THE CROP OF AMATEURS who began writing and performing songs in the late 1950s and early 1960s stayed by and large within the tolerated limits of what has here been called the middle ground. Of the major talents, Okudzhava has largely remained there, despite various trials and tribulations, and some of his work has even joined the repertoire of the official mass song. But there were some other poet-singers whose creative impulse and personality led them in the opposite direction, away from the middle ground and into the undergrowth. Chief among them were Vladimir Vysotsky and Aleksandr Galich. Significantly, their names were almost completely absent from the discussions of “author’s songs” even by early critics who were trying to be objective, like Andreev and Dobrovol’sky. A comparison of what happened to Galich and Vysotsky with what happened to Okudzhava provides a very instructive lesson in the way the Soviet system has treated its creative artists in recent times. To understand the options facing the poet-singers of the 1960s as their work came into conflict with official literary policy, it is necessary to sketch in the background of the position they share with other members of the Soviet creative intelligentsia, and also to take into account the new opportunities for creative dissent that technological advance has provided.¹

If an individual artist becomes unwilling to accept the positive and negative constraints on his freedom of expression that are inextricable from the process of publication in whatever medium in the USSR, and if he wishes actively to dissent rather than to carry on and dissemble, there are four basic ways in which he has been able to act. The first is to “choose silence” (which may be officially interpreted as an active form of dissent), either not producing anything at all or storing the work until such time, perhaps after the author’s death, as publication within Russia becomes possible, or when the consequences of publication will not damage him personally. Writers call this method “working for the drawer,” and it was the choice eventually made, for example, by the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940). The second way is to ignore the Soviet media and send work abroad. This approach became too dangerous after the novelist Boris Pilnyak (1894–1937) fell from grace for doing it unwittingly in 1929. It was then in abeyance until revived by Pasternak, Sinyavsky, and Tarsis in the exceptionally liberal conditions of the mid-1950s. The third way is to emigrate in order to pursue the creative impulse free from Soviet constraints. This device was used by Evgeny Zamyatin (1884–1937) in 1932, and then, if we set aside the emigrations in the chaotic situation during and immediately after World War II, it has become possible again—sometimes as voluntary emigration, sometimes as compulsory exile—since the early 1970s. The fourth way is to remain in the USSR, continue working, and circulate the results by private, clandestine methods.

Not all of the four ways have always been available. In the worst years of Stalinism, there was only the first. And even then it had to be camouflaged by a smokescreen of visible public activity, if the person concerned had any regard for his own physical survival and that of his relatives and associates. The fourth way has been the most frequently used during the postrevolutionary period as a whole. But the four ways are not equally available for other than political reasons. Except for the way of emigration, they are most powerfully affected by the factor of pure technological feasibility.

Of all the factors involved, the purely technological one has been the least studied while at the same time being arguably the single most powerful among them. The fact is that the various branches of the arts differ considerably with respect to the extent and nature of the technological resources they need for their expression. Because they are technologically the most demanding, film and TV are utterly at the mercy of the official monopoly in the USSR, and there is no significant dissident activity in these areas. There are only various kinds of “bending the rules,” getting away with greater or lesser infractions of the limits imposed by the control mechanisms. The performing arts, similarly, are largely impracticable without considerable resources. From time to time there have been stories of various kinds of clandestine theatrical activity in the USSR, but it can leave little or no record and can operate only on a very limited scale of public access. Whether there has been a school of symphonists “writing for the drawer” in Russia in recent years remains to be seen, but none of their work could be performed, let alone recorded and published for further performance. The same goes for film. The technological requirements for the satisfactory reproduction of pictures in color mean that a dissident graphic artist in the USSR can make only one example of his product at a time.

Under these conditions, it is inevitable that dissident activity should be most strongly in evidence in those aspects of human communication where there is least mediation between artist and audience, producer and consumer. This circumstance is what gives rise to the commonplace observation that the most vital creative activity in Russia today is carried on in “pre-Gutenberg” conditions. People who have spent time with the Soviet creative intelligentsia in their native habitat would probably agree that the most vital art form now is the anecdote. It is a purely oral genre, told and retold in informal circumstances to a restricted audience, and requiring no equipment. Andrei Sinyavsky has gone so far as to attribute to the anecdote even more importance:

The future of Russian literature, if it is destined to have a future at all, has been nourished on political jokes. . . . In its pure form, the joke demonstrates the miracle of art, deriving as it does nothing but good from the savagery and fury of dictators.²

And the same thing seems to be true about the song. It too thrives in adversity, becoming a purely oral art form as necessity dictates.

