THE RANGE OF SONGS lying at the opposite end of the spectrum from the official mass song, and separated from it by the nebulously fringed middle ground that has just been discussed, forms part of underground Russian culture. It is made up of songs that in principle are not carried by the media and are not permitted a public hearing—in the unlikely event that anyone in his right mind would actually present them for publication or broadcast and try to get them through the control system. We shall see that there actually are some ways of doing that, and circumstances under which it is allowed to happen. But the essential condition is that the song should not be presented in its own right, as it were, but as coloring or as an appendage, or as a negative example, in some other undertaking. Underground song is part of that elusive and constantly evolving entity, modern urban folklore, and in the USSR it exists mainly within and for the use of the metropolitan literary and cultural intelligentsia. It has several separable constituents, some of them surprising at first sight.

To begin with, we should consider an aspect of Soviet official culture that by its very nature is not open to precise definition or even examination, because it exists inside the private consciousness of people who are as a rule extremely sensitive to the political implications of their observed conduct. We are all familiar with the notion of “doublethink.” It does not really baffle us any longer that a Soviet citizen—perhaps even one who is doing a term in a labor camp—can stand and sing Lebedev-Kumach’s “Song of the Motherland,” including the couplet

I know of no other land

Where a man can breathe so freely

without irony. He almost certainly does not know any other land anyway. But it would not occur to him that he is bending his conscience to sing these words, any more than only the most fanatical of British republican atheists would refuse to sing “God Save the Queen” if the occasion demanded. The words are functionally sanctioned as the appropriate social behavior in a particular context. Life is too short, and most human beings are sufficiently able compromisers by nature not to need to ask ultimate questions about sincerity before committing every single one of their social acts. But it is difficult for anyone who is not a Soviet citizen to grasp the comprehensiveness and sheer all-pervading presence of the official ideology in the USSR. It is commonly observed that Russians now have as second nature the ability simply not to notice such things as the slogans on red bunting that are draped across their streets, reared on scaffoldings on all their highest buildings, repeated over and over again by all the media, and drummed into them by the education system: “Glory to the CPSU!” “Party and People Are One!!!” “Peace to the World!” and so on. The saturation is such that a person would need to confine himself entirely to the private environment of his own apartment (if he is lucky enough to be so selfcontained and self-sufficient) and keep all the media firmly switched off and excluded, if he wanted to insulate his mind from these things. But for thinking people, slogans, and the whole vast ocean of “agitation and propaganda” of which they are the surface expression, actually contain the seeds of their own destruction. Only the slightest whiff of irony, only the most elementary confrontation between the slogan and reality, is needed for the entire system to begin to negate itself. First among their strategies for self-preservation, passive resistance, and even reprisal, the Russian people have recourse to political humor. The first line of the universally known official march of the Soviet air force (by P. German and Yu. Khaik, 1928) goes: “My rozhdeny, chtob skazku sdelat’ byl’yu” (“We were bom to turn fairytale into reality”). By making a couple of tiny adjustments to the skazku, “fairytale,” the Russian intelligentsia both subverts the official myth of Communism’s “radiant future” and asserts its familiarity with ideologically alien culture: “My rozhdeny, chtob Kafku sdelat’ byl’yu” (“We were bom to turn Kafka into reality”).

Official culture, of course, is not static. There is constant movement into and out of the category of officially acceptable song, as with all other categories of official art. And what moves out is not forgotten. Nothing in Soviet life is potentially so subversive as the official culture of the past, especially the “un-past” that has been decreed unmentionable. A vast hymnology, iconography, and hagiography of Stalin was accumulated during the years now dubbed with characteristic mendacious evasiveness “the years of the cult of personality” (the phrase itself, with its pointed exclusion of Stalin’s actual name, provides a very good illustration of the technique of unpersoning.) This huge stockpile of artifacts has been consigned to oblivion. A few items from it, as we saw in the case of Lebedev-Kumach’s “Song of the Motherland,” have been purged of the offending name and recycled. The Soviet national anthem was popularly referred to for many years as “The Song without Words,” for although the tune of the original Stalinist anthem was retained, the words could not be publicly performed because of their laudatory references to the leader. A whole generation of Russian schoolchildren grew up singing “Russian and Chinaman Are Brothers Forever.” Every Soviet citizen over the age of forty has in his mind a huge detritus of what is now quite scandalously subversive information acquired on his way through the education system in Stalin’s time. He copes with his memory by means of doublethink, neglect, humor, or dismissive derogation. But the old official songs form a significant element in the undergrowth of song. And, as we will see, they can be evoked and exploited by skillful authors.

Although the state has continually sought to bring song under its control and keep it there as a means of propagandizing its own values, it has never been successful in taking over the whole of the spectrum—notwithstanding its economic monopoly of the media, its system of prescription and proscription, its hold on the education system, and its intrusion into leisure activities. Just as in other spheres of human activity, but perhaps even more successfully and intensively, the private, unofficial element has managed to persist and to renew itself. It will not be possible to give anything like a complete account of this process until recent émigrés consider the subject worthwhile, or until it becomes feasible for Soviet citizens to be more forthcoming. But it is possible to point with a fair amount of confidence to certain important elements in the undergrowth of song.

The Gypsy Song

One important type of unofficial song that has continued to exist despite occasional condemnation is the gypsy song or gypsy romance. The concept is used very vaguely in Russian to refer to songs that may have no overt reference to actual gypsies in their subject matter. They are performed most characteristically by a solo singer to his own guitar accompaniment, with many liberties permitted with regard to both variation on the melody and departures from consistent tempo. The gypsy song or romance usually deals with illicit, unbridled passion and has an element of debauchery in its setting.

The gypsy choir and gypsy singers are continuously attested in Russia from the last third of the eighteenth century. They helped to popularize the seven-stringed guitar, which has become standard in Russia.¹ The gypsy choir as an element of high-society entertainment reached its peak in Russia in the 1830s, the most famous one directed by Ilya Sokolov, who died in 1848. Gypsies captured the imaginations of Russian poets at least as far back as Derzhavin (1743–1816), and they were used as an image around which the poet could weave a picture of a life untrammeled by the restraints of urban society. Several major nineteenth-century Russian poets, such as Apollon Grigor’ev (1822–1864) and Aleksei Apukhtin (1840–1893), wrote lyrics drawing on gypsy life and its supposed passions. The cult of the gypsy reached its height with the popularity of Bizet’s Carmen (1875), which took Russia by storm soon after the turn of the century. However, by this time

. . . the repertoire of the gypsy choirs and their style of performance had turned into what is referred to as “that gypsy stuff” (tsyganshchina)—songs of decadent content and low artistic quality. The “gypsy romance,” which had first been close to Russian sung romances, by this time had lost all its artistic value. It became widespread in petty bourgeois circles, where it was usually performed as a solo song with guitar accompaniment.²

The gypsy song thus became a kind of emblem of bourgeois decadence, and it was the target of particularly hostile criticism when Soviet popular music was brought under Party control in the 1930s.³ The gypsies themselves were brought within the Party-state system of entertainment with the organization in 1931 of Romany (Romen), the State Gypsy Theater, which exists in Moscow to this day. Along with the circus, the gypsy theater is commonly regarded by the intelligentsia as one of the very few institutions that the Soviet state has not managed to deaden.

