Guitar Poetry as Literary Genre

IT WAS ASSERTED IN THE introduction to this book that there is no hard and fast distinction between guitar poetry and “normal” Russian literary poetry. This statement is as true in the realm of style as in any other. Guitar poetry has no single specific style of its own. The songs of Galich, for example, have more in common with his own poetry for reading, and those of Okudzhava with his, than the songs of either have in common with each other. And the style of Okudzhava’s songs has more in common with that of some published Soviet songs than it does with the unofficial poetry of Joseph Brodsky. There are important similarities between the style of some guitar songs, especially those of Galich and Vysotsky, and that of some dissident literature in other genres—especially the satirical prose of Erofeev, Terz, and Voinovich. This similarity is in part a natural reflection of their shared function as a deliberate antithesis of the characteristic styles of official literature. In style, as in all other respects, guitar poetry is a part of contemporary Russian literature, and it has common characteristics with different areas of that literature according to function.

But guitar poetry as a genre does exhibit some characteristic stylistic tendencies. The most salient among them reflect the universal tendencies of sung texts.¹ The use of repetition and refrain is prominent. These devices are used with far greater frequency in sung texts than in poetry meant to be read on the page. The reasons are not far to seek. The words of songs are intended for aural perception; the listener has no control over the order and manner in which the material is presented. The author therefore tends to use additional emphasis, in the form of repetition, for his main points. He may also consider providing a refrain, which may serve to mark the structure of the text in an aurally perceptible way, fulfilling the same function as white space on the page between the stanzas of a poem for reading. It may also provide a resting period to allow the listener a break in concentration, a moment of relaxation. These elementary functions of repetition and refrain operate just as strongly, it seems, when the song is composed in the sure knowledge that it will be recorded, providing the listener with the possibility of going back and controlling the presentation of the material.

Of course, the music may and probably will differentiate refrains and repetitions. But the resulting variety within unity is lost when the text is set down on the page and lacks its musical accompaniment. That is perhaps the most severe shortcoming that song texts incur when they are divorced from their music. They may well come to seem unnecessarily repetitive, annoyingly insistent, unsubtle. In this respect, guitar poetry shares a common fate with all sung verse.

The use of repetition and refrain increases the general level of phonetic patterning in the text. This enriched patterning may be further heightened by the use of standard phonetic devices of poetry such as assonance and alliteration. But there are considerable differences between the styles of the individual guitar poets in this respect. Okudzhava is generally sparing in his use of phonetic enrichment, aiming at a mellifluous sound texture based on the careful organization of vowels and the avoidance of large clusters of consonants. Galich is the most studied and inventive of the great guitar poets in this regard, pulling off virtuoso feats of echo and pun. Vysotsky’s style, as in several other respects, is at the opposite extreme from Okudzhava’s; he is often excessive and slapdash, indulging in strings of rhymes for their own sake. But these excesses are rescued in performance by the author’s own mocking recognition of his outrageousness.

Nothing can make up for the loss of the author’s own performance when guitar poetry is divorced from his voice and set down on the page. The author’s performance is an essential part of the song’s semantics. A small number of guitar songs, as with songs of other kinds, have left their authors behind and assumed an anonymous existence as folklore. They exist in the memories and performance of thousands of people. Sung by someone other than the author, they are still capable of making a profound impression in the right circumstances. But that impression is never as strong as it is when the author’s own guitaraccompanied voice comes directly from his lips or through the speaker of a tape recorder. Here we have a fundamental difference between guitar poetry and what Mark Booth calls “song poetry”:

What the modern reader most wants to find in poetry is the poet’s personal encounter with reality, fixed with subtle rightness in a unique construction of language. It should be clear that songs almost never answer to this expectation.²

But Russian guitar poems do answer to this expectation, most adequately when they are experienced in the poet’s own performance. In this respect, they lean toward the condition of poetry rather than the condition of song.

However, it would be absurd to suggest that the absence of the author’s voice destroys the artistic effect of a guitar song. The best examples of the genre still stand up to examination and analysis on the page, just as much as any other kind of song does.