But the “pre-Gutenberg” idea is obviously only partly true. The USSR has not been completely insulated against technological progress. Even so relatively primitive a machine as the typewriter represents a significant departure from oral methods of preservation and transmission. Multiple identical copies can be made on it. And then multiple copies of each copy can be made. The copies are fairly durable, transmissible without direct contact with the author, and (given a certain inevitable amount of error in copying) they accurately preserve the author’s text. Duplication by carbon copying on a typewriter is the classic samizdat vehicle. It forms the staple medium in the dissident boom that has been witnessed in Russia in the last twenty years. The number of carbon copies that can be made at one sitting using Soviet materials has been estimated differently by different people, but it cannot be above ten. Access to copying machines in Russia is very severely restricted, and duplicating machines are closely guarded. The advent of xerography has had no significant effect, because the machines are not available privately. Access to them and accounting for their use are controlled even more severely than is the case with duplicating machines.

In the case of particularly scarce samizdat works, it is not unknown for the pages to be split up and given to different people in turn. Sometimes “reading parties” will be organized, at which the individual pages are passed along from one person to another as they are read. But even in these circumstances reading remains essentially an individual, silent, and passive activity. And the number of copies cannot rival the capacity of the printing press.

The supply of samizdat is augmented by the flow of tamizdat, “things published over there,” i.e., outside the USSR. Despite the vast increase in human traffic into and out of the USSR in the last two decades and the virtual impossibility of checking every single item of mail that comes in from abroad, it has still proved possible for the authorities to keep the inflow of tamizdat within the limits they are prepared to accept. This restriction is accomplished mainly by psychological blackmail rather than actual administrative measures. The incomer, particularly if he is a Soviet citizen, knows that he is liable to be searched at the border and have anything objectionable confiscated. Furthermore, he knows that the event will not go unrecorded and may have consequences for his subsequent prospects. And he knows that the possession of certain items of tamizdat, such as those published in Frankfurt by the anti-Soviet publishing house Posev, carries an automatic prison sentence on discovery.

But developments in electronics have brought changes in dissident activities, as in all other spheres of life. The international telephone, despite continual control that amounts to persecution, has given Russia’s dissidents the means for immediate direct contact with the outside world, something quite unthinkable not much more than twenty years ago.

A vast amount of information is broadcast into the USSR by a number of foreign radio services, the principal ones being Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe, and the BBC. Soviet jamming of them has been relatively mild in recent years—even though the Helsinki agreement was supposed to lead to the complete cessation of jamming. Radio has made a fundamental difference to the problems faced by the state’s controllers of information in the USSR; since broadcasting began from outside, it has no longer been possible, as it was in Stalin’s day, to seal the country off from any information that the Party-state apparatus has not sanctioned. And so radizdat, “publication by radio,” joined the family of terms coined for the expanding numbers of potential means for dissident publicity. Radizdat plays a particularly important part in the cultural sphere by transmitting samizdat and tamizdat back to its country of origin.³ The radizdat audience must exceed the potential readership of even the most assiduously reproduced samizdat carbon copy by a factor of many times.

There is also some evidence that Soviet radio hams are using private installations to broadcast uncensored material. The most striking example concerned the city of Donetsk in 1974. It was reported that more than one thousand hams had been detained since the beginning of the year.⁴ And there was a case in Vilnius when one ham was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for broadcasting “anti-Soviet agitation.”⁵

The third electronic device to become available, besides the telephone and radio, is the tape recorder. It has had a far more powerful impact than they on the actual generation of dissident material. The Russian for “tape recorder,” borrowed from German, is magnitofon. This word has been truncated and compounded in Russian to form the word magnitizdat, “tape recorder publishing,” which like samizdat and the others refers to both the process of production and the product, in this case dissident material recorded on magnetic tape.

The open-reel tape recorder was first marketed in the USSR on any significant scale in 1960, when 128,000 of them were manufactured. The number reached nearly a half million by 1965 and topped the million mark by the end of the decade.⁶ They were, and remain, in the experience of the present writer, who first saw and heard one in 1963, very crude by Western standards. There is always at least one facility out of operation, the speed varies alarmingly, and the quality of the tapes is appallingly low. Cassette recorders have started to be manufactured and imported from the Socialist countries in recent years, and they have brought some improvement in convenience and quality. Western and Japanese machines are not on public sale in the USSR. They are available in the foreign currency shops and sometimes get into the hands of the Soviet population through illicit deals eventually going back to this source.

The things recorded on magnitizdat tapes are various. The Russian underground song is actually, if anything, a minority taste among people with collections of tapes. There is much more likely to be a high proportion of Western pop music and rock, recorded from the various radio stations that broadcast to the USSR from outside, and correspondingly low in quality, since they are made from long-wave broadcasts. There also will be better recordings of the same sort of music, transcribed from records brought in by foreigners or Soviet tourists; they are very much in demand. Then there might be a collection of older Russian songs, such as those of Leshchenko, which are highly prized but not officially available because of their erotic or decadent content. Besides all this music, used either as background or to dance to at parties and get-togethers, there might also be some more piquant items. One that the present author has heard is a professionally made recording of the obscene epic “Luka Mudishchev,” recited to the background of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique symphony. Magnitizdat is not necessarily something politically subversive. There is a good deal in it that simply reflects the chronic shortage of consumer goods. And tape recordings are a good way in Russia as everywhere else of putting together suitable music for a party. There is also a good deal of snobbery, one-upmanship, and so on connected with the acquisition and circulation of them.

It did not take long for both authors and audience to realize that in the tape recorder they had a very potent new device for circumventing the control mechanisms. The machine had many advantages. The poet could now do more than declaim his words. He could give his voice permanence without being involved in the process of censorship, something which had not been possible in the case of the phonograph record, with its complicated and delicate manufacturing process intervening between performer and audience. With the tape recorder it became possible to make an immediate, tolerably faithful recording of voice and music, without much equipment and in private, domestic surroundings. The operation of the processes of control had driven what was most vital in Russian culture away from public places and into kitchens and living rooms. The tape recorder was the perfect facility for exploiting this domestic, “homemade” situation. Also, tapes can be copied fairly easily. All that is needed is two compatible tape recorders and a connecting lead; there is no laborious manual operation demanding a great deal of time and skill, as is the case with typewritten samizdat.

In addition to these advantages, the tape recorder has still others. It can be used to play to audiences of the most varied sizes, ranging from one person to as many as can be packed within earshot. It therefore creates a situation of perception that is midway between those of written literature and the performing arts.

The tape recorder also brought with it the inestimable advantage of making possible the use of music as well as words. The reading and interpretation of poetry on the page is as a rule a sophisticated, skilled, and solitary (even secretive) activity practiced by a minority of people. The number does not exceed by many the number of people actually engaged in producing the text—“Poets write for themselves and each other.” Song, however, makes a much more direct and immediate impact, and it appeals to an infinitely larger audience than the one that is interested in written poetry. Melody and rhythm act together to speed the words to the listener’s mind and emotions and imprint them there.

The music used by the guitar-playing poets of the 1960s in Russia was always a means to an end, however. The “homemade” quality of the whole enterprise of guitar poetry can be immediately sensed in the nature of the music. The accompaniment is never more than functional. It consists almost exclusively of simple patterns, always played on the acoustic seven-stringed guitar. These patterns are made up of the most rudimentary elements: single bass notes, roots and fifths almost without exception, on the on-beats, and simple triads on the offbeats. In this guitar style there is no influence of the blues in any shape or form. Equally, there is no organic link with traditional Russian folk music of the countryside; the undoubted links with twentieth-century urban folklore remain to be properly investigated. The guitar is a rhythmical prop and very little besides. The predominant structure is the four-line verse whose melody remains the same through the entire course of the song. Occasionally refrains and repetitions are used, but there is never any complexity that might interfere with the immediacy of the song’s impact. Very seldom is strict tempo maintained. There are pauses for dramatic emphasis, scurrying accelerandi for refrains and fills. Over this primitive rhythmic and harmonic scaffolding stretches the voice. It is manifestly untrained, tonally poor, uncertain in pitch, at times employing crude recitative or ordinary speech—but always enunciating clearly. In guitar poetry the words are always more important than the music.

The homemade, markedly amateur standard of music and singing is matched on the classic magnitizdat tapes of the 1960s by the quality of the recordings. For the most part, these tapes were made in private by amateurs, and they are of correspondingly poor quality. It is possible to come across recordings made in actual or approximated studio conditions or taken from the public address system at concerts, but the classic article is far from good. There is usually considerable surface noise and distortion, and quite wide variations in speed. Repeated copying on different machines may render a singer’s voice almost completely unrecognizable, converting a baritone into a gabbling contralto. There is usually a range of assorted clunks and pops as the microphone is shifted or bumped. And on many tapes there is persistent background noise. Some of it is extraneous, like vehicles passing in the street outside or the footsteps and voices of neighbors. Some of it, though, is an integral part of the ambience of magnitizdat: the creak of furniture, the chink of bottle against glass, the coughs and muttered comments from the audience in the room. Most characteristic of all is the interplay between singer and audience. There will be requests, banter, and repartee, warm or bitter laughter, pregnant silence at the conclusion of a particularly telling song followed by the bustle of tension-breaking movement and speech. Applause occurs only on recordings made in front of concert audiences, which are exceptional in magnitizdat as a whole.

