Since my youth I have liked the work of Bulat Okudzhava, though back then I knew him only as a performer of songs. At home we had several of his records, and I enjoyed listening to the entire collection of my parents’ music. A little later I discovered Okudzhava also as the author of music and lyrics for many film songs, which I still enjoy listening to today.
Among other things, Bulat Okudzhava wrote quite a few songs for war films. I am sure almost everyone knows at least “We Face Deadly Fire” from Belorussky Station, or “Drops of the Danish King” from Zhenya, Zhenechka i ‘Katyusha‘. Okudzhava’s songs were able to convey the full range of feelings, and between the lines you could sense that the author knew what he was writing about.
And then I came across a book by Okudzhava from the series “My War,” in which veterans’ memoirs are published.
From School to the Front is not a single work but a collection of recollections that can formally be divided into “novellas” and “stories.” Formally — because this is not fiction, but rather the memoirs of Bulat Shalvovich, conveyed in his own manner.
The book begins with excerpts from interviews with the author, and only then come his writings. Okudzhava’s childhood was not easy. His father was repressed, and his mother also endured prison as the wife of a repressed man. And then came the war, at the start of which Bulat Okudzhava was only 17 years old.
The works in the collection are arranged chronologically according to when the events take place. First come the short recollections of the beginning of the war, of how he and his friend were so eager to get into the army, though they were not yet of age. How they eventually managed to talk the military commissar into it, and he finally sent them off to training.
Then follows a “novella” about daily life at the front. These are short sketches in which the author recalls himself precisely as a teenager, who felt invincible, for whom death was still not taken seriously. But these stories are very brief and end with his being wounded, after which Okudzhava never returned to the front. He fought for only a few months (only — in comparison with the length of the entire war).
The second part of the book is no longer about the war at all, but about the first postwar years. Among them stands out the novella “Spick-and-Span Newcomer,” which tells of the life of “capital-born” Okudzhava in a village where he was assigned to teach. There the young Okudzhava experienced both a crush on a student and a struggle with the school principal, who cared less about the children’s education than about keeping the grades presentable — even if that meant resorting to window dressing.
Of the entire collection, it was the novella about village life that I liked the most, while the part about the war felt rather dull. Although it is written with a kind of recklessness characteristic of Okudzhava in those years — after all, he was still just a boy — as a standalone work the war recollections (and the book is positioned first and foremost as war memoirs) did not seem all that impressive to me.
My rating: 3.5/5
