23 Facts About Bulat Okudzhava

Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava was a Soviet and Russian poet, writer, musician, novelist, and singer-songwriter of Georgian-Armenian ancestry.

Bulat Okudzhava was one of the founders of the Soviet genre called "author song", or "guitar song", and the author of about 200 songs, set to his own poetry.

Bulat Okudzhava's songs are a mixture of Russian poetic and folk song traditions and the French chansonnier style represented by such contemporaries of Okudzhava as Georges Brassens.

Bulat Okudzhava was born in Moscow on May 9,1924, into a family of communists who had come from Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, to study and to work for the Communist Party.

The son of a Georgian father, Shalva Okudzhava, and an Armenian mother, Ashkhen Nalbandyan, Bulat Okudzhava spoke and wrote only in Russian.

Bulat Okudzhava's mother was the niece of a well-known Armenian poet, Vahan Terian.

Bulat Okudzhava's father served as a political commissar during the Civil War and as a high-ranking Communist Party member thereafter, under the protection of Sergo Ordzhonikidze.

Bulat Okudzhava's uncle Vladimir Okudzhava was an anarchist and terrorist who left the Russian Empire after a failed attempt to assassinate the Kutaisi governor.

Shalva, Bulat Okudzhava's father, was arrested in February 1937 during the Great Purge, accused of Trotskyism and wrecking.

Bulat Okudzhava's wife was arrested in 1939 "for anti-Soviet deeds" and sent to the Gulag.

Bulat Okudzhava's mother was released in 1946, but arrested for the second time in 1949, spending another 5 years in labor camps.

Bulat Okudzhava was fully released in 1954 and rehabilitated in 1956, along with her husband.

In 1942, at the age of 17,9th-grader Bulat Okudzhava volunteered for the Red Army infantry, and from 1942 he participated in the war against Nazi Germany.

In 1956, three years after the death of Joseph Stalin, Bulat Okudzhava returned to Moscow.

Bulat Okudzhava only employed a few chords and had no formal training in music, but he possessed an exceptional melodic gift, and the intelligent lyrics of his songs blended perfectly with his music and his voice.

Bulat Okudzhava's songs were praised by his friends, and amateur recordings were made.

Bulat Okudzhava regarded himself primarily as a poet and claimed that his musical recordings were insignificant.

Bulat Okudzhava supported the reform movement in the USSR and in October 1993, signed the Letter of Forty-Two.

Bulat Okudzhava died in Paris on June 12,1997, and is buried in the Vagankovo Cemetery in Moscow.

Bulat Okudzhava's dacha in Peredelkino is a museum that is open to the public.

Bulat Okudzhava learned basic guitar skills with the help of some friends.

Bulat Okudzhava knew how to play basic chords on a piano.

Many of Bulat Okudzhava's songs are in the key of C minor, centering on the C minor chord, then progressing to a G 7, then either an E-flat minor or C major.