The most famous example of a Russian gypsy song—recorded countless times, commonly regarded by non-Russians as the epitome of Russian song in general, and a staple of the cabaret and amateur repertoire since well before 1900—is “Two Guitars” (“Dve gitary”). The words are as banal in the original as the translation suggests:

Two guitars in another room

Begin their plaintive moaning,

A refrain I’ve known since childhood,

My darling, can it be you?

The song’s refrain is the Russian equivalent of “tra-la-la,” literally: “Ah, once, and once again! Many, many more times!” (Ekh, raz, eshche raz,/Eshche mnogo, mnogo raz!):

It is you, I recognize

Your modulation into D minor,

And that melody of yours,

Its frequent repetition.

Ekh, raz . . .

How could I not recognize you?

Upon you lies the mark

Of passionate merrymaking

And stormy hangovers.

Ekh, raz . . .

It is you, you devilish rake,

By the punchbowl,

And your melody

To that Hungarian strain.

Ekh, raz . . .

Ah, it aches, oh, how it aches—

My head from too much drinking . . .

We’ve been drinking, and we’ll go on drinking

The whole week through!

Ekh, raz . . .

This translation has been made from a text of the song as first published in Moscow before the Revolution; the exact year is unknown.⁴ The song and all its numerous variants actually go back to a lyric poem by Apollon Grigor’ev, first published in 1857. The first stanza of the original poem, which is still often sung, goes:

Oh! Won’t you have a talk with me,

My seven-stringed friend!

My soul is full of such longing,

And the night is so moonlit!⁵

The content, the actual words, of this song are of very little significance in themselves. They vaguely sketch a lifestyle of bohemian debauchery. The permanent appeal of the song derives from its combination of sentimental words and plaintive melody, the most common catchall minor tune that has been used again and again. It is also an excuse for the open display of emotion; but self-parody is never far away when the song is performed.

The gypsy element in guitar poetry as it emerged in the 1960s rarely becomes explicit; it exists rather as a submerged component in the musical style. One characteristic manifestation of it is Galich’s title “Bol’nichnaya tsyganochka,” which does not mean “The Gypsy of the Hospital,” as would seem to be the case. The word tsyganochka is an affectionate diminutive meaning “gypsy (song),” and the title means something like “A Song in Gypsy Style about a Hospital.” Of the major guitar poets, it is Vysotsky who most overtly used the gypsy style. He sometimes performed the classic gypsy songs; his version of “Dark Eyes” (“Ochi chernye”) is the epitome of the modern Russian intellectual’s idea of unbridled, passionate gypsy emotion.

It is in the gypsy song and the gypsy style of performance that guitaraccompanied solo song has its strongest root in Russia. By the early twentieth century the seven-stringed guitar had become a Russian folk instrument.⁶ Even Lenin is said to have played the guitar during his exile in Shushenskoe (1897–1900), in addition to playing chess and shooting game. Two graphic testimonies to the prevalence of amateur guitar-accompanied song may be found among the most beloved Russian dramas of the twentieth century. Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is punctuated by snatches of song and strumming on the guitar from the decayed gentleman Telegin, nicknamed “Waffles.” And at one stage in the proceedings, when they are far gone in drink, both Dr. Astrov and Vanya himself show that they can take up the guitar and sing at least a fragment of a sentimental romance. Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Days of the Turbins (1926) was mentioned earlier because of the use in it of the tsarist national anthem. As the play opens, Nikolai Turbin, the eighteen-year-old youngest son of the family, is singing improvised words to his own guitar accompaniment. He sings snatches of song throughout the play; the final example occurs just before the end and provides a touching musical frame to the play’s action. Both Uncle Vanya and The Days of the Turbins have been staples of the Moscow Arts Theater’s repertoire for many years.

The popularity of the seven-stringed guitar and the gypsy style of playing to accompany song is in large part due to the ease with which the technique is acquired. The seven-stringed Russian guitar is tuned D-G-B-d-g-b-d; its open strings produce a G major chord, and the related D and C chords can be produced with very little dexterity, which is why the seven-stringed guitar is the most widespread accompanying instrument in Russia. It also helps to create the “amateur” aura that guitar-accompanied song has; even when the strumming is being done with consummate skill, the result still sounds easy to attain and unprofessional.

The Cruel Romance

The second important kind of song that is found in the undergrowth of modern Russian culture is the “cruel romance,” to translate the Russian term literally (zhestokii romans). The cruel romance is a ballad-type song, usually with a strong narrative element telling a melodramatic story of unrequited love or infidelity. Quite often revenge leads to a violent outcome. The style is one of open sentimentality, and the text frequently concludes with a direct appeal for sympathy from the audience. However, self-parody and irony are never far away. The manner of the cruel romance is very familiar to English speakers from such songs as “She Was Poor but She Was Honest,” with its bleedingheart last verse sung by the song’s heroine-victim herself:

“It’s the same the whole world over,

It’s the poor as gets the blame,

It’s the rich as gets the pleasure—

Ain’t it all a bleeding shame!”⁷

There exists no adequate account of the origins and history of the cruel romance in Russia.⁸ It seems to have evolved as a parody of the high art Lied, or “romance” (romans) as it is called in Russian, somewhere toward the end of the nineteenth century. The cruel romance was cultivated by cabaret singers and was especially popular in the cabarets of St. Petersburg in the years before the Revolution. It has been used as an object of parody and also as a serious stylistic source by several Russian poets.

