“Private” person in Bulat Okudzhava's novel the journey of amateurs

The article suggests that in the prose legacy of Bulat Okudzhava, in particular in his novel The Journey of Amateurs, the projection of the past on the modern reality the author lives in has a conceptual meaning. Time forms the basis of Okudzhava’s poetics, permeates the entire fabric of his historical works, and creates a kind of consonance of remote epochs. For Okudzhava, the period when he wrote historical novels was associated with reviewing the internal laws a certain part of the Soviet intelligentsia lived up to, as well as with a significant reevaluation of previous ideas about freedom and the human. The writer always strives to enter into a dialogue with the reader, to share thoughts about the right to choose, about responsibility, about powerlessness in the face of history. At the same time, the author, being a poet and thus having a lyrical worldview, gives a subjective emotional assessment of the historical events, showing them through the prism of the perception of a “private” person. A “dilettante” or an “amateur” in Okudzhava’s artistic consciousness is synonymous with the word “intellectual”, and all his works can be considered as a reflection on the fate of an intellectual in an alien and even hostile world. Heroes who are in conflict with society have the right to their “breath of freedom” - an act, a state of mind, the acquisition of individual and personal existential place in history.