Conclusions

Guitar poetry, which is poetry sung by the author to his own guitar accompaniment, emerged in Russia in the late 1950s and was a prominent feature of Russian cultural life for some twenty years. Its impact and popularity were made through magnitizdat, publication and circulation by tape recorder. Russian guitar poetry has no equivalent in the contemporary cultures of other nations, though there certainly have been individual poets, such as Georges Brassens and Wolf Biermann, whose work is close to it in technique and spirit. Guitar poetry in Russia, though, belongs to the country’s serious literary tradition. And in no other country is magnitizdat as important as it is in the USSR.

The pioneer Russian guitar poet was Bulat Okudzhava. When he began, he was not working in an established poetic mode. Rather, his songs brought together elements from different traditions and married them in a new synthesis. Although almost all the Russian poets for two hundred years had written songs, they had not as a rule performed them or composed their own music. Meanwhile, guitar-accompanied solo song had also been a feature of Russian cultural life since the eighteenth century. It was first associated with gypsy song, but eventually it became a popular kind of informal entertainment in a wide variety of social contexts. Okudzhava was the first poet to take this style, add elements from urban folklore, and use the resulting medium for serious poetic expression. Guitar poetry provides a good example of how a subliterary demotic form may be picked up and elevated to serve at the forefront of literary development. Many elements of its verbal style exist in Russian spoken poetry, though; the style of guitar poetry is not specific and exclusive.

Guitar poetry was not a development that came from outside the mainstream of the Russian literary process. It was initially created by members of that same metropolitan intelligentsia which is at the forefront of all Russian cultural life, and for their consumption. All three of the great guitar poets were brought up on the streets of Moscow. All three of them were near the center of cultural life before they emerged as guitar poets. And for all three of them, guitar poetry was preceded and accompanied by other forms of creative activity—Okudzhava as poet and novelist, Galich as dramatist, Vysotsky as actor. This situation also reflects the novelty of guitar poetry as a cultural phenomenon; it was not and never became an established and sufficient basis for professional literary existence.

That it did not become so is also a strong indication of the dissident, unofficial status of guitar poetry in the USSR. However, no absolute distinction can be drawn between the content of guitar poetry and that of officially accepted songs and poetry. Rather, there is between them a substantial “middle ground” where they overlap. This overlap involves both themes and style. Several themes in particular can be found here. Both official and dissident song tends to idealize woman, and to be patriotic. And songs not written for publication do not as a rule break the stylistic taboos that hold in official Soviet literature.

But guitar poetry in the main and at its most characteristic is an expression of dissent from officially promoted and accepted forms, themes, and style. As such, it has a good deal in common with other kinds of dissident Russian literature. Like them, it deals with forbidden subjects, opposes official themes and attitudes both implicitly and explicitly, uses language that is too frank and realistic to be tolerated in the media, and is a haven for irresponsible humor.

The precondition for the rise to popularity of guitar poetry was the tape recorder in private hands. It has been the only genre in which technological developments have been exploited by creative artists themselves to bypass and overcome the official monopoly on the public media in the USSR. The existence of private tape recorders meant that the guitar song was outside official control and could not be suppressed. For the first time in the long history of Russian dissident song, there was a medium that gave the author’s message permanence. With magnitizdat, dissident song moved out of folklore and into literature.

The success of guitar poetry has fed to a considerable extent on the failure of official song to capture the hearts, minds, and memories of Soviet citizens, partly because of the fact that normal people naturally resent and resist anything that is forced down their throats. And under Soviet conditions, media saturation has been achieved more completely than by any other official ideology in modern history. But the ideological control of official song has made it incapable of satisfying the requirements that seem essential if any work of art is to become genuinely popular: that it provide either a credible representation of people’s actual lives or a tempting alternative to them. Official Soviet song, like Soviet literature, cannot deal with everyday life as it actually is for most Russian people, because reality contradicts officially enforced claims about what the Bolshevik Revolution has meant for the people. And the mythological alternative that official ideology promotes, the promise of a radiant future for all mankind, commands no suspension of disbelief.

