Introduction

Guitar poetry¹ was originally a cultural development of the Khrushchev era in the USSR, part of an upsurge in Russian poetry associated with the de-Stalinization of intellectual life in the mid-1950s. It has run its course alongside many other phenomena in Soviet life that were released by this process. The pioneer guitar poet was Bulat Okudzhava (born 1924), who began singing his poems in the late 1950s and made his first public appearance in 1960. Okudzhava accompanied himself on the most accessible of all Russian musical instruments, the seven-stringed acoustic guitar. He soon had imitators, and two of them, Aleksandr Galich (1919–1977) and Vladimir Vysotsky (1938–1980), proved to be indisputably great figures in their own right. The three outstanding guitar poets all came from the intelligentsia of central Moscow, and were members of the capital’s literary elite before they began their careers in guitar poetry. They represent three generations of Russian citizens, and to some extent each spoke for and to his own generation. But each used the genre of guitar poetry for his own expressive needs, and as a result the three artists created distinctive individual bodies of song. And they were treated in different ways by the literary and state authorities.

The heyday of guitar poetry occupied the decade beginning around 1962. During this period, all three great poets were at work in Russia, and most of their greatest songs were created. At about the same time, tape recorders were beginning to be sold to the public in the USSR, and recordings of guitar poetry could be copied and circulated beyond the reach of official controls, a process known as magnitizdat, “tape recorder publishing.”

The result was one of the most important developments in Russian culture of the last twenty-five years. Within the Russian intelligentsia, guitar poetry is generally acknowledged to be such a development. And it has penetrated beyond the intelligentsia more powerfully than any other literary phenomenon. To Russians outside literary circles, guitar poetry is better known than written literature, both official and dissident. For them, Vysotsky is a much more relevant and revered voice than either Yevtushenko or Solzhenitsyn. It goes without saying that this situation is not reflected in Soviet criticism and literary historiography, where guitar poetry is not much more than a target for abuse, if it is mentioned at all. Independent Russian literary historians have devoted some attention to guitar poetry.² But among non-Russians there is almost complete ignorance of the subject. Even specialists in Russian literature tend either not to know much about it or to regard it as a subliterary phenomenon. More often than not they do both simultaneously. Guitar poetry has certainly not been accorded the attention it deserves by recent non-Russian literary historians.³ It is perfectly natural, and indeed highly desirable in the case of modern Russian literature, that the picture of a national literature in the minds of foreigners should differ from the one held by the native readership, its literary elite, and the masters of its media. But the discrepancy in the case of Russian guitar poetry is so remarkable as to be more than enough to justify an attempt to change the situation.⁴

Guitar poetry is a composite art form which interpenetrates the domains of its two constituent elements, poetry and music. Poetry, of course, is one branch of literature. And guitar poetry is not the only art form in which poetry and music come together to make song. The complexities in the perception, description, and interpretation of guitar poetry that spring from these interrelationships are awesome. A consideration of any one of them in isolation would fill a whole book; the same could also be said of a treatment of their aesthetic aspect on its own. And further complexities arise out of the peculiar and novel mode in which guitar poetry is most characteristically preserved and transmitted, that is, through tape recordings made privately and circulated in unknown numbers and combinations. The history of the genre before the advent of publicly accessible tape recorders, and the relationships between the Russian form of guitar poetry and those of other nations, are additional vast potential areas of inquiry.

In narrowing down this range of problems for the present study, the choices have stemmed partly from the author’s views regarding the importance of the problems themselves in relation to the subject as a whole, and partly, of course, from the direction of his own personal interests and sense of his own competence.

