ШКОЛЯРЫ БУЛАТА ОКУДЖАВЫ: «МАЛЕНЬКИЙ ЧЕЛОВЕК» В ПОИСКАХ БЛАГОРОДСТВА
SCHOOLBOYS OF BULAT OKUDZHAVA: “LITTLE MAN” IN SEARCH OF NOBILITY

Summary/Abstract: The relevance of the topic is determined by the request of modern literature studies to revise the Sovietaesthetic assessments and ideological interpretations of the works about war, as well as the relatively recent need fora thorough study of Bulat Okudzhava’s literary heritage. Okudzhava’s early short novel Be Well, Schoolboy (1961)and the co-authored screenplay Zhenya, Zhenechka and “Katyusha” (1968) are for the fi rst time compared as stagesof refl ection on a “little man” in a war situation. The working hypothesis of the study stems from L. Ya. Ginzburg’sideas about a new function of the “little man” in the twentieth-century art. Being a universal symbol of humanvulnerability, the “little man” is in charge of restoring the moral balance. Furthermore, the study develops V. A. Koshelev’sgeneralizations regarding the mythologization of the War of 1812 as the “last chivalric war”. This approachenables one to determine the originality of the problematics of Okudzhava’s works against the background of themost prominent examples of the so-called “lieutenant prose” and compare the main types of autopsychologicalcharacters searching for nobility. The substantially new element of the study is the analysis of the historical and literaryfantasies of Okudzhava’s “schoolboys” which express the author’s realistic view of the “honorable past” (theNapoleonic era).

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