Songs for Fat People: Affect, Emotion, and Celebrity in the Russian Popular Song, 1900-1955 077352441X, 9780773524415

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Songs for Fat People

david m acfadyen, associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages at ulca, is the author of Red Stars: Personality and the Soviet Popular Song, 1955–1991 and two books on Joseph Brodsky.

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SONGS FOR FAT PEOPLE AFFECT, EMOTION, AND CELEBRITY IN THE RUSSIAN POPULAR SONG, 1900–1955 David MacFadyen

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2002 isbn 0-7735-2441-x Legal deposit fourth quarter 2002 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for its publishing activities. We also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. The author would like to offer special thanks to Erin Fox, for help and advice.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication MacFadyen, David, 1964– Songs for fat people: affect, emotion, and celebrity in the Russian popular song, 1900–1955 / David MacFadyen. Includes bibliographical references, filmography, discography, and index. isbn 0-7735-2441-x 1. Popular music – Soviet Union – History and criticism. 2. Popular music – Social aspects – Soviet Union. 3. Singers – Soviet Union – Biography. i. Title. ml3497.m145 2002 782.42164’0947’0904 c2002-90247-9 Typeset in New Baskerville 10/12 by Caractéra inc., Quebec City

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For my parents, brother, and sister

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CONTENTS

Illustrations

ix

Introduction: A Quick Comment before We Begin in Earnest 3

part one in practice: eleven famo us perform ers, lo ved by tens o f m illions 1 Grace under Friendly Fire: The Gypsy Romances of Izabella Iur’eva and Tamara Tsereteli 9 2 The Romance in Exile: Iurii Morfessi and Petr Leshchenko 3 Internal(ized) Exile: The Mystery of Vadim Kozin 4 Exit Stage Left: Aleksandr Vertinskii and Cabaret

38

64 87

5 Affectation and Buffoonery: Leonid Utesov and Odessa Jazz 114 6 Klavdiia Shul’zhenko: “Let’s Have a Smoke, Comrade!”

142

7 Mark Bernes: Hushed Songs from the Silver Screen 169 8 Prison and Prestige: The Folk Songs of Lidiia Ruslanova and Liudmila Zykina 200

part tw o in th eory: soviet entertainm ent seen fr om today ’s perspectives 9 Time to Speculate and Take Stock: 1 January 2000 in Russian Light Entertainment 237

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contents

10 Conclusion and Unsolicited Encore Notes

273

Audio-Visual Sources

343

Index 353

viii

253

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Izabella Iur’eva

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Tamara Tsereteli

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Iurii Morfessi

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Petr Leshchenko

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Vadim Kozin

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Aleksandr Vertinskii

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Leonid Utesov

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Leonid Utesov

Klavdiia Shul’zhenko

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Klavdiia Shul’zhenko

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Mark Bernes

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Lidiia Ruslanova

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Liudmila Zykina

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SONGS FOR FAT PEOPLE

Suddenly a dry, dull knocking begins to resonate through the crystalline silence. A thumping noise: one, two, three, ten, twenty times. Then, like a lump of mud thrown into the cleanest, clearest water, there comes a wild squeal, hiss, boom, howl, yell, and crash, all followed by an assault of subhuman voices, reminiscent of equine neighing or the grunting of some brass pig … The braying of jackasses, the impassioned croaking of a colossal frog. This loathsome, maniacal cacophony is subject only to the most imperceptible of rhythms. Having listened to the caterwauling for a minute or two, one comes, willy-nilly, to the conclusion that this must be an orchestra of mental cases, driven mad by a carnal fixation. Some half-man, half-horse must be conducting them with his immense phallus. This is all coming from the hotel next door, where a radio plays in order to assuage the world of fat people, the world of predators. Over the airwaves comes the latest foxtrot, played by an orchestra of Negroes. This is music for fat people. Maksim Gor’kii on modern music, in Pravda, 18 April 1928

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INTRODUCTION: A QUICK COMMENT BEFORE WE BEGIN IN EARNEST

After cinema, the most popular and important form of entertainment in the Soviet Union was song, either purchased (on paper, vinyl, and tape) or performed (at home and on stage). Several denizens of Soviet entertainment who are still working today have achieved sales figures close to a quarter of a billion records, yet there is no research available on their work, on what Russians liked to hear. I have tried to rectify this failing with three monographs on Russian song throughout the twentieth century that avoid the crude abstractions of political oratory: this present book and two others, previously published, Red Stars and Estrada?! The rhetoric of the Cold War even today structures the teaching and study of East European customs. The old binary oppositions of international diplomacy foster and further a structuralist heritage in Slavic departments; twentieth-century Russian culture is seen in degrees of compliance with or deviance from Soviet ideology. Politics colours everything. Such an enduring critical approach has led to the dismissal of the most important and vital aspects of Soviet society as either undeserving of attention or, at best, sullied by dogma. Song, it is held, does nothing but reflect policy. Nothing could be further from the truth, more damaging to our understanding of the world’s biggest nation, or more dangerous in terms of perpetuating stereotypes. The very notions of East and West are dissolving quickly, yet we still interpret modern Slavic civilization in terms of geographically specific, Soviet grand narratives and the supposed sense of lack or absence in everything that constitutes them. I have endeavoured over the last few years to gather and study some

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songs for fat people

of the much-maligned, yet indispensable aspects of Soviet culture that might give (at long last) some dignity and a sense of affirmation to those who practised them. I collected many thousands of songs in order to compose a picture of Russian popular entertainment, its changes and shifts, often irrespective of the political context. Sometimes that entertainment is civic, sometimes not, as it moves in and out of ideologically defined repertoires; it adopts and affirms as much as possible by embracing many genres, many styles, and paying scant attention to fashion or unidirectional chronologies. The philosophical consequences of this affirmation are enormous. They counter the goals of Soviet centralized, progressive planning. The plotting of state-approved coordinates on any map of projected progression is always done at the expense of all the (many more) coordinates not chosen. When popular or light entertainment develops a worldview of affirmation, embracing fashions, schools, and periods, Soviet teleology is either bent back on itself or vanishes in a shower of ink dots as the small stage chooses infinitely more coordinates on its own graph, which moves in all kinds of unexpected directions. This is neither subversion nor political deviance. Sometimes Soviet song runs parallel with politics for a while and is happy to do so, but it then moves off on another tangent to embrace other phenomena. Affirmation must go on. If nobody says yes to other, new phenomena, then linearity takes hold and these same styles or genres slip away forever, claimed by the workings of history and tales of things past. Once the need to affirm is revealed, this need to say yes, to affect, and to be affected by (truly popular) traditions also changes our perception of nostalgia or pre–World War One culture in Eastern Europe. We are used to dismissing nostalgic pensioners in Russia and elsewhere as foolhardy, retrospective champions of a prior order or philosophical certainty. Most people, though, even in the worst political regimes, do not spend most of their time being political. The majority of citizens spend even periods of revolution at work, at home, or in the pub. Today’s pensioners, who once frequented those pubs, are now more distraught at the damage capitalism has done to domestic, private happiness (the emotion corresponding to affirmation) than they are nostalgic for social, centralized planning. Old and tired, they cannot muster the energy or rent the venues to remember and assert their past culture. They cannot include it in the (expensive, financially censorious) present in order that their “once-present” not become the past. Here, then, in an attempt to record and remember things that might otherwise be forgotten, is a partial history of estrada, the overarching form of Slavic artistic expression that includes the popular

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introduction

song, an emotional demonstration in an often colourless, dogmatic society. This volume covers the period from passionate Russian or gypsy folksongs of the late nineteenth century to their inclusion in Soviet culture, the birth of tangos, foxtrots, waltzes, and so forth all the way to 1955, the Thaw, and the great sighs of post-Stalinist relief. The exotic and unusual term estrada came to the Russian language from the French estrade or Spanish estrado meaning platform and stage; both definitions have been preserved in the Russian. A modern dictionary will offer the English equivalent, “variety,” a term that today perhaps bears overtones of Victorian music halls. There is no muse of estrada. This is an easily reached conclusion when one considers the following categories appropriate to a full definition of the term: theatre (of a light or comical nature, rather than the classics), literary readings, feuilletons, satirical songs, comic stories, parody, compèring, puppets, popular, lyrical, and civic songs, folk music, vocal ensembles, dance, and finally (as if the bag were not mixed enough), circus. In examining the way in which Russian songs have embraced variety across the twentieth century, we begin in the following pages just outside of that time-frame, with the old, sung art of a wandering inconstant people: gypsies and their fervent romances. It is hard to imagine a type of song with more emotional, desirous power, and the romance will therefore serve us very well as an introduction to the force of emotion and all it can do in dreary, socialist contexts. We will look at the careers of two women, one Russian and the other Georgian, together with the way in which a nomadic art form survived the pressures of business before the Revolution and those of politics afterwards. We will trace the careers of other men and women struggling to perform operetta or tangos as they fled the dangers of Soviet society that had little patience for café culture. That journey will take us, among other places, to Ukraine, Latvia, Romania, Paris, London, New York, San Francisco, and across the Pacific Ocean back into Russia through the towns of China that remind us so much of Casablanca with their émigré customs, smoky bars, and forged passports. A good part of our time will be spent inside the Soviet Union, too. We will see what happened to the idea of “mass” songs, in particular. Does that term indicate official or public approval, and is there any overlap between them? Several of our “massively” popular performers used their success in jazz, big bands, swing, or the style of French chanteurs to forge a career in movies. By keeping an eye on all of these trends, at home and abroad, in safety and danger, on movie and (eventually) television screens, on pristine vinyl or the muddy front line of war, we can get a sense of how complicated Soviet culture really was and how much respect those silent pensioners on Russian subways

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today really deserve, lest we – as usual – dismiss them as the passive, unquestioning recipients of an ideological system. What we see as one unadulterated aesthetic is the muddled mélange of a bona fide circus. Gypsies were seen at many a circus and it is with gypsies we begin in 1908, since they inspired decades of song and dance.

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PART ONE

IN PRACTICE: ELEVEN FAMOUS PERFORMERS, LOVED BY TENS OF MILLIONS

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1 GRACE UNDER FRIENDLY FIRE: THE GYPSY ROMANCES OF IZABELLA IUR’EVA AND TAMARA TSERETELI An artist can’t really be a politician … Big business and music don’t mix … [In old estrada] there were good, kind relations between people.1

a gratuitously violent introduction to the 1900s The gypsy had to kill her; she had been unfaithful. Revenge, however, brought the murderer little peace. He was haunted increasingly by his conscience. Eventually he could stand his private anguish no more and sought a denouement to this tragic tale, authored in blood. Close to the tranquil thicket where he had so recently slain his sweetheart, the malefactor threw himself over a cliff. Curtain. This terse and rather grim scenario comes from a pre-revolutionary silent film of 1908, Drama in a Gypsy Camp.2 It shows very clearly bigcity perceptions of gypsy culture at the start of the twentieth century, perceptions that found bold and equally coarse expression in the urbanized forms of an extravagant, impulsive song of wayfaring natives: the romance. This type of ardent, even torrid poetry, sung to the variable, spirited tempos of a lonely guitar, had actually travelled to Russia from France more than a hundred years beforehand. Paris and its environs were so closely associated with the genre in Slavic eyes that “romance” in the late eighteenth century had meant any francophile verse written by Russians and then set to music. The French themselves had always seen romances as “the carriers of emotion par excellence” or “poems of ancient love and gallantry.”3 Consequently, when pluck or pathos became both fashionable and nationally specific during late Sentimentalism, the desire to celebrate local, noble emotion in Russian song first arose – fittingly enough –

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among a group of young poets connected with Moscow’s Boarding School for the Nobility. Since sentimental heroes rarely stab each other, though, the romance as we know it today needed the unhampered aesthetic of Romanticism to assert itself fully, either in sadness or the merrier context of friendship and heavy drinking. Given the nature of gypsy life, it is also logical that free and full movement between emotions was often expressed in these texts as physical wandering, as tales of leaving one place or yearning for another. One’s sweetheart is loved and left, lost and found. Such themes of opposition, although expanded at times to musings upon the antitheses of life and death, almost never resorted to an escape or rejection of immanence, of the hic et nunc.4 This type of selfregulating tendency in the romance, the tendency not to go too far and start invoking the supernatural or take to wielding large knives, allowed even modishly civic or ethnically sensitive themes to appear in texts of the mid-nineteenth century (à la Nekrasov). In essence, though, the reputation of romances as melodramatic “gypsy nonsense” (tsyganshchina) could never really be shaken.5 During the summers of nineteenth-century St Petersburg and Moscow, similar nonsense would come into the cities from outside and be heard at fairgrounds, in parks, and in formal gardens. After sundown, romances sounded from the dining halls of expensive restaurants and extravagant hotels. The popularity of these songs reflected the growing interest in music as industry. Between 1900 and 1907, half a million records were sold in Russia, and factories were opened by both British and French investors. The first gramophones were made domestically as early as 1899, and to cover the explosive demand, another half million were imported over the next eight years.6 To the uneven cadence and impassioned complement of a guitar or piano, soloists would peddle their “easily accessible, popular melodies, sentimental or emotionally appealing poetry, which was capable of touching, exciting, and igniting the soul of the most undemanding listener.”7

romances and the problem of soviet “mass” songs Дорог весенний час. Это, пойми, для нас Льются волною песни, кино и джаз. [Springtime is so precious. It’s just for us, you see? A wave of songs, movies, and jazz comes flooding in.]8

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In the smoky atmosphere of fin de siècle restaurants, constantly interrupted by noisy diners, romances could not sustain forever the stylish veneer temporarily granted them by composers such as Glinka, Musorgskii, Rimskii-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky, who had honed “chamber” romances from the poetry of Pushkin, Baratynskii, Del’vig, Fet, and others. Parlours lost ground to pubs and Cinderella went home from the ball. Unfettered emotions seemed fitting entertainment for the tipsy; vulgar public demand was growing swiftly as the twentieth century approached. In subsequent years, the Soviets would do little to rescue or promote a parlour genre, but still people clamoured for romances. “The demand was indeed enormous. No matter what the Soviets called them: pseudo-gypsy, petty bourgeois, or [just] current, voguish romances, the essence of the genre remained unchanged. Romances expressed the yearning for a past, departed or unrequited love that had fizzled out, together with dreams about some other ‘mighty passions’ or a celebration of gypsies’ unimpeded lifestyle.”9 At the far end of thematic shifts within this genre lay the rough and tumble of the new “criminal” song (blatnaia pesnia) together with the “cruel romance” (zhestokii romans), which tells of rare passions taken to the criminal extremes documented in our silent film. Such maximalism not only lends itself to self-parody, to a mock epic, but suggests that the zhestokii romans may itself have arisen as a parody of emotionally squeamish parlour texts.10 So what is the romance: epic or lyric? The Brockhaus-Efron encyclopedia of 1899 defines it as a “small, epic poem, which in a few strokes depicts an everyday event, albeit one that stimulates both feeling and fantasy.” The Great Soviet Encyclopedia more than half a century later called it, with supreme vagueness, “a lyric work, free of generic markers,” and distinguished chamber romances from the urban or “quotidian” (bytovye) versions that had emerged in pubs and factories. Between these two definitions, we see how expressive emotion changed its relative status. The grand, dramatic scale of private feeling prior to the Revolution had encountered a stronger affect after 1917, one of clamorous state-sponsored sentiment that made romances seem puny in comparison. “Affect” in this sense is a feeling or emotion that exerts a force. Initially that noisy sung intensity came in the form of civil war. Lenin signed a declaration on 7 April 1919 by which all dramatic and musical artists were drafted for front-line entertainment. On 26 August of the same year, a broader mandate brought all of estrada under state control.11 As soon as 19 April 1920, any estrada performance within the Moscow city limits needed prior governmental approval. By the end of the decade, romances would be dismissed nationwide as archaic

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introspection and officially jettisoned in favour of a consciously social aesthetic.12 By 1930, for example, after several unsuccessful interim measures, Leningrad’s (very social) estrada organization would be formed: Lengosèstrada. This stately consolidation lay in the distant future, though; immediately after the Revolution it was felt that repertoires wavered disconcertingly between the influence of grasping entrepreneurs and the (financial) need to be successful before a public of suspect refinement.13 Numerous artists were saved from the marketplace and registered with the government, yet a lot of them were then dumped almost immediately, due to precisely these suspect repertoires. The victims of the marketplace were suddenly seen as its proponents. These rejected showmen had no time to stop and consider the fickleness of their fate; stories began to circulate that older estrada performers were being chased through the streets of Moscow. Thugs with revolvers were looking for those who had at any time sung before the Czar.14 This brief and hazardous contest was called off for the years of the New Economic Policy (nep, 1921–28). The sluggish economy was kick-started with a temporary return to private enterprise, which would hopefully relieve some awful problems with food and fuel shortages in particular. The professional aspects of estrada, which had begun in the 1860s and were so rudely curtailed after the Revolution, now exploded anew with the reappearance of “intimate songs” in countless bars and restaurants.15 Signs reappeared with the long-forgotten words “Cabaret” and “Variety” lovingly painted upon them. Both genuine and stylized gypsy romances rang out, together with their newer urban equivalent. The gypsy presence was in fact so great that singers began to see both safety and financial logic in numbers: they often joined forces and performed as choirs, frequently to great acclaim.16 These choirs actually had considerable precedent. They first appeared in Moscow in the eighteenth century and their members were (all) soon known as “Moscow” gypsies, simply because no one was entirely sure where they had come from. Count Orlov-Chesmenskii was so taken with them that he formed a similar private chorus to sing at all his functions. Lacking any real knowledge of wayfarers’ culture, though, the count was more than happy just to use peasants from his own estate. It seems, therefore, that nobody was initially sure of what gypsies looked like, either. Once the fashion was more seriously instituted, genuine Romany choirs would by the early nineteenth century go on to perform with great frequency in wealthy homes. As cities grew with commerce and industry, however, performances moved gradually from the elite back to the masses. Choirs were seen in restaurants, spas, shops, and (on bad days) at railway stations. Each choir had at least