Valery Bryusov, for example, in the section entitled “Songs” (“Pesni”) in his epoch-making Urbi et orbi, the volume which in 1903 established the theme of the modem city in Russian poetry, used the cruel romance as source and model.⁹ Aleksandr Blok also made use of the genre. There is an interesting reference to the cruel romance in Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoir of her friend, the actress Sonya Holliday (1896–1935), who was particularly fond of this kind of song. One poem of the cycle Tsvetaeva dedicated to Holliday is a brilliant parody of the genre:

The rain is knocking at my window,

A workman leans over his squeaking lathe;

I was a street singer

And you were the son of a prince.¹⁰

The cruel romance also seems to have flourished in the period immediately after the Civil War, the NEP period, when the resumption of private enterprise in small-scale undertakings led to a boom in night life. The late poetry of Sergei Esenin (1895–1925), especially the cycle “Tavern Moscow” (“Moskva kabatskaya,” 1924), provides the most striking literary embodiment of this style. The most famous example from the NEP period, remembered and sung to this day with great gusto and generally considered to be a folk song, is a cruel romance cast in the form of a street-vendor’s cry, called “Bubliki.” The word refers to the speaker’s wares, the ring-shaped hard bread roll something like a pretzel:

Buy my bubliki,

Hot bubliki!

Chase your rubles

Toward me quick!

And in this filthy night

Take pity on

Unhappy me

And my trade.

My father’s a drunk.

And proud of it,

One foot in the grave

And he still drinks!

My mother’s on the streets,

My sister’s a fallen woman.

And I’m a smoker

Watch me do it!¹¹

This song was in fact composed by one Yakov Yadov for the Odessa cabaret singer G. Karsavin.¹²

It is very difficult indeed to find any evidence about the fate of the cruel romance during the 1930s. As Stalinism took hold and consolidated, public reference to a phenomenon as a-Soviet as the cruel romance was something to be avoided. There are some scraps of evidence that refer to wartime, however.

A good example of a song in the style of the cruel romance is the following, by an unknown author. The song was mentioned by Mikhailo Mikhailov, and a full but imperfect text was first published in England in 1964.¹³ It obviously dates from World War II.

I was a battalion scout,

And he was our HQ clerk;

I was answerable to Russia,

But he was sleeping with my wife.

Wife of mine, poor Shura,

Surely you’ve not stopped caring?

What made you, you poor fool,

Swap your eagle for that shit?

An eagle and handsome figure of a man,

I wouldn’t even stand by his side,

From Moscow to Berlin I strode

Over corpses for three years.

I strode, and then in the hospital

I lay in death’s embrace,

And the nurses wept in the ward,

And the surgeon’s scalpel trembled.

My brave neighbor was also in tears,

A colonel, three times Hero of the Soviet Union,

He wiped away his tears

With his hardened soldier’s hand.

An accursed shell fragment

Had pierced my bladder.

Once I leaned down for my false leg

And there under the bed was the HQ clerk.

I battered his white breast

And tore off his medals,

Take a look, people of Russia,

Observe, my native land.

My poor wife Shura

I adored madly;

My false limb wouldn’t stand for her

And my crutch tore her to bits.¹⁴

This song exhibits several hallmarks of the cruel romance. The singer makes an emotional appeal to his audience (in this case, the entire Russian nation) because he feels he has been treated unjustly and wants redress. Clichés like “death’s embrace” and “soldier’s hardened hand” are used deliberately, as are some elements from classic Russian folklore (the hero as “eagle,” the “white breast” of the victim). The protagonist has an ironic attitude toward his own plight. What makes the song especially appealing is that it takes an irreverent, worldly attitude toward the war theme—which, as we have seen, is sacrosanct in official song.

A second, more modern, song that exhibits strong elements of the cruel romance is a unique text which was taken down by Vladimir Markov from the lips of a deported Russian woman in a labor camp in Nazi Germany:

Everything’s finished, everything in the world is lies;

My happiness is shattered, I’ll never get it back.

In a house with shining windows and a well-lit room,

The waltz sounds out and the ball begins.

Couple after couple, but my man’s with someone else,

My heart is jealous, I’m sorry he’s not with me.

. . .

My dear women friends, what a mistake I made,

He loves another and doesn’t love me any more.

Loves her, kisses her strongly, presses her to his heart,

But he doesn’t know there’s a baby growing up.

The child will grow up and ask where its father is,

And here is what I’ll answer him:

Your daddy’s dead, my sweet child,

And a tear will drip from my eye.

Stop crying, mommy, stop pouring tears,

If daddy’s dead there’s no bringing him back.

Your daddy hasn’t died, my poor child,

He loves another and doesn’t love me anymore.

Whose grave is this, overgrown with grass,

A poor girl died from poison at seventeen years old.

Men, you men, you have such scheming hearts,

Your love is all words, but never is it deeds.¹⁵

Markov’s concise description of this song’s origins is interesting. He calls it

. . . a love song, among the true descendants of the cruel romance, which are still sung at the lower depths of musical culture by laundrywomen, seamstresses, prostitutes, and others. No one collects or records these songs now, for obvious reasons, and they never leave the dark social corners of the cultural periphery. The melody is always borrowed from a well-known song, and the text is never the same. The lyrics, a helpless imitation of “high” poetry, full of grammatical errors and ridiculous stylistic blunders, are nevertheless sometimes charmingly naive and touching.¹⁶

It needs to be added that however much these songs may be taken seriously on the cultural periphery, they are well remembered, preserved, and performed by intellectuals in Russia. Their attraction is due to the naive charm that Markov points out, and also to a genuine straightforward admiration for them as an alternative to official, politicized culture. They constitute a kind of high camp, regarded with an inextricable mixture of condescension and affection. And, of course, they are functionally differentiated from serious, “high” literature; they are not placed at a lower level of the same hierarchy but occupy one of their own, the function of which has to do with entertainment, relaxation in informal circumstances.

An interesting cruel romance, apparently of recent vintage, the authorship of which has not been established, is “Anna Karenina.” The song, a vulgarization of the great novel’s plot which brings in the characteristic “begging” motif of the cruel romance, was very popular among Soviet university students in the 1960s:

In Moscow there lived the heroine of a novel,

She came of ancient gentry stock.

Her name it was Anna Karenina,

Her patronymic was Arkad’evna.

She had no desire to work hard;

With a criminal passion in her blood,

This lady lived without the slightest care,

Suffering from Russian love.

Then along came Vronsky, a terrible cad,

And an officer to boot.

He’d been nurtured by a different epoch,

And he hadn’t lived in the USSR.

Old man Karenin was severe and unkind,

But Anna was beautiful and sweet.

She couldn’t take that kind of family life,

And she started an affair with Vronsky.

But Vronsky, the rat, was very conceited,

And he forgot his promise.

He turned out to be ideologically backward,

And not on her wavelength at all.

Inside Anna a deep wound opened up;

It’s no secret for us, after all,

That she left her tyrant husband

And her twelve-year-old son.

So proud Anna went off to the station,

And proudly lay down on the tracks.

In those far-off days of capitalism

Nobody thought of saving her.