Magnitizdat tapes started circulating on a significant scale in the early 1960s. It will never be possible to give any accurate quantitative account of the number of tapes involved in magnitizdat or of the numbers of people involved in the production and circulation of the tapes or making up their audience. There can be no information equivalent to the print runs of books or anything of that kind. There is no doubt that the production process has been centered on the literary intelligentsia of Moscow and Leningrad, as is the case with all dissident activity. It certainly has a stronghold in the educational elite; by the mid-1960s, as Mikhailo Mikhailov’s account suggests, underground song was to be found widely among university students in Moscow. And, of course, it is cultivated and enjoyed by the political elite, too, as Aleksandr Zinoviev has indicated:

The leadership didn’t like these songs that much. But the times were such that they turned a blind eye. The children of the leadership belted out these songs at home and at their dachas with all the power their tape recorders could muster. The leaders themselves listened to them on their own, saying to themselves: “He’s really laying it on thick, the bastard! But that’s the truth he’s gabbling! Only what’s the point? You can’t do anything about it anyway.”

I have to know these laws of ours

Because of my position.

The more you wave your arms

The deeper you sink into the bog.

And the leader orders his spouse to serve him a bottle of cognac. And he drinks it alone, locked up in his den.⁷

But the possession and circulation of magnitizdat are certainly not restricted to the metropolitan intelligentsia. There are reports that tapes have penetrated to the furthest corners of the USSR and found an audience that transcends all class and social divisions.⁸ But it will not be until we have much more evidence, perhaps even now being collected by some enlightened Soviet folklorist “working for the drawer,” that we will be able to find out even approximately how wide the audience for magnitizdat has been.

The first time that the texts of magnitizdat songs were published, it would seem, came when five songs by Bulat Okudzhava were included in the second of the pioneer samizdat almanacs called Syntax (Sintaksis), edited by Alexander Ginzburg and “published” in Moscow in February 1960. All five of these songs have subsequently appeared in the official Soviet press. One of them (“Len’ka Korolev”; the title is the name of a person) even appears on the pages of the anthology Russian Soviet Songs, 1917–1977 that was frequently cited earlier. The three almanacs that Ginzburg managed to “publish” before his arrest appeared in the West in 1965.⁹ From this date, the penetration to the West and publication of magnitizdat song texts have been uninterrupted. Perhaps the only possible objective indication of the scale of the movement in its first decade is that the Samizdat Register maintained by Radio Liberty lists as item number 487 of samizdat documents that had reached the West by February 1971 “Transcriptions of more than 750 underground and labor camp songs and poetry.”¹⁰ As we shall see in greater detail later, Okudzhava and Galich were the first to be published intensively outside Russia. The first collection of Okudzhava’s songs appeared in 1964 and went into several editions, and translations of his work into Western languages have been appearing steadily since the mid-1960s. The first collection of Galich’s songs was published in 1969, after he had been the subject of considerable interest in the Russian émigré press.

But the publication that enables the guitar poetry of the 1960s and 1970s to be seen and assessed as an entity did not appear until 1977–78. And inevitably it came about beyond the borders of the USSR. It was a four-volume set of texts, taken down from and accompanying thirtyfour cassette recordings made from tapes that had been brought out during the mass exodus of Soviet Russians, the “third emigration,” that took place during the 1970s. The whole thing was published by the YMCA Press in Paris under the title Songs of the Russian Bards.¹¹ This collection includes about 950 songs, by a total of twenty-four authors, including six working together in pairs. The quantitative relation between the achievements of the three great guitar poets is fairly represented in the collection. The pioneer, Okudzhava, and Aleksandr Galich have about 80 and 110 songs respectively. Vladimir Vysotsky has 295 songs. Among the others, Matveeva is represented by only 19 pieces, a reflection of her official acceptance and the consequent availability of her recordings in the USSR, but nothing like an adequate representation of her full contribution to the genre. The “second line” of true underground guitar poets is represented by Yury Kukin and Yuly Kim, with 79 and 73 songs respectively. After them come the others: Boris Almazov has 46 songs, Yury Vizbor 35, Evgeny Bachurin 31, and Aleksandr Gorodnitsky and Evgeny Klyachkin 29 each.