The versification of Russian guitar poetry has the same elaborate, highly regulated feel for the anglophone reader as Russian poetry does in general. And it is true that guitar poetry does employ syllabotonic lines, rhyme, and invariant stanza forms, just like most Russian poetry. But the versification of guitar poetry has some distinguishing features apart from the use of refrain and repetition that was mentioned earlier.³ As a whole, guitar poetry tends to use polymetric structures more than poetry for reading, that is, the use of more than one metrical design in the course of the text. And there is a more even distribution between the four major groups of meters (iambic, trochaic, ternary, and nonclassical) than is the case with poetry for reading; in particular, the iambic tetrameter and pentameter, and the three-ictus dol’nik, which are very prominent in Russian poetry, are much less frequently used in guitar poetry.

Within these general properties of guitar poetry, each of the three great guitar poets has molded himself a distinctive selection from the repertoire of Russian metrical resources. Okudzhava is the most conservative. He has a repertoire that is certainly wide and varied but not all that sharply distinct from the repertoire used by modern Russian poets in general. However, one feature of his versification sets it off quite sharply from that of Vysotsky and especially Galich: Okudzhava, like most poets writing for reading, tends to use a single metrical design throughout the whole length of a song. This simplicity is compensated for by the relative complexity of Okudzhava’s melodies compared with those of Vysotsky and Galich. The latter favor polymetrical structures and less adventurous melodies. In Vysotsky’s work, it is common for two contrasting metrical designs to appear in alternation, one often being a refrain. In Galich’s work, however, structures of considerable complexity appear, sometimes consisting of three and even four contrasting metrical designs. Combined with the changing melodies that accompany the changing metrical designs, the effect is one of great richness and variety, an effect that is completely lost in translation.

The origins of the versification of Russian guitar poetry can only be guessed at in the present state of knowledge. One thing that is certain, though, is that it derives directly neither from the Russian folk tradition nor from the tradition of high literary poetry. It is certainly possible to find in the work of the guitar poets some isolated examples of meters that are based on folklore. The use of folk-based meters, though, is relatively rare in guitar poetry as a whole. It is probable, although it remains to be demonstrated in detail, that the characteristic forms of Russian guitar poetry derive, as do a great number of the metrically innovative forms in Russian poetry, from foreign sources. Prominent among them would be the translations into Russian of such balladinclined poets as Béranger and Kipling.

Low and High Styles

Stylistic range is one respect in which unofficial Russian literature is most clearly differentiated from official literature. Generally speaking, techniques that have become commonplace in modern anglophone literature have been regarded as unacceptable by the controllers of publication in the Russian language, both inside and outside the country. Noticeable absentees from modern Russian literature have been the absurd and the erotic, the twin literary spearheads of subversive anarchy. The Russian literary prints have always been concerned with various kinds of high seriousness and the promotion of whatever particular point of view their ideological masters have demanded from them.

Published Russian literature exhibits constraints at both stylistic extremes, high and low. At the low end of the scale, a very large area of normal spoken Russian is considered unprintable, both in the USSR and outside it.⁴ The attitudes that keep this language out of print are probably shared rather than imposed, because it is a fact that when Russian writers are working “for the drawer” or outside the limitations imposed by Soviet standards of propriety, they do not as a rule take advantage of their freedom to use “unprintable” words. These archaic standards of propriety have meant that it is still relatively easy for a writer to shock by using language that is normally considered unprintable. And a number of underground and émigré dissident writers, most prominently Eduard Limonov, Yuz Aleshkovsky, and Venedikt Erofeev, have exploited the possibilities of breaking the convention. The scandal caused by Limonov’s novel It’s Me, Eddie! (Eto ya, Edichka!) showed how intense were the passions that could still be aroused by foul language and explicit description—even among the Russian émigré community, surrounded as it is by the unrestrained pornography of Western societies.

The guitar poets have gone nowhere near the lengths Limonov went to in this book. They have evidently considered, along with the vast majority of dissident writers, that there is simply so much to be said plainly that cannot be said in official literature that an expansion of stylistic limits is unnecessary. Certainly, there is no guitar poet who has attacked official canons primarily in terms of style rather than content.

However, that is not by any means to say that the guitar poets have been indifferent to the effect of official stylistic restraints. The opposite is the case. They have felt in general that the language of official literature has become so stereotyped as to be literally meaningless, and that it is part of their task to find fresh means of expression. What they have done in this connection is to concentrate more than anything else on the colloquial end of the stylistic spectrum, attempting to capture the flavor of informal spoken Russian, but without dipping to any great extent into the subliterary range.

