THE SOVIET “MASS SONG” produced by the corps of professional songwriters and composers, and the officially approved folklore and literary heritage that go along with it, receiving active promotion from all the enormous resources that the Party-state axis commands, form a large segment at one end of the spectrum of song in modem Russia. There are no clearly definable boundaries separating this body of song from the next area on the infinitely gradated and constantly shifting spectrum that leads ultimately to the underground song at the opposite end. But there is an area of this spectrum that needs some examination as a point of reference, even if it cannot be defined with any great precision. This “middle ground” lies between what is actively promoted and what is actively persecuted by the authorities.

Part of the difficulty of definition arises from the fact that the very concept of ideological neutrality is officially unacceptable in the USSR. The principle that “he who is not for us is against us” may sometimes be held in abeyance for quite long periods, but it is never forgotten. Also, it is axiomatic that anything actually published in the USSR, whatever the medium, is in a real sense “official,” since the state has an economic monopoly of the media and controls access to them through its system of censorship. Nevertheless, in song as in all the other branches of the arts, the controllers tolerate a good deal of material which, while not explicitly promoting official attitudes, does not actually say anything that could be interpreted as hostile to them or incompatible with them.

The limits of toleration in the USSR, as everywhere else, are the focus of a continuous contest between the producers of cultural artifacts and the interests involved in the media. In the West, what is transmitted by the media is the result of a very long series of compromises involving artists, managers, producers, editors, trade unions, accountants, sponsors, lawyers, and agents, all of whom have their own motives and interests. In the USSR, the agencies that intervene between the artist and the public are probably not as complex or as insidious, but they are certainly more effective as interference, certainly more rigid and doctrinaire, and certainly more firmly rooted in a monolithic ideology. One can never be certain of the extent to which a text that is published in the USSR represents the author’s intention—assuming, that is, that there is a final product at all, and that it has not come to grief somewhere within the control system, or been dismissed as unrealizable by the author at the moment of conception. But within the system there is a certain amount of give-and-take, and the threshold of toleration shifts sometimes even from month to month as the result of the interplay between the creative process and the factors that are interposed between its products and the public.

There are also in the USSR, as elsewhere, various levels or degrees of publication, which are especially important in the case of songs. The most common location of a song belonging to the “middle ground” is not words on paper but more ephemeral modes of publication. The vast output of Soviet radio and TV includes songs which may have come in for bitter criticism by established songwriters because of the low standard of their words and music. Just as is the case everywhére, an overwhelming proportion of the material spewed out every day by the broadcasting media is trash, ephemeral both in the intentions of its creators and in the consciousness of its consumers. It is enough to listen to the Youth channel of Moscow Radio for a couple of hours to realize that if the material were deemed worthy of really serious checking by the ideological controllers, it could not possibly be passed. It is not actively subversive, but it is almost completely lacking in the positive qualities expected of Soviet art. However, rather than in radio and TV, it is in the theater and films that ideologically suspect or even hostile material persists and gets a public hearing.

One perhaps trivial example is the scene in Bulgakov’s play The Days of the Turbins (Dni Turbinykh), which has been in the repertoire of the Moscow Arts Theater for years, when the tsarist national anthem is played and the White officers on stage stand rigidly to attention. Everybody in the audience knows what the music is, and in this way an ideologically hostile cultural artifact has been preserved in the consciousness of Soviet audiences. Similarly, films which take prerevolutionary Russia as their subject abound in all sorts of songs, especially religious ones, whose words could not possibly be published within the domain of the Soviet system of censorship.

Perhaps the most striking example of this kind of “publication” was the use, in the production of Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet by the Taganka Theater in Moscow, of the Russian poet’s lyric also called “Hamlet.” It is the first in the set of poems appended to the novel Dr. Zhivago as the work of the eponymous hero. Some of these poems, unlike the text of the novel, have been published in the USSR more than once, but “Hamlet” was not published until 1980.¹ Its text movingly explores the plight of the persecuted intellectual, making an analogy with the agony of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. The Taganka performance began with an absolutely bare stage, stripped right back to the bricks of the outside wall behind it. As the stage lights gradually came up in synchronization with the dimming of the house lights, after the audience had taken its seats, the figure of Vladimir Vysotsky became visible. Dressed in his all-black Hamlet costume, he was sitting with his back against the bricks, and quietly strumming the guitar he cradled in his lap. As the lights grew stronger, he got up and walked to front center stage, and then sang Pasternak’s lyric to a soft guitar accompaniment. The effect was breathtaking—the underground poetsinger performing in his own inimitable way the most profound underground words of the great persecuted poet. This production of Hamlet was in the repertoire of the Taganka Theater for eight years and has been seen by thousands and thousands of Soviet citizens—who know the poem by heart anyway from samizdat copies. And yet, technically, strictly speaking, this poem was banned and unpublished in the USSR. Paradoxically, through its use by the Taganka Theater, it is well known and has been brought to the consciousness of an uncountably greater number of people than spare a glance for, say, the latest bunch of Yevtushenko lyrics in a large-circulation newspaper like the Literary Gazette (Literaturnaya gazeta).

In the middle ground there is also a considerable body of non-Soviet songs, Russian and translated, that for various reasons have been published and recorded in the USSR. Perhaps the most interesting example is the work of the great cabaret singer Alexander Vertinsky (1889–1957). Vertinsky emigrated after the Revolution, but he returned to Russia in 1943 and was active as a performer until the end of his life. His performances were not genuinely public but were restricted to “closed” occasions with the audience either carefully selected or with entrance available only to members of the specific institution sponsoring the performance. The exotic strangeness of Vertinsky’s decadent songs and style—something like those of Noel Coward—in the USSR in wartime has been described by Alexander Shtein.² The popularity of Vertinsky’s songs in the 1960s was documented by Mikhailo Mikhailov.³ That was long before Soviet recordings of Vertinsky were released, which happened on a small scale in the 1970s.