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one soloist, allowing for an easy movement between folk choral pieces and the development of a more fashionable, profitable, and romanceoriented repertoire.17 It was thanks to this well-established tradition that both gypsy choirs and their soloists kept performing after the Revolution and into nep. As we will see, though, things worsened as soon as the first Five-Year Plan was instituted: “The Russian romance had such a complex fate! It went through just about everything, all the way from its hour of fame to those years of persecution and direct prohibition. But it held its ground, because it transpired that the romance had very sturdy roots.”18 And so the battle began again as nep ended. Or did it? Let us pause for a while and consider that common assumption. The very notion of a post-romance “Soviet mass song” and its supposed success needs serious, protracted reconsideration. Even during World War One, the masses had not been terribly keen on jingoistic public bombast. “The leitmotif of [songs during] the war quickly became a desire to forget oneself, to escape from reality, to hide somewhere or stick oneself in a corner. At least that way you could play ostrich and hide your head … It was precisely at this time that the so-called light genres flourished.”19 “Light,” for whom, though? For the audience or artists?20 “Mass” song in what sense? Masses of copies printed and endorsed by decree or massively popular? A digression into the issue of popularity, emotion, and sung politics as a whole will allow us to come back a little later to our chosen genre after nep in the context of two specific romance singers with a much better, in fact essential, understanding of the social forces among which they worked. Gerald Smith, in his work on the modern bardic tradition in Russia, writes of the Soviet mass song as follows. It played its “appointed part along with the other branches of the arts in embodying the Party’s ideology in images acceptable to it, actively shepherding the country’s people along the road [of] the Party’s decrees, reinforcing the Party’s version of its history, creating an icon of the new Soviet man at work and in his private life.” He then wonders out loud to what degree such a stance can in fact guarantee popularity.21 If it cannot, then we do not have a mass song anymore.

mass songs of the thirties: dunaevskii versus rapm Let us take a typical public holiday under Stalin and listen to what people sing as they pass by. The State Musical Publishing House, in fact, did precisely this in various regions of Moscow during the October

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festivities of 1930. As people moved towards Red Square, 44 per cent of what they sang was classified as bourgeois, 19 per cent as “pseudorevolutionary,” and the same amount as originating from a folk repertoire. Politically correct texts accounted for only 18 per cent.22 Something was obviously wrong, which no doubt accounts for the jumble of genres that Soviet ideological songs absorbed when they tried to match and mix with the proletariat. They were heard amid “elements of urban, peasant, and military folklore, echoes of folkloric legends, spiritual choral music, and the epic leanings of the Civil War period.”23 Ideological repertoires seemed to be following the public, not leading. This quoted definition by scholar E. Petrushanskaia goes on to locate the Soviet mass song among various “folk intonations from Russian, Cossack, Jewish, and Ukrainian lyric songs, gypsy-style operetta, Neapolitan and Odessa folklore melodies, plus the influence of jazz and a criminal romanticism.” Hold on a minute! All this talk of a political aesthetic not only is clearly being forced upon estrada, but is being here applied by Petrushanskaia to Isaak Dunaevskii, the Jewish Ukrainian composer from Stalinist Russia in whose name a television award would be instituted in 2000. Dunaevskii’s own career will be discussed in the chapter dedicated to bandleader Leonid Utesov, but I should say here that although his songs may often have been commissioned by the state, they were very frequently apolitical in emphasis, always happy, and genuinely popular. When, for example, he worked with lyricist Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach on the slapstick romantic comedy The Happy-Go-Lucky Guys (Veselye rebiata) of 1934, the initial song of a lone romantic mountain shepherd with his shabby livestock was only gradually commandeered for increasingly political means. The private story first becomes transformed in a big choral arrangement at the film’s denouement, and it then falls victim to even grander processes in society. Verses on the Communist Youth League and the need for repelling an anonymous enemy transformed the shepherd’s song into something less than charming; it was used at Kremlin presentations and Soviet diplomatic functions in London three years later.24 Although Dunaevskii’s colleague could very easily pen allegiant bluster, such as the song “Holy War” (Sviashchennaia voina) of 1941, it is here that non-ideological emotion is being courted by politics. Soviet doctrinal songs acquiesce before or employ the sentiment of non-Soviet (i.e., apolitical) scenarios. Popularity is prior to politics. Nonetheless, music books and the Internet today preserve only the fully political version of this text, which grew slowly away from its original music-hall context, a shepherd’s love story, and his very private affection for a disenfranchised chambermaid.25

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The time of Veselye rebiata could be defined as a period when sung politics began to make use of popularity in earnest.26 That, however, was only possible because initial, incipient socialist entertainment had previously been notable for music-hall celebrities, for personalities singing enduring old-style songs. When, in fact, early professional Soviet songs had first appeared, they were all from the estrada stage.27 Their insistently high spirits helped to pave the road for those, such as Dunaevskii, to shape their aesthetic. Heaven knows that two things are always “fatal to any art and especially to estrada: tedium and monotony [odnoobrazie]”;28 Dunaevskii and his marching shepherds were major contributors to the development of affirmative variety (mnogoobrazie), happiness, and lyricism on a par with politics in the thirties. Take, for example, a conversation from the very first Union-Wide Estrada Contest of 1939. Prior to the competition the deputy arts minister expressed his agreement with the hopes of the jury, which was headed by Dunaevskii: “We really need some lyric songs here.” The suggestion came that society was “looking fairly healthy [polnokrovnyi]” and was not in need of new “predominantly propagandistic songs,” which merely “hit their listeners in the head with slogans.” “Both love and jealousy have their own, prominent place. The winning song will have to be a Soviet lyric, but nothing like the [bourgeois] ones put out before the war.” Other dignitaries were in agreement with the judges (which, by the way, included Utesov and the comic writer Mikhail Zoshchenko). Dunaevskii himself had even gone one step further in an article written on the eve of the competition. “There’s still hatred among Soviet composers towards the light (or simple [legkii]) romance, towards modest little songs [pesenki], satirical ballads, and witty folk songs [chastushki]. We’ve been a little too excited about the rhythm of heroic marching in our mass songs. We mustn’t get so keyed up that we forget the people need other kinds of songs, too.”29 Even after nep, mass songs had to be popular, just as they were in America. Dunaevskii was always insistent about his work’s popularity and the resulting joy it brought. More than a decade later, for example, he told chemistry students at Voronezh University how songwriting brings “great, inexplicable enjoyment. That’s true even when creative thoughts sometimes run into considerable, maybe excruciating problems. On the basis of my entire experience, I can say that creative work under any conditions is a source of great enjoyment.”30 In thoughts such as this, we hear hints that cheerful desire will persist longer than the political horrors of the thirties and their military expression in the forties. Joy will outlast persecution and war. As we will see, Stalin himself – the source of the horror – was a great fan of many musicians

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presented in this book.31 He may have commissioned certain texts or strident verses, but that doesn’t mean to say he liked or preferred them. Stalin’s jolly preferences reflected a prevalent desire to escape politics. Listeners both low and lofty had long grown tired of earlier trite propagandistic practices, such as referring to tangos only as “slow dances,” foxtrots as “quick dances,” and the Boston waltz as the “slow waltz.”32 This pedantic criticism had first emerged in Dunaevskii’s early career as double trouble from the Russian Association for Proletarian Writers (rapp) and the Russian Association for Proletarian Musicians (rapm), the latter of which declared all love songs “demoralizing” for the masses.33 When Stalin had suffered enough of such silliness, he closed down both groups on 23 April 1932 for “forcing artists to observe the associations’ demands and tastes. They have practised exclusionary organizational tactics, a vulgar transformation of art into sociology [sotsiologizirovanie], onto which they’ve slapped all manner of labels.”34 The public did not sing songs endorsed by the ubiquitous and influential rapm,35 so Dunaevskii tried to introduce hope. “I couldn’t,” he admitted, “bear the prudishness and hypocrisy of those prominent figures that hung around art, controlling it, but I had to agree with them when they demanded art for people in general [dlia nikh] and not just for ‘us.’ These individuals weren’t rejecting beauty – that couldn’t be done. They simply saw beauty in something different. We should look at things with their eyes and keep sculpting their notions of beauty until they become our notions; then we’ll believe in them with our entire being.”36 He tried to be magnanimous. This is not a matter of embracing stately pathos: when Dunaevskii had to write his famous “Song of the Motherland” for the 1936 film Circus, the same swagger troubled him because it “hung heavy like a weight around both the music and text.” Nonetheless he decided to match (not copy) the noble sentiment from a desire to “amaze his listeners every time in all ways possible.”37 The degrees of possibility he could insist upon affirming and exploiting under rapm were slight, though, since its policy was one of exclusion, not inclusion. Here is the grim undercurrent of Dunaevskii’s formative years that prompted the knee-jerk, opposing, and affirmative spirit of the thirties. rapm defined itself chiefly by what it opposed: it was antimodern, antiWestern, antijazz – but also antifolklore, antinationalist … They proffered revolutionary gebrauchsmusik, marchlike massovye pesni (“mass songs” for group singing) set to agitational propoganda (agitprop) lyrics, and “operas” or “oratorios” fashioned out of medleys of such songs, often the product of collective authorship … Not a stellar roster, not much of a musical yield, and from 1929, when they achieved administrative power, a terrible brake on

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izabella iur’eva and tamara tsereteli Soviet musical life. But rapm was nevertheless significant as the one new tendency the Soviet state brought forth in musical art. As … [the writer and musician] Leonid Sabaneyev put it, however sarcastically, shortly after emigrating, “If Communist Russia has created anything original, it is the advance in the democratic direction, the appeal for ‘music for all.’” The avant-garde character of this seemingly reactionary appeal is important to note, because otherwise one understands neither the style nor the sentiment that informs the music of Shostakovich, the tragic genius of Soviet music.38

Shostakovich also helps us to bridge the political and popular. He worked with Dunaevskii and comic jazzman Leonid Utesov, most notably in the comic revue Allegedly Murdered (Uslovno ubityi), which concerns air-raid defence drills in Leningrad and debuted in the city’s Music Hall on 2 October 1931.39 The two “sentimental” composers liked each other very much.40 rapm disliked the play very much, no doubt irritated by Shostakovich’s very charitable or “Dunaevskian” worldview. Shostakovich was both close and dear to Dunaevskii. Dear because of his unusual talent, endless artistic searching [poiski], close as a musician who took all forms of music seriously and did not single out the “light genre[s]” with critical disdain. “I could never understand people who have that kind of attitude to the so-called ‘light genre[s]’ – I never saw anything light in them,” wrote Shostakovich. There’s a good reason why the composer once remarked that “at performances of my work, it gives me pleasure when members of the audience laugh or just smile.”41

The play, sadly, met with little success, and the press felt that Shostakovich’s music lacked any “bright or memorable melodies.”42 One Western scholar has termed it the composer’s “low of lows,” a “hack-job,” and – in disdainful quotes – a “circus-review.”43 Others such as Elizabeth Wilson counter this view, noting Shostakovich’s enjoyment while working on the project. She also records his opinion of Utesov as “the greatest living artist in the ussr,” even if he was no great fan of the bandleader’s clamorous experiments in “theatricalized” jazz [tea-dzhaz], discussed later in this book.44 Although the two composers would later grow apart and Dunaevskii would bluntly contradict the general public delight over Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony in 1937–38, the opus in subsequent years would often be compared with great irony to Dunaevskii’s own “March of the Enthusiasts” (Marsh èntuziastov)!45 That marching song, a tale of bold, civic construction, nevertheless draws clearly upon sentimental motifs from the earlier Marsh veselykh rebiat: “We love ardently and sing like

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children.” Mass songs – ideological or not – and even Shostakovich’s grandest work all exercise a “sentimental style.” Affect moves in and around ideology but uses it to greater effect: it goes beyond dogma. A process of personal becoming outstrips the doctrine of political stasis, because the cheerful broadmindedness of these two composers allows them to be transformed – happily – by multiple, unexpected phenomena. The binary, captious nature, or odnoobrazie, of dialectics thus becomes something entirely different, a process of often nonjudgmental variety and change transmitted by Dunaevskii’s songs: “The musicians’ behaviour [in Utesov’s jazz ensemble] is philosophically construed, it makes the performance visually dialectical. It shows the connection between a person and their instrument … An instrument’s character merges with the musician … a mood is created … expressed by terms such as ‘human trumpet, human saxophone.’”46

popular songs and the “great patriotic war” During World War Two, an emotionally driven art became even more evident after the general call-up to all estrada artists, which was so well organized that each military district soon had its own swing band. Nonetheless, the songs played by stylish ensembles at the front tended to be older, familiar, and more “native,” not only because the homesick ensembles and singers were themselves away for long periods, but also because soldiers wanted to hear poignant songs of the hearth.47 One typical group of Leningrad musicians, touring the front line with some vocalists, helped to satisfy that retrospective yearning with musical wisecracks. “Want to hear the most popular tune back in Leningrad right now?” To the crowd’s resounding yes, an alto-sax would start wailing like an air-raid siren. In this way people at the front knew that “if there’s art around which is still that happy, it must mean my hometown is holding out.”48 Happiness means the story is not over and change is possible. Meanwhile, back in that town, record production continued with everything from maudlin ditties to loud patriotism, such as LebedevKumach’s Sviashchennaia voina mentioned above.49 The very day war was declared, Leningrad’s major pressing plant was ordered to start pressing disks with the sound of an air-raid siren and henceforth was one of the few places in the city supplied with an unbroken supply of electricity.50 The production of regular musical offerings sometimes gave way to other oddities: “How to Prepare a Residential Building for Air-Raids,” “Construction of Simple Air-Raid Shelters,” or “How to Extinguish Incendiary Bombs.” Perhaps the most interesting were recordings with the sounds of cars, tanks, and chatting soldiers, which

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would then be played loudly in strategically unimportant forests, all to confuse German artillery scouts.51 Apparently they worked extremely well and much Axis firepower was thus expended upon squirrels. Of the wholly musical records made at this time, many were sent directly to the soldiers, themselves often the heroes of the songs. The Red Army Soldiers’ Choir, which gave fifteen hundred concerts during the war, sang of, recorded, and thus instituted tales of heroic conscripts.52 To keep similarly precious records safe, like Klavdiia Shul’zenko’s poignant “Blue Kerchief” (Sinii platochek) or Utesov’s witty and anti-Fascist “Baron von der Pschick,” portable gramophones were produced in tough, iron-lined bags.53 Soldiers would gather in small, inconspicuous groups to hear these songs as the bombs kept falling. Andrei Tarkovskii’s film Ivan’s Childhood shows well the psychological importance of a gramophone for shell-shocked troops.54 Huddled around a muddy turntable, the exhausted infantr y not surprisingly came slowly to prefer happier kindly songs, not the ubiquitous plagiaristic “marches” of the late thirties written after politics started imitating Dunaevskii.55 After their own, happy front-line performances, Leningrad’s main variety troupe would return to and sleep in the city’s estrada theatre, together with other artists bombed out of their homes. Their audience often joined them when evening air raids interrupted performances close to curtain call. Performers had worried initially about the public’s need for music amidst gunfire and were touched by this dedication to their craft in frightening times. They were grateful, too, when a music teacher by the name of Ol’ga Firsova (who was also an amateur mountain climber) scaled the 75.2-metre gilded spire of the Admiralty Building in the autumn of 1941 to hide its glare from German bombers.56 Just like the estrada troupes, the teacher of a sentimental form of expression showed the townspeople “how to do it.” This emotional power of the musical world remained throughout the war, both at the front and at home – so much so, in fact, that children’s homes were wary of hosting estrada performances in their casualty wards, since songs reminiscent of past and festive times would bring only tears. Playing to healthier orphans was no easier, especially during the blockade of Leningrad, when the daily ration for children was four and a half ounces of bread. Over nine hundred days, 800,000 people died of hunger, 17,000 were killed by bombs, and another 35,000 were wounded in the one city. How could anybody cheer up the orphans? Children’s home – we usually associate that phrase with a joyful hullabaloo, with laughter and the stamping of little feet. Here, though, we were shocked by the awful silence of Children’s Home No. 28, where we had to give a concert.

