Red Wine Glasses. Bulat Okudzhava and Others

Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava, whose biography deserves great attention, was a famous Soviet singer, composer, and poet. To his own lyrics, the talented performer wrote songs himself, being one of the best-known representatives of the genre of author’s (bard) song. His work encompassed an entire era. The poet and composer are long gone, but Bulat Okudzhava’s poems and songs still sound in gatherings and on television screens.

Benedict Sarnov is a literary critic and publicist, the author of many literary biographies (“The Case of Mandelstam,” “The Case of Zoshchenko,” “Mayakovsky. Suicide,” “The Phenomenon of Solzhenitsyn”), and memoirs (“There Was No Boredom”), as well as four volumes of historical essays “Stalin and the Writers.”

The plot of Sarnov’s new book unfolds against a backdrop of historical events—from the beginning and middle of the 1960s (the roundup of the Khrushchev-led exhibition at the Manege, the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel) to the present day (1993, the assault on the White House). The heroes of the book—Bulat Okudzhava, Naum Korzhavin, Viktor Nekrasov, Vladimir Voinovich, Fazil Iskander, Andrey Sinyavsky, Vladimir Maksimov—are people who played an important role in the life of the author.