Songs like those of Vertinsky have a clandestine, or at most semipublic, existence. But the decadence and escapism of his songs are not entirely absent from “official” song. Outside the USSR, attention has always naturally focused on the exceptional, untypical, problematical, or “scandalous” products of Soviet culture. The run-of-themill, the average, tends to be ignored. However, the nature of this material is not what most people would think it is—stiff, heavily official work on approved themes like Lenin and the Party, tractor drivers and milkmaids—although there certainly is plenty of this dreary hackwork, exuding the uplifting philosophy that was attested in the official hymns. It comes as something of a surprise to learn, for example, that even in the years when Stalinism was at its most oppressive after the postwar clampdown, in Soviet poetry the dominant theme was one of escape, as Vera Dunham’s pioneering work has demonstrated.⁴ There was indeed some factographic work about the war, but there was even more of what Professor Dunham called “rhymed mushrooms”—verse about an artificial, “style-russe” countryside with echoes of a mythical Slavonic past. And the most frequently expressed aspiration by poets was for silence and peace, rather than for commitment to the communal political tasks of the present day. Findings such as these suggest that it may in fact be the “middle ground” of tolerated failure to write the Party’s bidding that actually makes up the bulk of Soviet art.

In terms of the song, it is the treatment of love that seems to offer the maximum leeway for publishing authors to depart from optimism, commitment, and positive thinking. One of the most popular recent Soviet love songs is “Weeping Willow” (“Ivushka,” 1958), by the otherwise obscure wordsmith Vasily Alferov:

A golden evening sunset

Shines over the river.

Dear weeping willow,

Calm my heart.

Green weeping willow,

Bending over the river,

Tell me, tell me without keeping secrets

Where is my love?

There were meetings with my darling

Under your boughs.

And every evening the nightingale

Sang us songs.

But my sweetheart has gone away

And he won’t come back.

With the song of the nightingale

Love too has ended.

Green weeping willow,

Bending over the river,

Tell me, tell me without keeping secrets

Where is my love?

[RSP, 592]

This unremittingly sad song is publishable probably because of its immaculate folkloristic accessories. The timelessness and conventionality of the style make the otherwise unacceptably gloomy message and tone acceptable. But it is possible to go even further in print. An established poet can, it seems, publish work that would appear to be quite incompatible with official canons. For example, Robert Rozhdestvensky, whose work was mentioned earlier in the context of official song, has the following lyric from 1974. It is called “Sweet Berry” (“Sladka yagoda,” 1974):

The sweet berry lures you into the wood,

Amazes you with its ripe freshness.

The sweet berry makes your head spin,

The bitter berry sobers you up.

I don’t know what’s happening to me,

Why they grow the way they do—

The sweet berry only in spring,

The bitter berry all year round.

Oh, cruel fate, like a mountain,

Has tired me out and used me up.

Of the sweet berry only a handful,

Of the bitter, two bucketfuls.

Go on, laugh at my trouble,

From the window watch me go.

We picked the sweet berry together,

The bitter berry I pick alone.

[RSP, 386]

The protagonist in this song, as the grammatical form of the Russian makes clear, is a woman. Rozhdestvensky here uses traditional Russian folk imagery to articulate a lament for the loss of sexual innocence and to assert a resigned view of woman’s life as timeless and tragic. The text of this song appears along with the same poet’s calls to do one’s duty by the Komsomol, march in step with right-thinking youth, and so on, in the anthology from which all the examples of official songs have been taken so far. Rozhdestvensky’s song shows that the “middle ground” can stretch a long way away from the official, even within the work of a single author.

One song that became extremely popular among young people in the early 1960s is “If I Should Fall Ill. . . .” Its words were written in 1949 by Yaroslav Smelyakov (1913–1972), a very talented poet whose life was one of continual persecution and privation, including two periods of arrest and one term as a prisoner of war. He eventually emerged, toward the end of his life, into high official standing.

If I should fall ill,

I won’t turn to any doctors.

I appeal to my friends

(Don’t start thinking I’m delirious):

Make up the steppe for me like a bed,

Hang mist at my windows,

And at the bedhead set

The night star.

I always walked straight ahead,

I wasn’t known as a namby-pamby.

If I am wounded

In fair fight,

Bandage my head

With a mountain road,

And wrap me up in a blanket

Patterned with autumn flowers.

Powders and drops—

I need neither.

In my tumbler

Let sunrays shine.

The hot wind of the deserts,

The silver of the waterfall,

Those are the best medicine.

From the seas and mountains

Comes a strong scent of passing centuries;

You only have to look at them to sense

That we live forever.

My path is not strewn with white capsules [oblatkami]

But with clouds [oblakami].

I will leave you not down a hospital corridor

But down the Milky Way.

[RSP, 463–64]

The religious impulse that has been so rigorously channeled into secular themes since the Revolution is here simply bursting for expression. The poem expresses a yearning for an untrammeled, direct, unmediated life, in contact with natural forces, a yearning that is central to many Soviet lyrics. In this respect, the song does contain, implicitly at least, a note of dissatisfaction with the bureaucratization, institutionalization, and urbanization that are characteristic of Soviet life. But the text cannot be interpreted unambiguously in this way. It has the same vagueness, the same lack of focus and specificity, as the official songs. Refreshingly, though, it lacks any of the accessories that crop up so often when nature comes into official song. There is no birch tree, for example. And there is a generally optimistic, life-enhancing ring to the poem. But it would be difficult indeed to see it as a positive exemplification of Socialist Realist art.

A Soviet critic writing in the mid-1960s asserted that “the most popular song at present . . . justly called the anthem of tourists, climbers, geologists, and students” is “The Globe.”⁵ The song goes as follows:

I don’t know where you and I

Will happen to meet again,

The globe goes round and round

Like a sky-blue balloon . . .