In order to make some assessment of the guitar song as a whole against the “spectrum of song” as described earlier, it is reasonable to begin by comparing Songs of the Russian Bards with the anthology Russian Soviet Songs, 1917–1977.

The work of Okudzhava and Matveeva appears in both collections. Indeed, Matveeva’s “Red-Haired Girl” (“Ryzhaya devochka”) and “The Land of Delphinia” (“Strana Del’finiya,” which was cited earlier) and Okudzhava’s “Len’ka Korolev,” “Song of the X Paratroop Battalion” (“Pesnya desyatogo desantnogo”), and “Sentimental March” (“Sentimental’nyi marsh,” alternatively known as “Nadezhda, ya vernus’ togda”) form a special category. They all have the curious distinction of appearing in both a definitive collection of Soviet songs and the most representative collection yet published of magnitizdat songs. Without making an exhaustive check of all collections and anthologies of songs published in the USSR in the last twenty years or so, it would be impossible to determine exactly how much of the contents of Songs of the Russian Bards had actually already been published inside the country. But it is reasonable to assume that quite a few of the songs concerned have been published in the USSR. All the Matveeva songs have been, and so have all the songs by Okudzhava. Not all the songs by the latter that appear in Songs of the Russian Bards have been included in collected editions of the poet’s work, though, because the contents of collections are more carefully selected.

However, if we compare the contents of Songs of the Russian Bards with those of the Soviet anthology that was earlier cited as representative of the first phase of the guitar poetry movement, we find a considerably greater degree of overlap. Of the thirty-eight songs in the Moscow publication, eleven (some of them misattributed) can be found in Pesni russkikh bardov. It is also necessary to take into consideration that the Moscow publication includes the work of some songwriters who do not write their own music, as well as some who neither write nor perform their own songs. It would probably be somewhere close to the actual situation if we guessed that about one-third of the songs in Pesni russkikh bardov have been published in the USSR. One other consideration that must be made is that a significantly higher proportion of the contents has probably been “published” in the USSR in forms other than that of words on paper. But that, of course, must remain within the bounds of speculation. And another, more substantial, issue must also remain within the bounds of speculation: the question of what proportion of the contents of Pesni russkikh bardov was ever submitted formally for publication in the USSR and turned down.¹² It may safely be assumed that many of these songs would have been denied publication, at least in any topflight journal or as part of an author’s book, purely on the grounds of literary quality. At a very conservative estimate, half of the contents are made up of weak, instantly forgettable stuff. The proportion would be very significantly higher if the work of Okudzhava and Galich were set aside.

It must be said in all fairness, though, that the principal aim of the anthology must have been simply to preserve for posterity as large a proportion as possible of the available texts, before the guitar poem became an irrecoverable episode in the history of modern Russian culture. And it should also be remembered that one of the most important functions of magnitizdat songs may be precisely to provide an outlet for inconsequentiality and triviality, impermissible within the art of Socialist Realism but profoundly needed by most people.

Given these qualifications about general quality, though, it is not difficult to point to some salient large-scale differences between the magnitizdat song and the official Soviet song as represented in the two anthologies. Predictably, the general tone of the two collections is strikingly different. The official anthology is dominated by the solemn, bravura, self-important mass song of the “hymn” type, with its highflown themes and panoply of abstract nouns. The magnitizdat anthology, on the other hand, is subdued and melancholy, with a strong infusion of humor, mainly gentle and self-mocking; and the vocabulary is significantly more conversational than that of the official song.

A miniature piece by Yury Vizbor epitomizes the dominant tone of the magnitizdat song:

It’s going to be a big winter,

Because across the river,

Autumn is slowly dying,

Waving its yellow hand.

The dark-blue alders are weeping,

Old Uncle Arbat is weeping,

Soaking-wet Russia is weeping,

Turning into fall.

Destroying the snowdrifts,

Autumn comes hard on the heels of spring. . .

It’s going to be a big winter,

Nothing but darkness and snow.

[PRB, II, 118]

The Arbat, which we will meet again in Okudzhava’s work, is an old Moscow street, whose charm has been increased by the ugliness of its modern replacement. Vizbor’s song would perhaps in most countries be received as a fairly innocuous mood piece about the changing seasons. But in a Russian song in modern times it is very provocative to present this kind of sadness unrelieved, without even a hint of consolation. Also, the song too readily suggests a metaphorical reading about the general situation of the country. This reading is especially inviting in view of the persistent and widespread use of weather imagery to refer to changes in Russia’s political climate.

