Bulat Okudzhava, Russian poet, bard, novelist and screenwriter, graduated from high 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 the mortar division. In the heaviest battles of 1942, Okudzhava was seriously wounded; for his military services, he was awarded the medal "For the Defense of the Caucasus" and the Order of the Patriotic War, I degree. In his autobiographical novels, Bulat Okudzhava showed the tragic fate of the young men of the pre-war generation, who fell under the deadly fire of the enemy from school. In these works, the war is shown exactly as it was seen by yesterday's schoolchildren, whose ideas about it sometimes diverged far from reality.