Cities and countries flash past,

Parallels and meridians,

But the dotted lines haven’t been made yet

Along which we will wander the world.

I know there is an undiscovered

Latitude of latitudes,

Where a wonderful friendship

Is bound to bring us together . . .

And then we’ll discover that boldly

We were both taking on a great cause,

And the places where you and I went

Have been marked on the maps of the world.⁶

The general optimism of this text, in which the protagonists are aware of themselves as individuals but also socially conscious, makes it acceptable for public performance in the Soviet media. But its central idea says nothing that explicitly supports Socialist Realism or any other particular ideology. The song finds a satisfyingly concrete expression for a universal longing for justified trust in a friend and confidence in one’s professional activities in the face of the unknown. Whether the “undiscovered latitude of latitudes” is a coy reference to life after death is a tantalizing question.

Almost as popular as “The Globe,” again according to Dobrovol’sky, is another song that for many years was not sponsored by the media but existed as folklore, mainly among campers and hikers. It is “The Brigantine” (“Brigantina”) by Pavel Kogan, a poet who was killed in combat in 1942 at the age of 24:

We’re tired of talking and arguing,

Of loving tired eyes . . .

In a far-off filibustering sea

There’s a brigantine making sail . . .

The captain, windswept like the cliffs,

Has gone to sea without waiting for us . . .

Raise in farewell your goblets

Of tart golden wine.

We drink to the malcontents, the unlike ones,

The ones who’ve despised a cheap refuge.

The Jolly Roger flaps in the wind,

Flint’s people are singing a song.

That is how we say goodbye

To our silvery, most sacred dream,

Filibusters and adventurers

By blood which is taut and thick.

If trouble, joy, or sadness comes along,

Just narrow your eyes a bit, that’s all.

In a distant filibustering sea

A brigantine is making sail.

The Jolly Roger flaps in the wind,

Flint’s people are singing a song.

And, our glasses ringing, we too

Begin our little song.

We’re tired of talking and arguing,

Of loving tired eyes . . .

In a far-off filibustering sea

There’s a brigantine making sail . . .⁷

Apart from the direct reference, in the person of Captain Flint, to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, enormously popular since its first translation into Russian in 1886, this text is heavily marked by the spirit of the most eminent Russian poet of adventure in exotic lands, Nikolai Gumilev, who since his execution for being a counterrevolutionary in 1921 has remained unpublished and almost completely unpersoned in the USSR, but who nevertheless exerted a strong influence on prewar Soviet poetry. What is also striking about Kogan’s song is that it was written in the dread year 1937, at the height of Stalin’s Great Terror. To understand its appeal in terms mainly of escapism, comparable with the novels of Alexander Grin (1880–1932), is obvious but unavoidable. The song is apolitical, implies values that have nothing to do with official ones, and has the appeal of a simple, morally direct code that makes life carefree and straightforward, far away from familiar surroundings.

“The Brigantine,” in the way that successful songs often do, spawned a number of successors. One of them neatly ties up the ethos of the song with the milieu in which it characteristically flourished. It is by the successful official songwriter Mikhail Tanich, and was written in 1966. It is called “City of Tents” (“Palatochnyi gorod”):

We live in mosquito country

And want no easy life.

We love our tent,

Full sister to the brigantine.

In the taiga the insects swarm,

And the post takes its time.

Forward once more

Like a fleet under sail

The city of tents sails on!

In our rucksacks are cities

And the crests of concrete dams.

River water splashes

Against the canvas hull of the brigantine.

Our long route in the taiga

Will be marked on the map in time to come.

Forward once more . . .

You can come if you want—risk it!—

To our canvas discomfort,

Where there aren’t many lights,

And guitars sing at night.

At night paraffin burns

On the decks of all the brigantines.

And forward once more . . .

Far-off places will be settled,

The tents be sent to a museum,

And the streets here be named

After our friends.

But all this will be later on,

After we’ve gone from here.

And forward once more . . .

[RSP, 638–39]

“City of Tents” is one of a very large number of modem Russian songs about what might loosely be called the romance of pioneering. The theme became a subject of intense official promotion during the “Virgin Lands Campaign” of Khrushchev. This policy gave birth to dozens of songs in which young people fly away from the cities into the taiga wastes, full of joyful anticipation, eager to work and build. But these songs also express a theme of universal appeal that this time coincided with the official drive to recruit young people for voluntary service in Siberia—the romantic urge to escape into wild nature. And the milieu created in the virgin lands was an important one for the creation and transmission of unofficial songs. Lev Kopelev made the connection between the great guitar poets and the culture of the virgin lands:

. . . the eminent singers were preceded by and coexisted with the amateur activity (samodeyatelnost’) of geologists, tourists, and the student brigades of “virgin-landers” (tselinniki). As they put distance between themselves and the ruling, “industrially” standardizing civilization, the gloomy clichés of propaganda, and all kinds of cultural work done according to plan, these groups of traveling young companions often became hotbeds of freedom and liberty. On the road in their leisure time they sang songs, as people always sing in these circumstances in Russia and The Ukraine, yes, and probably in all the other regions of our country. And most often there’s a guitar to accompany these singers.⁸

The popularity of the last three songs that have been quoted, and their rise into the middle ground, were part and parcel of a tendency in the arts during the post-Stalin phase away from solemnity and rigidity, away from the mandatory concern with man as a social animal, confident and aggressive. These songs were not written for the official media and supplied with music by recognized composers according to normal process with the mass song. In the case of Smelyakov’s text, the words were not even specifically intended to be sung. The words of these songs were taken up “by the people” and became detached from their authors. They did not exist through the public media as entertainment or propaganda but were sung mainly on informal occasions, away from the metropolitan centers or on the fringe of the official network of cultural activity.

