Русское зазеркалье (двуязычная версия)

In Russia, the term has gained a much wider linguistic acceptance. No wonder, considering that no Soviet musician would be overly offended if you called him or her a propagandist which was a noble occupation or, in any case, which was what any ‘cultural worker’ in Soviet Russia was supposed to do. Russian culture also has a very special attitude to fools that originates from the period of the Tsardom of Muscovy when wandering monks and ascetics posed themselves as buffoons, maybe in order to freely expose the injustices committed by authorities and the rich men. Those ‘fools’ (the Russian word is yurodivy) were often seen as truly saint men. You might remember from the first lecture I gave that Boris Godunov, the first democratic tsar of Russia elected as a tsar in the meeting of the national assembly in 1598, humbly implores Bazil the fool to pray for the salvation of his soul. (Yes, we used to elect our national leaders even then: we have a tradition of democracy not many countries can be proud of. No, Boris Godunov was not a fictional character, and neither was Bazil the fool, although I don’t know whether this conversation has actually taken place.) A Soviet ‘creative worker’ or even an amateur musician was a propagandist whichever way you take it: either he or she was a bard admiring the war heroes and perhaps even propagating Communism, or he or she was a minstrel, a buffoon, a dissident cursing the social order, but never a simple entertainer.

I hope that you had time to look at the article on bards in the Soviet Union I have forwarded to you for your general knowledge. Allow me to summarise it and say that the term bard came to be used in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s and continues to be used in Russia today, to refer to singer-songwriters who wrote songs outside the Soviet establishment. Because in bard music songwriters perform their own songs, the genre is also commonly referred to as author song, or avtorskaya pesnya.

Bard poetry differs from other poetry mainly in being sung with simple guitar accompaniment as opposed to being spoken. Another difference is that it focuses less on style and more on meaning. The same I guess largely applies to Russian literature in general. ‘The substance of life doesn’t change much from one culture to another, but the human soul requires a beautiful wrapper,’ to quote from the Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Viktor Pelevin, a prominent contemporary Russian writer, translated into English by Andrew Bromfield. ‘Russian culture, though, fails to provide one, and it calls this state of affairs spirituality.’ In the second part of our lesson we probably discuss how you interpret this quotation and whether you agree with what Victor Pelevin says or not.

The most famous bard in the Soviet Union was perhaps Vladimir Vysotsky. Other well-known bards were Alexander Galich, Bulat Okudzhava, Yuri Vizbor, and Alexander Rosenbaum. The five named persons might be—well, arguably so, of course—the most essential contributors to the development of the bard movement in Russia. The article on Wikipedia that I have forwarded to you yesterday gives a lot of other names, referring you to many fierce critics of the Soviet regime and/or Russia after 1991—such as Evgeny Kliachkin, for instance. ‘Fierce critics’ is perhaps too strong an expression where such definitions as ‘moaners’ and ‘complainers’ would perfectly do. You see, to be a critic of the regime is one thing, whereas to have real impact on the audience is quite another.