say, though, that a rolled-up greatcoat isn’t a Roman item . . .

The peasants of the Empire in its period of decline

Ate anything they could, and got revoltingly drunk.

And for sobering up they were all partial to pickle brine,

Apparently they didn’t realize there was a decline.

The critics will say, though: “Pickle brine! What next—it’s not a Roman item . . .

The women of the Empire in its period of decline

Were the only ones who had a sweet time, only them, the beauties;

All paths were open before their gaze,

They worked if they wanted, or went to the forum.

The critics in chorus cry: “Ah, the forum, the forum!—now that’s a Roman item,

Just one little word, but it does so much for the song!”

Maybe, maybe, maybe it is Roman, but what a pity,

It bothers me a bit, and brings my idea to nought.²⁷

This text both exemplifies one kind of Aesopian language and makes sly fun of it at the same time; the “young men of the Empire” that leap to the Russian mind come from the north to the Pamirs (on their way to Afghanistan) and from the east into Europe, not from the south as the Romans did. And the verb that ends the refrain in the original Russian, vozvyshaet, rings an immediate chime with Pushkin’s celebrated artistic credo:

T’my nishchikh istin mne dorozhe

Nas vozvyshayushchii obman.

More dear to me than the multitude of poor truths

Is deceit, which uplifts us.

Like “The Black Cat”, here is another song that is highly tendentious but expressed in unemphatic, gently derisive language.

The objective songs in this final group, Okudzhava’s highest achievements, vary greatly in ostensible subject matter. Here is a straightforward appeal for the “openness of soul” (dusha naraspashku) that is supposed to be part of the essential Russian character:

When the snowstorm howls like a wild animal,

Long-drawn-out and angry—

Don’t lock your door,

Let your door be open.

And if a long road lies ahead,

A difficult one, imagine,

Don’t forget to fling your door open,

Leave your door open.

As you leave home in the silence of night,

Decide without wasting words

To mix in the stove the fire of pinewood

With the fire of your soul.

Let the wall be warm

And the bench soft. . .

Closed doors are a penny a pound,

And a lock only costs a kopeck!

[65, 71]

The nearest thing in Okudzhava’s work to a Vysotsky-style narrative, but once again expressed with his usual evasiveness, mild irony, and tenderness, is the piece he at one concert introduced as “a song about how an old, sick, tired king set off to conquer another country, and what happened as a result”:

A king was preparing a campaign against another country.

His queen had dried him a sack of rusks,

And she’d sewn up his old cloak so carefully,

Given him a packet of tobacco and some salt in a rag.

She put her hands on the king’s breast,

And said, caressing him with her sparkling gaze:

“Beat them really well, or you’ll get called a pacifist,

And don’t forget to capture all the enemy’s cakes.”

The king reviewed his troops in the courtyard.

Five sad soldiers, five merry ones, and a corporal.

Said the king: “We fear neither the newspapers nor the wind.

We’ll beat the enemy, and come back victorious, hurrah!”

The king gives his merry soldiers jobs in the rear. The five sad ones fail to survive the campaign, the corporal marries a woman prisoner, and the army captures a whole sack of cakes. Here is how the song ends:

Orchestras, play! Songs and laughter, sound out!

Friends, it’s not worth giving in to passing sadness.

There’s no sense in sad soldiers’ going on living,

And besides, there’re never enough cakes to go round.

[65, 99]

Therein, of course, lies the essence of the Okudzhava song about war. The game is played for the whim of outsiders, who collect the glory and do not share in the suffering; the game brings out man’s propensity to inflate his sense of his own importance; the little man bears the brunt, especially if he is given to melancholy; and things never turn out in the way it is boldly predicted they will. But despair is no answer, whatever the objective facts may suggest. The setting of the song is again typical—a kind of pantomime never-never-land that has some medieval trappings but absolutely nothing to do with particular countries or the specific barbarisms of twentieth-century war.

Here is an even more blasé view of the human condition:

Here’s how it is in our day and age,

For every high tide there’s a low one,

For every wise man there’s a fool,

Everything’s even, everything’s fair.

But this principle doesn’t suit the fools,

For you can see them at any distance.

People shout at the fools: “Fools, fools!”

And that offends them a lot.

And so the fool won’t need to blush at himself,

So that each and every person should stand out,

On every wise man a label

Was hung one day.

We’ve seen these labels around for a long time,

They’re less than a penny a pound.

And people shout at the wise ones: “Fools, fools!”

And no-one notices the fools.

[65, 95]

Again, nothing is specific, in space or time, and so nobody really needs to take offense; everyone can smile ruefully and pass on.

Okudzhava’s three greatest songs have this evasive, convoluted quality to an almost maddening degree. “The Miraculous Waltz” (“Chudesnyi val’s,” 1961) paints a sylvan scene; it seems about to clear up its mysteries at every new line but then never quite manages to:

In the forest, under a tree, a musician is playing a waltz.

Playing a waltz, tenderly and passionately in turn.

As for me, once more I’m looking at you,

But you are looking at him, and he is looking into space.

The music’s been playing for an age. Our picnic’s dragging on.

The picnic where people drink and weep, love and leave.

The musician’s lips are pressed to his flute. I would press mine to you!

But you are probably that spring that cannot save.

But the musician is playing his waltz. He can see nothing.

He stands there, his shoulders pressed to a birch tree.

The birch twigs replace his fingers,

And his birch eyes are stern and sad.

Before him stands a pine waiting for the spring.

But the musician grows into the ground, the sounds of the waltz flow.

And his thin legs seem like the roots of that pine,

In the earth they intertwine, and they can’t be disentangled.

The music’s been playing for an age. Our love story is dragging on,

It’s been pulled into a knot, it burns but won’t burn up . . .