This fringe, in which the “middle ground” of song comes into its own, is difficult to define with any precision. The public part of it is located in those facilities that exist in the USSR for leisure activities of a cultural nature. They include cafés, the clubs that are attached to practically every industrial enterprise of any size, and the Houses of Culture, the institutions that serve (and organize) cultural activities on a local level. What goes on in these establishments is referred to in Soviet jargon as samodeyatelnost’, “doing it yourself,” with connotations something like those of the word “amateur” in English.⁹ The term covers anything not performed by professionals, even though professionals might be and probably are involved in a supervisory capacity. Insofar as samodeyatelnost’ exists within institutions like the clubs, efforts are made to bring it within the control system. For the most part, samodeyatelnost’ involves collective or group activities such as choirs, theatricals, dance, and musical ensembles (particularly ones using folk instruments like the balalaika); creative writing groups exist, too. For all these things, professional advice and practical help are channeled by the appropriate unions as part of their professional activities. Thus, for example, poets are expected to provide a roster of visits to creative writing groups in their area. This professional intervention forms the lowest level of the pyramid of state-sponsored artistic activity in the USSR.

Less formal than the clubs and Houses of Culture, and less susceptible to organization, are the opportunities that such leisure activities as camping and hiking offer for the singing of songs. In fact, “The Globe” and “The Brigantine” are especially popular in this milieu, and apparently existed within it during the years intervening between their composition and their emergence into a more public role in the 1950s.

The individual’s singing of songs to his own guitar accompaniment is a mode of performance that has existed in these environments since time immemorial. (The military is also sometimes said to be another environment in which guitar-accompanied solo song has persisted.) The reasons are obvious. A working technique on the guitar for accompanying the vast majority of songs is fairly easily acquired; the instrument is a fully adequate accompaniment in itself and is portable and, obviously, it leaves the vocal organs free for singing. At the end of the 1950s, guitar-accompanied solo song was taken up by several poets and developed into a new “serious” art form. What had been for years a subcultural activity, not much more than mere entertainment, began to seem appropriate to more serious, more demanding artistic purposes.

The most important stimulus was the general atmosphere of the early Khrushchev period.¹⁰ The “Secret Speech” of 1956 seemed to imply that the way would be opened for more informal, individual work, which would not have to fulfil all the requirements that had strapped the arts under Stalin. The emergence of poets who sang alongside those who declaimed their work was part of a general opening up and loosening in the arts, with opportunities for more direct contact between artist and public. The most celebrated manifestation of this tendency was the institution of Poetry Day, the first of which was held in September 1955. It is defined in the Short Literary Encyclopedia (Kratkaya literaturnaya entsiklopediya) as follows:

Poetry Day: The day of the mass meeting between Soviet poets and their readers, a form of active propaganda of poetry . . . it is held every autumn in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and other cities; organized by workers in the book trade and poets. On Poetry Day poets stand behind the counters of bookshops and sell books, read their work, answer readers’ questions, sign autographs. Poets also give readings, make appearances in squares, clubs, and so on, sometimes getting an audience of more than 75,000 listeners. . . .¹¹

The reaction of the public to the early “Days” was ecstatic. In his Precocious Autobiography, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, one of the leading lights in this movement, has given an account of how in the later 1950s poetry was in the vanguard of the revitalization of cultural life. The absolute high point at the time he was writing was the attendance of 14,000 people at a poetry reading at the Palace of Sport in Moscow. Among the writers he considers to have been on the side of change and movement at the time, Yevtushenko identifies Pasternak, Dudintsev, Yury Kazakov, Aksenov, Akhmadulina, Voznesensky, Rozhdestvensky, and “the poet Bulat Okudzhava,” who

in the evening sat with two or three friends, a glass of vodka and a guitar, singing his lyrics, without suspecting that in a few years they would be heard on thousands of tape-recorders.¹²

Another Poetry Day activity was observed in 1967 by Olga Carlisle:

Last fall in the vicinity of the Pushkin monument I heard several beatniklike young men, so much like their Western counterparts with their beards and guitars, sing Esenin’s menacing lyrics:

I too will cut a throat

to the whistling of autumn.

Certain singers continue this tradition; they write their own songs in the popular vein, drawing mostly on contemporary urban folklore.¹³

By the mid-1960s, the poet accompanying himself on the guitar had become a familiar phenomenon in Soviet cultural life. Its rising popularity had to be officially dealt with and accounted for. But commentators were rather at a loss as to how to deal with it, or even what to call it. The earliest substantial discussion of the subject was by the well-known critic Yury Andreev. It appeared in January 1965 in the right-of-center literary periodical October (Oktyabr’).¹⁴ Andreev felt compelled to defend his interest in the subject against colleagues who thought it unworthy of the attention of a serious literary critic. The remarks he attributes to his detractors are interesting, because they reflect attitudes that have persisted to this day:

What are you on about, those semiunderworld [polublatnye] little songs they were singing at that concert at our institute?

Listen, drop that bright idea of yours! Life’s too short, there’s so much to do, it’s simply criminal to waste time studying all kinds of vulgar froth. . . .”

“Surely not the modem ‘minstrels?’ We can’t find space for that!”—snapped the deputy editor of a “thick journal” categorically.¹⁵

The term Andreev uses for the object of his study is samodeyatel’naya pesnya, perhaps best translated as “amateur song.” He also uses the term ashug to refer to the poet-singers; it is the Kazak word for a singing folk poet, an appealing term which has not caught on. Andreev lists a total of 26 “ashugs,” making no distinction between them in terms of ability or talent. The list includes both Okudzhava and Galich (but not Vysotsky); also Gorbovsky, Kukin, Ancharov, Matveeva, Vizbor, Kim, Aleshkovsky, and Klyachkin, as well as a rump of authors who have never been heard of before or since.