The point may be graphically illustrated by reference to one of the classic magnitizdat tapes made by Galich around 1969. The audience, to judge from the background noises on the tape, is quite small, a dozen people at most. They are in someone’s flat, and the atmosphere is convivial. There are sounds of drinks being poured. At one point a car goes past and almost brings the proceedings to a halt. Galich sings his most classic dissident songs, with no holds barred as regards content. They include “Guignol Farce” (“Fars-gin’ol”) and “The Ballad of Surplus Value” (“Bailada o pribavochnoi stoimosti”). When he introduces the former song, Galich says: “. . . there’s this song . . . please excuse me for the first word . . . it’s called ‘Guignol Farce’.” The first line of the song goes: “Vse zasrantsy, vse nakhlebniki, . . .” The word that Galich apologizes for is in fact the first noun in the line, zasrantsy, a noun formed from the unprintable verb srat’, “to shit.” The singular form, zasranets, is equivalent to one of the many parallel English derivatives such as “shithead.” The Russian word is not permissible in polite mixed company, and it is certainly not printable. But it is by no stretch of the imagination obscene, or even seriously objectionable. The fact that Galich feels the need to apologize for the word in a private gathering shows the power of the norms that operate in Russian speech etiquette, especially for someone of Galich’s generation. It shows that these norms are still very strong even for someone who has cast off the official restraints and is writing without taking account of the control system.

On the same tape, Galich sings “The Ballad of Surplus Value.” The song includes the line “Posylayu nachal’stvo ya v zadnitsu.” Galich pronounces the last of these words in a primly distorted way. But there is an audible intake of breath from several people in the small audience. The word zadnitsa means, according to the Oxford Russian-English Dictionary, “arse, buttocks,” and it is marked as stylistically vulgar. The line means literally “I send the bosses into (my) ass,” i.e., tell them where they can get off. It is an innocuous enough everyday phrase; but it is quite unprintable in Russian. And again, the tape makes plain the author’s own embarrassment and his audience’s surprise.

Further examples of this kind of sailing close to the wind could be quoted from Galich’s work. But there are not many of them. And there are absolutely no cases of outright obscenity.

The same is true of Vysotsky’s songs. Among them, and especially in the criminal songs, it is possible to find some striking curses, perhaps the most expressive of them being “Ya zh te nogi oblomayu, v Boga dushu mat’!” (PRB, III, 28)—“I’ll smash your legs, into God soul mother!” The first phrase here is a standard Russian threat, and printable. The second is a fairly common colloquial phrase whose elements are printable individually and in this combination, but which also occur in unprintable phrases. The effect is to suggest violent blasphemous obscenity without actually articulating an authentic unprintable phrase. The use of euphemism is normal in Vysotsky’s low-life songs, and characteristic of the linguistic procedures of dissident Russian literature. In his performance of these songs, Vysotsky sometimes interjects words that verge on the unprintable. The most common one is blya, an abbreviation of blyad’, “whore,” one of the most frequently used curses in Russian. On a slightly higher stylistic level, but still extremely dubious from the point of view of printability, come lines like Vysotsky’s “No kto-to tam odnazhdy skurvilsya, ssuchilsya” (PRB, III, 28). The two words at the end of this line are verbs formed from nouns, respectively kurva, “whore,” and suka, “bitch,” the former always unprintable, the latter unprintable when used as a curse. The phrase actually means “Then someone went and turned informer.” But it is the following line of the song which is a greater infringement of linguistic propriety. It uses not obscenities but thieves’ cant: “Shepnul, navel,—i ya sgorel.” It means literally “(He) whispered, directed, and I burned up,” which means to say that the person concerned informed, put the police on the right track, and the speaker was arrested. This kind of undecorous language, with its unacceptable implication that there is a criminal class in the USSR, is as thoroughly frowned on by official opinion as is actual obscenity.