Come on, let’s calm down! Let’s all go home!

But you’re looking at him . . .

And the musician plays on.

[65, 97]

The language, imagery, and conceptual framework of this song are of a different order of difficulty from those of any other Okudzhava song. And this song, more than any other by Okudzhava, suffers from being detached from its melody, one of the strangest and most beautiful of all the tunes of the guitar poets. Its third line begins with an abrupt change of key that turns the whole mood around, from darkness to light and reconciliation. The song is most clearly “about” the ineffability of love. There is also, without doubt, a bifurcation of the author’s ego here between musician and lover. He sees himself in both roles, in the role of the artist as eternal and inextricable from natural forces, turned away from mankind and in rapt devotion to his art. But there is an absence of sequential development in the song; the connection between the appeal in the last stanza to go one’s separate way has no clear connection with the argument of the rest of the piece. However, the song is without a shadow of doubt one of Okudzhava’s most powerful and evocative pieces, and a text which for sheer lyric vision it would be hard to match in modern Russian poetry anywhere.

The second of the three most outstanding songs by Okudzhava is the one that has been heard outside Russia more widely than any other by him, because of its use at the conclusion of Makaveev’s noted film WR: Mysteries of the Organism. What Okudzhava thought of that is not a matter of record. Its title seems to be the frankest acknowledgment Okudzhava has made to any literary predecessor. The song is called “The Prayer of François Villon” (“Molitva Fransua Viiona,” 1964–65):

While the earth is still turning, while the light is still bright,

Grant Thou, O Lord, to everyone whatever he doesn’t have:

Grant Thou the wise man wisdom, grant the coward a steed,

Grant the lucky man money . . . And don’t forget about me.

While the earth is still turning—for Thine is the power, O Lord!—

Grant the power-greedy man to gorge himself on power,

Grant the generous man respite, if only till evening comes,

To Cain grant remorse . . . And don’t forget about me.

I know Thou canst do everything, I believe in Thy wisdom,

Just as a soldier who’s been killed believes he’s living in paradise,

Just as every single ear believes Thy quiet words,

As we ourselves believe, not knowing what we do!

Lord, O God of mine, my God with eyes of green!

While the earth is still turning, itself finding that strange,

While it still has enough time and fire,

Grant Thou to each a little, and don’t forget about me.

[65. 121]

Once more, the text has absolutely nothing to do with contemporary Soviet reality, or with any other historically identifiable reality. Nothing about it makes a connection with the late medieval world of François Villon. Given the song’s formula, it has some delightful examples of avoiding the obvious without resorting to clever paradox (“grant the coward a steed,” “grant the generous man respite”). The naive selfishness of the refrain line gives the song the feel of a child’s prayer. Perhaps even more important in the case of this song than of others, in translation there is no recompense for the subtle word play of the original. The phrase “Grant Cain repentance,” for example, is an exquisite newly minted pun (“Kàinu dai raskàiania,” which has the etymological feel of “May Cain be de-cainized”). Like “The Miraculous Waltz,” the song has no narrative element and no sequential argument but works through the accumulation of parallels and repetitions. This technique is characteristic of folk art rather than the modern literary lyric; the song sounds like a charm or a spell.

Okudzhava’s greatest song, though, does use the suggestion of a narrative to add to its folkloric incantational accumulation of parallel events. It is “The Blue Balloon” (“Pesenka o golubom sharike,” 1957):

Little girl crying, her balloon’s flown away,

People console her, but the balloon flies on.

Young woman crying, still she has no fiancé.

People console her, but the balloon flies on.

Grown woman crying, husband’s gone to another,

People console her, but the balloon flies on.

Old woman crying, she’s not had much of a life.

But the balloon’s come back, and it’s a blue one.

[65, 32]

Here is a song with the inevitability and absolute economy of the greatest art. Okudzhava has found a striking single image whose ultimate significance remains mysterious but which nevertheless acts perfectly as a correlative of the song’s action. The song defeats the predictability of a triple repetition by culminating with a fourth verse whose reversal of action and sudden addition of an epithet utterly disarm the listener. As we have seen in so many Okudzhava songs, there is a velvet sting in the tail. Rather than a conclusion, there is a new turn and a new horizon opened up, one whose terms could not be predicted from the preceding part of the text. The sadness of the first three couplets remains in the mind, but with a delicate consolation from the last. Once again, the text lacks any reference to any specific place or time. It is one of the most universal poems in the language, a masterpiece of lyric purity.

Although the song about the blue balloon is explicitly about women, it advances a view of life that is present in other songs by Okudzhava that have to do with his own experience and that of other men. To call it a cyclical view of the individual life is to make it more categorical than it ever is in the songs, but the idea of cyclical return is at its center:

Don’t torment yourselves in vain, for everything has its time.

If you grow some grass, it’ll be trampled by autumn.

You started your stroll from an Arbat courtyard,

And it looks as if that’s where everything will return.

[65. 149]

Everything here is characteristic of Okudzhava: the fatalism, presented in a mild, understated way that manages to have a consolatory effect; the avoidance of declamatory ideas and imagery—stroll as a metaphor for the individual life is a typical piece of deflation. Everything will come back to where it began, changed only by the deprivations of experience. Life is a melancholy affair, but it is not tragic, nor is it absurd. Okudzhava’s creative world (unlike, apparently, the historical world of his experience) does not contain the stretched extremes of passion that inform tragedy and absurdity.

These were some of the principal songs with which Okudzhava emerged as a new voice in Russian poetry and culture on the threshold of the 1960s. They have retained their popularity and their freshness for twenty years; their captivating air of sincerity has not aged into a stylistic mannerism. The guitar poets who came after Okudzhava are all in his debt for certain features of the style, but he could have no real followers. His innovations have been used by his successors for quite different ends.