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in practice We met the kids on the staircase, as they went off to get ready in their common room. They were roughly between eight and fourteen years old and just wandered slowly back and forth. They eventually settled down in an indifferent sort of way and either sat silently or talked to one another very quietly. What were they talking about? I went closer. – Tonight I’ll be having tea with some glucose and cheese. – Any butter? – No butter. Just some cheese instead of butter. The kids catch sight of me and fall silent. One of them turns away and takes a tiny notebook out of his pocket. I ask him to show me, but he shakes his head and blushes, almost to the point of tears. Then one of the boys explained that every day he writes down what he eats. He’s been doing so for a month and a half. Against his will, the first boy then gives me his notebook. A record of everything these children eat is written down in neat, tiny handwriting and framed by a little border he has drawn. It looks like an album with poetry. But instead of poems there’s the one thing that concerns these children more than anything else. – Why do you write it all down? – Just ’cos. To remember …57

Songs prompted adult weeping just as easily when the same troupe played to the men and women cleaning the snow from Lake Ladoga’s “Road of Life.” During the blockade, very thick ice on the lake allowed for 1.2 million people to be evacuated in trucks, plus 1.5 million tonnes of food. Amazingly, the ice also bore the weight of gas pipes and electricity lines. The songs performed for the people defending Ladoga, said one exhausted and teary-eyed woman, “made us remember how fortunate and happy we were earlier, in our [previous] lives that the Fascists had stolen.” Musicians, it was soon clear, were vitally important in wartime, as were all the other performing artists who travelled in estrada troupes. Zhdanov decreed that circus artists, for example, must get extra rations to keep their strength up. Clowns, though very grateful for the food, always kept some of their extra beans aside as “teeth” to spit out during mock punch-ups.58 The enemy was just as aware of art’s emotional role. The German artillery had the Leningrad Philharmonic on its short list, along with the Kirov Ballet and the Hermitage. The orchestras kept playing, despite the dual threat of firepower outside the city and famine within. Songs and music kept things human, a greater tool of private memory than anything civic could manage. They bred a personal context that stretched beyond the stage. Songs gave rise to emotions greater than themselves, just as a conversation with Klavdiia Shul’zhenko shows more than twenty years later. Artists promoted a sentiment older and more enduring than the texts used to express it. 20

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izabella iur’eva and tamara tsereteli – Klavdiia Ivanovna, do you remember the concert at Pulkovo Heights [outside Leningrad]? Where the front-line brigades performed? – No, I’ve forgotten already. You think I can really remember all the 500 concerts I performed in Leningrad during the siege? – Well, there was heavy shelling going on and you sang in the dugout. – There were so many concerts like that. They’re all mixed up now, in [memories of] the war’s noisy chaos. – But after the concert – the soldiers treated us to buckwheat porridge from their modest rations. – Porridge!!! Why didn’t you say so straightaway? I remember its aroma really well. How can anybody possibly forget that?59

As singers and their musicians travelled from base to base, battle to battle, they would scramble up onto the back of flatbed trucks, usually double-parked so that one became a stage while upon the other stood a large, vertical curtain and makeshift wings. Dancers wobbled precariously on the roughly-hewn truck beds, while acrobats – hiding from gunfire – entertained soldiers in huts so low that they could perform nothing but floor exercises. In these conditions jugglers were often obliged to kneel, for fear of clubs, balls, and flaming torches bouncing off the ceiling.60 This serious tomfoolery would come swiftly to an end after the war, when pathos was the order of the day and would remain so until Stalin’s death. Within months of Stalin’s passing, therefore, Utesov had eagerly penned an article in which he echoed the ideas of Shostakovich, his director in Leningrad, and called for a spirit of renewed difference or variation in estrada, for an end to “tedious sermons, all about what kind of music Soviet citizens ‘need.’ These same people are hungry for art. Give them the lot: opera, symphonies, songs, romances – and light music, too … All genres are good – except the dull ones.”61 Estrada had ridden out the storm, causing and making use of the ideological passions we often assume were used to destroy it. It’s now time to return to romances and two female artistes, to see how they managed over the same period. Without prior knowledge of Dunaevskii, rapm, et al., their struggles would make considerably less sense.

the white gypsy: izabella iur’eva Веселый час придет к нам снова. Вернешься ты … [That time of happiness will come to us once more. You’ll return …]62 21

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The above excursus through a few memories from the thirties and forties shows us, prior to our actual investigation of songs in the Soviet Union, that two points must remain both uppermost in our minds and necessarily complex. First, we cannot define assuredly the nature of mass songs, since they waver between forces of popular and political support. Second, individual styles and genres of Soviet estrada matter less in proud isolation than they do in unison. Unison is a desirable vehicle for the transmission of desire, so to speak. Synthesis, like the emotion it transmits, is not linear, hence my referencing of romances via jazz, circus reviews, and symphonies to follow an emotional force down its longest, most tortuous path. Let us also take the longest, truest path discernible around one performer of romances, Izabella Iur’eva, who was born in 1899 and died on 20 January 2000, still embodying her Soviet moniker, “Mme Full-House Forever” (Madam Vechnyi Anshlag).63 Such longevity also allowed her to enjoy the rare status of People’s Artist, awarded her by Yeltsin in 1992 when she was ninety-three years old.64 Beginning her extended journey towards to that award ceremony, Iur’eva had given her very first performances as the guns of World War One were just falling silent. Soon after, she left her hometown of Rostov with its amateur concerts in the park and headed for the bright lights of St Petersburg, accompanied by her mother. She hoped, like all female performers of the day, to find work singing in movie theatres between feature presentations, even though her only training for such a job had been impromptu performances at home, accompanying her father and three older sisters (Mariia, Ekaterina, and Anna). She had also enjoyed listening to her neighbour, a violinist, and the local cabaret – the impoverished could do the latter by drilling a hole in the wall surrounding the performance space.65 Much to Iur’eva’s relief, her big-city career would take off quickly, surviving both the attacks of the twenties against tsyganshchina (which often left her in tears off-stage) and the more extensive tirades against “light” entertainment after World War Two. She began her ascent with conspicuous poise, in a stylish black-velvet dress and string of pearls, at her St Petersburg audition before a group of theatre administrators. Her long fair hair, finely penned brows, and dark, doleful eyes cut an impressive picture, yet her (eternally) diminutive figure seemed somehow at odds with the emotional power of the repertoire. As if to stress that contradiction, promotional photos in later years would often show her with blond tresses pulled back and slightly tousled, a pensive finger touching her cheek: a hint of disorderly musings in a tiny frame. She performed three romances before being interrupted by some surprisingly audible bickering in the parterre: “I’ll take her!” “No, I

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will …” From among the select audience there slowly emerged the figure of a young man. He approached the stage and said, “If I may, I’ll take her for myself.” Thus began a courtship and marriage that lasted forty-six years.66 This romantic story was often repeated in interviews with Iur’eva; it forms a rich, sentimental backdrop against which less appealing incidents are related and assessed, the first of which is the Revolution. Iur’eva’s husband, Iosif Arkad’ev, would decide that the safest place for a singer of romances after 1917 was anywhere but Russia. After several years of weighing the pros and cons of Muscovite politics, of watching its ups and downs, he left with his wife for Paris in the summer of 1925, arriving on 14 July.67 The family had been politely “pulled” as much as pushed abroad, for Arkad’ev’s relatives in France owned both a mink farm and a radio factory.68 Once in France, Iur’eva, as a striking blonde and surrounded by other equally bright émigré stars, such as the singers Aleksandr Vertinskii and Iurii Morfessi (see later chapters), was offered several cinema roles by enthused directors in the capital’s restaurants. These escapades were surpassed only by her giving birth while caught in a traffic jam, delayed by chance at the doors of a children’s home, but she declined the car company’s traditional offer of a new model to all such mothers. She felt little cause to celebrate the delivery, since pregnancy had already forced her to turn down the film roles. She wanted increasingly to go home, so much so that the family was soon (together with sister and her husband) ensconced in sixteen square metres of a Moscow communal apartment.69 Although her professional career after the return seemed to show few signs of political fallout, other factors quickly conspired to lessen her time on stage. Iur’eva was devastated when her infant son died of a congenital heart defect. Under enormous psychological pressure, she was barely able to keep performing until 19 November 1928, when she walked away from the estrada. Either for personal reasons or for those imposed upon her by rapm et al., Iur’eva stayed off the stage for seven years. It certainly was not easy to perform at a time when tsyganshchina was termed a “sea of vulgarity, which even famine and typhus haven’t yet killed off.” Estrada songs were, quite simply, “a pitch-black quagmire: all kinds of foxtrots, gypsy stuff, criminal songs, and endless versions of pre-revolutionary ‘intimate’ or ‘mood’ songs. It all claims for itself some kind of ‘ideology’ that’s been stitched together on the fly.”70 This abuse continued at pedantic recording sessions: “Get rid of that note! It smells of tsyganshchina!” In her defence, Iur’eva claimed, “I was only ever being passionate. I’d never allow any bad taste in my work. People used to mention ‘cruel romances’ with a smirk, but it turned out that romances would

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last forever. That’s because their internal world of feelings is a world full of beauty and drama.”71 Feelings would outlast political reproach. Prudish acrimony, as hinted earlier, came to an end of sorts on 23 April 1932, with the Party’s declaration “On the Reconstruction of Literary and Artistic Organizations,” plus official disapproval for rapm’s heavy-handedness towards pre-revolutionary genres. People everywhere were tired of proclamations such as “Get vulgar and bourgeois works out of your repertoire!” or “Write works that are in harmony with the present!”72 In the following year it was officially announced that the range of genres represented by the Soviet music industry must henceforth be varied (raznoobraznyi); it must incorporate both high and low, local and exotic (within the ussr), serious and frivolous. Enter Dunaevskii and Shostakovich. Nevertheless, we can assume neither the absence of conflict nor the abolition of romances in an antagonistic, binary scheme of state versus small stage, because the complex problems of give-and-take continued, as two of Iur’eva’s letters from 1927 and 1936 show: To the Plenipotentiary Committee from Izabella Iur’eva: Please permit me to perform the following old romances at the Moscow Music Hall: “Don’t Tell Anybody Anything” [Nikomu nichego ne rasskazyvai], “Zhiguli,” “Between Two Worlds” [Sred’ mirov], and “He’s Gone” [On uekhal]. Izabella Iur’eva. … Resolution: The repertoire is exceptional in its vulgarity and bourgeois aspects. We will grant Iur’eva alone permission to sing these songs until some other suitably contemporary material is written. Editor Pikel’. June 1927. … Declaration No. 15, Central Committee for the Regulation of Dramatic Presentation and Repertoires: In accordance with such regulation, all vocal works associated with the word “old” must henceforth be neither in repertoires nor on sale. [In Iur’eva’s repertoire such songs are:] “Turquoise Rings” [Biriuzovye kolechki], “Today We Parted” [My segodnia rasstalis’ s toboi], “A Shawl Won’t Keep Me Warm” [Menia ne greet shal’], “The Autumn Wind Moans Pitifully” [Zhalobno stonet veter osennii], “That Night Was Radiant” [Siiala noch’ ], “Farewell, My Gypsy Camp” [Proshchai, moi tabor]. Moscow. 2 October 1936.73

Iur’eva’s graceful retirement from this political seesawing was not followed by critical glee; she retired quietly, to a life of infrequent surprises.

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On one occasion her husband, who had now made a lot of money in the perfume and soap industries (from twelve factories!), managed somehow to find and buy her a golden Chrysler, securing it from a foreigner for 20,000 rubles. This, however, was not the only act of adoration that prompted her return to the small stage and the renewed attention of her audience. Her other admirers included the writer Mikhail Zoshchenko, who was infatuated with Iur’eva and more than willing (along with the poet Samuil Marshak and American Armand Hammer) to jeopardize her marriage in the name of an illicit affair. My Dear Izabella! Thank you for the card, the wonderful records, and the evening spent at your apartment. You were so touching, in all regards. Everything was so wonderful, almost a little childlike … As a keepsake I am sending you a card and my own book. I hope that you’ll remember me – on some other occasion – as your ardent and faithful admirer. With a kiss for your darling hand, Mikh. Zoshchenko, 23 May 1938.74

In connection with this (unrequited) love, there are stories that Iur’eva, tiring of his attention, was at one point ready to throw him down the stairs of her building.75 Unperturbed by such a temper, Stalin was also equally fond of the songstress; he would dispatch cars late at night to collect her (but not her husband) for private performances. In the pitch-black corridors of the Kremlin, he would then tell her: “Izabella, you can sing whatever you want, any kind of tsyganshchina. Just don’t do any Soviet songs!”76 Stalin’s remarks are all the more surprising when we consider the official status of romances circa World War Two. One indicative article in the journal Sovetskaia muzyka of 1940 tried to show a respect for public taste, mollify or avoid professional condescension, and satisfy public goals. The result is a somewhat testy proclamation. We can explain the huge popularity of “gypsy” singers today, both male and female, with reference to one notable commonplace: they churn out lyricism and poetry of the human heart. The complete monopolists in this area are already evident. They sing about nature, eternity, love, lovers’ farewells, time’s inexorable passage, youth’s irreversible departure, starry skies, the White Nights [of Leningrad], and a desire for happiness. They cultivate the kind of themes that have always excited people and will never stop exciting them … [But] among all the masters of other arts today, these “gypsy” singers are nonetheless in the position of outcasts. The public’s delight, combined with the disdain of both professionals and social organizations, only intensifies

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in practice unhealthy, bohemian tendencies in these singers … The repertoire of “gypsy” singers, it goes without saying, corresponds in no way to the social goals that stand before all forms of Soviet performance – the goals of enlightening workers in the spirit of communist morals.77

In the estrada draft call of World War Two, Iur’eva saw a good chance to marry old- and new-style emotion, to amplify the unchanged sentiment of her prewar romances not as an outcast, but in a new and newly acceptable context. She performed vigorously at the front. During peacetime, her normal timetable had never exceeded three concerts per week, since all were given without microphones. During the war, that workload, often without amplification, rose to two per day. She sang in an estrada ensemble to troops en route to the battlefields, on their trains and station platforms – even in the trenches after their arrival. Nonetheless, on several occasions when bullets flew a little too close, her husband would arrange for the ensemble to play purely instrumental concerts, thus leaving his wife safely at the rear.78 One Soviet marshal commented after a brave and tiring front-line performance by the “White Gypsy,” as she was known: “I grew younger, thanks to your concert.” “My heart,” said a lieutenant-colonel years afterwards, “recalls those romances and other songs, especially ‘You Remember Our Rendezvous?’ We do.”79 The state approves of an emotional art form that cultivates sentiment, introspection, and retrospection in its audience. The sentiment conforms to, yet outdistances or grows beyond, the perimeters of a state order to express it. It overachieves. After the War: Fickle Fame and Thieving Housemaids After the war was over, the Composers’ Union tried to clean house by clamping down in October 1946 on some poplar estradniki who were registered among its members. (A year and a half later Zhdanov would exacerbate the situation, descending like a ton of bricks upon Shostakovich and others at a Party session dedicated to Soviet music.) What bothered the Union was not sentiment per se or its intensity, but the kind of sentiment expressed. Music such as Iur’eva’s was seen to rob the masses of socially useful energy by concentrating exclusively on personal problems, which could be socially detrimental.80 As a result of such worries, she included modern songs in her repertoire. These, however, were remarkably similar to the old ones, such as “An Evening of Waltzes” (Vecher val’sa), “My Heart” (Serdtse moe), “A Lyrical Waltz” (Liricheskii val’s), “Believe Me” (Pover’), and the very Russian tango “Forgive Me, If You Can” (Esli mozhesh’, prosti) performed to

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violin and sizeable Slavic accordion.81 The new songs made an imperceptible shift, yet they now fell smoothly into the Soviet canon and (as with Esli mozhesh’) became some of her most famous works. Autocrats and audiences were not far apart and the public noise they made hid a private concord. In 1950, mellowing with the years, Sovetskaia muzyka published a gentler article that appealed to perceptions of pre-revolutionary estrada and encouraged, not ordered, Iur’eva (by name) to redirect her energies towards Soviet rather than gypsy songs. After all, “the Soviet song is multifaceted [mnogoobrazna]. It embraces the broadest field of modern themes. Its range is enormous. It needs an equally huge circle of performers, too, the most varied in manner and talent.”82 It is evident that Iur’eva began to exist fairly peacefully within this overlap of rhetoric and sentiment, because a large country dacha soon followed. She also enjoyed star-studded friendships – with Dunaevskii, for example – but after Stalin’s death she had to decide between the dacha and her Moscow apartment, since the days of bottomless subsidies were over. Despite such a dramatic entrance into Khrushchev’s more modern society, when her husband passed away in 1971 (seven years after her farewell concert in Leningrad), she still chose to alleviate her loneliness in a very old-world manner, by hiring a series of people for live-in help. When Iur’eva celebrated her hundredth birthday in 1999, her connections to the Kremlin – the paradox of Stalin’s enthusiasm for tsyganshchina – aroused renewed and particular interest.83 Journalists could only explain the (sometimes secret) love of Soviet officials for her work by discussing the emotions of romances. Iur’eva had “cleansed them of vulgarity” and thus won the “sympathy of all society’s strata,” high or low.84 These feelings harboured the “original beauty [of the genre] that moved Pushkin, the beauty that caused Tolstoi to cry from emotion and Blok to hang his head.”85 Nevertheless, we should not forget that the presence of Stalin at Iur’eva’s private performances was often emotionally “restricting” for her, no matter how much he liked her work, especially the romance Sasha.86 She was “terribly worried” by his presence. Stalin would sit thoughtfully (yet ominously) off to one side of the entertainment, behind a table with food and drink. In the late nineties Yeltsin was less frightening, sending congratulatory telegrams instead of midnight chauffeurs: “The history of Russian estrada is seamlessly [nerazryvno] interwoven with your name, Izabella. Without fail, your songs and romances always warmed people in the most difficult of times. You generously gave them your heart. Even in

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the years when those in power paid you no attention, the Russian people loved and valued your talent.”87 He would later say that although “a great deal will be forgotten and withdrawn into history, your voice will remain as one of the brightest symbols of the departing century.”88 This discernible change in attention had begun in 1980, when a documentary film crew approached her.89 From that time onwards, both her memory and songs enjoyed new audiences, yet one still encounters the words of aging original admirers or elderly journalists who recall “that pleasant voice from our prewar childhood.”90 She was squeamish in her final years about being photographed by these people, offering journalists older pictures showing “the way that I’ve stayed in my spirit.” Comments such as Yeltsin’s allow us to draw a parallel between Iur’eva’s biography and the fate of the Russian romance throughout the century, to see the romance (or her) as the “idol” born of an age.91 As such a symbol, supposedly timeless, Iur’eva said, “It’s terrible when the body ages. But the soul stays young.” In an era when there were no longer the state organizations to officially bless or bear these idols,92 Iur’eva’s body began to fail. She joked about constantly forgetting her Validol and the fact that she would kneel from respect before younger artists today if only she could get up again!93 Nevertheless, in this juxtaposition of the apparently finite and infinite, what she called the “soul” kept going. Spiritual entities, as Gilles Deleuze once suggested, “or abstract ideas are not what we think they are. They are emotions or affects.” Affect keeps going when the body slows down. It outlasts both its recipient and maker. It outstrips its critics and clandestine aficionados because it leaves such a strong emotional imprint upon the world. At an evening in her honour in 1993, the finite and infinite were played one against the other when Iur’eva was touted as the “Russia which we lost.”94 What Russia, though? Yours or mine? Just hers, maybe? Where did it go? Did it go anywhere at all? The problem is one of memory. An influential journal of 1974 wondered if there was anybody in that year who did not know or remember Iur’eva.95 She suffered meddlesome officiousness, but an influential Soviet publication (and its public) still remembered her. Under democracy she was afraid (maybe wrongly) of being forgotten and could not now consider the very tough work of a comeback in the modern marketplace: “My God! I’d have a heart attack, if not two! I don’t even have a decent wig at the moment! In the name of all that’s holy, who needs all that at my age?!”96 The Russia we have lost need only be remembered and affirmed. It will then return. It is private, yet unconsciously and desirously public; hence the confusion. It needs no wigs or sturdy knees, because it is affective. What Iur’eva missed at the end of her life was the warmth