This book concentrates most consistently on presenting the actual texts of guitar poetry and the song genres most closely related to it. I have taken this approach because of the paramount need to dispel the ignorance of the texts that prevails among non-Russians, and thereby to provide some primary material for further discussion. The extensive citing of texts has inevitably led to a curtailment of the space that can be devoted to analysis, and several hard choices have had to be made. First of all, a certain amount of detail has been offered about the three major talents involved in guitar poetry. That is because of the author’s conviction that the work of Okudzhava, Galich, and Vysotsky ranks with the best (and certainly the most interesting) Russian literature of the postwar period. Also, their lives and careers are of great significance from the point of view of the history of Russian literary dissidence in the post-Stalin period. However, this emphasis on the three greats has meant that there is no space left for a systematic account of the lesser guitar poets. They appear here, if at all, only on the periphery, which is especially regrettable in the cases of Yuly Kim and Anri Volokhonsky along with his regular collaborator Aleksei Khvostenko.

Apart from the work and lives of the three major guitar poets, precedence has been accorded here to an account of the literary song as a whole in present-day Russia, with special emphasis on the Soviet “mass song.” This material has been presented as a spectrum, whose constituent parts are defined by a political criterion: the relative acceptability of the text in question to the Soviet authorities and its consequent level of access to the media in the USSR. The literary and musical dimensions of these texts have been regarded as secondary. But they are, in Soviet conditions, inextricable from the political. It is quite clear in the author’s mind that in the USSR the political process determines the rules (if not all the values) by which the literary process operates, by positive or negative reference. In terms of the criterion of official acceptability, the spectrum of songs begins with texts which positively reflect the Party’s call for Soviet culture to expound its ideology. It then runs through a substantial segment formed by texts that are ideologically inoffensive but perhaps not explicitly supportive of official requirements. And the spectrum shades off into songs that are regarded by the authorities as dangerously subversive. The access that song texts have to the media ranges correspondingly from active promotion at the former end to active suppression at the latter.

The necessity for some description of this spectrum of song, and the reason for presenting it as a prelude to a discussion of guitar poetry itself, is that in certain important senses guitar poetry developed, and continues to exist, by reference to it. Guitar poetry was created in the post-Stalin period in large part as a deliberate alternative to existing Soviet culture; and in searching for this alternative, the poets concerned drew on formal and thematic resources offered by traditions of song that the official world had tried to ignore, discourage, or suppress. This process may perhaps be understood in the last analysis as a manifestation of a normal strategy for self-renewal that takes place in the arts, whereby innovation comes about through the introduction into serious art of devices that previously seemed to belong outside it. But the relationships between Russian guitar poetry and the spectrum of song illustrate well the peculiar Soviet symbiosis between the political and literary spheres. This symbiosis is present and active in the minds of Soviet citizens when they experience any cultural artifact, and it may indeed be the primary formant in their response. The relationship between guitar poetry and the spectrum of song is also important in regard to the status of the guitar poets as individuals. The songs of some of them, and with them their creators, have in the course of time emerged from the clandestine world of magnitizdat into official acceptance; others have remained underground and even actively persecuted; yet others occupy a middle position between these extremes, shading into both. Guitar poetry may thus be seen from one point of view as constituting a formally marked component of the spectrum of song itself.

This formal marking, whose principal components are the musical characteristics and performance style of guitar poetry, is almost completely its own preserve, and it pulls the genre toward the clandestine end of the spectrum of song. The lone individual with an acoustic seven-stringed guitar in hand is inescapably an antiestablishment figure, a kind of gypsy. Regrettably, a discussion of the musical characteristics of guitar poetry, and their relationships with those of the spectrum of song, has had to be omitted almost entirely from this book. This work is a literary rather than a musicological study. Its emphases, despite the one-dimensionality sometimes entailed, fall consistently on the verbal texts and their literary context. Of the two domains that contribute to guitar poetry, that of poetry is far and away more important than that of music; indeed, the unevenness of this relationship may constitute the distinctive characteristic of guitar poetry as a species of song.⁵

It follows that of greater importance than the relationships of guitar poetry with other species of song are its connections with Russian literary poetry intended for declamation or reading. Guitar poetry is not detached from the main body of modern Russian poetry, but is rather an extension of it that uses additional means. This continuity and interpenetration begins at the level of the individual poet. All three great guitar poets have created poetry for reading as well as songs. With Vysotsky and Galich, the proportion is relatively small; but Okudzhava has written at least as much poetry for reading as for singing. Novella Matveeva, though, is only marginally a guitar poet; and the minor guitar poets include none who are recognized as significant regular poets. They have tended to be active in other aspects of literature for performance.