Andreev’s analysis of the actual content of the amateur songs is constructed in terms of their thematic range’s being so wide as to take in all the colors of the rainbow. There is the red of “our life”: the “civic, courageous lyric,” about the casualties of war, perhaps, but always optimistic and enhancing. Then there is the green of nature, where the singer rejoices in the beauty and wonder of the natural world that surrounds him. There is the yellow, or rather pure gold, of “fantasy and dream, romantic invention” (the field leader here is Pavel Kogan’s “Brigantina”.) Then there is the orange color of love, associated in this way by Andreev because orange is the most prominent color, just as love is the most prominent theme. In an insert into his main scheme, Andreev mentions what to an outsider is probably the most distinctive thing about the amateur songs he is discussing, namely, their “antibombastic” nature, their “nonacceptance of sugariness and false exaltation.” Andreev does not, of course, spell out exactly where in Soviet life the main source of the target of this negative quality might be located! He identifies this quality with the rich humor that the songs possess. When he goes back to his spectrum of colors, it is to deal summarily with the range from violet to black. He primly refuses to “name names” with regard to the authors of any “violet” songs. Andreev concludes his article by asking about the nature of the amateur song as a Soviet cultural phenomenon. He realizes that the reason for its rise and flowering is that “professional songwriters at this particular stage have not been able sufficiently to express the moods and feelings of young people.”¹⁶ However, Andreev’s discussion runs into the ground as he asks whether or not these songs can count as folklore (thereby implying positive cultural value). His inevitable conclusion is that in terms of the older criteria for validating folklore (collective composition, anonymity, oral transmission, variability of texts), they do not fit the bill. Finally, he wonders if in modern conditions, after the Soviet cultural revolution, now that there is universal literacy, the time has perhaps come to revise the criteria for folklore in order to take in the amateur song.

Andreev’s article has the general merit of being fairly open-minded about a phenomenon that for an establishment critic like him is fraught with all sorts of difficult implications concerned with defining the limits of tolerability in a particular art form. But he is not traducing the material when he finds that the bulk of it is quite compatible with Soviet criteria of acceptability. In fact, it is even highly orthodox thematically, informed by the same positive, optimistic, progressive views as the official song, and quite acceptable stylistically.

More objective and comprehensive than Andreev was B. M. Dobrovol’sky, whose essay appeared in 1968 as a contribution to a very serious volume dealing with all aspects of the use of folklore in “amateur artistic activities” (khudozhestvennaya samodeyatel’nost’).¹⁷ Dobrovol’sky uses the rather clumsy phrase “urban youth’s contemporary songs of everyday life” (sovremennye bytovye pesni gorodskoi molodezhi) to label his subject. The main point of his essay was to assert, with numerous examples, that there is no evidence of an interest in traditional Russian folklore among contemporary urban youth. These people have their own songs, whose origins and history have not been studied and whose texts are unpublished, but which have just as good a claim on the interest of scholars, on an aesthetic and every other ground, as traditional Russian folklore. Dobrovol’sky gives a valuable, concise historical survey of the evolution of the repertoire, citing songs from before the Revolution and from each successive period of Soviet history. And he examines the reasons why certain songs have stayed in the repertoire and others have not.

Dobrovol’sky says that in the late 1950s and early 1960s a new kind of song appeared, the “author’s song” (avtorskaya pesnya). The conditions fostering its growth were as follows:

The opening of “youth cafés” (with volunteer labor, another form of amateur activity) and song clubs; the organization of concerts by enthusiasts among the authors, collectors, and active listeners, and of amateur arts festivals and competitions; and the circulation of songs in taped copies and duplicated manuscript collections led to a remarkable expansion of the audience, and made “author’s songs” known to the public at large.¹⁸

The singers Dobrovol’sky regards as the founders of the author’s song are Yakusheva, Vizbor, Matveeva, Klyachkin, Gorodnitsky, Vikhorev, Poloskin, Dulov, Kim, “and many others.”

Dobrovol’sky has high praise for the artistic merits of songs by Matveeva, Gorodnitsky, and especially Kim. But he treads warily when he comes to the far end of the repertoire of song. He asserts that a special category among the songs known by contemporary urban youth is “songs for listening.” These are “songs which are accepted by the audience only in the author’s performance,” those of Klyachkin and Poloskin being Dobrovol’sky’s cautious examples. The reason why they can still properly be considered “mass” songs is that they are so “thanks to circulating in amateur tape recordings.” Finally, Dobrovol’sky attempts to define the specific characteristics of “author’s songs.” In one important respect he is absolutely right, if rather clumsy:

The distinguishing feature of the creative activity of urban youth with regard to contemporary song is that now the author of the song is most often the creator of the entire musical-poetic complex.

And he describes the way the song enters the folk memory:

. . . . it begins as part of everyday life—on tourist and climbers’ hikes, on geologists’ expeditions, at student evenings and so on. . . . The next stage is the encounter between the song and the masses in youth cafés, clubs, and Houses of Culture. These meeting-concerts are “amateur” (samodeyatel’ny). They take place as a result of the initiative of youth groups—lovers of song, who make up the evening’s program, set up the premises, design and distribute the tickets, and so on.¹⁹

Dobrovol’sky’s article will remain a valuable contemporary testimony to the actual conditions under which the guitar-accompanied solo song began to emerge and took a firm hold in Soviet culture.

