Question: In what context did you become acquainted with Bulat Okudzhava and his music and poetry?

RH: Well, he was part of that dissident movement of the nineteen sixties and so there was a whole range of poets, many of whom visited Berkeley as a matter of fact. Yevtushenko was also here, Voznesensky was here, Bella Akhmadulina was here, and then I think Okudzhava came only later than they did, I think they had been here earlier. And so he was very much a part of what was going on in those days. And you probably know more facts about this than I do, but there was a dissident journal, published I think in the very beginning of the nineteen sixties, called Tarusskiye Stranitsy, and he had a prose piece in there, it was called Bud’ Zdorov’ Shkolar, and that made a big splash, even before I, at least, knew anything of his poetry.

Question: So you were first introduced to him through his prose?

RH: Yeah…[and] I think he turned to prose again later in his career, and he wrote less and less poetry and appeared at fewer and fewer concerts. I think he was perhaps not all that comfortable doing it, I don’t know.

Question: Do you know where else he gave concerts in the U.S., besides Berkeley?

RH: I think on that same trip he had been in Los Angeles, and when he was here, I remember him saying he had appeared in Monterey, and also in San Francisco, while he was here in the Bay Area. And as you probably know, that was very much the period of the great surge of the third wave. There were a lot of Russian emigres here, in California, and in the Bay Area particularly. So there was a kind of built-in audience for him, and indeed not only for him, but for people like Yevtushenko and Voznesensky. I remember Wheeler Auditorium was packed full, and it was a very responsive audience, there was a lot of applause.

Question: A largely Russian speaking audience?

RH: Yes, absolutely. There were a few people from the Slavic Department, but it was mostly more recent emigres who made up the audience. Most of these third wave emigres settled in San Francisco, and it was principally those people who came to hear him. It was the natural audience for him. They remembered him, certainly, from back there, and they remembered him as one of the bards, and that was what he was most famous for among those people.

Question: So was this concert widely publicized at Berkeley, or was it primarily geared at that smaller community that was already familiar with him?

RH: Yes, except as I said, it wasn’t a very small community, it was quite large, and I recall that whenever those visiting Soviet poets appeared in Wheeler, Wheeler was always full, there were a lot of people who wanted to hear them. As I recall, Okudzhava was the only one of the bards who came here and appeared in Berkeley. Yevtushenko and Voznesensky and Akhmadulina, and later Brodsky, who came several times, just recited or read their verse and then spoke a bit and answered questions. But Okudzhava, as I recall in that concert, both sang and recited some of his poetry…And I remember he was touted among Americans as the Soviet Bob Dylan. And I was sort of disabused of that when I heard him. He certainly wasn’t the musician Bob Dylan was, and he didn’t pretend to be a musician, he just found it easier to present his poetry in that fashion.

Question: He reminds me more of Georges Brassens?

RH: Right, the French chansonnier, that was the type of performer he was, rather than someone like Dylan, I think…Like Charles Aznavour…And I think he felt really quite at home in France. I don’t know whether he spoke French or not. I don’t think he knew any English, or very little English.

Question: So you said that at the concert at Berkeley, everyone came and knew the words. Can you tell us anything else about what it was like to be there, what the atmosphere was like at that performance?

RH: Well there was a lot of energy in the audience, and one could feel it. And he himself could too…My wife and I invited him to dinner at our house before the concert, and we also invited Karlinsky, who was to introduce him. And the other guests were Nikolai Morshen and his wife, who is a Russian émigré poet who lived in Monterrey, I think a very fine poet, up there amongst the best of them. Well, both Karlinsky and Morson, and my wife, were products of the second wave of emigration, that is, right after the Second World War. I think, and I hadn’t foreseen this at all, I think Okudzhava felt a little out of place among these earlier emigres. But we had some drinks, we had some wine, and then, at the very end of dinner, over dessert and coffee, he said, “Я не могу выступать.” And we were just so taken aback, what are we going to do, you know, this is forty minutes before the concert was to begin, and we were responsible for delivering him to Wheeler Auditorium, to this huge mob of people who were waiting for him, and he said, “No, I can’t do it, I simply can’t do it.” And we tried to persuade him, and he was really quite insistent that no, he couldn’t do it. And I tried to figure out why he decided at that moment, an experienced performer, decided he couldn’t. And perhaps he, as I said, felt uncomfortable with these earlier emigres, who were products of the Second World War, and that automatically, as you probably understand, meant that they left the Soviet Union and were not the patriotic citizens of the state that was expected. And we finally persuaded him, let’s go, and we’ll see how things look once we get there. Well, once he got up on stage, and was introduced by Karlinsky and roundly applauded before he even began, and then he did his first few turns, and I mean the response was so gratifying, that I think he felt, this is proper, he started feeding off the energy of the audience, and it worked really well. But there were an anxious few moments when we who were responsible for him were not at all sure that he would make his appearance.

Question: Could you speak to Okudzhava’s larger importance as a cultural figure in Russia, both in the Soviet Union but also to this day?

RH: I don’t know a great deal about that, I didn’t follow contemporary Soviet Russian literature that closely, I was more interested in the earlier period, though I did meet those poets that we’ve mentioned, and a couple of the other bards…So I kind of knew who these people were but I didn’t study them, though I knew they were all part of that dissident movement of the sixties and seventies. And in that sense they were important people, in their own context. I’m not sure that they were so important on the larger scale.

Question: Are you speaking of the international scale?

RH: Yeah, I think they were very popular, but mostly because they had a built-in audience when they came to the West. And then the bards made records, and those were generally available, and people found them interesting – but of course you had to know Russian to get much out of them. Though some of Okudzhava’s prose was translated into English, and I think he had a certain readership, probably among Russian students.

…A lot of his texts, and a lot of the texts of the bards in general, they used a sort of Aesopian language about the conditions in Soviet Russia, and they were all real dissidents, important figures in that sense. Though Okudzhava was also, well, I won’t call him a literary bureaucrat, but he was a member of various editorial boards and things of that sort, of journals. But the journals in those days, of course, were really quite adventurous and often printing things that weren’t quite orthodox. And I think he was a part of that, of that whole moment.

Robert Hughes is a Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley