Back in 1961, Kharkiv hosted the FIRST official evening of Bulat Okudzhava’s original songs in the Soviet Union.

He was able to organize this thanks to the help of his ardent admirer—the critic and journalist Lev Livshits, with whom Okudzhava was friends.
In 1982, the famous bard would dedicate the following lines to our city:

A Conversation with Kharkiv.

I love huge cities,
Whose buildings stretch all the way to the sky,
And in those buildings live romantics—
Their lives are of their own making.
They live, squinting in the sun,
Uttering ordinary words,
And they open up their streets,
Just as one might discover islands.

I act like a boy myself when I’m with them,
I become a dreamer myself.
Putting on a white shirt in June,
I hurry off to their festivities,

Where tires shuffle quietly,
Breathing in the true coolness of the night,
A mild, thick midnight strolls unhurriedly through Kharkiv,

Where, unfurling the sails of the parks and
rocking the shores with its waves,
the Sumskaya River flows, flows, flows—all the way from so far away.

Just think—what a sight!
The only one of its kind on Earth,
this entire city, slumbering at midnight,
seems to be speaking to me.

My sorrows and my pains,
Everything that ached, everything that burned,
Suddenly drowned in this city,
Suddenly subsided and faded away.

Oh, Kharkiv, Kharkiv, your streets—
They are bright and free of fire.
May your pedestrians—those clever ones—
Teach me wisdom.

And let it be that, having cast aside all absurdities,
You Yourself will speak within me…
Your midnight trolleybuses
Float and fade away in the silence.