Another major difference concerns the central characters in the two categories of song. In guitar song the hero is almost without exception weak, hesitant, and perplexed. He is alienated from society, and if his relationships with any other people are discussed, it is only to point to unfulfilled love affairs. The guitar song is a refuge of the “little man”—to use one of the most hoary concepts of Russian literary history. Here he is in the work of Aleksandr Dol’sky:

I live in my apartment, surrounded by emptiness,

I work in a shooting gallery, taking money from the punters.

Here comes one with a girl who’s stupid and amazingly beautiful,

He’ll let off his ten shots and get gone as fast as he can.

Another one’ll come in, he’s had a few, medal ribbons on his chest,

He’ll shoot at yesterday, he smells of onions and vodka,

And as he goes off into the misty distance he’ll ask a stupid question:

Where’d you lose your leg? On the Stalingrad front?

So I’ll tell him it wasn’t at the front, it was when I was a kid . . .

And then evening will come and I’ll have to find somewhere to go . . .

[PRB, I, 83]

Here we have a little group of human beings whose lives come into brief contact. They are all mean and disillusioned, and they have no sense of any kind of social cohesion or any kind of higher goals.

As might be expected, the magnitizdat anthology contains songs on subjects that are taboo in official literature. They include labor camps, crime, drunkenness, unhappy love involving active malevolence, and everyday life presented in an unadorned way. The magnitizdat song also takes impermissible views of Soviet history. Here, for example, is one of the best examples outside the work of the three great poets of a satirical magnitizdat song. The subject, attitudes, and treatment are all central to Soviet experience, but official literature will never be able to encompass them. The song is by Yuly Kim.

Fifty years ago my uncle’s elder brother

Was taking the Winter Palace in Petrograd.

He tried hard, and took it; but meanwhile

To my grandfather was bom my father.

They sang “May you live many years” to the boy,

Saying: “He’ll take the place of us old men.

By the newspapers and all the signs,

You’ll go far, dear lad.”

Forty years ago my uncle’s elder brother

Departed from the ranks for Trotskyism.

My uncle personally took his Party card away,

And said not a few bitter words.

It’s thirty years now since my uncle disappeared

On account of his Trotskyite relatives.

“Who needs a family if he has the Party?”

It said in the denunciation my father wrote.

Precisely twenty years ago,

I appeared in this world.

“This young thing is dear to me,” joked my dad

Among his friends, stroking his Party card.

Ten years ago there returned to Leningrad

My rehabilitated uncle.

He returned, found my dad was a deputy chief,

And quietly departed for the next world.

In that eventful year I too became a candidate member,

And I look at my daddy;

Sure, he’s a fine fellow, but in my inside pocket

I’ve got something too . . .

He gets older with the years,

Can’t fathom the new subtleties,

Calls Israel “The Yids”

And thereby plays into their hands . . .

[PRB, III, 62]

The satirical bite of this song can be appreciated more fully if it is read in proximity to the second verse of Lebedev-Kumach’s “Song of the Motherland,” which was quoted in the first chapter of this book (p. 14).

The magnitizdat song leaves certain official themes strictly alone. The most striking absentee is the official brand of chauvinism. Instead, one of the most famous early guitar songs expresses a gentle homesickness:

Over Canada, over Canada a low sun is setting.

I should have fallen asleep long ago, why can’t I sleep?

Over Canada the sky is deep blue, with slant rain between the birches,

Though it’s like Russia, it still isn’t Russia.

Fatigue whispers to us to get warm, love plays its tricks,

The April snow teases us, the comfort of home tempts us.

But the snow’s not like spring snow for me, and someone else’s house isn’t a housewarming

Though it’s like making merry, it isn’t making merry.

Today it’s deep mud where you are, with spots of sun in the puddles.

Don’t weep for your love too soon, but wait for me to come back.

Over Canada the sky is deep blue, with slant rain between the birches,

Though it’s like Russia, it still isn’t Russia.

[PRB, I, 67]

The dreaded birch tree strikes again. But the difference between this song and the official song is that here there is no belligerent posture. The fact that Canada is not presented as a potential aggressor that motivates a show of chauvinistic rant has been enough to keep this song under a cloud, despite its patriotic nostalgia. The author of this piece is Aleksandr Gorodnitsky, whose song about the Atlantes was cited earlier.

With regard to the themes that occur in both official songs and magnitizdat, it is easy to point to some salient differences in the way they are treated. The war theme, for example, is very prominent in both branches of song. A magnitizdat piece by Mikhail Ancharov tells about the optimistic dreams of a surviving soldier immediately after the end of hostilities. But the initial scene is set in images of a starkness that is impossible in official songs:

The war is over, and the gurgling river

Rolls its flat stones along;

And dark-blue corpses stick up,

Caught in the reeds.

