Schoolboys of Bulat Okudzhava: “little man” in search of nobility

The relevance of the topic is determined by the request of modern literature studies to revise the Soviet aesthetic assessments and ideological interpretations of the works about war, as well as the relatively recent need for a 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 first time compared as stages of reflection on a “little man” in a war situation. The working hypothesis of the study stems from L. Ya. Ginzburg’s ideas about a new function of the “little man” in the twentieth-century art. Being a universal symbol of human vulnerability, the “little man” is in charge of restoring the moral balance. Furthermore, the study develops V. A. Koshelev’s generalizations regarding the mythologization of the War of 1812 as the “last chivalric war”. This approach enables one to determine the originality of the problematics of Okudzhava’s works against the background of the most prominent examples of the so-called “lieutenant prose” and compare the main types of autopsychological characters searching for nobility. The substantially new element of the study is the analysis of the historical and literary fantasies of Okudzhava’s “schoolboys” which express the author’s realistic view of the “honorable past” (the Napoleonic era).