Of Trolleybuses, Streets and Soldiers

Through unadorned verse and simple tunes, Bulat Okudzhava captivated generations of Russians and inspired them in hard times.





The scruffy-looking man, dark, thin and mustached, stood alone on the stage and hesitantly rambled through his simple verse, softly accompanying himself on guitar.





Listen -- boots are thundering,


And crazed birds are flying,


And women peer out from under their hands.


You know what they're looking at ...





Inundated for decades with proletarian songs about constructing railways and sappy ballads about unrequited love, the audience at Leningrad's House of Workers in the Arts, in 1960, did not know how to respond.





And where are our women, friend,


When we come through our doors?


They meet us and lead us in,


But our homes reek of betrayal.





But we'll brush the past aside -- lies!


And we'll look to the future with hope -- light.


But the ravens fatten in our fields


And war is thundering at our heels.





Bulat Okudzhava barely stumbled through "Song of the Soldiers' Boots" -- a ballad to veterans of the Great Patriotic War -- before the crowd frightened him off the stage. "Because I was so nervous, apparently half of the words were lost," he later said. "Suddenly someone in the hall yelled, 'Banality!' and a group of people sitting near this person began to applaud. I took my guitar and left the stage," he later said.


It was an unlikely debut for the poet who would become the "conscience of the epoch that had no conscience," in the words of writer Yaroslav Golovanov. But before long, generations of Russians who had been silenced under Stalin and were groping for pockets of freedom under Khruschev's Thaw, began to hear Okudzhava's words as their own.


His unadorned poetry set to straightforward melodies seemed, on one level, so simple that some fans insist he was just a romantic balladeer. "He wrote about humanity, not about politics," said family friend Semyon Lipkin. But the intelligentsia found political messages and allegories between the lines. The Moscow metro really referred to regimented Soviet life. The black cat hiding a smile behind its mustache while terrorizing its neighbors was a metaphor for Stalin. A toy paper soldier symbolized the dissident freedom fighter.


During the height of his popularity, from the '60s through the '80s, Okudzhava's songs seemed to resonate from every window in Moscow. Soviet citizens from all walks of life, huddled around bootleg tapes and flocked to his concerts, cherishing his poignant lyrics. Lines such as "join hands, friends, so we won't perish one by one," have become commonplace in conversation, referring to the strength of friendship.


Despite his enormous popularity, Okudzhava never changed his style. Ever unassuming, he sang as if he were sitting at a kitchen table, sharing thoughts with friends and coming up with a few funny, sad or ironic lines along the way. Even with today's new freedoms and dizzying change, fans continue to hold a special place for their cult hero bard.


This week, Russia buried Okudzhava, along with the tortured history that he helped them overcome. The 73-year-old poet died during a trip to Paris, after a history of heart trouble. "Okudzhava is the symbol of an entire era, and with his passing, this era has come to an end," said Nadezhda Azhgikhina, a literary critic and a columnist at Nezavisimaya Gazeta.


From the 30-somethings wanting to witness history to the carnation-clutching pensioners bidding tearful farewells and the political elite paying their respects, thousands of mourners filed into the Vakhtangov Theater on Wednesday for the memorial service. "Bulat's simple song is always with me. It bears no guilt," eulogized poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. "Nothing's left, and something in us has been cut to the root."


Russians will likely remember Okudzhava's undying faith in hope and forgiveness. His greatest gift to his fans was probably a reassurance that life would go on, to a people devastated by revelations that tens of millions had died in camps and that in many cases, friends and family members had betrayed each other. "Bulat was apparently able to express the soul of a man who has just awakened from the winter sleep of totalitarianism," wrote poet Vladimir Kornilov in the weekly Moskovskiye Novosti.


In the 1957 "Midnight Trolley," one of his best known poems, Okudzhava describes the guilt that wracked post-Stalin Soviets as "the pain which pecked at my temple like a starling." But he also reminds listeners that they are not alone because they are "rubbing shoulders" with others "who suffered in the night."





When I haven't the strength to master my misfortune,


When I feel despair coming on,


I hop on the passing blue trolley,


The last one,


The chance one.





Midnight trolley, rush along the streets,


Circle the boulevards,


Pick up all those who suffered in the night,


Disaster,


Disaster.





Midnight trolley, open your door!


I know how in the chilly midnight


Your passengers -- your sailors --


Come to my aid.





With them more than once I've left my troubles behind,


We've rubbed shoulders together...


Just imagine -- what kindness there is


In silence,


In silence.





The midnight trolley sails through Moscow,


Like a river, Moscow dies down,


And the pain which pecked at my brain like a starling


Subsides,


Subsides.





While people were still hesitant to speak out against Soviet repression, Okudzhava boldly sang of friendship under tyranny in "Brotherhood of Friends."





He who draws a sword against our brotherhood


Will deserve the world's worst punishment,


And I wouldn't give


A broken-down guitar for his life.





Though subtle in its political metaphors, Okudzhava's lyrics did not entirely escape the Soviet censorship machine. Okudzhava was never persecuted to the extent of exiled poet Joseph Brodsky or fellow bard Vladimir Vysotsky; but he was occasionally banned from performing and not all of his works were published. In a concert in northern Russia in the 1960s, poet Lidiya Lebedinskaya remembers, Okudzhava was not allowed to sing. "People already knew him and greeted him with a thunder of applause as he came out on the stage, expecting him to sing. But the only thing he was allowed to do was recite a poem," she said.