Guitar poetry does not suffer from these shortcomings. It can speak in natural language about everyday life as people know it to be; it has done so mainly in the work of Galich and Vysotsky. And it can provide myths that promise a palatable escape from everyday life; that it has done mainly in the work of Okudzhava and to a lesser extent that of Vysotsky. These two functions come together in providing a sense of consolation. On the one hand, people are assured that their problems are understood by others and not faced by them alone as individuals; and on the other, they are assured that man is capable of inventing an escape from the dictatorship of immediate reality. Guitar poetry has provided this consolation. And like other forms of dissident literature, it has also testified to the great historical experience of the Russian people, and to their private experience, in a way whose authenticity is beyond the reach of official art.

The three outstanding individuals who chose and developed guitar poetry as their medium of expression have each made a distinct contribution above and beyond the general achievement of the genre as a whole. In the last analysis, there are in the works of the great guitar poets three contrasting interpretations of the nature and purpose of human life. For Vysotsky, human life is hard and unjust, but it is knowable and susceptible to change through man’s own efforts, even if only by a despairing individual act of revenge. For Okudzhava, life is sad most of the time, illuminated occasionally by the example of certain charismatic individuals and by the glow of certain ideals, chief among them being love. But in the last analysis life is unknowable, leaving humans baffled in their attempts to encompass it. Finally, for Galich, as for Vysotsky, life may be understood and manipulated. But the manipulation is performed by forces of evil. And in the last analysis life is absurd, especially when viewed in the light of man’s solemn moralizing about it.

The work of the three great guitar poets also offers an instructive case study in the relationships between experience and expression in verbal art. All three poets write about war. But the only one of them who actually experienced it, Okudzhava, deals with the subject in a much more abstract, detached fashion than the others; their impressions were second-hand, deriving from service in the rear (Galich) and the stories of a father and uncle (Vysotsky) who both had outstanding combat records. Galich, who wrote about the GULag primarily as a debt of honor to a beloved cousin who spent many years in the camps, but had no personal knowledge of them, created some of the most powerful artistic treatments of the phenomenon. Vysotsky’s criminal underworld, whose authenticity in language and morals has been repeatedly endorsed, seems to have been based on an extrapolation from the poet’s experience of Moscow’s intellectual bohemia.

The three great guitar poets also had contrasting individual styles within the framework of the genre’s communal features. Okudzhava was a wistful lyricist and melodist whose agnostic attitude toward the “accursed questions” was expressed through gentle, evocative, and genuinely fresh images. Vysotsky was the spokesman for urban homo sovieticus, using the language of the backstreets to tell anecdotes and to howl out the pain of his self-destructive personality. Galich was a suave teller of black satirical stories, a dramatic and narrative poet whose attitudes were projected through dozens of fictional personae. Together, their work forms a major strand in Russian dissident literature of the post-Stalin era. Individually, their fates exemplify contrasting resolutions of the conflict between the creative individual and the Soviet authorities during this period. Okudzhava adjusted, survived, and has been increasingly accepted; Vysotsky drove himself to destruction in a tormenting dilemma between revolt and accommodation; and Galich was persecuted and driven out, his work anathematized in his native country.

Guitar poetry was at its peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At this time, the three great poet-singers were all composing and performing inside Russia. Each one had built up a repertoire of songs sufficient to define himself as a distinct creative individual. And then disintegration set in. Okudzhava faded out as a writer of songs in the wake of his brush with the Party in 1972. Galich was forced into emigration in 1974, and by that time he had virtually exhausted himself as a creative writer. Vysotsky grew more desperate and despairing. He continued to write and sing songs at the furious pace characteristic of everything he did until death caught up with him in 1980. His death meant that the great active era of guitar poetry had come to an end. But the tapes of magnitizdat have survived and will continue to preserve the authentic contemporary record of this remarkable poetic form.

There are no signs that a second generation of guitar poets is ready to carry on the work of the original masters. Instead, if anything, the next generation of dissident singers in the USSR has turned away from the forms and themes of guitar poetry and is looking to Western rock music as a source of inspiration.¹ All in all, it seems likely that guitar poetry will move into history along with the people who created and received it with such alacrity in the 1960s and 1970s.