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of care from now absent fans, the emotional contact that allowed her to stay on in the Soviet Union, “no matter how hard things were.”97 “I always wanted to live in my own country, though that sounds so oldfashioned today,” where people were kind enough to send her some charitable fare in tough times: fish, lard, candies, and “some kind of macaroni.”98 In her final years, the famous civic singer Iosif Kobzon also brought her fruit and vegetables. (Let us not be too mawkish, though. Iur’eva complained that she would give her maid “a pile of money” in order to buy what she could in the chic “Eliseev” store, but the singer suspected her maid of buying only the worst, even putrid, sausage at the market, which she would eat on the sly, in any case. Iur’eva also accused some past admirers of stealing from her archives when they visited.)99 Such upsets aside, her overwhelmingly positive power came from romances or songs that “must be performed by somebody with the talents of a dramatic actress. To sing a romance is to play a little drama, to extract the maximum content and sense from two or three stanzas. That’s how the words come alive, coloured by feeling, and stand out, almost visibly … Intelligence, a heart, a voice, and hard work [trud] – that’s what’ll make a performer of old romances.”100 Iur’eva herself would often judge the success of a performance with her tears: irrespective of a romance’s content, she would “put her entire heart” into each song and fall to weeping “if it turned out well.”101 The power of “love, fidelity, duty, the grand feeling of the human soul’s sufferings and joys,” enabled her to overcome the most austere of times. On the ghastly front lines of World War Two, for example, the winter frost was sometimes “horrific. Fairly often we had to stay in tents. Just imagine! Down on the floor there’s a roasting hot stove, so your feet are warm but your head’s covered in frost. I’m such a delicate flower that I catch a cold in Moscow from the lightest draught. There, though, I didn’t catch any cold whatsoever!”102 A heartwarming sentiment, in both senses.

a dark, “real” gypsy: the georgian tamara tsereteli Моя любовь ужасней казни! Я так люблю! Я так люблю! [My love is worse than torture! I love you so much! I love you so much!]103

Can the heartwarming sentiment of Iur’eva be matched? A fine contender would be the Georgian diva Tamara Tsereteli, who was a year

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younger than Iur’eva. Even in retirement she would still be an instantly recognizable personality, an artiste of dark southern aspect and broad white smile. The northern studied finesse of Iur’eva is here replaced by raven hair, full brows, and the dignified, pronounced profile of warmer climes. Her creative biography begins in sunny western Georgia with church choral lessons, after which her voice attracted early attention at the time she studied in Kutaisi’s Academy of Saint Nina. In 1917 she moved to Tbilisi (then Tiflis) to begin a medical career, but was persuaded instead to enter the local conservatory. The decision was not regretted, because her obvious talents soon garnered her the rare honour of a personal stipend. Here she was introduced into musical society by another singer of romances, Keto Dzhaparidze, and gave her first Georgian solo performance in 1920.104 News travelled fast, and thanks to the promotional endeavours of the young composer Boris Prozorovskii, by 4 November 1923 Tsereteli was performing on the stages of Moscow. The estrada brought her such success that she soon abandoned all thoughts of a “serious” career in opera with her contralto. This first concert in the capital was conducted in the old-style “collective” (sbornyi) format, where a fullblown classical orchestra (which performed its own program) surrounded Tsereteli and other artists who would read literary works. Genres and styles were mixed and matched. As her career advanced, she suffered less meddling than Iur’eva had, because her dusky complexion and Georgian accent made her sound not only like a “real” (not white) gypsy, but also like Stalin’s compatriot. Consequently, it has been said that for many years the fate of the romance was in her hands; nobody else could perform the genre with her freedom. Even in the years of rapm we read, “The entire world already knows Tamara Tsereteli, the most talented performer of gypsy songs. She has shown us genuine[!] tsyganshchina, without the kind of grubby vulgarity that grates on the nerves,” without “mawkishness or pomposity.”105 She avoided some other clichés of a romance repertoire, too: impassioned cries or shouts, dramatic pauses (usually uncalled for in the text), and frequent recourse to affectedly deep notes.106 Stereotypes that, seemingly, were acceptable to the Soviet press of the time in her performances included “extreme changes of tempo and rhythmic disruptions.”107 Yet even rural newspapers knew of the genre’s inherent dangers and praised her for walking the “tightrope” of romances, for avoiding the descent into “the vulgar tsyganshchina of pubs.”108 Whether or not Stalin was instrumental in aiding her career, Tsereteli began to walk that tightrope with decreasing frequency only after a 1953 jubilee concert, held in Moscow to mark thirty years on

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the stage and more than five thousand concerts in two hundred towns around the Soviet Union.109 Those years had relatively recently been crowned by her wildly successful concerts at the front during World War Two (the profits of which she gave to soldiers’ families), as well as by additional radio broadcasts for those in active service elsewhere. During that frightening time, she “was accepted everywhere very warmly, heartily. She was applauded sincerely, from the soul.”110 Popular for decades, she became an Honoured Artist of Georgia two years before her death and retired from both the stage (in 1960) and life (1968) in a less dramatic fashion than she had entered them. Some well-known actors came to Tbilisi [in Tsereteli’s youth] … they performed the play Poor in Spirit [Nishchie dukhom] and at one point in the course of the drama needed a gypsy song. Actually they needed the song “Burn, Burn, My Star,” and the play’s director gave the role to twenty-two-year old Tamara Tsereteli. She put on her gypsy costume and prepared to go out on stage. The director warned her: “You’ve got to remember, Tamara – this isn’t a concert. It’s a play. You’re not part of it. When you’ve sung your song, get off stage – don’t bow!” She performed her romance – and then there was such an explosion of applause that the play simply couldn’t go on. The audience kept calling her back on stage, but she wouldn’t go out. Finally the play’s heroine, in order to get out of the situation, said, “You couldn’t send the gypsy back out, could you? … Maybe she could sing the song just one more time?” Tamara repeated the number with great success.111

The rare problems in her career grew from the initially happy dialogue of an empire’s centre and periphery. At her opening concert in Moscow, the capital’s newspapers trumpeted assurances that she would soon become a star but would further only the “noble aspect” of distant gypsy songs.112 Reporting later from her native Tbilisi, the Moscow paper Zrelishcha noted the dignified atmosphere among her compatriots plus the exotic nature of a concert at which only Georgian and Armenian conversations could be heard in the hall.113 Whenever she was touring, she was eagerly awaited back in Moscow, but her heart remained resolutely in Tbilisi.114 “Nothing can make me forget my homeland, neither life in the north nor being abroad. One day I will go home and serve that homeland with all my strength.”115 Sadly she would not live to do so. Not even the Kremlin, it seemed, could protect her from one or two bad reviews caused by this “separatist sentiment,” which led her to include Revolutionary songs and those of the Civil War, just for safety’s sake. She would also wait a rather long time for formal recognition (as

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opposed to private enthusiasm from those same quarters). Even when she performed her 1953 jubilee concert, she had as yet no official titles, and the initial suggestion – made furtively (and paradoxically) as early as the troublesome thirties – that she might become an Honoured Artist of the Russian Federation would drag on for decades.116 Her “bureaucratic” biography is a mess, confused between north and south. All the same, as I say, Tsereteli was for some years arguably the most popular performer of romances in Russia, whatever the attitude towards her of a bureaucratic minority. “All those knick-knacks and doodads [bezdelushki i pustyshki]” of gypsy-style singing took on a wellliked “great significance” in Tsereteli’s performances.117 She did not resort to wailing or self-pitying “screams and whispers,” but advocated a philosophy of dramatic performance based upon her “ingenuous, joyful Georgian temperament.”118 Another Soviet critic also discerned Tsereteli’s disposition as the key to her success, since she was a “happy, intelligent, noble woman with a generous soul. She was good-willed and interested in everything – and these are the qualities which define an artist’s personality … irrespective of genre.”119 She was joyful, accepting or affirming and therefore generous in several ways. Tsereteli gave most of the day that she died, in fact, to writing an enthusiastic review of an upcoming artiste, a fellow graduate of Tbilisi Conservatory, Nani Bregvadze.120 In a similar sign of mutual respect and love, some Georgians at her funeral brought with them some homegrown violets and a handful of Georgian soil to sprinkle upon her resting place.121 Perhaps as a parallel to her own open-minded, multigeneric experience, Tsereteli had earlier written, in 1964, an article (in the influential magazine Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk) on “natural metamorphoses” in the work of estrada compères, who – as one person – connect “interludes, satirical pieces, parodies, and sketches.”122 We see exactly the same combination, absorption, or connection in her romances, which also undergo a series of metamorphoses.

the impassioned romances of tsereteli and iur’eva Tsereteli’s songs rely upon older elements of the gypsy thematic than do those of Iur’eva. Her sentimental tendencies are bolder than Iur’eva’s, more passion than love. The famous songs of both women are performed to a lone guitar or piano accompaniment, but Tsereteli’s bold, expansive emotion often ascends to greater volume than the calmer performances of her northern colleague. We will

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begin our comparison with Iur’eva’s version of the composition “He Has Gone” (On uekhal), in which the heroine is feebly resigned to the fact that only spring (as cyclical time) remains after the departure of a lover. This number is a fine example of the genre, if not the quintessential romance. The song begins with the typically listless, perhaps recklessly chosen, chords of a forlorn guitar, outside of strict rhythmic structures. The wistful, inconstant gypsy, nature’s plaything, strums as and how the mood strikes him. A moment’s pause and a woman’s voice sounds against the silence, slow and vaguely pained. The singer’s deliberate, drawn delivery accompanies the guitar’s flourishes with only rare synchrony; the passion of the music and that of the voice rise and fall slightly separated, once again as if at the whim of feelings beyond dry academism. The chanteuse seems tired and troubled, and romances often abandon their performer in moments of extreme turmoil: protracted vocal notes of yearning sound against growing stillness as the guitar or piano falls silent, as if the emotions outlast and outstrip their public performance. В дверь стучится зимний ветер, А на сердце зимний хлад. Он уехал, ненаглядный, Не вернется он назад. И весна мне не на радость, Коль зима в душе моей. Он уехал, он уехал, А слезы льются из очей. [A winter wind knocks at the door, and there’s a winter chill on the heart. My handsome one has gone; he’ll not return. I have no spring for my happiness, if winter is in my soul. He has gone, he has gone, and tears flow from my eyes.]

The final couplet here cancels any hope that springtime might indeed offer a lasting consolation. A little solace comes instead from the seven strings of a gypsy guitar. Reworking this traditional motif, Tsereteli might typically call upon song as a force stronger than calendrical time: “Hey, guitar, friend of mine, why do you ring out so timidly? / It’s not yet time to cry over me! Life may have passed, everything may have flown by, / But song remains, a song in the night hour” (“Hey, Guitar, Friend of Mine” [Èi, drug-gitara]). As soon as the guitar rings out, it will bring love back: “With a resonant song, with a guitar and dances, / My soul rushes, strives for affection; / My heart

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rushes, strives even now for / A smile – and reproach – in familiar sounds. / Once before our lives were accidentally / Merged and melded by this song” (“With a Resonant Song” [Zvonkoi pesnei]). Tsereteli does not, at times, wish to be reminded of the past, of prior powerful passions, but if “he was to return / I’d forget my woe, like a dream. / I wouldn’t reproach him with a single word” (“Do Not Tell Me about Him” [Ne govorite mne o nem]). She would not say no – she would say yes and affirm what she terms “your joyful, secret power,” the “secret passion” that she equates with a “spring storm [uragan]” (“You Are Nineteen” [Vam 19 let]). This affirmation culminates in the romance entitled “The Caravan.” Мы странно встретились и странно разойдемся, Улыбкой, нежностью роман окончим наш. И если памятью к прошедшему вернемся, То скажем – это был мираж. Так иногда в томительной пустыне Мелькают образы далеких, чудных стран. Но это призраки, и снова небо сине. И вдаль бредет усталый караван. ........................................ Пусть впереди все призрачно, туманно, Как наших чувств пленительный обман. Мы странно встретились, и ты уйдешь нежданно, Как в путь уходит караван. [We met mysteriously and will part mysteriously. Our romance will end with a smile and tenderness. If, with our memories, we return to the past, we’ll say it was all a mirage. Thus at times in the agonizing desert, images of distant, magical lands flicker by. But they are spectres, and the sky is blue once more. The languorous caravan wanders on. So be it, that everything is ghostly, enshrouded in mist, like the captivating deceit of our feelings. We met mysteriously, and you will leave unexpectedly, as a caravan sets off on its way.]

Emotions come and go, mysteriously. I want them, but they sometimes frighten me and can cloud my judgment. These rather dramatic conclusions are tailored as a quieter, more studied philosophy in most songs of Izabella Iur’eva, who is not an obvious advocate of Tsereteli’s heady passions. The Georgian sings of time’s nomadic, odd, and frightening movements; the Russian expresses her gratitude for those 34

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same movements. “Everything that was so beautiful, / Is swept away by time’s cruel hand. / But say ‘Thank you’ to time for that, / And time will return calmly to you” (“When Leaves Fall” [Kogda padaiut list’ia]). That “thank you” comes in the form of memory. The line “You remember our meetings” occurs in several of Iur’eva’s romances, and its invocation of repeated returns to a past event from the present (in order that the past be employed in that present) might just save a soul from “illness” whenever such meetings or rendezvous are in danger of being forgotten (“Rendezvous” [Vstrechi]). The same motifs of natural return (such as seasons) are in the repertoire of both performers, but Iur’eva uses them differently and, surprisingly, with some conviction, despite her characteristic restraint. Her lover does not believe that the sun will return after a severe autumn, but our demure singer hopes he might at least try and “believe that it will,” in a romance of the same name (Pover’). The inevitable must also be affirmed – as part of everything – if chance is to have any chance. In perhaps her most famous song, “Sasha,” she tells the young man of the title that memories might recapture not only the past, but also its effect upon the two lovers. Here the mood is much more hopeful, in some versions with carefree, ragtime improvisation running throughout. Саша! Ты помнишь наши встречи В приморском парке, на берегу? Саша! Ты помнишь теплый вечер, Весенний вечер, каштан в цвету? Нет ярче красок, нигде и никогда! Саша, как много в жизни ласки, Как незаметно бегут года. Жизнь кипит кругом. И нам ли думать о былом. Ведь не стареем, а молодеем Мы с каждым днем. [Sasha! Do you remember our rendezvous in the park on the sea, by the shore? Sasha! Do you remember that warm evening, that spring evening, with the chestnut trees in bloom? There are no brighter colours anywhere or at any time! Sasha, there is so much affection in life, the years fly by unnoticed. Life seethes all around. Is it for us to think of the past? After all, we grow younger with each day, not older.]

Affirmation will defeat the passing of the years: “Life’s smile will be seen only by the person who smiles at life … We must seek joy in 35

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everything, / For sadness will find us itself” (“A Spring Song” [Vesenniaia pesenka]). Another song, “The Lock of Hair” (Lokon), juxtaposes the passage of time, recorded by her elderly mother’s ringlet or curl, and the improvement of time as recorded by the heart. As we have seen in Iur’eva’s interviews, love improves over time, even if the body falls away. Любимая, родная, головушка седая, Ты с годами все белей, белей. Но год от года, мама, чем старей ты, мама. Тем для меня дороже и милей. Об одном я прошу у тебя, дорогая, Ты подольше, подольше, родная, живи. Чтоб в годах не старея, золотилось, как локон, Твое сердце большой материнской любви. [Beloved, dear, silver head of hair, you grow whiter and whiter with the years. But from year to year, Mother, the older you are, the more precious and adorable you are for me. I ask of you only, dear Mother, that you live a little longer, a little longer. Thus your heart, full of maternal love, will not age, but grow gold like a lock of (youthful) hair.]

conclusion: the passion of romances survived politics The careers of Izabella Iur’eva and Tamara Tsereteli show the power of emotional affirmation as a tool within, despite, and even against politics. The binary oppositions of political rhetoric, plus concomitant notions like temporal movement forwards (i.e., not backwards), also come under attack from a worldview felt. Feeling happy, glib though this may sound, is a powerful activity. Can it mean more than the alien, extremely strong affects that surround one, however? Awareness or consciousness is, after all, a matter of competing concepts (of better ideas) more than it is a relationship to objective “external” reality.123 The body in which consciousness is concentrated is itself a locus where affects and emotions do battle – in the heart. Simple love songs and heady romances are indicative of – and instrumental in – such processes. Affirmation is the unsung hero of such battles. Saying yes to all manner of phenomena can usurp the power of political structures and institute a non-linear view of a happy existence in flux. This is the affirmation or irregular movement of a nomadic (gypsy) worldview. Deleuze has summarized the significance of this view as a powerful

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means of muddling or roiling calm (if not stagnant) philosophical waters with the “affirmative powers of transformation. Dance transmutes heavy into light, laughter transmutes suffering into joy and the play of throwing (the dice) transmutes low into high.”124 Izabella Iur’eva and Tamara Tsereteli both encountered serious opposition from the forces of stasis, but remained within tangible and emotional reach of their primary Russian and Georgian audiences. What, however, happens if we increase the power of the forces bent on opposing the feelings of estrada, to the point where performers are obliged to run, to leave Russia after the Revolution? Can joy survive that kind of assault? The careers of our two gypsy artistes moved in and out of sentiments acceptable to the state. Does exile cancel such movement? In order to answer these questions, we need to look at two male contemporaries of Iur’eva and Tsereteli: Iurii Morfessi and Petr Leshchenko.