And that’s how those empty coquettes met their end,

Who’d seen the regime of the tsars;

But we who’ve lived through the seven-year plan

Won’t put up with a fact like that.

Give, citizens, gents and ladies,

Even a crust of bread,

For that Anna Karenina

Left behind an orphan son.

He wanders about like a fledgling,

Abandoned by one and all.

Give, brothers, and give, sisters,

It’s Sergei Karenin who’s asking.¹⁷

The juxtaposition of Tolstoy’s plot with the incongruous snippets of Soviet jargon and the revelation of the singer’s identity in the final verse make this song very appealing. At about the same time that “Anna Karenina” was popular, there was another song that was often sung back-to-back with it. This song is about Tolstoy himself:

Our great Russian writer

Lev Nikolaich Tolstoy

Wouldn’t eat fish or meat,

And walked barefoot down the alley.

His wife, Sofiya Tolstaya,

On the other hand, liked eating;

She didn’t walk barefoot,

But kept up her gentry honor.

And this here Sofiya

Who bore the surname Tolstoy

Liked neither the philosophy

Nor the simple nature of her husband.

In his life he had upsets,

He endured the blows of fate,

And you can’t read his novel Resurrection

Without shedding a tear.

He had his brushes with the government,

Even though he was the idol of the people,

Because of his novel Anna Karenina

And his other one, War and Peace.

Give, give, give, citizens,

I am his illegitimate son . . .¹⁸

The “begging” motif here is obviously just tagged on out of deference to genre convention. This inoffensive little song, incidentally, is a good example of what official critics have in mind when they condemn a text for lack of “ideological awareness” (ideinost’). It is not acceptable to talk about the great figures of Russian culture, however inimical they may be to Communist ideology, in this flippant, subliterary way. All these songs in the tradition of the cruel romance have a note of irony, a gently fun-poking attitude toward the various dilemmas and unlucky lives that they describe. This note keeps them in the underground of song and also makes them a valuable repository of an alternative tonality to official song.

The Criminal Song (Blatnaya pesnya)

The third principal genre that exists in the undergrowth of Soviet culture is the criminal song, to give an admittedly inadequate translation of the Russian term blatnaya pesnya; “underworld song” is perhaps equally good. The word blat, from which the adjective in the phrase derives, means “crime” itself but also has in modem Russian the meaning of “pull” in the sense of “illegal influence.” The word also means “thieves’ cant.” The term blatnaya pesnya is often used to refer to the entire range of unofficial song, but here it will be used in a narrower sense, to refer to songs about life on the wrong side of the law. Typically, the criminal song deals with stories of betrayal and revenge and illustrates the inflexible code or “law” (zakon) of the criminal world, a code which demands utter hostility toward the law of the state and complete solidarity within the criminal fraternity.¹⁹

No adequate description or history of the criminal song in Russia has been written, and relatively few texts have been published. Though the picture may be distorted by the operation of chance in publication, it would seem to be the case that the Soviet period inherited a good number of criminal songs from prerevolutionary times. The criminal song then had a period of flowering (like the cruel romance) during the NEP period, when there was scope for more underworld activity than at any other time in Soviet history. It was still possible at that time to publish reasonably objective studies of this kind of song and the culture in which it had its roots. Perhaps the most remarkable publication was an article of 1926 by N. Khandzinsky.²⁰ This article has a copious supplement of texts and even a lexicon; it also cites such things as the graffitti on the walls of prison cells. Khandzinsky collected his material in Irkutsk and the surrounding area in 1925 and 1926. His discussion notes the essentially urban character of the songs and poems, and the links—perhaps amounting to direct dependence—between the “folklore” of criminals and respectable literary verse. The collection of songs appended to Khandzinsky’s article includes the texts of several songs whose popularity is attested in written sources thirty and more years later. There is, for example, the notorious song entitled “Gop so smykom,” a phrase that Khandzinsky registers in his lexicon as “not established.” It has elsewhere been explained as the nickname of the song’s hero.²¹ This song is the defiant credo of a dedicated thief, a paean to his independent, dissolute, and immoral life, his determination never to sink into the ranks of law-abiding citizens. The second half of this extremely long text—one hundred and six lines altogether—concerns the hero’s intentions regarding the afterlife. He declares that even in hell he will continue with his calling, to the extent of robbing Judas of his pieces of silver. The song is clearly of literary origin. It has a tone of delicate irony and conscious undermining of its own outrageous braggadocio. “Gop so smykom” has become a kind of epitome of the criminal song, cited by Soviet critics whenever they wish to castigate vulgarity and degeneracy, the absence of Soviet idealism. In this respect, its only rival as a whipping boy is a song usually referred to by the name of its heroine, “Murka”:

The thieves big and small, the evil captains,

Were electing a new committee.

And a girl took the floor

Called Murka,

She was stem and bold.

They needed to get on with the job, they wanted a drink,

So they went to an elegant restaurant.

A guitar was sounding and a couple dancing,

It was Murka and some young fop.

I rushed up to her and grabbed her arm—

“I’ve got to have a talk with you.”

But she just laughed and pressed closer to her dude—

“I can’t live with you any longer.”

In a dark alley Kostya met Murka,

“Hello, my dear, and goodbye!

You’ve shopped our entire gang,

And for that you answer with your life.

Before, you used to love ‘No. 3’ cigarettes

But now, you won’t even need any tobacco.

Before, you used to like a drink of vodka with us,

But now you won’t even need cognac.

Hello, my Murka, dear Murka,

You shopped our entire gang

And now you get your lot.”²²

The motifs of betrayal and immediate personal retribution central to the tale of Murka are the hallmark of the criminal song.

With the growth of the Soviet labor camp system to an extent unprecedented in world history, a situation developed that was favorable to the preservation and transmission of underworld song. In an atmosphere where lip service to the ruling official ideology was still exacted, criminal elements were deliberately mixed in with political prisoners, who tended to be intellectuals. There was therefore an ideologically aware meeting between literary and subliterary cultures. It may be that the high proportion of Russian intellectuals with direct experience of criminal life is the distinctive feature of their social group, when compared with the intelligentsias of other countries. However, censorship has choked the reflection of this situation in literature.²³ The published evidence concerning the cultural life of the GULag is small, and the place allotted to song is a fraction of that. There can be little doubt, however, that song loomed large in the prisoners’ lives. As early in the life of the GULag system as 1929, Maksim Gorky paid a visit to the convict settlement at Solovki on the White Sea. He heard the convicts singing traditional Russian folk songs—but with new words, the subversive nature of which filled him with alarm.²⁴ In Soviet literary works dealing with the GULag, criminal songs have tended to be used in negative characterizations of people before they are “reforged” thanks to the conscientious toil of the security organs. However, not much, if anything, of the songs’ texts is ever actually published on paper. In Nikolai Pogodin’s famous play The Aristocrats (Aristokraty, 1934), for example, which is about the convicts who built the White Sea Canal, the third act ends and the fourth begins with scenes of revelry. In performance, the actors concerned sing songs whose words could not be published under any circumstances.²⁵ And in The Road to Life (Putevka v zhizn’, 1928), Ekk’s classic film about the rehabilitation of young people, several startling examples of criminal song are used to portray the corrupt state of the heroes before Soviet morality comes to their deliverance.

