The art of cutting and living

Most of the stories of Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava (1924-1997) are distinctly autobiographical, like his first story "Be healthy, schoolchlar!", Published in 1961 in the famous thaw almanac, Tarusa Pages, prepared by Konstantin Paustovsky. That literary start for a long time determined the lyrical intonation of the poet’s prose, and his proprietary self -irony, and the disobedience of officialdom. Okudzhava completely does not have a brave military-patriotic pathos, he perceives the war as a popular tragedy: “I want everyone to stay alive, everything, but most of all, so that with a red nose, similar to my father, so that he will return to To his girls, damn it! " ("Music lessons") The author is ruthless to himself - stupid, romantic, not yet thinking, through which camp hell his mother passed ("Girl of my dreams") But in the main thing he is firm and sure - not dictators, but a "little man". “As for the victory, even though I did not do anything heroic and, probably, was an unimportant soldier, still lives in me that it would be harder to win” (“Morning paints with delicate light”).

The accompanying article by Alexei Mikheev

Alexey Vasilievich Mikheev (born in 1953) - journalist, literary critic, translator, prose writer, editor -in -chief of the Internet portal "Dictionaries of the 21st century". He graduated from the Faculty of Economics of Moscow State University and graduate school of the Institute of Linguistics of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Candidate of Philology. He led the author’s headings in the newspaper “News Time” and on the Radio "Echo of Moscow", led the direction of fiction at the Rosman publishing house, and in 2005-2008 he was the editor-in-chief of the magazine Foreign Literature. Laureate of a number of literary awards, including the "man of the book", the Australian competition of avant -garde and experimental literature "Antipoda", the international competition of translated poetry of Vislavva Shimborskaya