Preface

I was initiated into guitar poetry and magnitizdat on my first visit to the USSR, in 1963. An encounter with a fanatical jazz fan in Leningrad led to a session with his treasured collection of tapes, mostly transcribed from the Voice of America radio station. The tape recorder, made in East Germany, was without a cover; it needed endless cajoling and makeshift repairs. I would later recognize it as the classic vehicle of magnitizdat. We sampled the fan’s most precious jazz tapes. Sensing that I had heard them all before, he put on a Russian tape, which turned out to be by someone called Bulat Okudzhava, a poet who sang his words to the guitar. The recording was obviously an amateur one, and its technical standard was unspeakably bad. I was fascinated, but regarded it as no more than a curiosity. My comprehension of spoken Russian was poor, and I had no entrée at the time to the literary and intellectual circles in which even by then Okudzhava, and with him the idea of sung poetry transmitted through clandestine tape recordings, had made an indelible impact.

During my student years in the early sixties, I worked vacations as an interpreter for groups of Soviet “young people” (molodezh’)—some of them old enough to be my father—who were visiting Britain under the auspices of the old Educational Interchange Council. It was from them that I learned the current repertoire of Soviet “mass songs.” On trains and buses and at impromptu concerts, dutifully led by their leaders, they would strike up with “The Buchenwald Tocsin,” “Do the Russians Want War?”, “Komsomol Volunteers,” and other anthems. On less-public occasions they would sing lyrics that at first I took to be traditional folk songs; eventually I was astounded to discover that the haunting “Roads,” for example, had been written by Lev Oshanin in 1945 and was just as much an example of a Soviet “mass song” as “Do the Russians Want War?” I also grew very fond of some childrens’ songs, such as “The Captain” and “May There Always Be the Sun,” and learned that they too were “mass songs,” the work of contemporary Soviet songwriters, Vasily Lebedev-Kumach and the same Lev Oshanin respectively, and written, astonishingly, in 1937 and 1962. The mass song, like guitar poetry, was an aspect of Russian culture that simply did not exist in the curricula of my student courses and my early teaching, and for many years I regarded them both as a diversion, somehow not worthy of the attention of a serious literary scholar.

As my visits to Russia continued through the sixties and seventies, and my sphere of contacts grew wider and my relationships with some people developed into friendships, guitar poetry was never far away from conversation. Eventually it became a framework of reference for shorthand orientation in the subtleties of Soviet life, and a never-failing source of humor. But what was for me an entertainment and an object of study was for some of my friends a mighty resource in their daily struggle with Soviet life.

I managed to bring some tapes home, and got hold of more from the few other foreigners who were listening to guitar poetry. I think it was in 1971 that I first gave a lecture-recital on the subject, and I spoke about it many times in the next ten years, mainly at universities in England, the United States, and Canada. It was always a pleasure to watch a realization of the power in these songs steal over the minds of audiences who may have understood only a part of their literal meaning and nothing of their contextual meaning, apart from what they had been told as an introduction to the particular example I was playing.

As part of the lecture-recital, I prepared translations of the songs and usually copies of the Russian texts, too, because at the time I started there were no printed texts available, except for a few songs by Okudzhava. This endeavor developed into an attempt to translate some of the songs isometrically, so that they could be sung in English to the original tunes. One result has been my collection of Galich translations (Alexander Galich, Songs and Poems, Ann Arbor, 1983). The translations in the present book, though, all of which are my own, are not metrical. They aim to be as faithful to the literal meaning of the original as is consistent with the preservation of economy and a tolerable English style. They also set a premium on retaining the same distribution of matter to the line that is found in the originals. But no literary merit is claimed for them. The poetics of guitar poetry is a subject that will doubtless receive proper treatment in the appropriate publications, but one that has had to be largely neglected in this book, in translation as well as in discussion.

In contrast to the situation when I started, at the present time there are abundant texts and recordings available of guitar poetry in Russian. This fact has laid to rest my anxiety about writing a book on a subject which would not be accessible to interested readers in its original form, an anxiety that has held up the writing of this book for some years.

I have experienced the delight and stimulus of meeting all three of the great guitar poets personally. Aleksandr Galich was very kind and encouraging on several occasions after his emigration in 1974. The last time was after what turned out to be, alas, his final concert, given in Venice as part of the Biennale in December 1977. I met Vysotsky several times in his dressing room at the Taganka Theater, a coup engineered by a group of Moscow friends to whom I will always be grateful. I was with him there one night after he had played Hamlet. I have never seen anyone in so transcendental a state as this quite extraordinary man was on that occasion, the epitome of fulfilled creative energy. I talked to and interpreted for Okudzhava during part of his tour of England in 1977. He was modest to the point of evasiveness, protesting that he could remember only a dozen of his songs. That year, during the course of which I met all three of these great poets, was the last year on earth of guitar poetry in its full panoply: Galich died that December, and was followed by Vysotsky in 1980.

When I talked with the three poets about their work, there was more guarded disagreement between us than anything else. Like all Russian writers I have met, they insisted that there are ultimate areas of their work which are accessible only to their fellow countrymen, and hinted in their various gentle ways that it was impertinent for a foreigner to study and write on something as intimately bound up with an alien language and society as their songs. Perhaps they were right.

The deaths of Galich and Vysotsky, and the withdrawal of Okudzhava from any substantial involvement with writing and performing songs, have brought the first phase in the history of guitar poetry to a close. It may prove to have been not just the first phase but the whole story. But whatever may happen in the future, it is certainly possible and appropriate to take stock now of what has happened so far.

My account is that of an outsider, even though it draws on some firsthand experience of the subject in its native habitat. Since the published evidence is scanty, the detailed history of guitar poetry and the context of song in the USSR can be told only by the people who were actually involved in the process of its creation, promotion, circulation, and reception. It is to be hoped that these people are aware of that, and prepared to do something about it.

This book is about song, an art form that uses words and music together. It is bound to suffer from the limitation inherent in the written discussion of all music: the examples will be abstract and onedimensional. And the words of the songs discussed here were intended not only to be sung but to be sung by the person who wrote them. Putting them down on the page deprives them of the resonance and authenticity of the poet’s own interpretation. It also exposes them to the kind of isolated scrutiny that the written literary lyric receives, and which these texts are not necessarily meant to endure. All of these problems are in addition to the losses that are inevitably suffered when poetry is translated from one language into another. An awareness of these difficulties has haunted the author at every stage of his work on this book.

GSS

Vancouver, B.C.