Via a Guitar
Smith, Gerald Stanton
Via a Guitar SONGS TO SEVEN STRINGS: RUSSIAN GUITAR POETRY AND SOVIET 'MASS SONG' by Gerald Stanton Smith Indiana University Press. 271 pp. $25. Gerald Stanton Smith's book, Songs to Seven...
...This study proves that a little hard work can solve even a riddle wrapped up in a mystery inside an enigma...
...Karen Rosenberg (Karen Rosenberg is a faculty member of the Russian Research Center, Harvard University...
...Part of the problem is linguistic: even advanced students of Russian stumble over the pungent slang and off-hand references to the minutiae of Soviet life...
...his tales of Soviet vice and crime violated puritan norms...
...Without this context, not only is the punch of each song lost, but our picture of the Soviet Union must remain flat and amateurish as well...
...his parodies of Soviet kitsch offended its producers and sponsors, and his mention of internal social inequalities and rivalries during World War II contradicted the official image of a nation united in resistance...
...In the early 1980s some of his lyrics (including one about the depressing vacuousness of life) were published in the Soviet Union...
...In the 1960s and 1970s, the availability of tape recorders— and the rubles to buy them—created the conditions for a new medium of oral culture...
...traying Jews as heroes (not just victims) in World War II, he used the guitar song as a means to explore tabooed areas...
...His criticism of the Stalinist heritage went further than Khrushchev's...
...From 1958, when his play, The Dress Rehearsal, was banned for por...
...The repeated succession of thaws and freezes is another little-understood feature of post-Stalin Russia...
...But not all the poet-performers shared Okudzhava's fate, and many songs are known only via clandestine recordings...
...The names of the most famous singer-songwriters—Bulat Okudzhava, Vladimir Vysotsky, Aleksandr Galich—crop up occasionally in the U.S...
...In the second half of the 1960s, when the freeze set in, material which had recently been publishable was forced underground...
...Gerald Stanton Smith's book, Songs to Seven Strings, is the first work in English to elucidate the sometimes cynical, sometimes poignant songs to a seven-string guitar which thousands, perhaps millions, of Russians know by heart, even when they have never played over Soviet mass media...
...even his narrator admits to moral cowardice...
...Smith rightly turns this common question into a discussion of changing literary values...
...Songs to Seven Strings contains so many translations it can qualify as a basic anthology of the genre, but the text provides the background which an anthology would unavoidably lack...
...While the classic mass song in state service exudes sentimental optimism about work and love, many by Okudzhava, for instance, lack a positive hero and an inspirational message...
...Vysotsky, a hard-drinking, fast-living actor at the prestigious Tanunka Theater in Moscow, became its superstar...
...During the more liberal period, early-to-mid 1960s, such songs of the middle ground were printed, performed in public, transmitted over the airwaves, and discussed by sympathetic Soviet critics...
...The unexpected, ironic juxtapositions in Galich's dense art link him with Russian masters of the absurd, such as Mikhail Bulgakov, and with distinguished satirists like Mikhail Zoshchenko...
...Are these lyrics really poems or literature...
...press, but the meaning of their work has remained elusive...
...His death at age forty-two in July 1980 distracted Russians from the Moscow Olympics, and the crowds who paid tribute to him at his grave and at his theater persuaded Western journalists of the popularity of his songs...
...Only those who have tried to translate and explain these poems set to music can truly appreciate how remarkable is Smith's achievement...
...And what's more, Songs to Seven Strings is readable and accessible to nonscholars...
...One might argue with his personal rating of one song or another, but his defense of the genre as a whole is cogent and convincing...
...And yet he was not so marginal to Soviet society as to be unmentionable in the media...
...Such songs, written before Galich's emigration from the Soviet Union in 1974, irritated and activated the conscience of his contemporaries, reminding them of the power of the spoken word...
...Aleksandr Galich, however, won no such posthumous recognition after his death in 1977...
...His characters, evading their guilt through drunkenness and promiscuity, lead depraved, often sordid lives...
...Smith is one of a younger generation of scholars who are complicating our conception of the Soviet Union by pointing out a spectrum between the extremes of abject conformity and outright dissidence...
...His grotesque pictures of Stalin and the labor camps are especially chilling because of his insistence that Stalinism was not just terror from above but an ideology supported by many (and still adhered to by some...
...Samizdat has an oral partner in magnitiz-dat: the private production and distribution of tapes made at intimate gatherings in the Soviet Union or from foreign records and broadcasts...
...By the end of the 1960s he had lost the privileges which come to Soviet writers for good behavior, but he gained well-deserved fame in the unofficial, oral culture...
...Yet Smith notes that since the late 1970s many (though not all) of Okudzhava's songs have made the reverse trip and have been printed and recorded in the Soviet Union...
...Although Vysotsky began his songwrit-ing "career" by imitating Okudzhava, he wrote fewer acceptable songs than did his mentor...
Vol. 49 • October 1985 • No. 10