The wind stinks of carrion,

Sly and thievish;

And ocher-colored skulls Keep on trying to laugh.

[PRB, II, 74]

An even more striking example of the officially impermissible treatment of the war theme is the following song by Boris Almazov:

In station buffets, where floors aren’t very clean,

Shoving an empty bottle into their pocket,

Old front-line soldiers die

Of their old wounds’ opening.

They die, and their gray heads

Bang down on the marble table top.

And then their kind, sensitive commanders

Pronounce words over their graves.

Maybe there’re no sirens wailing at dawn,

Maybe no metal hurtling through the early morning;

Soldiers get killed in wall newspapers,

Soldiers get killed at Party meetings.

[PRB, I, 56]

Here we have a grimly disenchanted presentation of one of the most favored aspects of the war theme in official songs: what happens to the conquering heroes in later life. We remember that in official songs their gray heads remain unbowed, since the men are always borne up by their consciousness of the ennobling valor of their experience. A couple of verses from Matusovsky’s “Once a Soldier, Always a Soldier” (“Soldat—vsegda soldat,” 1960) make the contrast unmistakable:

Maybe you’re no longer in the ranks,

But under your civilian clothes

I recognize, always and everywhere,

A soldier’s bearing.

It’s maybe a long time since

You wore your army outfit,

But people still say:

Once a soldier, always a soldier.

. . .

A soldier doesn’t take long to pack,

Says goodbye without wasting words,

And all his belongings

Will fit into one sack.

Even when he’s drafted into the reserves

He’s happy to serve the fatherland;

And that’s why people say:

Once a soldier, always a soldier . . .

[RSP, 475]

These old soldiers not only do not die, especially not in a sordid station buffet, they don’t even fade away.

Another equally unorthodox war song by Almazov begins by telling how a boy is rewarded for his good behavior by the present of a frighteningly realistic toy automatic rifle. On his way to kindergarten he fires at everything he sees, including “pigeons, shop windows, and passers-by”:

That little boy was happy

In his foolish five years of age;

And from the pubs the disabled ex-soldiers

Sadly watched him go by.

[PRB, II, 76]

Here a child is used as a negative image. And the ex-soldiers are, firstly, drinking and, secondly, do not assert that their sacrifice was worthwhile—in fact, the implication of the song is the opposite. And there is no message concerning the just war for the Motherland. These elements, natural and universal as they may be, are enough to keep Almazov’s song underground in the USSR.

Even more prevalent than the war theme in both bodies of song is the subject of love. Again, it is not difficult to find in the magnitizdat material songs on this subject that are unthinkable in official terms because of their particularity and explicitness. Here is one by Evgenii Klyachkin:¹³

I’ll snuggle up to you under the blanket,

You’ll move away, but so what, go ahead;

It’s just that I can’t do it any other way,

Even a match can’t bum on snow.

It’s just that you’re always turning your back,

As if you’re sleeping all alone, not with me;

I’ve covered myself up and I’m not looking round,

And I’m trembling like the skin behind my knee.

I know what I’m doing, but you can’t understand

My very highly associative hint . . .

And the alarm clock won’t stop ringing,

Even the granite is pink from the hints . . .

[PRB, II, 101]

Here is another unprepossessing love song, this time by Mikhail Ancharov. The speaker is female, a former parachutist who has left her physicist husband:

“You’ll be the number one woman in the world,

The country will hear of your name . . .”

Except that of the life I was promised

I never saw a damned thing.

He worked in a secret office

Developing the country’s science;

But he was no use at all himself,

He sweated every time he took his pants off.

I can see all our boys

Floating through the skies.

“Mommy, mommy, look, the dandelions

Are sending their dead petals down.”

They’ve not forgotten their Katya the parachutist;

I shouted “Hurray!” at the top of my voice.

Kicked the physicist in the ass,

And cleared off, still innocent.

But ruffians are pissing by the gate,

The moonlight gleams like pee . . .

Hello, woman’s loneliness,

That phonograph shriek every night.

[PRB, II, 73]

Defiant infidelity on the part of a woman; her disloyalty to a hardworking and loyal servant of the country in a responsible and demanding job; and, it goes quite without saying, the naturalistic crudity of the ideas and their verbal expression—all these make this text completely unthinkable as acceptable material for the Soviet media.

A characteristically tongue-in-cheek love song by Yuly Kim conjures up a delightful impression of a Soviet official seducing a girl from the naughty capitalist West. Unlike the stereotype, he is forward and she is modest:

You’re so enchanting, so modest,

Your shoulders and breasts are like china.