The terminological difficulties encountered by Andreev and Dobrovol’sky have never really been resolved. The guitar poets are still referred to by a large number of terms: poet-singer (poet-pesennik), chansonnier (shanson’e), balladeer (balladnik), minstrel (menestrel’), bard (bard), even troubadour (trubadur) and minnesinger (minnizinger). The history of this group of words has been discussed by a leading Soviet lexicologist, A. A. Bragina, in a passage that incidentally says quite a lot about the history of middle-ground song.²⁰ The word shanson’e is attested in Russian as early as 1864; a century later, says Bragina, it has the meaning “a singer who pays attention to the word, to the content of his song.” Bragina notes the increasing use of menestrel’ and bard as synonyms for the age-old native Russian word pevets; bard is first attested in the eighteenth century, menestrel’ in the midnineteenth. She quotes an advertisement for a concert in the Palace of Sport in Luzhniki, Moscow in May 1966, at which there is to be a section devoted to “bards and minstrels.” Her most revealing sample of the word is as follows:

There has been much writing and argument about the contemporary bards . . . their songs have been condemned more often than they have been praised . . . just try to buy a guitar these days—you’ll have no luck. . . . Undoubtedly, this phenomenon is connected with the widespread impact of the songs of the bards, which are sung exclusively to the guitar. . . . But let’s remember that the songs of the bards started getting popular in the late forties and early fifties (now the amateur singers can be divided into generations—there is an older one and a middle one, and a young one has already appeared.)²¹

In the mid-1960s, then, Soviet literary critics were trying to describe and explain a new force in Russian poetry and song, the essence of which they saw in its amateur nature. This movement was not without parallel outside the USSR.

Popular music in the West has been transformed in the last twenty years with the rise of rock music in all its forms. The essence of the rock revolution in the beginning was, however much subsequent developments may have traduced this factor, to thrust a lack of professionalism, an unschooled, rough, jagged kind of content and form, into the smooth, overslick, and therefore insincere-sounding popular music of the fifties. The USSR was not insulated from this impulse. But the roots of the turn against officially approved, establishment professionalism grew in native soil whose fertility was even greater potentially than that in the West. It was, as we have said, the soil turned over by the de-Stalinization of Russian life and culture in the wake of Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” to the XX Congress of the Party in 1956.

However much the political factor may have been the real but unspoken issue underlying concern with the rise of guitar poetry, it was on the grounds of professionalism that resistance to it was mounted. Of course, in song as in literature and all the other aspects of the arts, there is in the USSR a powerful vested interest in the maintenance of the status quo. The established professional has his credibility and status at stake. It would be a mistake to think that the relative lack of pressure from the marketplace means that the official songwriter in the USSR is insulated from extraartistic pressure. He is without doubt most consistently pressurized by the ideological watchdogs. But he has his own professional concerns, too.

The route by which an issue is brought to public debate in the USSR is never entirely clear. It is most likely that concern expressed inside the Union of Writers or the Union of Composers about the rise of amateur songmaking, perhaps stimulated by Andreev’s article, led to an editorial in the Literary Gazette on 15 April 1965 entitled “Youth, Song, Guitar” (“Molodost’, pesnya, gitara”). This editorial gave an overview of the current situation, recognizing that young people were turning away from the offerings of the official providers of “mass songs” and starting to create their own material. The titles alone of the “responses” to the editorial speak volumes. First came L. Pereverzev with “The Modern ‘Bards’ and ‘Minstrels’ ” (15 April), an indication of the official line accompanying the original stimulus for the debate by a recognized musicologist. Then came I. Dzerzhinsky, a composer, with “Ought We Really Begin with Advertisements?” which appeared on 24 April and proclaimed that there was a real issue, which was not being tackled in the right way. M. Tabachnikov, also a composer, published “The Guitar Is Not to Blame,” also on 24 April, drawing attention to what he saw as the fundamental issues: content rather than form. Next, on 29 April, came a salvo from on high, in the form of an article by Lev Oshanin, “The Birth of a Song,” full of ponderous official platitudes. Then came a restatement of the need for the official songwriters to shake up their ideas, with the singer V. Goncharenko’s “What Ought They to Sing?” on 13 May. Another singer, M. Mikhailov, stated that the official line would prevail: “The Song Will Remain with Us” on 20 May; then came the composer Mokrousov with a smug view from the winning side whose victory was a foregone conclusion, “The Victor Is Not Judged” (“Pobeditelya ne sudyat”) on 27 May. Finally, there was a ponderous broadside from the most senior living writer of official “mass songs,” Solov’ev-Sedoi, on 3 June. He reused the title of the original editorial, for which he had almost certainly been a consultant, if he was not indeed the actual author. His concern was to condemn recent trends in the field of song. He reported among other shocking things that he had recently heard a group of students singing near one of the Neva harbors; he said that their songs were “musical do-it-yourselves, with primitively put-together melody and incoherent text. Something hopeless, pathetic, taken from dance-hall tunes.”²²

The function of this spate of articles was to call attention to the presence of a problem consisting essentially of the threat of an emergent cultural element opposed to the professional establishment. There were some further manifestations of official concern in the later 1960s. In February 1967 the venerable composer Dmitry Kabalevsky complained about “jazzification” as a disease that was rapidly infecting the body of Soviet music.²³ Writing soon after, in March 1967, Mikhail Isakovsky expressed his anxiety that the official mass song had lost its way. He was echoing a complaint that had been made by his colleague Konstantin Vanshenkin in a Pravda article of 4 March about the decline in the standards of Soviet songwriting. Composers, Isakovsky complained, had started imitating Western popular songs, and singers had started imitating their Western counterparts, so that listening to an up-to-date Soviet song “makes you feel as if you’ve swallowed a frog.” Radio and television were to blame, said Isakovsky; they had lowered standards while increasing demand. One estimate was that the Youth (Yunost’) radio station in Moscow alone was using about three hundred new songs a year; and a corps of hackworkers had arisen to meet the demand. As a result, things “on the song front” needed to be set to rights. The 2,185 poets who were members of the Union of Writers at the time (20 February 1967) should surely be able to produce a few good songwriters, argued Isakovsky. His peroration is a good example of Soviet rant:

And so, what we need to do is bring back music into the song and bring back the genuine poetic word—these are the two main conditions on which the future fate of the Soviet song depends. The song our people needs and loves so much.

