Wives, mistresses, muses. Stormy personal life of Bulat Okudzhava
Bulat Okudzhava was married twice, but there were many more of those with whom he fell in love. And no matter how the poet's love stories ended, he continued to bow before His Majesty the Woman ...
school love
Nizhny Tagil, tense pre-war years. Bulat is in the fourth grade and is in love for the first time in his life - with classmate Lelya. She treats him calmly, not singling out other boys from the crowd, but Bulat does not leave courtship.
There were frequent power outages at school, and as soon as the light went out again, he rushed to Lelya's desk, sat down next to her and silently pressed his shoulder to it.
When the parents decided to transfer Bulat to another school, it was a real blow for him. Infinitely bored, he sent the girl his photo with the caption "Lele from Bulat." There was no answer, and then Bulat went to the old school to look at it with at least one eye.
“I’m telling a topic on history, and suddenly I see: a familiar face looms outside the window. Almost fainted. After the lessons, Bulat walked me home. He walked behind, carried my briefcase and, as always, was silent, ”recalled after many years the same Lelya - Olga Nikolaevna Meleshchenko.
Their next meeting took place only 60 years later, in the Nizhny Tagil literary club "By candlelight". The poet did not recognize his first love, but when Olga Nikolaevna was introduced to him, he was very moved. For three years, the woman received nine letters from him, which stopped coming only after the death of Okudzhava.
Unfulfilled love
Okudzhava volunteered for the war, but did not reach the 45th - he was discharged due to a severe wound. Bulat briefly came to Moscow to visit relatives (his father was shot back in 1937 on a false denunciation, and his mother was arrested as the wife of an enemy of the people). On the Moscow Arbat, Bulat met the girl Valya.
The school story repeated itself: she allowed to take care of herself, but things didn’t go any further - Valya gave preference to Comrade Bulat. But he fell in love so much that he began to write poetry:
your heart, like a window in an abandoned house, Locked up tight it's not close anymore... And followed youbecause I'm destined I'm destined for the world looking for you... He will not publish these lines anywhere - too personal. But Valya will keep them. And when Valentina Leontieva becomes famous throughout the country, they will often remember their author, the symbol of the generation of Bulat Okudzhava.
She would never have started looking for a meeting with him, if not for the request of the television editor, who wanted to invite Okudzhava on the air. Leontieva felt embarrassed, but nevertheless dialed the poet's number, and in order for him to recognize her, she quoted the same poem. Bulat could not even think that "Aunt Valya" from the TV was his post-war love. 50 years after their last meeting, he gave her a collection of his poems, terribly regretting the lost time: "How much could have been otherwise ..."
First wife
After Moscow was Tbilisi. Here Bulat Okudzhava entered the institute, received a diploma and began working in his specialty - a teacher. Together with him, his first wife, Galina Smolyaninova, also taught. They met as students, and Galya was able to give Bulat what he so desperately lacked - care, homeliness, warmth of his native hearth. Having lost his parents early, he missed his family and therefore hurried to create his own. It was Galina who inspired Bulat to try to set the poems to music - she had a wonderful voice and ear. The news that they would become parents delighted both, but the pregnancy ended in tragedy: the daughter died shortly after giving birth. The marriage cracked, although both Bulat and Galina made every effort to save him. The birth of Igor's son did not help either. Okudzhava was already a famous poet: he moved his family to Moscow, attended meetings of writers with Galina, but this was just a screen behind which two people who had moved away from each other did not dare to break completely. So far, at one of the friendly evenings, Okudzhava met Olga Artsimovich.
Second wife
She swears that that evening she had no idea who Bulat Okudzhava was. Fully devoted to science, the girl did not read poetry, did not listen to songs. But when I saw Okudzhava, I immediately realized that this was Genius.
“A wife has no right to speak of her husband in such terms. But then I really had no idea who he was, and therefore I rightly thought: this is a genius. And she has never changed this point of view since then, ”Artsimovich said. The next day he invited her to a meeting at the Central House of Writers. They talked for three hours without a break, feeling an incredible spiritual kinship - even though he was a lyricist, and she was a physicist. On the same evening, Okudzhava asked Olga to become his wife. He divorced Galina, she broke up with her husband. They began to live in Leningrad with Olga. Family happiness a year later was overshadowed by a real drama. Okudzhava's first wife, outwardly calmly accepting their divorce, died a year later from heart failure. Bulat tried to take their son Igor to him - but Galya's relatives did not allow it. And how would they fit in a tiny Leningrad room with two children (Olga had given birth to Bulat Jr. by that time)? The early departure of Galya (she was only 39) and the tragic fate of her son until the end of her life were the ongoing pain of Bulat Shalvovich. Igor grew up weak-willed and led, got into a bad company, began to use drugs. He died at the age of 43 - a few months before the death of his father.
last love
Their meeting happened by chance, but Natalya claims that she had a premonition of it from the moment she first heard Okudzhava's "Prayer". April 3, 1981, she is 26, he is 30 years older. But love covered both with a head. Okudzhava spoke at the Institute of Soviet Legislation, where Natasha Gorlenko worked. At a meeting with the poet's staff, the girls surrounded the poet, who shouted with each other: "You should have listened to how she sings!". She was embarrassed, he smiled. Having already left the institute, Okudzhava saw that Natasha was catching up with him, and offered to see him off. She refused - her husband was waiting for her. Five months later, the same tragedy occurred in the girl’s life that Okudzhava once experienced: her child died after childbirth. Trying to cope with the pain, she dialed his number and offered to meet. Thus began their secret romance. “We were constantly rushing somewhere, changing trains and cars. He especially revealed himself when we left Moscow. On the road, in the carriages, in the endless flickering of telegraph poles ... He even wrote a poem on this topic: “All lovers are prone to escape ...”, Natalya said. The owner of a beautiful voice, she soon began to accompany him at concerts, where she sometimes won more applause than Okudzhava himself. He was very proud of it. “Ptichkin,” the poet called his last love. He was tormented by a constant sense of guilt - both before Natasha and before Olga. Okudzhava did not dare to divorce his wife, instead they broke up with Natalya for seven whole years. She managed to get married, give birth to a son, then divorce. And all this time I felt everything that was happening with Bulat. When he was dying in Olga's arms in Paris, Gorlenko also had to call an ambulance. When she came to herself, she learned about the death of the poet.