I’m a bit scared to try and touch you,

It’s like breathing on a candle.

When you so trustingly place

Your fingers into my palm,

You simply cannot imagine

That you’re putting them into the fire.

The moon’s gone behind a cloud,

And then it comes out again. . .

Permit me to press your white hand

To my red heart.

My feelings, my dreams, my fantasies

Have begun to burn in my heart like a flame;

In combat with the world bourgeoisie,

I’ve earned my right to a private life.

And I’ll tell you with total frankness,

I who’ve suffered in want and in struggle,

That the cultural wealth of the bourgeoisie

I have every right to requisition.

The moon’s gone behind a cloud. . .

[PRB, II, 119]

Everything here is beyond the permitted range of the official song: the cynical tone, the particularity, the impropriety of the man’s conduct, both in itself and on the part of a Soviet official. The clichés themselves (the white hand, the knowingly banal “red” heart, the moon) also poke fun at the stereotyped accessories of official and permitted songs.

A song by Valentin Vikhorev¹⁴ combines many unorthodox elements:

A tram set off for the front. . .

Mother crumpled up her hankie,

He crushed my shoulder with his hand;

“Stay on your feet, son.”

There was paper crisscrossed on the window,

And the sore-throated rasp of sirens. . .

That winter there was a letter—

He’d been killed at Srednyaya Rogatka.

The son can’t believe the news. The war ends.

Mother has another husband,

Life’s life, she said.

She gave money to the church for your soul,

So don’t appear in her dreams.

I’m thirty-five now,

I’m older than you, my father.

I take your granddaughter for walks

Where once the lead whistled.

It’s all houses now,

It’s all gardens now. . .

And your granddaughter is big enough

To pick flowers for you.

A tram set off for the front,

Twenty-five years ago.

But I’ve forgotten nothing.

There are flowers on your grave.

[PRB, III, 88]

The treatment of both the war theme and the family theme here is incompatible with official requirements. The singer’s mother should remain faithful in widowhood to her dead soldier husband; and she should certainly not involve the church in her actions. The son should, indeed, not forget his father. But he should not be turned so resolutely toward the past, which has been physically obliterated by a present of which nothing favorable is said (or toward the future, which should be represented by rather more positive things than a young girl who is apparently being taught to look backward like her father). Also, there is the grotesque image of the tram going to war, an inadmissibly unheroic reminder of just how close the Germans were to the gates of Leningrad.

* * * * *

These few examples, which could easily be added to, have been deliberately chosen from the work of the less-eminent poet-singers to illustrate the way in which guitar poetry may at least to some extent be understood as an alternative to official song. It either deals with subjects the official song cannot touch or treats official subjects in an impermissible way. In this respect magnitizdat is clearly fulfilling one of the same functions as samizdat and dissident literature as a whole.

However, that is by no means the whole story. If we continue to confine our attention to the lesser lights in the movement, we see that for the most part their songs are firmly anchored in the middle ground. They neither confirm nor deny the official line. The satirical element is for the most part remarkable for its absence. A few poets are strongly satirical, outstanding among them Yuly Kim, the author of a number of texts that rank alongside the best of Vysotsky and Galich. But in contrast to the sharp particularity of Kim’s satirical songs, most guitar poems have the same vagueness of reference, the same lack of particularity and specificity that we noticed in the official “mass song.” There is a strong escapist element, most salient in the work of Matveeva.

Even more striking are the ways in which guitar song tacitly supports the official line. There are no songs that are antipatriotic. Just as remarkably, there are no songs in the collection that contradict the official view of motherhood. When mothers appear, they are the same grieving sponges for male guilt that are found in official song. And the love songs also tend to idolize women, to make icons of them rather than flesh-and-blood human beings. The language used in the guitar songs is certainly nearer to the colloquial end of the stylistic spectrum than is that of official song. But there is still a very noticeable absence of anything that oversteps even narrowly drawn limits of linguistic propriety. There is also a lack of evidence that the guitar poets are interested to any great extent in formal or linguistic experimentation. On all these grounds, guitar songs would not fail to meet the Party’s requirement of being comprehensible to the average citizen.

It would seem, then, that the authors of guitar songs have certain assumptions in common with the people responsible for administering official culture in the USSR. To understand the guitar song purely and simply as an alternative to official culture is not possible. To some extent, it reflects a shared Russian notion of what the arts should concern themselves with and the way they should properly communicate.

These observations have been made with reference to the second rank of guitar poets. The question of whether they hold true of the three great guitar poets will be considered in the following chapters.