It is impermissible and simply unthinkable to reconcile ourselves to the music-and-song garbage that to our shame has accumulated in our country in such a great amount. This garbage needs to be decisively and permanently swept away.²⁴

When the Union of Soviet Writers held its IV Congress in Moscow from 22 to 27 May 1967, the delegates were addressed on the fifth day by Lev Oshanin, whose “Lenin Is Always with Thee” was cited earlier. He gave a concise résumé of the history of the Soviet mass song since the Revolution. It had gone through three peak periods, said Oshanin: the mid-1930s, during the war, and then the late 1950s and early 1960s. Among the songs of this third period had been “many bright, profoundly human patriotic works.” Lyrics had appeared that successfully countered the turbid wave of “hits” coming from the West. Genuine feelings had returned to the song, and life in all its multiplicity had been reflected in it. From ritual tribute Oshanin turned to ritual denunciation. He quoted one example of a vulgar song, by A. Gorokhov with music by V. Kuprevich, about a cosmonaut’s nightmare, a piece that had somehow been broadcast. However, the point of Oshanin’s speech, as is usual with these things, was to call the attention of officials to the unsatisfactory state of affairs revealed by the measures recently undertaken by the relevant organizations. In this case there had been, Oshanin reported, a joint meeting of Secretariats of the Union of Writers and the Union of Composers of the RSFSR. Various proposals had been made to tighten up editorial standards and raise the quality of the songs that were being let through, especially on the radio.²⁵

A further indication of the seriousness with which the problem of song was being taken in official circles came in the late 1960s. No less a personage than a Deputy Minister of Culture of the USSR, V. Kukharsky, published an article on the subject in the composers’ journal Soviet Music (Sovetskaya muzyka) late in 1968. This article is directed against amateur singers and their works. It is shot through with one of the cardinal fears of the Soviet bureaucrat, the fear of “drift” (samotek), implying that the Party has failed to fulfil its function as leader and controller of everything that happens.

What is sung most often at these meetings of “bards” “who have made a name for themselves,” what songs are recorded by lovers of the cheap musical fronde on their tapes and records, which are then sold by speculators who are growing fat on these goods at three rubles a go? It’s murky rubbish.

Kukharsky cites some lines from songs by Galich and Vysotsky, and accuses the latter of advocating a specific political program: “propaganda, which consists in sowing doubt, spiritual disarmament, and laying youth to waste.”²⁶

One noticeable blow in the opposite direction to the official onslaught came from the Leningrad musicologist Vladimir Frumkin, who in the late 1960s was actively involved in promoting guitar poetry. In 1969 Frumkin succeeded in publishing an article on the subject in the composers’ journal. Making use of a listeners’ poll he had conducted and his own professional musicological analysis, Frumkin subtly ridiculed some settings that the prestigious composer Matvei Blanter had written for a batch of Okudzhava songs. Okudzhava’s own “amateur” music was found to be much more appropriate and effective than Blanter’s.²⁷ At about the same time, publication permission was withdrawn for Frumkin’s musical edition of some Okudzhava songs. The fundamental reason, Frumkin had no doubt, was the consternation of professional composers at the success of the guitar poets, and of Okudzhava in particular.²⁸

The newspaper Literary Russia (Literaturnaya Rossiya) reported in November 1970 that the Secretariat of the Directorate, RSFSR Union of Writers, had conducted a meeting the previous December between poets and composers. One result of their discussions had been to call for the establishment of a special commission to deal with problems of “song production.” The commission was established, and Lev Oshanin was appointed chairman. A second meeting of poets and composers was called late in January 1971 to deal with the problem of songs in films. Its next meeting, held in May 1971, dealt with the problem of military and patriotic songs; the work of certain poets was recommended for use as texts. But, as far as the published reports enable a judgment to be made, these meetings failed to come to grips with the shortcomings of official song and to propose measures to counter the growing influence of guitar poetry.²⁹

Manifestations of concern such as these on the part of official bodies continued throughout the 1970s. As in all the other branches of the arts, there has been an unending and occasionally very bitter struggle between the authorities (including the artists who side with them) and the various sources of dissidence. The “cultural front” in the USSR is like a battlefield, on which the occupying official troops, with vastly superior equipment and an unmatched intelligence service, are engaged against a numerically superior peasant jacquerie. The former tend to be hampered by their rigid tactics and clumsy command structure, and even more by their outmoded ideology. The latter are helped by the continuous emergence of gifted individual leaders, their flexibility, and their open-mindedness toward innovations in tactics.

If we look at what official opinion was actually objecting to in the attacks on “amateurism” in the song that we have just examined, we may find some surprises.

As we can see from the information given by Andreev and Dobrovol’sky, and from the scraps of evidence contained in the publications of the musical establishment, the songs that evoked such consternation and complaints about falling standards in fact belonged to the “middle ground.” They did not explicitly contradict official attitudes, but neither did they support them. What has subsequently happened to the majority of the people involved in early guitaraccompanied poetry is that although they may have begun by arousing official condemnation and being found to lack the professionalism expected of Soviet songwriters, they have survived. Their work of the time either has been consigned to oblivion or has expanded the body of song that exists in the middle ground. The most signal example is Okudzhava. At the beginning, some of his songs came in for severe criticism, especially because of the pacifism they allegedly advocated. But by the end of the 1970s a large proportion of his repertoire was or had been in print in the USSR, and recordings of his work were available.

The same is true of another poet who emerged singing songs to a guitar in the early 1960s. She is Novella Matveeva (born 1934), who has been steadily publishing lyric poetry since the late 1950s and has several albums issued of guitar-accompanied performances to her lyrics. She has been criticized from time to time for the sin of escapism but has not encountered any really serious persecution.³⁰ Her most famous song is “The Land of Delphinia” (“Strana Del’finiya,” 1964), which she sings in an appealing, rather winsome, little voice:

The dark blue waves come rolling in.

Green ones? No, dark blue.

Like millions of chameleons

Changing their color in the wind.

The glycine blossoms tenderly,

It’s more tender than hoarfrost. . .

And somewhere is the land of Delphinia

And the town of Kangaroo.

It’s a long way away, but what of it?

I too will go away there.

Oh, my God, my God,

What will happen when I’m not there?

