"Earthly passion takes us to heaven": Bulat Okudzhava in the memoirs of the women he loved

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

"A hundred times I pulled the trigger of the rifle, and only nightingales flew out …" - probably these lines from a poem Bulat Okudzhava characterize the author as well as possible, who on May 9 would have turned 92 years old. The Soviet press accused him of pacifism and vulgarity, while women in love saw him as completely different: "soft, romantic, impulsive." The way he really was. Only with those whom he himself loved. Unknown Bulat Okudzhava in the memories of women who left a mark on his life - further in the review.

Bulat and Lyolya studied at a two-story wooden school. Classmates lived in Vagonka - a residential area of the Nizhniy Tagil Carriage Works. Olga Nikolaevna recalls: “We studied with Okudzhava for only one year - in the fourth grade. To be honest, I then treated Bulat the same way I treated all the boys. It got dark early in the winter, and the electricity in our school often went out. When the class was plunged into pitch darkness, Okudzhava rushed swiftly to my desk. He sat down next to him, shyly pressed his shoulder and was silent. For a whole year, he never said anything to me. In the fifth grade, Bulat moved to another school, and our paths went our separate ways.

Okudzhava's second wife Olga Artsimovich, with whom he had been married for about 35 years, recalls their first meeting: “After all, I lived very closed, in a family of physicists, in their circle; she was not friends with writers. When Okudzhava just began to enter glory, my uncle invited him to visit - to sing. That's when I saw Bulat for the first time. A genius came in, that's all. The wife has no right to talk about her husband in such terms. But then I really had no idea who he was, and therefore I rightfully thought: here is a genius. And she has never changed this point of view since then."

Probably no one knew him better than Olga: “Heroic pathos is not inherent in him at all: he liked to emphasize his slenderness, fragility, comicism, clumsiness - hence all these grasshoppers and ants among the continuous Soviet eagles and falcons. But despite the fact that he avoided talking about the war, he has it in almost every poem, right up to the very latest. I think that the arrest of his parents and the war were traumas that he did not completely overcome, and was it possible? And he did not forgive anything. Now I am talking about the fact that he deliberately belittled himself … but this is also wrong, because everything was mixed in him - this is the whole point. He was, after all, a Caucasian. A proud Caucasian. With hypertrophied self-esteem. An ant is an ant, and he did not allow familiarity to anyone and, in general, was a rather brave guy. His courage was of a fatalistic nature, he was generally a fatalist - he did not like to actively change his life, come what may, he did not like to make decisions … But when fate put him in extreme circumstances, he did not shy away."

Natalia Gorlenko was 31 years younger than Okudzhava. Both were not free, both wrote poetry and performed with author's songs. “… Now everything that was between us, I feel more sharply than in those years. Then our life was just crazy. Almost two years of hidden underground existence, from human eyes, from spies, from people close to him and me. We were constantly rushing somewhere, changing trains and cars. He was especially revealed when we left Moscow. On the road, in carriages, in the endless flashing of telegraph poles … He even wrote a poem on this topic: "All lovers tend to run away …" But as soon as we approached Moscow, he became gloomy, and I became sad. Everything was different in Moscow …”.

Natalya recalls: “When he heard me sing for the first time, he said resolutely:“That's it, now I will perform only with you”. And we began to go on tour together. So there was no way to hide our relationship. " “His letters are divine. There is also a lot about love in them. And everything is written not just because there is nothing to do, but seriously. Yes, there was also sentimentality in him … The poet … Soft, romantic, impulsive."

This is how the poet was seen by the women he loved, the same real he was in his poems. "This woman in the window": poems by Okudzhava, which became a romance