“Thoughtfully and Meekly”. Behind the Line of Okudzhava’s Song “The Visiting Musician”

The article is a commentary on the phrase “Thoughtfully and meekly” from B. Okudzhava’s song “A visiting musician” (1971). It is suggested that the possible sources of the line are Alexander Kushner’s poem “To the Zoological Museum...” (1962), unpublished to this day and distributed in typewritten copies in the 1960s, and Vasily Kazantsev’s poem “We drank with him at the machine...” (first publication — 1964) The first of them could have attracted Okudzhava with its potential songfulness (a fragment of it was actually performed in song in the film “Two Sundays”, 1963) and the absence of Soviet optimism, alien to both poets; the second is the image of a poet appearing in urban everyday life, a combination of high and low. Okudzhava was close friends with Kushner; Okudzhava and Kazantsev participated in the celebration of Poetry Day in Novosibirsk in 1964. Along the way, the literary fate of this line is briefly traced: it is also found in other authors, some of which turned to it already under the influence of Okudzhava (Vladimir Kovenatsky, Veronika Dolina, etc.). Author of the article published (for the first time) as an appendix, A. Kushner’s poem “Memory” (1984), dedicated to Okudzhava.