The palms will dry up when I’m not there,

The roses will fade away when I’m not there,

The birds will fall silent when I’m not there. . .

That’s what will happen when I’m not there.

Yes, but how many times now has the good ship Porcupine

Sailed off without me?

How can I erase a disaster like that

From my memory?

But yesterday there came, there came, there came

To me a letter, a letter, a letter

Postmarked from my Delphinia,

Franked “Kangaroo.”

White envelopes from the post

Burst open like the buds of a magnolia,

They have the scent of jasmine, but

Here’s what my relations write:

The palms there aren’t drying up while I’m away,

The roses there aren’t fading while I’m away,

The birds aren’t falling silent while I’m away. . .

How can this be while I’m away?

[RSP, 658–59]

This song has been published and recorded many times in the USSR, and toleration of its apolitical nature, escapism, even pessimism may be explained by reference to its absolute vagueness. There is no possible way of interpreting it as a reproach against actual conditions. It expresses only an undirected sadness and longing; the imagery, however, is exotic but conventional, sketching out some locations perhaps to a Russian identifiable with the Crimean coast.

Matveeva continues on her way, the most “overground” of the important figures involved in the guitar-poetry movement. She is not the only one, though. Plenty of songs by other members of the first wave of balladeers were published in the USSR in the 1960s. The most interesting collection of their work was a small anthology, just over one hundred pages long, called How Reliable the Earth Is (Kak nadezhna zemlya), which was published in Moscow in 1969. It was immediately spotted and reprinted under a new cover in the West, with the substitute title The School of Okudzhava (Shkola Okudzhavy).³¹ This title is more informative than the characteristically vague affirmation of the original, and it also takes advantage of the popularity, even notoriety, of Okudzhava’s name in the late 1960s. The anthology is not a collection of “pure” guitar poetry. Besides the work of the true “bards,” responsible for words, music, and performance, it includes a fair number of pieces by teams of composers and lyricists. However, the book gives the most representative picture available of the situation of guitar poetry in the USSR at the end of its first decade of existence. It has the words and music of four songs by Okudzhava, and smaller selections by Ancharov, Yakusheva, Vizbor, Kukin, Klyachkin, and Dulov. Among them are some of the most popular of all the early songs. The claim to the greatest popularity, perhaps excepting the work of Okudzhava and Matveeva, goes to a song by Aleksandr Gorodnitsky about the Atlantes that support the facade of the Hermitage in Leningrad:³²

When your heart is weighed down

And your breast feels cold inside,

To the steps of the Hermitage

Make your way at dusk;

There, without drink or bread,

Forgotten down the ages

The Atlantes hold up the sky

In their stone hands.

. . .

These stone effigies, the song goes on, stand and selflessly carry out their demanding task, while human history goes on around them. The moral of the song is contained in the last verse:

They’re standing there forever,

Their foreheads propped on disaster,

Not gods, but men

Accustomed to heavy labor.

And hope should go on living

For as long as

The Atlantes hold up the sky

In their stone hands.

[ShOk, 8–9]

This song has optimism and humanism. One of its middle verses contains a splendidly patriotic reference to the blockade of Leningrad. But the song is an occupant of the middle ground rather than a full-fledged official “mass song” by virtue of the absence of any specific Socialist Realist features. It also contains an insidious analogy between the Atlantes, with their thankless and permanent strain to do no more than keep things as they are, and the Russian people. This analogy, of course, is quite unacceptable in terms of the official progressive ideology, with its vision of “the bright future for all mankind.”

The anthology accurately reflects the connection between guitaraccompanied song and the open-air movement, because of the substantial number of camping and hiking songs it contains. They include Gorodnitsky’s “My Cities of Tents” (“Moi palatochnye goroda”) and the significantly named “The Last Brigantines” (“Poslednie brigantiny”) by Yu. Andrianova. There are some love songs, and even some “mommy songs” that are entirely worthy of the official prototypes, especially notable being G. Zaidel’s “To My Mother” (“Materi”), which is about a gray-haired griever whose pilot son has perished in a flying accident.

Apart from Okudzhava and Matveeva, most of the authors represented in the anthology had had their day by the late 1960s and early 1970s and then faded away into other spheres of work or into oblivion, leaving perhaps one or two songs in the repertoire of the “middle ground.” Only one of them, again leaving aside Okudzhava and Matveeva, is represented in Russkie sovetskie pesni, 1917–1977. He is Mikhail Nozhkin, with his highly patriotic mass song of the hymn type “Russia” (“Rossiya,” 1967; RSP, 685). Mostly, the authors concerned have become lyricists and occasional writers, supplying texts for songs used on radio and TV and in the theaters. Their work has never been brought together and studied in the USSR and is not regarded as part of the country’s literary history. As we shall see, the involvement of writers who became dissidents has cast a shadow over the entire movement.

The “middle ground,” then, is a significant sector in the spectrum of song. It finds its audience through the more ephemeral media of radio, TV, plays, and films. In doing so, it may meet a very large public indeed, perhaps larger than the public that would take notice of something officially published, recorded, and promoted. The middle ground includes songs written by professionals and performed by other professionals, like the official mass song. But it also has a strong proportion of poets writing their own words and music, and performing them to their own accompaniment, as is the case with Okudzhava and Matveeva. The latter were in the forefront of a move toward amateurism that began in the late 1950s, a move that eventually succeeded in bringing a new element into the middle ground.³³

The songs of the middle ground have several thematic characteristics. They can deal effectively with love, especially the sadder aspects of it. They also have a strong escapist element. The distinguishing tonality is one of relative understatement—an absence, as Andreev pointed out, of the high-flown rhetoric of the official song. Again, though, certain modes are out of reach of the middle ground. Satire and anything but the most benevolent humor are absent. Plenty of thematic and emotional areas also remain that neither the official song nor the middle ground can deal with under Soviet conditions.