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2 THE ROMANCE IN EXILE: IURII MORFESSI AND PETR LESHCHENKO There isn’t a branch of Russian art or science that has remembered its own people the way that show business has. Strange, I know, but true.1

who was iurii morfessi? who cared? Iurii Morfessi and Petr Leshchenko were two Russian idols. One died in Paris, penniless; the other passed away mysteriously in a Soviet labour camp, maybe from a stomach ulcer, maybe from poison. Both of them had been extremely famous – in fact heartthrobs – across all of Eastern Europe. What on earth happened, and how, if things became so grim, could the affirmative stance of their songs have been of any philosophical consolation? Even though Izabella Iur’eva left Russia because of the Revolution, substantial fiscal comfort awaited her in Paris and she later returned home to suffer little critical flak.2 The reasons Morfessi and Leshchenko left Russia were considerably more menacing. The forces of signification against which they struggled were much more powerful.3 Any government, in essence, has “the power to affect in all its aspects (the government of children, of souls, of the sick, of families, and so on).”4 Since affect is the use of power for the purposes of giving something “meaning,” then we need to look at the way in which that power is effected and then (if possible) accepted or refashioned by an affirming individual. Governmental or imperial affect circa 1917 is for many estradniki something encountered spatially. The movement of an individual in exile counters imperial stasis, in this case by moving in and out of its edges, between Odessa, Kishinev, Riga, Bucharest, London, Paris, and other cities. Yet that movement is sometimes totally (permanently) outside the empire, and therefore of no interest to it. Can this kind of international motion be affirmed in such a way that it is not merely the consequence of socialist policy, the sorry

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imposition of an indifferent or angry state upon a singer? Can it be the happy invocation of “a plurality of centers, a superposition of perspectives, a tangle of points of view, a coexistence of movements, which essentially distort representation”?5 Can exile on an empire’s fringes thus escape the meaning portrayed and imposed upon it from that sovereignty’s centre? Representation relies upon stasis, upon the same meaning and the same form (or space). Movement frustrates sameness and maps new spaces; meanings are picked up, moved around, and put somewhere else. This process is hard to represent, since it refuses to stay still. What was the attitude of the incipient Soviet Union to movement? How did its political agenda relate to the popularity of Morfessi and Leshchenko at home or abroad, before or after exile? How did they, in turn, relate to that agenda, and why did it, perhaps, kill them both? These and other questions will be answered in this chapter. I have decided in these pages to make particular use of web-based sources, to show the status of these two performers in far-flung corners of that former empire even today. After all, even in 1982, young readers were writing to national newspapers and asking, “Who is Iurii Morfessi?”6

iurii morfessi: diamond cufflinks from the royal family Ямщик, не гони лошадей! Мне некуда больше спешить, Мне некого больше любить, Ямщик, не гони лошадей! [Coachman, don’t drive the horses on! I’ve nowhere else to hurry and nobody to love anymore. Coachman, don’t drive the horses on!]7

Iurii Morfessi was born in Odessa in 1882, or so the story goes. Nowadays there is a growing tendency to say he was born in Athens, moving at the age of one. His family was indeed originally from Greece and had made first contact with the Ukrainian port perhaps seventy years prior to the young singer’s first birthday. Rumour had it that the boy’s great-grandfather had been a pirate and had hidden treasure on an unnamed island in the Aegean. His father, sadly, fared less successfully on the waves and drowned in an accident, a tragedy the family considered a dismal omen for the eight-year-old boy. Ignorant of his fate, Iurii sang from an early age in church choirs and even wealthy parlours, though he was never to enjoy a formal education. He tried several times to run away from home, desperate 39

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to travel. Several established Soviet authors lovingly relate the story, even today, of his first encounter with professional estrada, once he had overcome the passing precocious urge to become an architect. As he walked along some seaside boulevard or other, the young Morfessi’s attention was caught by a new sideshow in Odessa. Anybody who wanted could record his or her voice on a phonograph. “It won’t hurt to try,” thought Iurii and “just for posterity” recorded a couple of comic songs. Much to Morfessi’s surprise, a man standing beside him suddenly became interested. He was an impresario of the local opera. The callow singer was thus accepted into the theatre, helped not only by the kind of voice that nature alone can bequeath a man, but an inborn artistic intuition, too.8

Morfessi’s big break indeed came thanks to this “impresario,” an artist from Moscow’s Bol’shoi Theatre who was then teaching at the Odessa Conservatory. The young man was first offered a few small roles at the city’s opera theatre, together with more permanent work as prompter.9 These brief appearances on stage were so impressive that he was quickly offered more in a production of Charles Gounod’s opera of several decades prior, Faust. No doubt part of that impression was purely physical: Morfessi was a man of ample frame, and his modish hairstyle of short, oiled, and parted locks only emphasized this mass. His somewhat meaty features, slightly receding cleft chin, and broad chest created a body that in movement seemed to doubt its own progression, a perfect combination for early theatre of “restrained” aristocratic mien and the bold, physical ability to project one’s character very far. His fame as a genuine theatrical presence would quickly spread, with no help from what his family continued to see as destiny: he almost drowned, just like his father, in a boating accident two days before a major production. Morfessi was tempted by his own aunt to move to Kiev and join her estrada (not opera) troupe in a theatre with the suspiciously Arcadian name of “Chateau des Fleurs.” Having later experienced both high and low culture in Odessa and Kiev, Morfessi gravitated towards something of a geographic and stylistic median. He moved to Iur’eva’s hometown, where leading operetta roles were offered him between 1905 and 1906; here he could attract the attention of music lovers from both Moscow and St Petersburg. The latter city afforded him his first metropolitan show, a musical presentation of life in a wayfarers’ camp called Gypsy Songs in Various Personae. At this time he also gained bona fide experience of the gypsy style by listening to performers in wayfaring camps outside of Petersburg. The same gypsies would then attend his concerts. The press praised his first Moscow show in early 1909 as that of a “cultured, talented artist and charming, handsome baritone.” He was 40

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simultaneously promoted as an artist who has always “continued to strive for heartfelt [serdechnye] relations with the audience. Nowadays he encounters that heartiness everywhere.”10 Morfessi moved quickly upwards and onwards, to several similar encounters via operettas by Offenbach and Strauss. Desperate to satisfy this growing audience, the artist signed on for shows that sometimes ran simultaneously in different theatres. Friends, such as the artist Aleksei Alekseev, knew him therefore as a man of many roles. He played them on and off stage; all were popular. “A Greek by origin, a handsome man with black hair and dark eyes, Morfessi knew his own worth very well and behaved on the stage as an ‘idol.’ He played the same role in life, whether he was going into a barber’s shop, hailing a cabby, or giving a doorman some tip. He had the grand gestures of an aristocrat … an aristocrat from the provincial operetta.”11 Tickets to his shows would sell out two months in advance. This fame led to a recording contract, a twofold blessing for the singer. The heavy workload of so many shows and tours had left him with a serious respiratory inflammation; he was advised to reduce the number of performances in his schedule. He was touring not only in Russia, but also in Ukraine, Turkestan, the Crimea, and the Caucasus. Even the members of Russia’s royal family were among Morfessi’s admirers. Nicholas ii considered him the nation’s finest singer of romances and afforded him an honour unknown even to opera singers such as Chaliapin: a private performance upon the royal yacht Pole Star. The Czar, a great admirer of Morfessi’s sentimental, if not lachrymose, style, was amazed at his ability to perform so much from memory. “It’s just a matter of habit, Your Imperial Majesty,” replied the singer. A mnemonic art re-employs the past to create a permanent, changing present and thus charms a czar, the embodiment of imperial stasis. For his memory and effort, he was awarded cufflinks studded with diamond eagles. This regal attention was of interest and use to foreign recording companies, and an additional, sizeable contract from His Master’s Voice forced the singer to tour again. This time he travelled extensively throughout Russia, usually in the summer season and with scant regard for doctor’s orders. That disregard extended with equal physical risk yet greater happiness to the festivities surrounding the shows, as well. In Tbilisi we met with the same grand success and happiness that we’d noted in Tashkent, with the only difference that here in Tbilisi everything was more glamorous and majestic … In the audience sat dozens of people from the most important Georgian families, beautiful princes and princesses. The front row was full of officers, too … Each guest was obliged to drink from a Caucasian ram’s horn, to empty it completely. Putting it down was forbidden. It had to be 41

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in practice drained to the very bottom, even though it held a bottle and a half of wine. I was never a teetotaller, I’d gone through my own basic training with other singers, but even for me it was hard to empty the thing without pausing for breath. The Georgians made a joke of the matter by downing two, or even three, horns! My unfailing companion and musical accompaniment at such celebrations in our honour was Sasha Makarov, an unsurpassed master and wizard of the gypsy guitar. He wasn’t troubled by these horns, even when they were filled not with wine but the stiffest cognac! Sasha’s iron constitution could handle that kind of mixture, the kind of hellish cocktails that could fell a buffalo!12

When World War One quickly sobered Russian society, Morfessi began to perform charity concerts and, in the name of improved fundraising, restaged his old show “Gypsy Songs in Various Personae.” He also adopted some patriotic texts, Kazak Kriuchkov (Cossack Kriuchkov) and Rvemsia v boi (We Rush into Battle). Recordings of both were made and sent to the front as soon as possible. A series of sbornye concerts were performed in Petersburg for wounded soldiers, consisting not only of romances, but of ballet numbers as well.13 In the soldiers’ letters of gratitude to Morfessi, the singer was described as a roseate influence in their troubled lives, one that conjured the past in tangible forms:14 Dear Iurii Spiridonovich! There are four hundred of us here, wounded and sick soldiers in Petrograd Military Hospital No. 3. We just can’t wait for that blissful moment when we’ll hear you perform some old romances and other songs. They always sound so new. Brighten our dingy existence here in the hospital! Remind us of our past; sooth our ailing souls. We’re waiting here for you. You did promise to hurry and visit us!15

Morfessi spent much time gathering money for wounded veterans, and – like Tsereteli – donated all profits from his wartime performances to the same cause. He continued to perform for the Czar and his enthused son, despite the gathering military and political storms; the delighted heir to the throne had trouble sitting still during programs and was often warned by Anastasiia and his other sisters “not to keep pestering Mr Morfessi.” Morfessi’s record sales, like his royal audience, did not reflect the general social malaise. His recording company was now accustomed to a healthy turnover, to pressings in the hundreds of thousands.16 Roles in three movies or “boulevard dramas” gave a face to this already lucrative voice. A new luminary shone from the silver screen in By Fire and Sword (Ognem i mechom), Daughter of a Fallen Woman (Doch’ padshei), and She Did Not Fade Like a Rose (Uvianula ne tak, kak roza uviadaet).17

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Revolution! Morfessi on the Run across Europe The Revolution, unlike war, was closer to home and a more serious threat to stars of decadent drama, as Nikita Mikhalkov’s film Slave of Love shows so tragically. Morfessi, again like some of Mikhalkov’s characters, decided to leave Russia in 1920. Even prior to the outbreak of hostilities he had begun to feel very uneasy, especially on rural tours, such as to Ekaterinburg. “Beyond the city limits there was utter chaos. Morfessi had to suffer hassles in the railway system, constant delays, and, worst of all, the boorishness of soldiers who had fled the front and were now heading home to their villages.”18 While in Iaroslavl’, he almost died in a hail of czarist cannon fire. He had cajolled his fellow artists, with some difficulty, to accompany him on a morning stroll. When they returned, their hotel was a pile of rubble. Despite these close calls and the increasing dimensions of civil war, Morfessi did not want to leave. What finally convinced him to flee Russia was the persecution of other pre-revolutionary artists. Once the decision to escape was taken, he did so southwards, via Kiev and then Odessa, where he – in an aesthetically fitting manner – tarried long enough to give farewell concerts both at the city opera house and on the small stage. Very soon afterwards he set sail for Yalta, whence he was offered safe passage to Greece, though he declined and opted instead for Constantinople. A brief series of Turkish performances was then followed by continued movement, first to Venice, then to Vienna and Prague, and finally to Paris, where Morfessi was blessed with work in a new restaurant, Troika, with its wealthy (and newly arrived) Russian clientele. This early concentration of Russian émigrés in the French capital allowed him to continue his career with the same repertoire – folk songs, street songs, romances both cruel and salon – with great success in both restaurants and clubs.19 That sameness was also felt back in Russia, irrespective of revolutionary labour pains, so to speak; even Lenin’s family archives include some sheet music to Morfessi’s songs.20 In 1929 he toured as close to Russia as prudence would allow, travelling through the Baltic to skirt an empire. These adventures fatigued and irked his (second) wife; when she abandoned him in favour of an American, Morfessi moved in the opposite direction, beginning an excursive, nomadic existence throughout Europe that would last from 1935 until 1940. After 1936, for example, he spent much time in Yugoslavia, in particular the cabarets of Belgrade, where the roving Romany aesthetic of his early days resurfaced. Mythologizing his own predicament, perhaps, he sang in a rough-cut sheepskin waistcoat and riding boots. Rather than languish in nostalgia, though,

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he applied the wandering life to matters of genre, incorporating the songs of Soviet composers into his repertoire.21 The likelihood of returning to the land of such songs waned with each year, and so Morfessi gravitated back to Paris, where he would ultimately stay until the end of his life (he died 6 August 1957), save a brief period spent in London to avoid the German military presence. These final years of a resigned and retiring man are very poorly documented; so much so that, for example, it remains a mystery how and where his recordings of 1943 were cut. Although released by the Berlin Polydor affiliate, there is nothing to suggest that Morfessi was ever himself in Germany.22 As the Russian community dissipated over that time, so did Morfessi’s audience and his financial health. He faded slowly into obscurity, isolation, and a death of no apparent interest to anybody. Over his career, he had recorded approximately two hundred romances, songs, and arias. Despite his travels and mixed origins or genres, he remains today – for his Russian public – a wholly Russian artist: “Iurii Morfessi never held the citizenship of any other country.”23 Elsewhere, in the same spirit, we hear that “we must give him credit where credit’s due. To the end of his days he remained a Russian citizen, never having swapped his Russian passport for a foreign one.”24 His apartment was testament to this enduring patriotism, for there always hung a portrait of Czar Nicholas.25 Morfessi tried hard to play an affirmative role, but marital and political misfortunes were stronger than his ability to instigate a merry, multigeneric philosophy. The incorporation of Soviet numbers into his repertoire represents perhaps acquiescence to the supposed desires of a distant, powerful “Other” more than an attempt to willingly incorporate “otherness” into a motley sense of self. Let us see if Petr Leshchenko fares any better in equally sad, if not sadder, circumstances.

petr leshchenko: king of the socialist tango In the type of circumstances where neighbours found themselves obliged to write denouncements against each other, Leshchenko’s songs helped to preserve an element of normal life.26

Leshchenko was born in the very rustic setting of Isaevo, a peasant village not terribly far from Odessa, in 1898. (There are, however, increasingly audible voices that contend he was born in Kishinev or that his real name was Martynovich.)27 As with several of the singers

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in this book, his youthful introduction to singing came with the church choir, though Leshchenko also danced and practised earnestly on a guitar, given him as a present by his father. For reasons explained anon, he would actually begin his subsequent career as a dancer, incorporating modish foxtrots and folk song – chastushki – only later. Most of his rustic, motley youth, as a matter of fact, was not spent in Ukraine, since Leshchenko’s father had moved often with his family in search of stable work. These awkward itinerant beginnings led, thankfully, to unexpected opportunities. Like Iur’eva, he was able to garner an initial contact with professional singing in movie theatres between shows, in his case at Kishinev’s “Orfeum” cinema, plus in a restaurant with the rather fetching name of “Siuzanna.”28 This quiet life continued until World War One, when Leshchenko volunteered for service in Kishinev. Ensign Leshchenko’s initial experience at the nearby front line came under somewhat dramatic conditions. He was cast into battle amid impuissant, increasingly desperate Romanian soldiers, rescued only by the timely intervention of Russian troops. A stressful tour of duty continued until revolution broke out in St Petersburg at a time when Leshchenko was himself completely immobile, stranded with serious wounds in a field hospital. He was frantic to leave, since with the emergence of Soviet Russia, Romania suddenly had changed from ally to alien territory. It grabbed the lands of Bessarabia for itself, claiming them from Moscow; Leshchenko suddenly found himself “abroad.” In this odd political position, the singer found it easier, once he was healthy, to travel westwards than to think of entering Russia, and so with the cessation of hostilities he went to Paris in search of work.29 There he met his future wife, the dancer Zinaida Zakis, who had been studying in France. Together they planned a repertoire and toured Europe, returning to Kishinev only in 1928. At this time, Leshchenko was perhaps more of what we might today term a costumed folk, or stylized “Cossack,” dancer than anything else, and even then he was playing second string to his wife, who would perform for longer periods. From such information it is perhaps already clear that Leshchenko was a much smaller man than Morfessi. The former, as a dancer, was of slight standing, with a narrow and high brow, wide ears, and an equally broad smile, which gave him a somewhat boyish charm throughout his career. His flowing peasant or Cossack smocks and waisted britches masked a wiry, nimble body, which when combined with his slightly quiffed hair evoked a quintessential prewar citizen, lean from the adversities of Central European politics that made contented immobility unfeasible. As wartime problems still lay ahead, further travels among the cabarets of Europe then took the couple to Riga, where Zakis’s parents