This type of language is used most consistently in Vysotsky’s criminal songs, where it contributes to stylization and relates to tradition. Of the three great guitar poets, it is Galich whose language is at the same time the most “realistic” and the most unremittingly colloquial. This fact has been recognized by all Russians who have commented on his work. For example, Nataliya Rubenshtein cites the following stanza, which comes from Galich’s “Ballad about the General’s Daughter” (“Ballada pro general’skuyu doch’ ”):

On suchek iz gulevykh shoferov,

On baryga, i kalymshchik, i zhmot,

On na torgovoi daet,—bud’ zdorov,

Gde za rup’, a gde kakuyu prizhmet.⁵

Nataliya Rubenshtein cites this particular stanza to make the point that it is completely untranslatable, and would need pages of commentary to explain the sociological reality behind it. But by no means all Russian native speakers would understand it at first hearing. The reason is that every single element in it belongs to subliterary contemporary Russian slang. It combines ellipsis (the second couplet) and cant vocabulary (the second line) in a baffling way. The words are used as much to give an impression of spoken language as for their literal meaning; and their effect is to make a very sharp break with public linguistic etiquette.

It is characteristic of Galich’s work that the quatrain about the taxi driver is direct speech, used by one of the characters in the song from which it comes. The use of polyphony, a multiplicity of voices, is one special characteristic of Galich’s work. It reaches an extreme in one of his greatest songs, “Composition No. 27, or Trolleybus Abstraction” (“Kompozitsiya No. 27, ili trolleibusnaya abstraktsiya”). The stanzas of this song consist of three parts: four lines of direct speech, purportedly overheard in a packed Moscow trolleybus; four lines of blasé comment from the author; and finally a couplet that cites a Soviet advertising slogan:

“He didn’t get there fair and square, he crept,”

“He got them a vacuum and a carpet from TsUM,”

“And she said to him, ‘You swine, you swine!’ ”

“They were doing annual stocktaking just then.”

Outside, rain and then snow,

Rain then snow, tears then laughter.

One man’s slaughter is another’s execution,

Some fall in love, others are disgraced.

“Use the services of Aeroflot!

Save time!” and tra-la-la!

This passage mixes linguistic registers in a way that is kept out of official literature because it is not edifying. It falls below the standards of public linguistic etiquette (or, as Galich would have maintained, it is not dead enough to be printed in the USSR). And, of course, it lacks the “ideological awareness” demanded of official literature. In English it seems rather banal, but in its own linguistic context it is, while grotesque, startlingly fresh and realistic. Galich in particular (and guitar poetry in general) in this respect was trying to substantiate the stylistic breakthrough that was attempted in the post-Stalin period, an attempt at innovation that inevitably ran into the sand in official literature.

Still, the fact remains that Galich, Vysotsky in his criminal songs, and to a large extent Kim in his satires almost always do remain within the bounds of publicly sanctioned linguistic propriety. Departures from it remain rare. In the case of Okudzhava, there is absolutely nothing in his songs that would in principle be unprintable in the USSR. What makes his language distinctive is, as was suggested in an earlier chapter, the fact that he completely avoids the clichés of officially sanctioned literature.

The other stylistic extreme, the high end of the register and the textual “difficulty” associated with it, has also been censored out of Soviet literature. It is not compatible with the didactic aims of Socialist Realism. Like the low end of the stylistic spectrum, however, highstyle difficulty is not found to any great extent in unofficial literature either, and therefore it must be considered to be a shared assumption on the part of both official and dissident authors. Unofficial literature, too, is written to be understood by the widest possible public, and it therefore does its best to be comprehensible, to make an immediate impact, and not to be limited in its audience to those who have the education and leisure to spend time on study. This point was made with maximal force by Aleksandr Galich in one of the interviews he gave soon after he was forced to leave the USSR. He described poetry as “a cry for help,” and argued that it would be pointless for anyone to cry for help in incomprehensible language.⁶ In guitar poetry, as in dissident literature in general, the message, the “what,” is primary.

Guitar Poetry and Light Verse

Russian guitar poetry, then, tends to use elaborate versification and colloquial vocabulary. Its texts are seldom difficult or obscure. And also, guitar songs, especially those of Vysotsky and Galich, tend to tell stories. For the anglophone student of poetry—and indeed, for some Russians—these characteristics consign guitar poetry to the category of “light verse,” something distinct from, and inferior to, serious literary poetry. Indeed, the three categories proposed in W. H. Auden’s definition of light verse would neatly take in all the work of the Russian guitar poets:

(1) Poetry written for performance, to be spoken or sung before an audience. . . .

(2) Poetry intended to be read, but having for its subject-matter the everyday social life of its period or the experiences of the poet as an ordinary human being. . . .