The real life of the camps, as opposed to their use as an example of Soviet social progress, has been an “un-subject” in Soviet-published literature throughout its history. It was allowed to sneak into this literature only for a few years up to 1962, the date of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” And quite apart from the necessarily oblique representation of camp culture in literary sources, the time may never come when folklorists in the USSR are allowed to publish and analyze the objective evidence relating to the history of their subject in the camps. It may already be getting too late even to collect this material, unless a good start has been made unofficially. It is therefore to émigré and unofficial sources that we need to look in order to form an impression of the part played by song in this massive segment of the history of modern Russian culture.

Perhaps the most striking testimony of this kind is contained in the memoirs of Aleksandr Vardi, A World under Guard (Podkonvoinyi mir), which concerns the Soviet camp system in the immediate postwar period. Among many remarkable sequences illustrating song as part of the convicts’ cultural life is the following:

When they had eaten their fill, the older criminals climbed on to the middle bunk, sat around in a circle Turkish style, and started playing cards. Their bodies, naked to the waist, were covered with all sorts of pornographic tattoos and scars.

Below, Senya Garkavy, a boy grown old before his time, piped up in a trembling alto:

We saw, we chop, we stack,

We curse all the grasses.

Oh, why did our mothers have us!

Slyly winking at Pivovarov with his pale faded eye, he went on:

Listen and take heed, lads,

Why we’ll pay them back in full:

They stood us up against tree stumps,

Stripped us and beat us up.

Oh, why did our mothers have us!

The dashing song rang out louder and louder, the despairing underworld [blatnoi] little tune warmed up and got more devil-may-care, and the singer’s sad eyes grew more comprehending and expressive.

You yourselves, my friends, know the reason

Why we’ve always made the vow:

“I’ll be a reptile and I’ll never forget

That rotten commander

And his belly waiting for the knife!

The knife!”

“Senya, be a good lad and sing about Vorkuta for us,” rasped Trofimov, clearly deeply moved.

“Right, about the Arctic Circle and about the queen,” said the others in support, “Go on, Senya, let it all go!”

Barely audible, full of suffering, the song floated up from the gloom of hopeless longing:

Beyond the Arctic Circle, in that godforsaken land,

The nights above the earth are as black as coal.

The wolfish howl of the snowstorm won’t let me get to sleep.

Oh, for just one ray of light in this darkness and horror!

I often remember that old, old threshold,

Those long eyelashes and that brown face,

I know you’re not spending your nights alone,

You’re thinking sadly of faraway me.

Beyond the Arctic Circle life doesn’t last long.

The savage winter blizzard will cover up my tracks.

Don’t look for me, don’t trouble and torment yourself.

If you get a chance, just remember me.

And on without pausing, but with a change of melody:

I’m silent in the countless crowd,

But there’s a cry in my heart,

Eternal interplanetary cold

Has entered my soul.

In the polar darkness over the crowd

Your image is before me.

There’s only you in the whole world,

Zosenka!

The carriage fell silent. The criminals put aside their cards and fell into a sorrowing silence, and the voice—weak, flickering like the flame of a candle tossed about—complained and grieved:

Even though I fall down in the formation

I’ll get up.

Wait for me and I’ll come back,

I’ll come back.

I’ll get up and I’ll come back.

I’ll hug my darling to my heart. . .

Zosenka, Zosenka,

There’s only you in the world,

Zosenka!

And then, suddenly, jumping up from his place, gesticulating not just with his hands but with every muscle in his body, Garkavy began to cry out in a fit of sobbing:

My mother starved to death,

My dad got his in the war,

As for me, the guards drive me

Across this tortured land.

Smash! Slash! Tear! Burn!

Get revenge for your mother!

Don’t forgive anything for your sisters!

Smash! Slash! Tear! Burn!

Smash! Slash! Tear! Burn!

Truncheon the bastard till he’s deaf!

The murderer, collaborator, the boss,

Stick your knife through his liver!

And Garkavy went on with his dance to the roars, singing, shouts, and clapping of those around him. He clapped his hands against the floor and the soles of his shoes, mercilessly pounded his skinny, wiry sides, even found a way of sticking his filthy fingers into his mouth so as to make pops and whistles. His entire body writhed and shook. Any gypsy would have envied the abandon and expression of his dancing:

We fought the war and came through

But we’re done for now.

We saw the Fascists into their coffins

And we’ll see the Chekists too.

On our bunks we’ll fiddle-de-dee

Under them we’ll fiddle-de-dee,

But as for working for the bosses

We’ll never do it, never.

Smash! Slash! Tear! Burn!

We’ll have the bosses’ guts!

Cut the bloodthirsty leader up,

And make borshch for everybody!

Smash! Slash! Tear! Burn!²⁶

The book contains many other scenes such as these; there is no reason to doubt their authenticity. The songs have a deliberately antiliterary style. Their language is coarse, but obscene only by implication from time to time. What makes them striking is the savagery of the emotions they express: a lust for revenge, a burning sense of outrage and offense. At the same time there is a sentimental, nostalgic attitude toward the idea of home and family.

The songs performed by Garkavy are without doubt of literary origin, composed by an individual poet on a specific occasion, but having then “become folklore,” detached from their author and known as part of a common stock of songs. The environment they reflect is that of men in confinement. But the confinement they depict has no specific features that would identify it as the Soviet GULag.

There is no lack of songs that do reflect this specific environment, however. By far the most famous of them all is “Comrade Stalin, You’re a Real Big Scholar”:

Comrade Stalin, you’re a real big scholar,

You saw what was what in linguistics,

But I’m a simple Soviet convict,

And my comrade is the gray Bryansk wolf.

What I’m in for, I swear I don’t know,

But the procurators are right, it would seem,

And so here I sit in the Turukhansk region

Where you sat in exile under the Tsar.

Here I am in the Turukhansk region,

Where the guards are severe and rude,

Naturally, I understand all this

As an intensification of the class struggle.

The singer goes on to assure Stalin that he sympathizes with his heavy responsibilities, and calls himself a fool for not being able to escape even once, when Stalin managed to do it six times from his exiles. . . .