The most interesting area of contiguity between guitar and literary poetry is formed by the substantial body of songs that has been composed over the years by recognized Russian poets, for whom the song is a venerable and viable lyric genre. Nearly all the important Russian poets have written songs at some time in their career.⁶ These songs fall outside guitar poetry, because they have not as a rule been performed by the author to his own accompaniment on the guitar. But they are stylistically and functionally similar to guitar poetry. And they contribute to the same body of sung folklore if, as is the case with some texts that originated as guitar poems, they become detached from their authors and take on an independent existence within the folk memory. We shall cite examples by such eminent modern Russian poets as Yaroslav Smelyakov and Gleb Gorbovsky, as well as examples by authors for whom one or two phenomenally successful songs form their sole poetic achievement, such as Akhill Levinton and Yuz Aleshkovsky. Songs by these authors have been taken up by guitar poets, even the great ones at the early stages of their careers, but they usually form part of the repertoire of minor and amateur singers to guitar accompaniment.

The aspect of guitar poetry’s relationships with orthodox Russian literary poetry that has been singled out for discussion here reflects the main difficulty that foreign literary scholars experience in dealing with Russian poetry in general. This aspect is its “seriousness,” its credibility as a literary monument capable of evoking a profound human response and meriting careful study. Guitar poetry sounds and looks “light” to the foreigner. Heard in performance, seen on the page, and particularly in translation, it has that same lack of textual complexity, that naiveté wrapped up in archaic-looking highly regulated forms, that many foreign readers of modern Russian poetry find second-rate, even embarrassingly so. An attempt has been made in the final chapter of this book to analyze the causes of this problem and face their consequences. It is worth emphasizing now, though, that for the Russian audience the problem of the genre’s “seriousness” hardly arises, any more than does the question of the political resonance of the texts. It is only in a book aimed toward an anglophone readership that these questions need to take precedence over others that are usually more central to studies of poetry.

The essence of guitar poetry is the poet’s singing of his own words to his own guitar accompaniment, a kind of creative expression that goes back in Russia, as elsewhere, to long before the twentieth century.⁷ In Soviet Russia it acquired a new dimension and was transformed as a genre when tape recorders began to be available for private use in the 1960s. Tape recordings were instantly seen to offer a new method of preserving and circulating texts, one that would bypass the system of controls attendant upon access to the media, over which the state, guided by the Party, exercises an ideologically determined monopoly. With the advent of the tape recorder, the poet also had at his disposal for the first time a convenient means of preserving the impact and authenticity of his own voice. The tradition of oral literature, more central in Russia than in other European countries, acquired a permanent medium for the first time. Alongside samizdat, the time-honored Russian method of circulating clandestine literary material, appeared magnitizdat. This novel and specific mode of transmission and circulation for a body of literary texts helped to define guitar poetry as a genre and also created new problems of interpretation and categorization. Like folklore in the preelectronic age, guitar poetry is aurally perceived and orally transmitted, but unlike that folklore it is created and performed by known individuals who are both the original creators and the performers of the material. This factor further complicates the network of problems referred to earlier that derive from guitar poetry’s situation between poetry and music. Its ramifications have been considered too vast and probably too specialized to be allotted anything but the most perfunctory discussion in the present study.

There is a considerable need for thorough analysis of the various problems that have just been mentioned, in isolation and in their interconnections. The serious investigation of Russian guitar poetry has hardly begun. The present study, it is hoped, will provide some primary evidence and a rough chart on whose basis the more detailed work of the future may take its orientation.