(1924-1997), Russian poet, singer, and novelist.
Bulat Okudhava’s parents were both professional Party workers. In 1937 they were arrested; the father was executed and the mother imprisoned in the Gulag until 1955. At age seventeen Okudzhava volunteered for the army, saw active service, and was wounded. After the war he graduated from Tbilisi University, then became a schoolteacher in Kaluga. In 1956 he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and moved to Moscow. He worked as a literary journalist, and joined the Union of Writers in 1961. He made his name as a prose writer with the controversially unheroic war story “Goodbye, Schoolboy,” and followed this with a series of historical novels depicting various episodes from nineteenth-century gentry life.
In the late 1950s Okudzhava pioneered “guitar poetry” songs performed by the author to his own guitar accompaniment. This genre drew on long-established traditions of Russian drawing-room art song (“romance”), student song, and gypsy song, as well as that of the French chansonniers, who became well known in Russian intellectual circles in the late 1950s (Okudzhava’s favorite was Georges Brassens). Okudzhava cultivated an amateur-sounding performance manner. In actual fact, he was an extremely gifted natural melodist, creating dozens of original and unforgettable tunes. Okudzhava’s songs are suffused with nostalgic, agnostic sadness. They deal with three principal themes: love, war, and the streets of Moscow. In his treatment of love he is an unrepentant romantic, idealizing women and portraying men as subordinate and flawed. In his treatment of war he is anti-heroic, emphasizing fear, loss, and mankind’s seeming inability to find a more humane way of settling disputes. In his treatment of Moscow he looks back to a time before the city became a Soviet metropolis, when it offered refuge for the vulnerable and sensitive in its courtyards and neighborhoods, especially the Arbat district. His treatment of war and Moscow were particularly at odds with official notions about these matters. At about the time that Okudzhava created his basic corpus of songs, the tape recorder became available to private citizens in the USSR, and the songs were duplicated in immense numbers, completely bypassing official controls.
By the mid-1960s Okudzhava had become, after Vladimir Vysotsky, the most genuinely popular figure in the literary arts in Russia. He was unique in that, while he remained a member of the Party and the Union of Writers, his work was published abroad (without permission) and circulated unofficially in Russia, while continuing to be published officially in the USSR. Shielded by his popularity and his fundamental patriotism, he was never subjected to severe repression. From the mid-1980s until his death he was something of a Grand Old Man of Russian literature, the doyen of the “men of the 1960s.” In 1994, his novel The Closed Theatre, a barely fictionalized account of his parents’ life and fate through the eyes of their son, won the Russian Booker Prize. See also: JOURNALISM; MUSIC; UNION OF SOVIET WRITERS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Smith, Gerald Stanton. (1984). Songs to Seven Strings: Russian Guitar Poetry and Soviet “Mass Song.” Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press.
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Makarov, Dmitriy; Vardenga, Maria; and Zubtsova, Yana. (2003). “Boulat Shalvovich Okoudjava.” «http:// www.russia-in-us.com/Music/Artists/Okoudjava».
In 1820, Emperor Alexander I convened a secret committee to guide him in policies regarding the Old Believers (also known as Old Ritualists or raskolniki-schismatics). The secret committee included some of the most important churchmen and ministers in Russia, including the minister of religion and education (Prince Vasily Golitsyn) and Archbishop Filaret Drozdov, later to become metropolitan of Moscow and the preeminent prelate of mid-nineteenth-century Russia. Originally given the task of finding an appropriate form of toleration within the Russian legal system, the committee quickly broke into liberal and conservative factions. Internal politics of the committee, added to the emperor’s own vacillating desire for a “spiritual revolution” in Russia, weakened its ability to make significant changes. Ascendance of conservative members pushed the committee’s views from tolerance of the Old Belief to more stringent enforcement of punitive laws against them. After the death of Emperor Alexander, the secret committee became mostly a forum for discussion of anti-Old Believer policies in the Russian government. It continued to exist into the reign of Alexander III, whose landmark law of 1883 finally revised the legal status of Old Believers in the Russian empire. See also: ALEXANDER I; FILARET DROZDOV, METROPOLITAN; OLD BELIEVERS; ORTHODOXY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Nichols, Robert L. (2004). “The Old Belief under Surveillance during the Reign of Alexander I.” In Russia’s Dissenting Old Believers, ed. Georg Michels and Robert L. Nichols. Minneapolis: Minnesota Mediterranenean and East European Monographs.
The term Old Believers (or Old Ritualists) includes a number of groups that arose as a result of Russian church reforms initiated between 1654 and 1666. Old Believers desired to maintain the traditions, rites, and prerogatives of Russian Orthodoxy, whereas Nikon, patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, wanted to make Russian practices conform to those of the contemporary Greek Orthodox Church. Nikon’s opponents, conscious of both a departure from tradition and an encroachment of central control over local autonomy, refused to change practices.
The reforms took two general forms-textual and ritual. In the first, a group of editors changed all Russian liturgical books to conform with their contemporary Greek counterparts, rather than old Russian or old Greek versions. The most famous of these was the change in spelling of “Jesus” from “Isus” to “Iisus.” While the Old Believers rejected all innovation, the symbolic centerpiece of resistance was the sign of the cross. Traditionally, Russians put together their thumb, fourth, and fifth fingers in a symbol of the Trinity. The second finger was held upright, to confirm Jesus’ form as perfect man; the middle finger was bent to the level of the second, symbolizing Jesus’ Godly form that bent down to become human. These two fingers touched the body during the sign of the cross, showing that both natures of Jesus (human and divine) existed on the cross. In Greek practice, the fingers were re-versed-thumb, second, and third fingers were held together and touched the body, while the fourth and fifth fingers were held down toward the palm. When Nikon obliged his flock to change their hands, it seemed that he wanted them to discount the icons in their churches and the instructions in their psalm books, which explicitly showed the old Russian style of the sign. In fact, the Stoglav Council, convened exactly a century earlier, had condemned anything but the “two-fingered sign.”
The implementation of reforms were draconian. Ivan Neronov and Avvakum Petrovich, who had been part of Nikon’s circle, challenged the patriarch. Sometimes left alone, at other times persecuted, Nikon’s opponents included some of the most respected churchmen in Muscovy. In an unusual move, Neronov was finally allowed to continue using the old books for his services, but Avvakum was exiled to Siberia and finally burned at the stake for his extreme anti-reform posture. Even women were not spared-the boyarina Feo-dosia Morozova was carried out of Moscow to the Borovsk Monastery, where she perished in jail.
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For each of the famous anti-reformists, thousands more pious Russians simply paid no heed to the calls for reform and continued to pray according to the old style. Their existence underlined the limit of Nikon’s other goal, which was to limit the expansion of central control of religious affairs to the patriarch alone, taking away local prerogatives. The vast majority of Old Believers simply refused to accept either the reforms or the centralization that Nikon imposed on his flock. The traditionalists, of course, perceived themselves as true Orthodox, and called followers of the reformed ritual “new believers” or “Nikonians.” Much of this early history, however, is still poorly understood. Recent scholarship has shown that the Old Belief did not coalesce into a movement until perhaps a generation after the schism. Because local concerns tended to override any broader organization of Old Believers,