Yesterday we buried two marxists,

We didn’t cover them in red bunting;

One of them was a right deviationist,

The other, it turned out, had nothing to do with anything.

And before he passed away forever,

He willed you his tobacco pouch and all his words,

He asked you to get to the bottom of all this here,

And screamed out quietly, “Stalin’s so clever!”

Live a hundred years, comrade Stalin,

And though it may be my fate to kick the bucket here,

I only hope the production of steel can rise

Per head of population in the country.²⁷

The thoroughgoing irony of this song masks a reality that is hard to acknowledge even for the most inured dissidents—that Party members did in fact remain loyal to the Party and Stalin even in the camps, and remained convinced that when the great, all-wise leader found out about the crimes that were being perpetrated in his name by the security organs, he would sort things out and return the country to normal.

“Comrade Stalin” became a genuine folk song and was registered as such many times.²⁸ Eventually, it became generally known that the author of the song was Yuz Aleshkovsky (bom 1929), whose checkered life history had included many different trades and professions, including taxi driver. He had been published in the USSR as a children’s writer, but none of his songs or his prose was ever published there. Aleshkovsky eventually became an émigré in 1979. Besides “Comrade Stalin,” he is the author of two other songs that have certainly become folklore: “A Song from Places Not So Far Away” and “Soviet Easter Song.” Both of them became anthems of the camps.

An anonymous song that became the theme song of the Far East GULag, centered on Kolyma and the city of Magadan, is this one:

I remember the port of Vanino,

The gloomy look of the ships,

When they loaded us aboard

Those stinking, black holds.

Mist was coming down over the sea,

The maritime element roared,

Our destination was Magadan

The capital of the Kolyma region.

Not songs but a plaintive groan

Was tom from every breast.

“Farewell, Mainland Russia, forever”

Bawled the ship, beside itself.

The prisoners suffered from the swell;

Embracing like brothers,

Unbidden from their tongues

Hollow curses were torn.

Curse you, Kolyma,

You who are called the planet of paradise,

It’s impossible not to go mad,

And there’s no way back from here.

Death has made friends with the scurvy,

The wards are packed like sardines,

And maybe this spring

I’ll be in this world no longer.

Don’t cry, mother and wife,

Nor you, my sweet children,

It seems that my lot in this world

Is to drink a bitter cup to the dregs.

I’ll die and they’ll bury me,

I won’t get put in a coffin,

The blizzard will cover me with snow,

Cover me like a white shroud.

Winter’s raging in the snowstorms,

And my strength’s melting like a candle,

Curse you, Kolyma,

Grave of freedom and happiness!²⁹

This song has no element of irony whatsoever. It is a plain, straightforward cry from the heart about the intolerable conditions that were encountered by the people who were sent out to the Far East segment of the GULag. The classic testimony to the experience is the two books of autobiography by Evgeniya Ginzburg, both called in Russian A Precipitous Route (Krutoi marshrut). The song does contain, however, an element of sentimentality, which again centers mainly on the nostalgia for home and family. It is tempting to see this song as in some ways a deliberate antithesis of the official “mass song,” a kind of antihymn. It has the same high-pitched emotional tone, and an insistent hopeless pessimism that is the mirror image of the official song’s blatant optimism. The song has in common with official song, though, the use of the first person as spokesman for the collective, in this case the collective of the oppressed.

One of the most piquant episodes in the published history of the camp song in Russia concerns the following text:

We’re freezing to death in this godforsaken camp,

Eating and boozing, going out of our minds;

Our hell and our heaven

Are the polar darkness of Kokosalma.

We’re murderers, a bloody herd,

The forest and tundra have become our prison,

We will never come back from hell,

We will never return home.

Like stinking, rotten slime

That rots on the cliffs of a bay,

On our cheeks there is dirt and bristles,

We’re not human beings, we’re scum of the swamps.

Hairless and black-mouthed

We carouse like madmen with the witch scurvy,

The lice gobble us and whisper at night

“You’ll never go back home!”

We have lost our battles,

On our positions are lying

Mountains of corpses. Probably no one will remember

The names of these dead soldiers.

The ones who’re still alive will go insane,

Their souls will be twisted forever.

We will never go back from here.

We will never return home.

This song was published in the Soviet journal Banner (Znamya) in 1958. It was said to be from a copy found in the pocket of a dead German soldier from the Northern Division of the SS, killed by Soviet troops in the forests of Karelia during the Russo-Finnish war. However, as the émigré critic B. Zhabinsky showed,³⁰ the song was in fact a Soviet camp song dating from the construction of the White Sea Canal in the early 1930s. It is not known who was responsible for the minor changes in the text (such as the second line, where the original, obviously impossible as it stands, says “We’re puffed up from hunger and going out of our minds”). Whether the Soviet critic who published this song was deliberately trying to pull a confidence trick will probably never be known.

No collection of camp folklore can yet be published in the USSR, any more than can objective historical accounts of the GULag. Meanwhile, the songs published in the context of memoirs by survivors outside the USSR may or may not include the most important and bestknown songs. They probably represent only a fraction of what must be the most vital component of Russian folklore in the postrevolutionary period.³¹

The persistence of convict songs in Soviet life during the Stalin period is attested only fragmentarily. Perhaps the most striking example is the following, where Nadezhda Mandel’shtam is writing about an apartment building inhabited by writers and secret policemen in Moscow in 1937, at the height of the Great Terror:

One day, into the courtyard of the building came some wandering singers. They sensed the need of the moment and sang the best, classical convict songs—from Siberia and Baikal, and thieves’ songs. . . . People (not the writers, of course) immediately thronged the balconies. They joined in with the singers, threw them money. . . . That lasted about half an hour, until one ideologically staunch inhabitant ran down and drove them away. . . .³²

There is much more published evidence about the late 1950s and early 1960s, when visits by foreigners, and especially graduate students with a knowledge of the language, began again after a gap that had lasted since the time of the Communist-inclined pilgrims of the 1930s. One of the most perceptive was Mikhailo Mikhailov, born the son of Russian émigrés in Yugoslavia. He spent the summer of 1964 in Moscow as an exchange student and published the first really well-informed description of private life among the Soviet intelligentsia in its post-Stalinist phase. In a special section of his book, Mikhailov describes a party in a student dormitory at Moscow State University.³³ Songs had been sung, and much liquor had been drunk, and then a young Siberian came into the room, carrying a guitar. He began to sing.

