Be Healthy, Schoolboy! A Story

Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava (1924—1997) was a Soviet and Russian poet, prose writer, screenwriter, bard, and composer. The autobiographical story "Be Healthy, Schoolboy!" (1961) is a work about the Great Patriotic War. The story is written from the perspective of seventeen-year-old Bulat Okudzhava, a boy who grew up in just a few months. The author sincerely, simply, and touchingly narrates how, out of naivety and foolishness, he mistook the whistling of German bullets for the singing of birds, how he ate with a splinter for a long time because he lost his spoon, and how quickly he learned to ignore the cold, hunger, and fatigue. He also talks about how much he wanted to please the only girl in the unit, Nina. The heroes of the story "The Front Comes to Us" (1967) are still very young, but they dream of going to war as soon as possible and "hitting" at least one fascist a day. Friends Henka and Zhenka even try to escape to the front secretly from the adults. They truly understand what war is when the front itself comes to their quiet town.