«WE ARE BOUND TOGETHER WITH THE SAME DESTINY»: TWO ETUDES ON VERSE AND GRAMMAR OF BULAT OKUDZHAVA’S OEUVRES


2022. № 3 (33), 36-49

Vinogradov Russian Language Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract:

The article regards Bulat Okudzhava’s oeuvres of the second half of the 1950s and the 1960s in the context of the processes which took place in Russian poetry of that period and through lens of metric and grammar units represented in his poems. The fi rst part of this article investigates into the use of the pronoun ‘we’ in Okudzhava’s songs and poems and puts forward the hypothesis that in his case it is possible to talk about a peculiar status of ‘we’ which acquires a kind of ‘consolidating’ meaning that invites his audience to share the specifi c collectivity constituted by performative qualities of poet’s public representation. The second section considers the use of caesura in Okuzhava’s poetry: in his poems, meters with caesura experience a revival and come back to the metrical repertoire of Russian poetry; the further spread of those meters, in turn, is directly linked to the kind of the collective subjectivity constructed by ‘we’ in Okudzhava’s oeuvres.