Be Healthy, Schoolboy! A Novella

Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava (1924—1997) was a Soviet and Russian poet, prose writer, screenwriter, bard, and composer. The autobiographical novella "Be Healthy, Schoolboy!" (1961) is a work about the Great Patriotic War. The novella is written from the perspective of seventeen-year-old Bulat Okudzhava, who matured in just a few months. The author sincerely, simply, and touchingly recounts how, out of inexperience and foolishness, he mistook the sound of German bullets for the singing of birds, how he ate with a stick for a long time because he lost his spoon, and how he quickly learned to ignore the cold, hunger, and fatigue. And also about how he very much wanted to impress the only girl in the battalion, Nina. The characters in the novella "The Front Comes to Us" (1967) are still very young, but they already dream of getting to war as soon as possible and "taking out" at least one fascist a day. Friends Genka and Zhenka even try to sneak off to the front, hiding it from the adults. They truly understand what war is when the front comes to their quiet town.