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resided. After a tempting offer of permanent employment from a local restaurant, Leshchenko began truly to establish himself as a solo singer here in Latvia, towards the end of 1930. A major reason for this shift from choreography to song was his wife’s pregnancy, which made it impossible for her to dance.30 Another reason was that the role of restaurant – or cabaret – singer offered the prospect for greater financial rewards than a dancer’s negligible earnings. Leshchenko knew that the clear division of stage and hall would now vanish as he strove with extra effort to manifest a singer’s “special gift”: In any variety show, when you stand on the stage, you’re under a spotlight: there’s an orchestra in the pit in front of you and the public are sitting behind their tables. And on those tables there’s champagne and many other “concoctions”! The difficulty of performing in variety is that you have to entertain those people in the hall sufficiently for them to forget the appetizing dishes in front of them, together with the engaging young lady or suitor beside them – just so that they’ll listen to [you] singing. It’s even tougher in a cabaret. There [you] stand right beside the audience, almost among them, and they’re looking you in the eye (or into your mouth) and they notice the movement of every muscle on your face. You need that special gift of taking the public in hand, of making them listen.31

Thus he worked until the middle of the decade, when he decided to move, this time to Bucharest, establishing recording contracts both there and in Riga. This rapid, if not meteoric, change in fortune had come, as with Morfessi, from the blessings of royal patronage as word of his craft moved southwards back to Romania. King Carol of Romania (where the Russian language was heard more often than in Latvia) would subsequently ask the singer to perform privately at his country residence, to which Leshchenko would usually be driven in a huge, armour-plated automobile. At this time, again on the wings of a royal commendation, he was also contracted to entertain British high society on a tour of the United Kingdom, and he would return again to England in 1935 for some London engagements, in particular at the Troccadero, Savoy, and Palladium. He appeared as a guest on bbc radio, having been granted a little air time that was announced in the national magazine Radio Times as a romantic “surprise item.” As the Stalinist purges wrought savage havoc in Russia, Leshchenko’s fame spread on both the ether and vinyl, culminating in recording deals with Parlophone, Columbia, Elektra records, and Odeon. This number of obligations – and his unwillingness to either understand or respect them – left the elusive singer (once cornered) with some very modern problems of copyright and breach of contract.32 On these

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various labels his work was travelling so far and fast that one Soviet explorer, working in the capacity of North Pole radio operator, enjoyed a couple of his songs (Musen’ka rodnaia and Bliny) as they came in loud and clear from a radio station in Reykjavik!33 Leshchenko sang gypsy songs and romances (in both Russian and Ukrainian), together with the work of several prominent Soviet composers: the Pokrass brothers, Strok, Fomin, Bogoslovskii, and Dunaevskii. The relationship between Strok, the great author of socialist tangos, and Leshchenko was so close that their first private performance at an acquaintance’s apartment ended in mutual kisses.34 Though far from Soviet life and a patently impulsive performer, Leshchenko knew that lyrical sentiment, be it exiled or endorsed by Moscow, crossed borders (in both directions) with conspicuous ease. Things went so well in Bucharest that he was even able to open a restaurant named, quite simply, “Leshchenko.” In odd tribute to the empire from which he was exiled, the new owner commissioned a vast mural representing a troika to crown the establishment’s furnishings, while the tables were decorated with expensive lampshades of various colours.35 The size of the house orchestra gives some indication of how an establishment designed for food was in fact musically biased: violin, piano, saxophone, double bass, drums, clarinet, bayan (Slavic accordion), guitar – and even a harp on occasion. This loud, gaudy, and celebratory atmosphere continued to be evident in Leshchenko’s records of the late thirties, too. The gypsy aesthetic, fortunately, allowed the singer to avoid many political problems when he was on stage, because for both Russians and Romanians the romance “sounded like something native.”36 Many of Leshchenko’s recordings in fact found their way back to a very appreciative public in Russia, where they were offered in hushed tones to urban(e) aficionados or more openly in provincial marketplaces. This was especially true after Bessarabia and the Baltic were made part of the Soviet Union in 1940. Leshchenko, although adored in Russia, was not broadcast on Russian radio, nonetheless, because he still lived – as an “émigré” – in Bucharest.37 (The problem of which party caused that émigré status in the first place did not appear to be an issue for discussion.) War Breaks Out: “Hitler Loves the Russian People!” In June 1941 Romanian and German forces invaded the Soviet Union; in October they occupied Odessa. Leshchenko was drafted but ignored the call. After two similar drafts, Leshchenko was courtmartialled but left unpunished, ostensibly as a consequence of his fame. There were rumours that he had recently served as a general’s

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adjutant, but they were never substantiated. In 1942 he was called again and despite faking illness – with, some say, even an operation for authenticity’s sake – he was obliged to do at least something martial and found himself bearing not arms but cutlery in the Crimea, more specifically in the Officers’ Catering Corps after October 1943. Here he gave some concerts. Despite Leshchenko’s gallant (and successful) efforts to avoid actually fighting, the Soviet press was most upset that he had answered the call-up. It accused him of broadcasting the following crude bulletin to the Red Army on Fascist Romanian radio: “Moscow has fallen, Leningrad is taken, and the Bolshevik Army has fled across the Urals … Red Army Soldiers! What do you need this ****ing war for? Good grief, men! Hitler loves the Russian people! That’s the honest word of a Russian! Come on and join us!”38 The authenticity of this vitriol remains hotly disputed even now. Life for Russian speakers in the Odessa region was hard. Russian schools and churches, for example, were closed down. Only after more than a year of wrangling was Leshchenko offered the chance to reach that fearful, timorous audience and mollify Soviet criticism. He would thus enter the city in the strange capacity of being invited to entertain his occupied hometown.39 Political problems had delayed his appearance for a long time, but the Odessa public could not care less for the awkwardness of the situation: Leshchenko was in town! Huge queues formed for tickets at the Odessa Theatre of Opera and Ballet, the same venue used and filled by many pre-revolutionary estrada stars.40 During this time Leshchenko fell in love with and married a beautiful nineteen-year-old accordionist in his ensemble, Vera Belousova. Leshchenko left with his young bride for Romania, officially divorcing Zakis in May of 1944. Despite marital problems and the decimation of all restaurant business by the war, the singer could not bring himself to emigrate to America, as many friends constantly suggested. His career was saved, he thought, by anti-Fascist revolts in Bucharest that same summer against Antonescu, the briefly jubilant Soviet “liberation” of Romania, and the consequent appearance of a fresh Russian audience in the streets. Leshchenko performed to Soviet troops in their field camps and was even able to press some new records. Initially these concerts were just for the Russian officers: Marshal Zhukov was a devotee of the singer’s work and rumour had it that he would often weep openly on hearing Leshchenko’s voice.41 The Soviet military presence was such that the singer had constant work for three years after the end of hostilities. He offered his audience songs such as Mark Bernes’s “A Dark Night” (Temnaia noch’) and Klavdiia Shul’zhenko’s “Blue Kerchief” (Sinii platochek), both of which were already huge hits for those artists in Russia (they are discussed in

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later chapters). The high command was so grateful that they found him a new apartment in downtown Bucharest. At these military concerts he would usually appear in knee-high boots and a peasant smock, tied at the waist. Thus dressed for the first half of a performance, he sang folk songs and romances. More contemporary tangos and foxtrots were presented after the intermission, when the singer would don a suit.42 One audience member recalled Leshchenko’s performances clearly even two decades later: Some workmen told us that tomorrow evening Leshchenko was going to give a special concert in the Jewish Theatre, for the benefit of Soviet officers. His records had been fashionable at home before the war. We got ourselves seats in the front row of the parterre. The curtain opens. An elderly man comes on stage in a grey, worn-out suit. He has white shoes and a black tie with white stripes. This is Leshchenko. With a gesture of his hand to someone, a pretty twenty-year-old appears from the wings. She has large, grey eyes and is carrying an accordion. He presents her to the audience. – This is my wife, Vera Belousova … We got married in Odessa. The woman bows; she’s embarrassed and tries not to look us in the eye. We all know that more than anything else she wants to go home to her mother. Leshchenko himself has a pitiful, muddle-headed air about him. To start with, he doesn’t know how the audience will relate to him. – I am an emigrant and guilty before my own people. But my entire life I’ve sung only in Russian and under [the pro-Fascist dictator] Antonescu that was dangerous … The Fascists wanted me to sing in German. I refused and they smashed all my records. To the accompaniment of his wife, Leshchenko sings Kolechko [“Little Ring”], then Vse, chto bylo [“All That Once Was”], Poi, tsygan, plach’ tsygan [“Sing, Gypsy! Weep!”], Shutochnaia pesenka [“A Whimsical Song”], Devon’ka milaia [“Dear Maiden”], Proshchai, moi tabor [“Farewell, My Gypsy Camp”], Vecherniaia zarnitsa [“Summer Lightning, One Evening”], Dva serdtsa [“Two Hearts”], Vozle lesa u reki [“Near the Forest, By the River”] … It seemed then that this sad concert had come to an end, but Leshchenko came out one more time. One phrase [from his final song] rang in our ears for a long time afterwards as if we were struck by his brave voice, one that had suddenly grown younger: “I’m not afraid to go to Siberia, to Siberia. / After all, Siberia is Russia, too …”43

After his warm but worrying welcome from the Soviets, restaurant culture reappeared towards the end of the forties. The singer was able to re-establish himself with sufficient confidence that he even reinstated some of the more disdainful house rules from his previous restaurants, such as no drinking or eating during the performances.44

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Nonetheless, he could see that his foreign and transient émigré audiences would not last forever as celebratory, postwar leniency lessened. His clientele slowly departed and the singer’s career underwent an unthinkable regression: he was obliged once again to sing in movie theatres. At this time Leshchenko considered going “home” to Russia and sent a personal request to Stalin. It was suggested to him at various stages during the very protracted application process that the singer might indeed be allowed to go home, but his wife would have to face charges of treason, for some inexplicable reason.45 Leshchenko protested loudly to the officials that bore such news, in an emotional display that did little to improve his case. Since, however, so few people witnessed these events, the issue of how much Leshchenko actually wanted to go home remains moot. In many publications there is the widespread cliché that Petr Leshchenko wanted passionately to go back to Russia. Nevertheless, there is no substantial proof to be offered in favour of such an argument. The only thing to which many people refer is that he sang Soviet songs abroad. [But] Leshchenko’s nostalgic love for Russia was not synonymous with a desire to throw himself into the ussr’s “age of great construction.” We must soberly assess what material he sang from the Soviet repertoire – and how he sang it. Without a doubt, he chose works loved by the Soviet people, from among those so-called Soviet mass songs. But he interpreted them in his own way. In Dunaevskii’s “March of the Happy-Go-Lucky Guys” from the comic movie, he reworked a few couplets such that all references to the Land of Soviets vanish.46 Instead of “Step on, Komsomol tribe,” he sang “spirited [molodetskoe] tribe.” Instead of “When the country will order us to be heroes,” he sang “Science will order us to be a hero.” In Dunaevskii’s other popular march from the film “Circus” [Shiroka strana moia rodnaia], he dropped some couplets altogether, such as the one referring to “Our proud word Comrade, dearer than all words of beauty” … “Stalin’s law for all peoples” becomes “The law of all peoples, severe for all.” In these kind of renditions there isn’t the slightest hint of somebody rushing off to the land of their forefathers. After all, no matter how sly you were, [in order to get home] you’d have to acquiesce and play the game as it existed, or at least give the impression that you were giving in. Here there’s neither the former nor the latter.47

The Awfulness of Leshchenko’s Arrest and Death The fall of the Romanian royal family in the final days of 1947 was grim news. Leshchenko and his wife continued to make cinema and restaurant performances, but he found himself increasingly persecuted by Romanian authorities. He was eventually arrested in the

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summer of 1951 for alleged cooperation with the pre-Soviet army and therefore by implication with the Nazis. The arrest came during the intermission of a concert in Brasov. His wife saw his stage costume lying over a chair and an open guitar case when she sought him offstage after a curtain call was not answered. A man in civilian clothes approached her and said, “Don’t look for Leshchenko and don’t worry. Keep working as you were. He’ll be back in a day or two. He’s been summoned in order to clarify a few things.”48 Vera Leshchenko’s husband did not come back. It later transpired that he had been sentenced to five years for anti-Soviet activities and had died after three years in a camp, as mentioned, on 16 July from an ailment described either as a stomach ulcer or (unofficially) as deliberate poisoning. His own sister became privy to this information only two years after his death, when he did not return home following the end of his prison term. The whereabouts of his grave are unknown, and his wife never saw or spoke to him again after the ninth month of his arrest. I got a card in the mail, which allowed me to see my husband; it included a list of the things that I could [or could not] give him. On the appointed day I set off to the place that was indicated on the postcard, not far from Bucharest. There was barbed wire everywhere and behind it Petr’s face, thin, tormented, and darkened by sadness. A military escort stood nearby. The distance between Petr and myself was about five metres. Neither of us was allowed to make physical contact or say a single word to the dearest, most precious person in each other’s life. That was our very last meeting … Three decades have passed now, but I just can’t forget it all. That scream in his eyes, his lips whispering something or other … all that barbed wire and those escorts.49

The only words his wife can remember him saying are “I’m not guilty of anything, believe me … God sees everything. The hour of justice will come!” She herself would later be taken to Russia and also found guilty of treason. She heard the court’s decision – that she was to be shot – and fainted in the courtroom. The sentence was eventually transmuted to twenty-five years hard labour, during which she would never forget her husband’s “good name” or that “his songs would [today] continue to make people happy and excite them.”50 Indeed, both at the height of his career and after his death, the entire Russian émigré community continued to enjoy his work; he had just as many fans in Russia itself, where “people danced, loved and suffered to his elegant musical compositions – to those tangos, waltzes and foxtrots.”51 Leshchenko’s story is testament to an unspoken disparity between Soviet policy and practice. Millions of Russians adored him, in the

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émigré community, inside Russia, and even among the highest-ranking of all military officials. He was Soviet culture of the postwar period for an enormous number of that society’s members, yet he fell foul of its ideology. He was a member of the affective community that existed despite political geography, yet he fell foul of political rhetoric designed to define that same community. The inclusive, international aesthetic that Leshchenko embodied is Soviet culture, yet we prejudice our view of Russian culture through the insentient, proscriptive desires of ideology rather than through the emotional domain of Soviet praxis. We prejudice what ideology hoped people would do, and ignore what they did or felt in actuality.

romance, tango, and foxtrot … songs and sensibility Какой-то голос шепчет властно, Что много счастья впереди! [Some voice whispers to me with authority that there is much happiness ahead!]52

In assessing the actual deeds and feelings of the Russian people, we should remember that the romances of Iurii Morfessi were more oldfashioned than those of Leshchenko. Morfessi, because of his classical training and frequent jobs in both opera and operetta, was working within a more conservative tradition than his contemporary. As opposed to the cruel or impassioned sparseness of romances, Morfessi’s most famous songs are often performed to a small estrada orchestra, where the rhythmic games of gypsy passion or “ethnic” tambourines are embellished with (or replaced by) the oompah of a small horn section. Even the impudence of nep street songs is treated to a (feasible) violin and a(n unfeasible) piano; we envision a music hall rather than the sidewalk outside. His resonant delivery and scholarly enunciation were, of course, impeccable and lacked the drawn-out vowels, swallowed phrasing, or sulky moodiness of a romance artiste. The librettos and other texts that Morfessi often performed were also taken from a much older, maybe consciously arcane tradition. References to concrete geographical or physical loci are few and far between in these songs. Instead we have a multitude of gardens, shown in various seasons, most of which are used to draw parallels with the affairs of the heart. Lovers move in and out of love while moving in and out of gardens. The basic structuring of these texts is therefore between the natural and the man-made, so to speak, between love and

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a well-tended lawn. The power of emotions, be they happy or not, often cannot defy the movements of the vegetable kingdom, when the rise and fall of summer and winter might (but do not necessarily) guarantee the return of a rosy disposition (Pridi, dorogaia).53 Seasons and emotions overlap, and here private sensation tries to use another force through acquiescence; it gives in to something other than what should be the happiness of spring and starts praying (rather than affirming wholeheartedly). В больном моем сердце любовь угасает, Опять хризантемы завянут красой, Весна ведь недолго, и сердце страдает И плачет, томится, рыдает слезой. Приди, дорогая, Весна ведь настала, Опять расцвели Хризантемы в саду. [Love is fading in my ailing heart. The chrysanthemums’ beauty will fade, for spring is but short, and the heart suffers, weeps, yearns, and sheds its tears. Come, then, my dear, for spring is again here, the chrysanthemums have again blossomed in the garden.]

Maybe she will come, maybe not. The speaker invites gaiety, but he does not invoke it. This tendency towards passivity, even if sometimes productive, is developed in another song, “Because I Love You So Madly.” Here the hero does invoke a lover, albeit in distinctly ethereal terms. He is begging, not instigating. His “madness” seems as much a consequence of the woman’s infuriatingly non-material appearance as it does a result of his genuine emotion. This is too much feeling directed towards something insufficiently tangible. Affect, born of immanence, is trying to operate in an alien realm and can only pray for a success that it is unable to manipulate or mastermind. Потому я тебя так безумно люблю, Что безумно хочу и желаю. Не отдам никому, хоть себя загублю, Я тебя, как мечту, обожаю! Ах, меня не вини, Пожалей и взгляни, Отгони прочь тоску и сомненья,

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in practice Поцелуй, приласкай, Счастье жгучее дай, Я хочу в твоих ласках забвенья! Я ответа в любви у тебя все молю, Жизнь отдам, если ты пожелаешь. Ах, тебя я люблю, потому и люблю, Что ты сердцем моим обладаешь. [I love you so madly because I want and desire you so. I’ll not give you to anybody, even if it kills me. I adore you, as a dream! Oh, do not blame me. Take pity and look upon me; drive away my yearning and doubt. Kiss me, be tender. Give me happiness more ardently: I want oblivion in your affection! I pray for your answer in love. I’ll give up my life, if you so desire. Oh, I love you, I love you because you own my heart.]