Establishment literary critics chastised his "gypsy" and "boulevard" songs, saying they resembled the White Army songs of the 1920s. Until Perestroika in the late 1980s, Okudzhava's recordings circulated mainly in the magnitizdat, or bootleg cassette tape culture. The recordings were made when Okudzhava sang for friends at small private gatherings. "When one of us was lucky enough to find a recording," said Azhgikhina, "my friends and I spent countless evenings huddled around a tape player listening to his songs over and over again."


Okudzhava is often mentioned side-by-side with Vysotsky, "the Bob Dylan of Russia." "There were two people who sang about our time, our generation and our country. Their songs are about how we lived from 1960 to 1980, and they will continue to tell out story in the future," said singer and poet Yuli Kim.


But the similarities end there. Vysotsky, with his raspy voice and aggressive melodies, sang in open opposition to the regime. His direct and emotional lyrics hit the listener in the face with rage. Okudzhava's words were understated and prompted listeners to reflect upon themselves. He sang in a penetrating but soft voice. Okudzhava often performed standing, with one leg up on a chair, guitar on his knee. "This trembling, weak voice, these primitive guitar cords. It seemed he should get catcalled even when he performed for friends, let alone the big stage," said writer Andrei Pavlov, of his first impressions of Okudzhava.


Okudzhava was born in Moscow in 1924 to a Georgian father and an Armenian mother. His native language was Russian because his mother -- who spoke Armenian, Georgian and Azeri -- wanted her son to speak only "the language of the great Lenin." He grew up in the courtyard culture of the Old Arbat, and his loving images of the streets of his childhood continue to speak to Muscovites today. In the 1959 "Song of the Arbat," he glorifies the street he grew up on, not the ones Soviet workers were building.





You flow like a river with your strange name


And your asphalt transparent like water in a river.


Oh my Arbat, you are my vocation,


You are my joy and my misfortune.





Okudzhava's parents were Communist Party functionaries. But they fell victim to Stalin's purges. His father was shot in 1937, and his mother spent 10 years in the gulag.


Like most young boys of his generation, patriotic fervor propelled him to volunteer to defend his motherland, and in 1942, at age 17, he went to the front. "I was a romantic in the spirit of the time. I was going to measure my forces against the fascist invaders. ... In two, three weeks, the romanticism faded. The war descended upon me with its filth, blood, the destruction of human dignity and losses," Okudzhava wrote in Novaya Gazeta in 1995.


After the war, he entered the Philology Department of Tbilisi University, graduating in 1950. He taught in a village school in Central Russia's Kaluga region and worked as a journalist and at a publishing house before concentrating full-time on his own writing.


Okudzhava's first volume of verse, "Lyrics," was published in 1956, and the poet soon began to sing his works, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. The poems "just asked to be sung," Okudzhava recalled in a recent interview in Komsomolskaya Pravda. "I liked it, my friends liked it, so I sang my verse." Okudzhava had no professional musical training, and his melodies remained technically unsophisticated throughout his career.


His appeal lay in his understanding of human frailty. "In Bulat's songs, the person is always an individual who, despite his ultimate weakness, does not allow himself to be broken," wrote Kornilov. In the 1959 "A Paper Soldier," Okudzhava paid homage to the generations of people who had come to feel like emasculated warriors, with good intentions but seemingly powerless in the battle against state repression.





Once there lived a soldier boy,


A brave and handsome soldier,


But he was just a children's toy, he was just a paper soldier.





He would have liked to change the world


So everyone would be happy,


But he always hung over the bed,


He was just a paper soldier.





Although best known for his songs, Okudzhava published several volumes of poetry, short prose and historical novels. He also acted in films and wrote screenplays. In 1994 he was awarded the Russian Booker Prize for "The Closed-Down Theater," an autobiographical novel about his parents and their generation of dedicated communists.


Okudzhava continued to write poems and short fiction until his death, although in recent years he stopped putting his verse to music, saying that the time for that had passed. Mikhail Fedotov, Russia's representative to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, who was hosting the Okudzhava family in Paris when he died, said in a television interview, "Bulat continued to write verse until his last hour of consciousness. His last poems were about the joy of being in Paris -- the city he loved, and Moscow -- the city he sang."


Indeed, Okudzhava was always unparalleled in his ability to capture his devotion to his home city under political oppression. In "Song of the Moscow Metro," he at once elegantly poeticizes dreary everyday life and criticizes the immutable state order.





It is never crowded in my metro,


Because since my childhood


It has been like a song


With the refrain:


"Stand on the right, walk on the left!"





Order is eternal, order is holy:


Those who are on the right -- stand still


But those on the move


Must always keep on the left!





This week Russians were still trying to grasp the impact of Okudzhava's death. "The sweet voice of Bulat Okudzhava entered everybody's heart," said President Boris Yeltsin, who also announced plans to erect a statue of the poet on the Old Arbat and to name a street after him. News programs reporting his death opened with black-and-white footage of his performances. "It's like we thought he would always be here," said film director and family friend Marlen Khutsiev, "because legends do not die."