What staggered me most of all was the actual songs. I had never imagined that anything like that existed in the USSR. He sang all sorts of convict songs—happy ones, despairing ones, and cynical ones . . . through them spoke the Russia we know from the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; there were genuine “earthy” [pochvennye], profoundly national works, not stylizations—not the sort that gets broadcast on Soviet radio—but raw, sometimes naive but always profound, very melodic and profound.

Mikhailov cites about a dozen songs. Among them was the first publication in English of “Comrade Stalin, You’re a Real Big Scholar”; and also “A Song from Places Not So Far Away,” “Soviet Easter Song,” and several others. Mikhailov concludes that these songs represent “the most significant folk creativity of our times, and it is understandable why they have been created in Russia rather than anywhere else.”

One major formant in the domestic culture Mikhailov describes was the absorption into the cultural life of Moscow and Leningrad of numerous members of the intelligentsia who had been in the camps—a powerful contributory factor to the dissatisfaction with official Soviet culture that was so evident in this period. These people had seen a reality that made it impossible for them to accept slogans anymore. In his story “This Is Moscow Speaking” (“Govorit Moskva,” written about 1960 and published abroad under the pseudonym Nikolai Arzhak), Yuly Daniel describes the return from the GULag and associates it with a rise in interest in camp songs as part of a counterculture. The story is set in the late 1950s.

It was the time when songs from the camps were becoming popular. They were gradually seeping through from Siberia and the Far North, and you kept hearing snatches of them in refreshment rooms at railway junctions. It sounded as if the amnesty decree were being sung through clenched teeth. They wound their way round the suburbs like the vanguard of an advancing army. Suburban trains pounded out their rhythm. At last they marched into town on the backs of the “rehabilitated” offenders. There they were picked up by the intelligentsia. . . . There was something rather piquant about a cosy chat on the Comédie Française being interrupted by the melancholy dirge of some poor devil on his last legs, and about the way the bright boys of the Faculty of Literature discussed the alliterations and assonances of this outlandish style. Ladies, flushed with vodka, mouthed delicately:

Hey, boss, hey, boss,

Let me go home.

And if one of them suddenly winced and choked on a word that had hitherto lain fallow in her vocabulary there was always some connoisseur on hand to say: “But darling, this is literature!”

Then everything was as clear as daylight. The mad howling of the wolves, the louse-ridden vests, the sores, the tattered foot-rags, the so-called rations, which fell into your aching guts like a lump of clay—it was all literature.

But sometimes one of these well-washed, well-fed types would feel a sudden pang, a superstitious fear. “My God, what am I doing? Why am I singing these songs? Why am I asking for trouble? It’s all coming at me from a dark comer of the room. Only one thing is missing—the traditional knock at the door. . . . Who am I to smile at the naiveté of these words? After all, it’s really immensely serious. This is what it was like. Goodbye Moscow! Goodbye everybody. They’ll pick up a rifle, press the trigger and shoot me dead. Nasty!”

But the song went on and people smiled and those ominous shades from the past skulked out of the room, through the lobby and on to the landing. And there they stayed.³⁴

Of course, Daniel’s assertion is a simplification. Members of the intelligentsia formed a significant part of the population of the camps, and they knew these songs first-hand rather than “picking them up” after other people had brought them back to the towns.³⁵

The popularity of the blatnaya pesnya into more recent times is attested in a sanctimonious poem by Yevtushenko:

The “intelligentsia” is singing blatnye pensi.

It doesn’t sing the songs of Krasnaya Presnya.

On it goes to the accompaniment of vodka and dry wines,

About that same old Murka and about Enta and the rabbi.

They sing to

shishkebab and to sausages,

Doctors sing, actors and actresses, too,

Writers at their dacha in Pakhra sing,

Geologists and

even atom scientists sing,

They sing,

as if there were a general conspiracy among them,

or as if they were all from a criminal background.

Ever since

I was very little,

I never ever loved

the folklore of thieves,

and a revolutionary melody

is my

guiding

melody.

And without calculation,

I would prefer that there always showed, crimson and high,

something from the revolutionary song

in my poems,

simple and tough as a flagpole. . . ³⁶

Criminal songs also became a fairly common accessory of Soviet fiction in the late 1960s. The guitar-strumming youth became a stock character at this time, and he was usually provided with at least a fragment of a song to perform. Tendryakov’s “Three, Seven, Ace” (“Troika, semerka, tuz,” 1966) has such a character in Bushuev, who is, significantly, an ex-convict. Aksenov’s story “A Pity You Weren’t with Us” (“Zhal’, chto vas ne bylo s nami,” 1969) contains some good examples. Perhaps the most remarkable appearance of a song in this respect occurs in the first of a pair of stories by Vasily Roslyakov; the story features a party scene. The participants sing Pasternak’s poem “The Snowstorm Swept o’er All the Earth” (“Melo-melo po vsei zemle”), one of the Zhivago poems that has been published in the USSR, and also Radin’s revolutionary march “Bravely, Comrades, in Step” (“Smelo, tovarishchi, v nogu”). One solitary line of another song also appears—“And I’m only a simple Soviet convict”—which, as we know, comes from the most famous camp song of all, Yuz Aleshkovsky’s “Comrade Stalin, You’re a Real Big Scholar.”³⁷

The history of the actual creation of underground songs by poets who did not themselves sing in the years preceding the emergence of guitar poetry will probably never be known in detail. Even the history of unofficial written poetry during these years, a subject rather more tangible than that of the song, is not known with any certainty.³⁸ However, as part of a uniquely vivid story, Ruf’ Zernova mentions the creation of one song in Leningrad in the darkest days of the late Stalin period:

In 1948, when the country ran out of anecdotes, he wrote a song. Using the tune of “Cut-Glass Goblets”:

I was standing in my place,

Looking for pockets to pick,

When suddenly up to me came

A citizen I didn’t know.

Quietly he said to me

“Where should I go

So as to spend this evening

Having a real good time?

I need girls and more girls,

I need wine and yet more wine;

And I don’t give a damn

How much it all costs!”

I answered him:

“Just yesterday they closed

Our last remaining dive,

On the Ligovka it was!”

But he said, “In Marseilles

They have such bars

They have such liqueurs,

They have such cognacs!

The girls dance there naked,

The ladies wear ermine,

The footmen bring you wines

And the thieves wear tailcoats!”

He offered me French francs,

And a glassful of pearls,

If I would hand over

The plans of a Soviet factory.

We grabbed this subject,

Took away his suitcase,

His money in francs,

And the glassful of pearls.

And then we handed him over

To the powers of the NKVD.

And ever since then around the jails

I’ve never seen him again.

The powers congratulated me,

The procurator shook my hand,

And immediately placed me

Under strict surveillance.

And since that time, lads,

I’ve just one aim in life:

If only I could set eyes on

That Marseilles in the West!