The ability to take an alternative active role in this dilemma is again one potentially created by song. Music can make or break his worldview. Morfessi knows this but is less than willing on occasion to invoke the emotive power of his romances. “You ask for songs? I have none … I sing no new songs whatsoever, and avoid old ones. They trouble my ailing soul. With songs I simply suffer all the more” (Vy prosite pesen? Ikh net u menia … ). The problem here, though, as is often the case in older romances, is that suffering (or excessive feeling) is also thought to be somehow ineffable: I do not want these emotions and could not express them even if I did. My words cause me pain. Once again, surplus passion is not sufficiently grounded (Zabudem slova and the related text, Tumanno, tumanno … ); fervour is seen as something supernatural. Feeling is unnervingly forceful and in the hands (quite literally!) of fairies. Я песен не прошу, прошу лишь только ласки, Мне грустно самому от старых песен тех. Хотелось бы забыться, забыться, точно в сказке, И унестись далеко, и унестись от всех. Забудем мы песни, забудем слова, Что сердце терзают больное. Упьемся, а там не расти хоть трава: Миг наш … и забудем земное. [I ask for no songs; no songs, only affection. I myself am sad from these old songs. I would like to forget myself, forget myself, as if in a fairy tale,

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iurii morfessi and petr leshchenko and be borne far away, far from everybody. We’ll forget songs, forget words that hurt the ailing heart so. We’ll be intoxicated, even if no grass grows there: the moment is ours … and we will forget everything earthly.]

This vacillation between desire and its result, between wanting and indecision can be so dramatically expressed that entire texts may be given over to either positive or negative philosophies, which then contradict themselves entirely when placed side by side or anthologized in modern recordings (Ne nado vstrech and Da! Vse proshlo). 1 Не надо встреч … Не надо продолжать … Не нужно слов, клянусь тебе, не стоит! И если вновь больное сердце ноет, Заставь его застыть и замолчать. ........................................ 2 Вновь жажду встреч! … Верни мне снова ласку, Мое больное сердце пожалей! Вновь возврати весны былую сказку, Приветом прежним сердце мне согрей! [1. We mustn’t meet … We mustn’t go on … We mustn’t speak, I swear to you, it’s not worth it! And if an ailing heart aches again, force it to stay still and be quiet.] [2. I hunger for our trysts once more! … Return your affection again. Take pity on my ailing heart! Return once more the former fairy tale of spring. Warm my heart with a previous welcome!]

In the face of these frightening passions and the cruel, irreversible passage of time (Dni za dniami katiatsia … ), only one solution slowly manifests itself: sung affirmation. The cyclical workings referenced in romances such as “Time Will Change” are, perhaps, a delicate combination of the inevitable and the willed, the transformation of things seasonal by things heartfelt. Memory and sung emotion effect a qualitatively different and active type of return. On the other hand, maybe not. Does Morfessi sing to his beloved “vision” in order to effect her return or to console himself on her loss? Does “time change” according to its own laws or the singer’s desire? His success is doubtful.

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in practice Как цветок голубой среди снежной зимы, Я увидел твою красоту. Яркий луч засиял мне из пошлости тьмы. И лелею свою я мечту. Ах, время изменится, Горе развеется, Сердце усталое Счастье узнает вновь. И глядя на тебя, вспоминаю я дни Моих прежних несбыточных грез. Они канули в вечность, пропали они, И остались следы горьких слез. Но время изменится … Как виденье, как сон, ты уйдешь от меня, Озаривши всю душу мою. Свою тайну любовно и тайно храня, Я тебе, дорогая, спою: Ах, время изменится … [I caught sight of your beauty, redolent of a sky-blue flower amid the winter snow. A bright shaft of light touched me through the vulgarity of darkness. I cherish my dream. Oh, time will change, woe will dissipate, the tired heart will know happiness once again. And looking at you, I recall those days of my previous, unrealizable daydreams. They fell into eternity, they have been lost and only the trail of bitter tears is left. But time will change … As a vision, as a dream, you will leave me, having lit up my entire soul. Protecting my secret lovingly and in secret, I will sing to you, my dear: Oh, time will change …]

Leshchenko’s romances, waltzes, tangos, and other songs lack both Morfessi’s calm restraint and the tendency towards indecision (or reassuring abstractions) that comes from such restraint. The songs of the former are more firmly rooted in an earthier gypsy aesthetic, and given his training as a dancer, he employs much livelier arrangements than Morfessi’s Bavarian oompah. He reverses the Greek’s preference for horns over strings, and so wayfaring violins also add a greater air of romantic roving than any well-polished tuba can manage. Leshchenko also lets his gypsy style fall to heady ethnic dance, this time in opposition

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to Iur’eva or Tsereteli, who (despite their passion) would stand immobile and try to look gorgeous, not troubled. Morfessi’s songs, as mentioned, conjure images of the provincial music hall; Leshchenko’s sound like the work of a restaurant’s house orchestra – it is not hard to envision him as a whirling dervish among the front tables. He embodies the fervent feeling of his songs; as a dancer, he is “moved” by them. Emotion has a concrete locus (inside me) and is not dismissed in the name of concert-hall decorum or dispatched to a land of fairies. In this hands-on relationship with fervour, greater reference is made to actual places, social problems, and personal dilemmas resulting from mishaps in such domains. Love, lies, passion, sadness, and suicide either result from experiences in very slightly abstracted realities (such as “a prison”) or are concretely associated with a given place: the passion of Barcelona, the nostalgic longing for Bessarabia.54 Consolation is found in tangible drink, food, and company. Hedonism here is not effected, though, in a tawdry or simplistic reworking of gypsy commonplaces. Conventions act as the reliable, archetypal context in which the most philosophically successful form of emotion is cultivated – song. Leshchenko uses tradition. As with Morfessi, though with greater gusto, music and the expression of sung feeling are celebrated by Leshchenko as the greatest possible tool against the linear or hierarchical injustices of either time’s passage or modern society, where the nomadic existence of a gypsy worldview encounters the more structured forms of urban life. Nostalgia here is not political. It concerns the use of a minor state – yearning – to produce a state of becoming in the face of rigidity.55 Lechchenko’s biography, just like his songs, illustrates these differing sentimental stances in that his tiny recurrent shows brought recurrently novel emotions to radically different crowds (Fascist, royalist, and Communist). One’s uniqueness or “irrepeatability” allows for true repetition.56 While that repetition was invaluable to Soviet soldiers (as sentient sentimental men and women), it was awkward for those who authored Soviet jurisprudence. Legislatures, not listeners, shunned change. Variation faces off against rigidity in some of Leshchenko’s Soviet compositions. “My Dear Loom” (Stanochek), for example, replaces the gypsy camp with a modern factory. Love comes and goes, but the factory’s spindles keep going, round and round. The factory tries to (but cannot) house the heart. Ardour is forced to leave the social stage. День рабочий на исходе, Раздается зов гудка, Это было на заводе У прядильного станка.

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in practice Станочек, мой станочек, О чем поешь? Таких, как мой дружочек Ты не найдешь. Я работаю над пряжей Чуть дрожащею рукой, Разлюбил, не вспомнил даже, От меня ушел к другой. [Another working day comes to a close and the factory whistle sounds. This all took place at a factory, at my loom. My dear loom, what are you singing about? You won’t find anybody like my darling. I work on the yarn with my hand faintly trembling. He stopped loving me. Didn’t even remember me and went off to another girl.]

Fostering normal emotions in this environment is very difficult, as a similar song – by Leshchenko himself – makes clear. It concerns the return home of a political prisoner (or incarcerated soldier) to his beloved girl, Anikusha. Here, both the prisoner and his abandoned lover have been forced by governmental semantics (state control) into a dull series of unchanging, self-perpetuating days. The effort needed to construct anything resembling affirmation and a positive return will be great.57 This song is hugely popular even today. За Байкалом по Сибирским тайгам Возвращался с плена я домой. Утомленный, но шагал я бодро, Оставляя след в степи чужой. Где-то здесь в избушке ты томилась, Я же там один спешил к тебе. На Карпатах в облаке, Под небом Я с тобою вновь наедине. Аникуша, Аникуша, Если б знала ты страдания мои. Аникуша, Аникуша, Очи черные твои, как угольки. Ну как я мог забыть тебя, мою родную, Счастье мое вновь с тобою одной,

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iurii morfessi and petr leshchenko Аникуша, Аникуша, Снова мы в любви счастливой и святой. [Along Lake Baikal and across the Siberian taiga I am returning home from prison. I am exhausted but step cheerfully, leaving footprints in the unfamiliar steppe. Somewhere here you pined away in a hut and I have hurried to that place, to you. You and I are together again, in the Carpathians, the clouds, beneath the sky. Anikusha, Anikusha, if only you knew all of my sufferings. Anikusha, Anikusha, your eyes are as black as coals. Oh, how could I forget you, my darling. Once again I am happy with you alone. Anikusha, Anikusha, once again we are together in a love both happy and divine.]

The difficulties related in such songs can easily breed a fatalistic philosophy, as expressed in some of Leshchenko’s other work. The song “Stay” (Ostan’sia) includes these words: “A capricious, tender, audacious girl, / Swore her love to me, then left with another. / Your love will fade, like the roses of your happiness, / And you will wake, again with tears in your pained heart. / I am tired of living and live by hope alone.” This type of tiredness could, with little effort, be expanded to the pessimistic opposites of life and death, as mentioned in our initial discussion of romances. Such is the case in his funereal “Sombre Sunday” (Mrachnoe voskresen’e) or the Soviet-sounding “Mother’s Heart” (Serdtse mamy), based upon a well-known Polish number. Here Leshchenko’s text is suggestive of some later Soviet songs of the sixties and seventies by authors such as Robert Rozhdestvenskii. This tango is invested with a theme seemingly unsuitable for the dance floor: a mother’s irrecoverable loss of her son. Leshchenko nonetheless has no qualms about employing war-torn civic sensation in a manner that remains sufficiently non-specific to suggest the tragic, timeless aspect of doleful folklore as much as any twentieth-century conflict.58 He also sings from the point of view of the mother, from the centre of emotion itself. Кошмарной темной ночью Покрылось сердце дрожью, Я потеряла любовь мою, Сын мой оставил меня одну. Мой милый, мой сыночек, Забыл ты маму свою, Тебя молю я вернуть покой мне И снова я зову к себе.

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in practice Бедное сердце мамы еле стучит в груди, Бедное сердце мамы ищет покой в тиши, Доктора не зовите, сына мне возвратите, С ним хоть один часок побыть … Как тяжело мне жить. [On a nightmarish, dark night a shiver overcame my heart. I lost my love, my son left me alone. My son, my darling son, you have forgotten your mother. I beg you to return my peace and once again I call you. A mother’s poor heart barely beats in her chest. A mother’s poor heart seeks peace in the quiet. Call no doctor, just return my son to me, so that I might be with him for just one hour … How hard it is for me to live.]

This civic air is even clearer when Leshchenko sings songs by Russian Soviet artists such as Mark Bernes, taking from his war films the aforementioned Temnaia noch’ or four songs by Isaak Dunaevskii.59 The works chosen were Kapitan (“The Captain”), Marsh Veselykh Rebiat (“March of the Happy-Go-Lucky Guys”), Shiroka strana moia rodnaia (“My Native Land Is Broad”), and Spoi nam, veter (“Sing to Us, Wind”), known to many people as Veselyi veter. He also created a medley of the composer’s work in the form of a foxtrot, ending with the invocation to “Dance with greater mirth and pluck! We’re singing and playing you a foxtrot song!” These degrees of happiness and sadness, of absent sons and vigorous foxtrots, have no difficulty coexisting in the public Soviet arena.60 They define the broadest possible playing field of emotions, across which there is room to cultivate a nomadic, apolitical worldview of desire, of unfettered assemblages. That freedom of thought is willingly fostered in three ways: reference to extremely distant places (as we saw in the mention of Lake Baikal above), extreme drinking, and reference to gypsies, who both drink and travel to such places.61 Amid the geographic songs, we encounter mentions of the Caucasus and Carmen or her native Barcelona, but the most famous is “Bessarabia, My Native Land” (Bessarabia, krai rodnoi). This song is composed to a native melody of longing for which – rumour had it – a Nazi officer had shot Leshchenko in his restaurant. Working on the assumption that we can change the word “soul” for “affect,” we see that the desire to go home is here one of amplified emotion, hopefully in order eventually to choose and prejudice one countr y over another, one woman over another. The repetitive “wheels” of cars and urban life in which Leshchenko finds himself (once more as lyricist) are compared to repetitions or returns of sameness, then contrasted with an emotional patriotic return to Bessarabia.

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The grand civic spirit to which Leshchenko had absolutely no aesthetic objection is then subsumed into a lyric love song while still remaining a song of Romanian national pride. Yet it references a space older than modern Romania and therefore sidesteps politics, perhaps. It is also, strictly speaking, not truly a Romanian song, since it is both sung in Russian and sung by a “Romanian” born in Ukraine, which then (by the time of this song) had became part of the Soviet Union. Singing it in Romania (or Odessa) to gun-toting German officers would also give the song a pro-Soviet air. We have therefore come full circle from Soviet fervour, the traditions of which are initially applied to an alien – Romanian – thematic, which (because of that fervour) returns as a radically different song under Nazi occupation or, in fact, at any time that Leshchenko is not in Russia. Soviet art has provided a force that Leshchenko employs to fine subjective advantage, while at the same time it angers Fascist troops. It is pro-Russian, anti-Russian, private, public, Romanian, and irksome to Fascists; it is Soviet and very popular. Бессарабия, край родной, К тебе стремлюсь я всей душой, Ты моя одна мечта, с тобою весел бываю я. Бывает, вспомню я лихих сотоварищей своих, Век жить буду, горевать, Родимый край мой вспоминать. Тра-ля-ля-ля-ля-ля, Есть цыганка там одна. А грудь, а стан, глаза, уста! … Мариола, ты краса моя. Помню горы, леса и поля … Не забыть мне их никогда. И травку, берег реки, бычка, Когда Мариола стала моя. Хмель, туман и хор комаров – Сливалось все в мечте об одном: Век с ней быть, ее любить, И много-много ей говорить. Тра-ля-ля-ля-ля-ля, Есть цыганка там одна. А грудь, а стан, глаза, уста!.. Мариола, ты краса моя.

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in practice С тех пор прошло уж много лет, И сколько я перетерпел уж бед. И в новой жизни обязан ей – Жене-рижаночке моей. Шарабан сменило авто. Эх, жизнь моя, ты колесо … Запах травы сменило «коти». В объятьях с нею не чую души. Тра-ля-ля-ля-ля-ля, Никогда вас не забуду я. Уста к устам – вот в чем краса. Бессарабия, родина моя! [Bessarabia, my native land, I rush to you with all my heart/soul, you are my one dream. I am so joyful with you. I will remember my dashing fellow comrades. I will live, grieve, and remember my native land forever. There is one gypsy girl there: what a bosom, figure, eyes, and lips! Mariola, you are my beauty. I remember the hills, the forests, and the fields. I will never forget them. The grass, a river bank, a bull, the time when Mariola became mine. The hops, the fog, and a chorus of mosquitoes. It all merged in a dream of one thing: to be with her forever, to love her and to say so very much to her. Many years have passed since then, I have already seen so much misfortune. In my new life I’m bound to another, to my wife from Riga. Cars have replaced carts. Oh, my life you’re like a wheel … The smell of grass has been replaced by the perfume of Coty. When I hug her I don’t feel a soul. I will never forget you. Lips against lips: that’s real beauty. Bessarabia, my homeland!]

conclusion: exiled singers complicate the “soviet” song A movement of the hand, a turn of the body, a fleeting change of facial expression – and there’s an entirely new person in front of us.62

Aleksandr Vertinskii (the subject of Chapter 4), Iurii Morfessi, and Petr Leshchenko were the three big stars of post-revolutionary Russia and its émigré community, either in Bessarabia or far, far beyond.63 The works of all three, although recorded almost exclusively outside of Russia, were constantly smuggled back in owing to the demand and people’s willingness to risk prosecution for the illegal transportation

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of foreign goods. The status of at least Leshchenko as “Soviet” performer is therefore – according to the received meaning of that qualifier – extremely confused.64 This is especially true because the ban on Leshchenko was not as strict as with other performers. Records, with relatively little effort, were smuggled into Russia and would guarantee endless evenings of high romance.65 The high emotions of his songs were folded back into his biography and the man became his repertoire. After 1945 many rumours circulated about Leshchenko’s fate. The Germans had shot him in Riga, a Nazi officer (as mentioned) had shot him in his own restaurant during the song Bessarabia – krai rodnoi, he had hanged himself in Paris over an unhappy love affair or had become wildly rich in Romania, maybe Poland, maybe Bulgaria.66 Stalin passed away and was denounced; Leshchenko was not. In the 1960s, because of a Union-wide shortage of vinyl, some amateur disks were made using second-hand x-ray plates from hospitals.67 His old songs were therefore distributed in a way associated today with the dispersal of underground new music (bards, experimental jazz, or rock). “Real” records from Leshchenko’s repertoire were not released inside Russia until 1988.68 In 1993, when there opened a “Square of Stars,” a Hollywood Boulevard, outside the entrance to the country’s biggest concert hall, Rossiia, nine performers were chosen for the first plaques: Leshchenko, Vertinskii, Utesov, Bernes, Ruslanova, Iur’eva, and Kozin were among them.69 All are in this book. Today, there exist radio stations that play – finally – Leshchenko’s music at home, with an average audience aged between twenty-two and fifty-five, raised in families with “good traditions, where Utesov, Vertinskii, and Leshchenko are heard.”70 Those traditions, as I have suggested, may have been shoved on legislative grounds into émigré communities outside of Russia, but they remained healthy thanks to popular support not only within Russia but within the Soviet army, the émigré community abroad, non-Russian audiences under Fascist occupation, and even in Lenin’s own family. These dramatically disparate audiences are linked by sensibility, which operates in but beyond ideology.71 For an even clearer example, let us turn to a singer of romances and other works who was exiled to the very edge of Russia – to Magadan. He was therefore not afforded the creative freedom of those who walked the Champs-Elysees. Then again, maybe it did not matter, because the man in question, Vadim Kozin, found great support and creative assistance from the same Soviet authorities who had banished him forever to the shores of the Arctic Ocean. The same system exiled and then encouraged him; love and legislature seem to be two aspects of bureaucrats’ attitude to Morfessi, Leshchenko, and Kozin. So what is a Soviet song?

