Bulat Okudzhava, Russian poet, bard, prose writer and screenwriter, graduated from school in 1941 on the eve of the Great Patriotic War. Like many of his peers, he immediately began asking to go to the front, and was soon assigned to a mortar division. In the hardest battles of 1942, Okudzhava was seriously wounded; for military merits he was awarded the medal “For the Defense of the Caucasus” and the Order of the Patriotic War, 1st degree. In his autobiographical stories, Bulat Okudzhava showed the tragic fate of the young men of the pre-war generation who, from school, came under mortal enemy fire. In these works, the war is shown exactly as yesterday’s schoolchildren saw it, whose ideas about it sometimes diverged far from reality.