(3) Such nonsense poetry as, through its properties and technique, has a general appeal. . .⁷

In a discussion of light verse that takes Auden’s as a point of departure, Kingsley Amis disagrees with much that Auden had said in this preface. But he adds one notion that encapsulates the reason why much Russian poetry in general, and especially guitar poetry, sounds like light verse to the anglophone audience: “Light verse makes stringent demands on the author’s technique. It prefers forms incompatible with decent seriousness: jogging rhythms, elaborate rhymes. . .”⁸ Auden maintained that “light verse can be serious,” but that this seriousness had been beyond the reach of English poets since the Romantic Revival. Since that time, he asserted, “it has only been in trivial matters that poets have felt in sufficient intimacy with their audience to be able to forget themselves and their singing robes.”⁹ Amis, while not entirely accepting this assertion, did agree that light verse could exist only by reference to a serious tradition running side by side with it, since light verse is “altogether literary, artificial, and impure.”¹⁰

These observations, by two eminent English poets, admirably point up a cardinal difference between the Russian and English poetic traditions. The fact is that for a Russian, a poem needs to be “light” in the Auden sense, and also to meet Amis’s “stringent technical demands” in order to qualify as a serious poem and avoid being light in the sense of trivial. There is in Russian no significant tradition of “light” poetry which exists by reference to a more serious tradition; in the minds of Russians, a poem is either serious or not a poem.¹¹ But the fundamental reason for this situation is connected, in a grotesquely paradoxical way, with Auden’s definition of the social conditions necessary for the existence of a poetic tradition with no split between “light” and “serious”: “Poetry which is at the same time light and adult can only be written in a society which is both integrated and free.”¹² When he wrote this statement in the late 1930s, Auden undoubtedly had in mind some form of Communist society of the future. The situation of Russian literature in the Soviet period, though, suggests that the conditions Auden hoped for can also come about in a society that is integrated by servitude. Official Soviet opinion would accept Auden’s contention without reservation, and claim that the literature of Socialist Realism exemplifies the result—a literature that is accessible and serious at the same time. But events have shown that it is in fact the dissident stream in modern Russian literature that exemplifies this condition. It speaks to an unfree people about the problems their enforced integration has brought upon them.

There is another barrier that distorts the perception of Russian guitar poetry by non-Russians: while the connections between poetry and song have been intimate and enduring through European literary history, during the twentieth century the gap between them has tended to widen. In most countries it has widened to the point of their becoming completely separate. Melody is now thought either to detract from the artistic purity of the text or to distract the audience from its message. Even more, there has been a widening gap and eventual severance between poet and singer, who in ancient cultures were not distinguished from each other. The poet has become more and more the remote artist who communicates with his audience through the medium of the printed word studied in isolation by a silent reader. The success or failure of the communication might not necessarily worry the poet very much at all. And the singer has moved further and further away from the author of his words and also, with the exception of opera, away from what is accepted as art and is instead relegated to the status of entertainment. Rock music, in which the author and singer are usually the same person, does not command serious attention as literature.

In Russia, however, the oral element in literary culture, including singing, has not been subjected to quite the same devaluation and specialization. It is a commonplace that in the tradition of modern Russian poetry, the most authentic mode in which the text can be communicated and perceived is felt to be the poet’s own voice, speaking aloud to an audience that is physically present. And the prevalent Russian fashion in the declamation of poetry borders closely upon song. It employs a range of pitch and an emotional intensity that strike anglophones as melodramatic to the point of comicality. From this kind of declamation it is only a short step to the deliberately unmelodic singing style of the guitar poet.

The idea of Philip Larkin or Robert Lowell’s singing their poems to their own guitar accompaniment is ludicrous. Conversely, most literate anglophones would consider that because Bob Dylan, say, sings his words to a guitar, he cannot be a serious poet. But for a Russian poet, to sing is not absurd or demeaning at all. If anything, it represents a legitimate recapturing of a device that properly belongs within the resources of his art. The Russian poet who chooses this unsophisticated medium to ensure that his unsophisticated message gets across effectively may seem naive or dull to the foreign audience, which looks at him from the dazzling context of the contemporary Western media, through which all styles of all ages are available simultaneously. But for his countrymen, he is a serious poet, and his message matters.