What girlies they have there,

And what bars,

What liqueurs,

And what cognacs!

The girls dance there naked,

The ladies wear ermine,

The footmen bring you wines,

And the thieves all wear tailcoats!³⁹

The author of this song was Akhill Grigor’evich Levinton, who at the time was a research student in the Faculty of Philology at Leningrad University. He simply appeared one evening at his friends’ house and sang the song, which he had just composed. Zernova comments:

. . . the song was impeccable. It gradually entered folklore, samizdat, and the thesaurus of the language (I mean “The plan of a Soviet factory” as a cliché). . . . Suddenly, in that most godforsaken, accursed, astounded year of 1948 there spilled over the great open spaces of the motherland this miraculous colossal Odessan “Glassful of Pearls.” It had everything: the thirties and the roaring forties; spies, thieves, our glorious Chekists, and the dream of foreign parts, too, which is a myth about life beyond the grave. And it turned out that it was actually possible to make fun of all that. But the main irony was that this Glassful of Pearls poured out over Leningrad, which had been beaten and beaten again, eternally seditious, eternally insulted, gloomy and cheerless, which had long forgotten Lenka Panteleev, its very own Robin Hood. And then suddenly it was there: “the dive on the Ligovka” . . . and every other two lines in the song there was something unexpected, a gift, an explosion of guffaws, truth.⁴⁰

The song is indeed a work of near-genius, and is indeed a miracle when one considers the time and circumstances in which it was written. And it does encapsulate the pedigree of the underground song as it was to emerge in the work of the poets of the 1960s and 1970s. From the gypsy song comes the dream of debauchery. From the criminal song come the underground ambience and some of the actual phraseology. And from the cruel romance come the urban setting and the theme of virtue unrewarded, leading to the singer’s plea for sympathy and condescension from his audience. The song has indeed “become folklore.” Several variants of it have been published outside Russia.⁴¹

Five years after Levinton’s burst of inspiration, another Leningrad poet parodied the criminal song to magnificent effect:

When the night-time street lamps sway,

And it’s dangerous for you to walk the dark street,

Out of the beer-hall I come,

I’m expecting nobody,

I’m incapable of falling in love again. . .

One girl kissed my feet like a madwoman,

Me and a widow drank away her house and home!

And my insolent laughter

Was always a winner,

My young life cracked open like a nut. . .

Here I sit on my prison plank bed like a king on his birthday,

Dreaming of getting my dreary ration,

The raindrops knock at the window,

But it’s all the same to me now,

I’m ready to be the first to douse my torch. . .

. . . When the night-time street lamps sway,

And a black cat runs up the street like an imp—

Out of the beer-hall I come,

I’m expecting nobody,

I’ve broken my life’s record once and for all.⁴²

This song was written far away from Leningrad by Gleb Gorbovsky (bom 1931), one of the most talented participants in the flowering of Leningrad poetry that took place in the late 1950s.⁴³ He is also one of the few poets involved who has mended his rebellious ways and become an institutional figure. His “Street Lamps” (“Fonariki”) instantaneously became folklore, to the author’s discomfiture on one occasion:

Gleb was sitting in a drinking joint somewhere in the Far East. Drunk, naturally. And next to him they started singing “Street Lamps.” Gleb gets up: “Fellers, that song was written by me!” “Like hell it was, you bitch, THE FOLK wrote it! It’s a folksong!” And the folk proceeded to smash in the sides [boki i baki] of the imposter poet. Gleb could never remember this incident without laughing. “That’s a kind of popularity, too,” he’d say.⁴⁴

The songs of Levinton, Aleshkovsky, and Gorbovsky are examples of literature become folklore; through the operation of circumstances we happen to know the names of the authors. But these authors are not known as performers of their own works in song form. These particular songs exist side by side with guitar poetry and have common roots with it, though.

* * * * *

Gypsy song and its characteristic mode of performance; the cruel romance; and the criminal song dealing with the underworld and the camps form the three principal components of underground song. They are the work of poets whose names are for the most part unknown. To a considerable extent, they exist in complementary distribution to official song and are differentiated from it by function as much as anything else. The same people know the whole spectrum of song and use different elements from it on different occasions.

From the point of view of guitar poetry, the importance of the underground tradition of song is that it preserves and presents several alternative models to official song. The gypsy song offers the model of self-contained performance, with a solo singer accompanying himself on the guitar in a free, emotional style, taking liberties with tempo and pitch. The cruel romance offers a range of debased literary devices, but above all it contains a rich vein of parody and an ironic attitude toward the sentimentalism that pervades serious song. And the criminal song offers, at least in potential, a striking alternative ethos to the official social code: in it, the individual asserts himself as the arbiter of his own destiny in a world where justice is crude and swift. And in the camp songs, there is a theme that has been excluded from official literature, a theme centered upon suffering, deprivation, and the destruction of the personal life of the individual.

In the literary turmoil that followed in the wake of the de-Stalinization debate of the mid-1950s, the authors of songs, besides expanding the middle ground in the way that was discussed earlier, saw in underground song a set of untapped stylistic and thematic alternatives and possibilities. And as we shall see, several of them used this anonymous heritage as the main springboard for their own work.

There was more in the background than the native heritage, though. Alongside the gypsy style, the guitar-accompanied solo style also existed in Russia as a result of the importation of the German cabaret song.⁴⁵ Here, the most important influence in the USSR has been the work of Bertolt Brecht, who himself sang songs to guitar accompaniment. He was inspired to do so and learned the actual manner from Frank Wedekind, who was probably the first European intellectual to use what had been a subliterary genre of urban entertainment for serious literary purposes. Brecht, of course, is the direct ancestor of Wolf Biermann, the outstanding contemporary German exponent of guitar-accompanied satirical song.⁴⁶ And besides the German tradition, there was the French, whose influence is attested in the use in Russian of the word shansonn’e. The songs and singing of Yves Montand, Georges Brassens, and others have been known and admired in the USSR since the late 1950s. Bulat Okudzhava, the pioneer Russian guitar poet, wrote an obituary notice for Brassens; much of what he said about Brassens’s style and poetic significance is directly applicable to Okudzhava himself.⁴⁷ The rise to popularity of the French chansonniers in Russia was a consequence and a part of the opening up of direct cultural relations with the West in the Khrushchev period. The precise extent and nature of the non-Russian influences on the poet-singers of the 1960s, however, is a whole subject in itself.

Gypsy song, the cruel romance, and the criminal song were a strong native legacy. The foreign traditions of song that were available to the Russians combined with them in creating a rich variety of elements that could be drawn on in the creation of a new genre—guitar poetry.