Songs by Bulat Okudzhava

About Okudzhava

In any case - what prevented it from being published in the Soviet Union? After all, somehwere at the end of the 60s the state publishing house "Muzyka", in Moscow, agreed to print a small collection of Bulat Okudzhava's songs. It was supposed to have been the first edition of pieces representative of a new genre, founded by Okudzhava about ten years earlier; a genre which didn't have an appropriate, generally accepted name. Since, most of the lyrics in the collection had already appear in print, so from the verbal ideological standpoint the publishing house "Muzyka" was safely insured from risk. Strange as it may seem, the book fell through not on account of the lyrics, but because of the music. Okudzhava's melodies were a source of doubt and anxiety to the administration of the publishing house. To publish Okudzhava's poems the way they were performed by the author - that is, with the natural combination of his melodies and guitar accompanimet - meant to recognize offically a rather doubtful, unofficial genre, which appeared in a scandalous form: a form, which was not planned anywhere or approved by anyone, which was outside any of the norms and rules in accordance with which songs are composed, selected and distributed in the Soviet Union. So, the manuscript safely passed editorial proofreading, but as it turned out, it ended up not on the printing press but in the desk of K. A. Fortunatov, the director of the publishing house, where it remained for several years.