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3 INTERNAL(IZED) EXILE: THE MYSTERY OF VADIM KOZIN Bravo! Bravo! You’ve got a voice, but as yet you’re nothing as a singer [of romances]. What kind of “melancholy thoughts,” “rebellious destiny,” or “experiences” could you possibly have? Where did you get all that? You’ve what – been living a secret life or something? Lots of disappointment behind you, eh? It’s all a little contrived. Never sing what you don’t actually feel yourself.1

learning how to make tolstoi weep Vadim Kozin (born 1903) is the first of our singers from a major city, in this case St Petersburg.2 He is also the first to be from a genuinely privileged background, since his father, educated in France, headed a very successful mercantile family. His mother, who sang in a gypsy choir, and her influential husband were visited by estrada stars of the time, and on occasion even Morfessi would come by.3 During one visit he sat the very young Kozin upon his knee and remarked, “Goodness, how our successors are growing up!” That same boy would grow up consciously imitating Morfessi’s style, the bold mannerisms of a man he would later call “the idol of my youth.”4 In another correlation with Morfessi’s life, Kozin would often travel to the city limits and visit gypsies, in this case his mother’s actual parents. Thus he learned to sing, with no professional lessons and guided only by intuition and emotion: “I should sing the way I feel.” At home and among fervent, impulsive gypsies he would learn many romances, none of which were terribly “revolutionary.” The mode for “gypsy stuff” gave birth to a certain primitivism on the estrada. The literary qualities of these songs did not transcend run-of-the-mill hackwork. The typical motifs of a fashionable repertoire would always include a series of salon niceties. The amorous intrigue of a romance would as a rule begin “in the long night hour,” “at the hour of sundown,” “in that quiet hour,” “in the final hour,” or in “the bad hour.” The heroes’ rendezvous would also

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vadim kozin take place in a suitably “romantic” situation: “by the hearth,” “on a bench in the avenue,” “in the abandoned garden,” “in an unlit parlour.” The eyes would always be mentioned as “miraculous,” “sparkling,” “black,” “azure,” or “desirous.” Those same eyes would “burn,” “pledge,” “shine,” “beckon,” “melt,” and “promise …” Plus there would be a great number of other clichés, all tried and tested: “a chrysanthemum bush,” “a branch of lilac,” “radiant dreams,” “secret thoughts,” “unclear reverie,” “tender kisses,” etc. etc.5

Kozin had ample experience of these estrada gypsies and their “tender kisses” as well. He was even related to the great singer Varia Panina, who would embellish her own staged versions of wayfarers’ songs with tents and live horses in the name of drama and verisimilitude. 6 Rumour had it that Lev Tolstoi could tolerate neither gramophones nor their records, yet when he heard a recording of Kozin’s relative, he was overcome with emotion and even shed a rare tear.7 With the Revolution came dramatic changes in the family’s fortune. Their substantial assets were seized in the name of the people. Mr Kozin’s career was ruined: the wealthy merchant was forced to spend the rest of his days looking for piecemeal accountancy work.8 Vadim was himself obliged to labour after school in the dockyards along the river Neva to supplement the family’s meagre income. He began singing in Petrograd’s amateur clubs at the time he left school (1923); this helped to bring in a little more money, especially helpful because his father’s death in the previous year had worsened an already dire situation. Kozin felt his loss deeply, for his father had happily escorted his inexpert offspring around as many restaurants and bars as possible during the nep years, in order that he see how (or how not) to sing on the estrada. At this time there was an explosion of “light-hearted, intimate songs,” “songs of mood” (pesenki nastroeniia), and he wanted Vadim to present himself properly, with an idea to both financial and social profit: “Estrada’s an art that serves society each and every day.”9 In 1924 Kozin was accepted officially into the temporary organization that was Lengosèstrada’s precursor, Lenposredrabis. Such agencies were usually involved in booking artists who as yet had no permanent place of employment, and indeed Kozin was singing at this time in several movie theatres. He also expended considerable energy as a pianist, accompanying silent films, including those of Charlie Chaplin, with his “endless blues, ragtime, and improvisations.”10 Permanent work and salvation from sore fingers came, however, only in 1931, when he joined the subsequent more-established concert bureau of Leningrad’s central region, its House of Political Enlightenment. He concocted a stage name for himself at this time. Inspired by the darling of the silent screen Vera Kholodnaia, he (with considerable

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impudence) used the masculine form Kholodnyi. Such a name would have helped enormously in promotional work, for which artists were often themselves responsible. Kozin, for example, would mix buckets of glue at home with his mother and then adorn prominent streets with posters, all before breakfast on the day of his concerts. This extraordinary effort was an attempt to capitalize on both the singer’s genre and gender, because until the thirties it is fair to say that gypsy romances were the domain of female singers, such as Tsereteli and Iur’eva.11 The very fact that a man had the gall to try his luck attracted a considerable number of people to his concerts. Here he would perform old songs such as Para gnedykh – the tale of a neglected “Pair of Bay Horses” – with such “internalized pain” that many people in this early Soviet audience would weep openly.12 This master of the maudlin was a man of modest height, slender build, and high brow (from premature balding), which gave him, as opposed to Leshchenko’s roguish air, the ambience of a sensitive urbanite. For some reason his suits often seemed too large, which must have aided the touching sense of “defencelessness,” just as his slightly pendulous lips seemed to make him somewhat melancholy, the victim of some sad story of which he might sing. His success as an eager, earnest artist was great: “Kozin lived in a world of posters, sell-out shows, and the ovations … of his ecstatic fans and listeners.”13 In some sense, Kozin and his apparently “feminine” modus operandi did indeed build upon the tradition of Iur’eva and Tsereteli, so his success was perhaps explicable. He performed some romances to the distraught lone accompaniment of a guitar, matched by the natural, touchingly tremulous note to his voice. The overall impression was one of grace under emotional pressure. His more famous romances were polished with the expensive, jazzier frippery of horns or some wistful syncopation on the ivories; they sound considerably less troubled as a result. There is a great irony in the fact that the really tragic aspect to these songs of youthful fervour would come towards the end of his life, when times were very hard indeed and he recorded only at home on magnetic tape supplied by friends.14 Biography caught up with the pose when the humour of witty wind instrumentation vanished from former numbers such as Liubushka.

fame and fault-finding go head to head Kozin’s first encounter with trouble came at the appearance of rapp and rapm, when romances fell precipitously out of favour and he was forced to move from gypsy to folk songs. He sang works associated with certain geographical regions (Archangel, Pskovsk, or Riazan’)

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and thus defined or maintained an ethnographic accuracy in his performances, as requested by state concert agencies. Despite being bothered by occasional meddling of this type, Kozin still rose in popularity, joining the capital’s Mosèstrada (the concert agency) in 1936. This decision, however, was prompted more by sad circumstance than growing confidence in his career. He had attempted to raise his concert wages in Leningrad by threatening to quit. The management, much to the horror of Kozin’s wallet, stood firm, and in order not to choke on a large piece of humble pie he soon left the city. Although his demands showed an obvious lack in judgment, one can sympathize once it becomes clear that his concerts in the “two capitals” at this time were all without the assistance of amplification and included as many as forty songs. Shows would start at nine in the evening and end only after midnight.15 Only the help and friendship of Arkadii Pokrass Jr, who accompanied Kozin on the piano, lightened this heavy workload. At the start of the forties, despite official objections to the romance, the journal Sovetskaia muzyka amiably announced that “polar explorers, ships’ captains, workers in the Far East, labourers and collective farmers, office workers and Red Army soldiers all demand shows by Kozin, Iur’eva, and Tsereteli. Concerts dedicated to old Russian romances and songs from the gypsy camps are most successful.”16 Kozin’s popularity even spread to the Kremlin. He often performed privately for Stalin, customarily at his dacha, standing directly opposite the leader. Whenever he sang there with other artists, a small table was laid out for the estradniki, yet many could not eat from fear. Stalin himself would prefer wine, but would force all others to drink only vodka. In the meanwhile he would clap his hands, tap his feet, and sing quietly along with Kozin’s songs.17 Stalin loved Kozin and knew some of his numbers by heart (though not his most respectable): Ритатухи ходил к Нюхе, Нюха жила в пологу. Нюха девочку родила, Больше к Нюхе не пойду. [Randy took a trip to Annie, Annie and her bedroom door. Annie soon became a mammy. I won’t go there any more.]

Stalin’s unobtrusive approval appears to have had consequences elsewhere. At the end of the thirties, the price of imported vinyl, used for pressing records, became prohibitively expensive and the state agency of Gramplasttrest tried to find a way out of the problem. An

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alternative type of plastic was used at the Moscow Experimental Record Factory, which resulted in domestic disks that were more flexible. People were a little suspicious, so to force the number of purchases, the newest recordings by the most popular artists were released only in this form. Kozin was of one of the very few singers afforded this dubious honour.18 Two or three years later, though, his admirers noticed with considerable alarm that the records no longer lay flat on the turntable and had begun to crack at the edges, spoiling the run-on groove. Very few of these records still exist today, no doubt having been dispatched through numerous Soviet windows with great anger and little accuracy.19 A few years later, during World War Two, there was a request that records be handed in, broken or not, for the war effort, since an unnamed element in the vinyl was needed for some mysterious process of great benefit to the nation. Nevertheless, a number of artists constituted a “Diamond Fund,” whose records were neither to be broken nor handed in. Such records were stamped “Not for Exchange.” Kozin was, initially, the only person on that list; later the authorities added Iur’eva, Utesov, Ruslanova, and Shul’zhenko. A new Kozin record would cost five smashed ones plus a bribe to the sales staff. People would buy boring records – such as political speeches – in order to shatter them immediately at the counter and guarantee a new Kozin release.20 His disks remained among the most prestigious to own throughout the 1930s and later.21 Prestige and popularity drove the pressings of Kozin’s works into high gear, and by the end of his career, according to some estimates, he had recorded more songs than even Utesov.22 Wartime led to the estrada call-up and Kozin was one of the first performers to volunteer his services, singing in military camps both indoors and in the field, in hospitals and aboard ships. He even sang for supply trains, shuttling between the sound of gunfire and the distant factories that supplied those guns. His songs took on a proud patriotic air from the combined temperaments of favourite poets like Nekrasov, in whom he saw genuine “lyricism, melodiousness, and a civic spirit.” That public aesthetic was nevertheless tempered with private pain, an element Kozin also saw in (and borrowed from) the “refined disquietude” of decadent fin de siècle poet Severianin, which he thought “has never been bettered by anybody – yet.”23 One of the most influential numbers in this vein dates from 1941. Here we see proof that even from the pen of a gypsy singer “the songs of wartime were the most varied. They ranged from a serious, grand civic spirit and patriotic resonance to lyric numbers, full of sadness for an abandoned home, family, and a loved one, living and waiting in the hope of a future rendezvous.”24 Words to his song quoted here

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were thrown from airplanes to troops below. With success like this, it is not surprising that Kozin thought himself and Dunaevskii to be the wealthiest artists in the Soviet Union. Нет, моя Москва не будет взята «ими». Нет, моя Москва останется моей! По московской улице копытами своими Не пройдут «молодчики», не пройдут по ней. Москва, Москва, Москва моя родная, Ты сердце славной Родины моей! Москва, Москва – столица дорогая, Ты стала еще ближе нам в огне суровых дней! Близок грозный час, час смерти подступает Для фашистских псов, бандитов, палачей. А для Москвы-красавицы все так же солнце станет. Сиять огнем и золотом ласкающих лучей. Москва, Москва, Москва моя родная, Ты сердце славной Родины моей! Москва, Москва – столица дорогая, 25 Ты стала еще ближе нам в огне суровых дней! [No, they won’t take my Moscow. No, my Moscow will stay mine! Those asses won’t gallop down Moscow lanes. Moscow, Moscow, my dearest, you’re the heart of my glorious homeland! Moscow, Moscow, cherished capital, you mean more to us in the fire of these cruel days! The awesome hour is near, the time of death approaches for Fascist dogs, bandits, and executioners. But the sun will rise for Moscow the beautiful, it will radiate with fire and the gold of its soft rays. Moscow, Moscow, my dearest, you’re the heart …]

As the estrada became the theatre of war, Kozin’s oratory was most required (and performed) in the very line of enemy fire. He was sometimes so close to the front line that he would spend a morning tacking posters on trees that by sundown were behind the lines of advancing Germans. His efforts were warmly received in official quarters. The military hero and future marshal Ivan Bagramian awarded him the Order of the Red Star. Thanks to such accolades, Kozin’s standing at this time was infinitely higher than that of singers like Vertinskii (see the next chapter), who had only just returned from his lengthy exile.

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in practice At the start of 1944 Kozin and Vertinskii were both staying in the Moscow hotel Metropol. They would meet in the dining room and bow to one another, even though they were not close – with the exception of one amusing incident. Vertinskii’s young wife asked that some pastries be brought to her room. The maid did as she asked, but either Lidiia Vertinskaia was in a bad mood or the eclairs really were stale … She could not control herself and exploded with: “Why are they so dry? This is impossible!” The maid burst into tears and fled the room. When he heard about this, the hotel director, who was from the Caucasus and a friend of Stalin’s, was infuriated. “I’m going to call Stalin and tell him how you’re all behaving. Damn the lot of you!” Later that evening Kozin’s phone rang in his room. He recognized Vertinskii’s voice: “Vadim, my dear, what can I do? I just can’t figure out how to deal with this scandal!” Kozin kindly agreed to help and calm matters on both sides; he took it upon himself to play the role of lawyer. He went downstairs to the director, with whom he was on friendly terms, and quickly sorted out the whole affair. “You couldn’t possibly forgive them, could you? You know how it is – bourgeois upbringing and all …” “Well … only for you, Vadim,” said Stalin’s friend. “Let’s consider her little outburst forgotten.”26

sudden arrest: everything goes horribly wrong in 1944 In 1944 Kozin suddenly vanished from the lobbies of expensive hotels. In fact he vanished altogether. Soon afterwards, concert posters and records stopped appearing. For reasons we will investigate below, it transpired that Kozin had – by some utterly unexpected and inexplicable legislature – been sentenced in the spring of 1945 to eight years in the camps. As it would slowly become clear, he was sent to Magadan in the very distant northeast of Russia. In a rather surreal manner, he had not been obliged to travel in the typical filthy conditions endured by other prisoners on steamers heading to distant shores. He was given his own cabin and even allowed to take some private baggage into exile. Going up on deck was an activity he was allowed to enjoy at will. All this for a very specific reason. Managing the camps in the Far East at this time was a certain General Nikishov, whose wife, Gridasova, was a tremendous fan of Kozin’s songs. Therefore, while prison guards, dogs, and machine guns met all other prisoners, a private car was waiting for Kozin upon his arrival, and it drove him almost at once to the local theatre. The star had been asked not to wear the normal camp clothing on his arrival in Magadan and so he was dressed most fashionably.27 He in fact obliged in a coat so stylish that Gridasova asked to borrow it so that a similar one might be sewn for her husband. Nikishov never saw

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the original coat and knew nothing the source of his wife’s surprise, so when he subsequently noticed Kozin wearing a suspiciously similar piece of clothing, he asked the prisoner – politely – to wear it no more. The general was equally offended on attending another camp concert of Gridasova’s making when a tipsy prisoner suddenly called out, “Hooray for Kozin!” Horrified at praise that should be saved only for governmental figures (such as himself), Nikishov threatened Kozin with solitary confinement. Gridasova, needless to say, hastily worked her significant charm and saved the singer all unpleasantness. The theatrical world in Magadan was most impressive for such a farflung locale, as many other artistic “criminals” and erstwhile stars of the Moscow stage worked on productions together with the local townspeople. An inmate’s official enrolment in the “cultural brigade” of a camp allowed him a reduced workload, which was added incentive for all gifted prisoners to participate in local shows. A typical evening’s presentation would be sbornyi. The evening would begin with classical music, arias, piano concertos, and some literary readings. After an intermission the emphasis was upon light music, with occasional jazz and dance performances.28 Some actors and musicians were thus spared the harder, if not typical, work of forestry and panning for gold. Other equally “useful” prisoners were employed in the camps as if they were at home: geologists, doctors, engineers, and even architects.29 Prison artists were fed in the women’s camp, where food was better, since less was stolen from the kitchen: “Women wouldn’t really steal from a man, and they certainly wouldn’t from a male artist!”30 Kozin’s situation improved further still when he gave occasional inhouse concerts at the apartments of the local intelligentsia or dignitaries, which was (by camp regulation) strictly forbidden. It seems very unlikely that Nikishov did not know about these events. He perhaps, as a begrudging admirer of the man’s work himself, just let such matters pass in silence. This certainly appears to have been the case, as many officials ranked above Nikishov would plan their inspections of his and other camps at the time that Kozin was to perform. They would even bring their families. In this surreal, purgatorial atmosphere Kozin was granted his release early, at the start of September 1950, for both “good work and exemplary behaviour.” He decided to stay in the city and by the end of the month already had employment as a local theatre director. A little later he worked as a librarian, spending much of his time filling volumes of Dostoevskii with copious notes and staving off the clinical depression that sometimes troubled him, especially in the first few years of exile. In the camp, grateful though he had been for the kid-glove

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treatment, he had suffered from protracted periods of despondency, feeling he would be trapped forever. After Stalin’s death, Kozin resumed his touring activities in 1955 once his official allowance for performances had been raised to a reasonable level. Nevertheless, he could never face a return to the capital, which the authorities eventually offered him.31 Even after many of the prisoners were freed and had left to go home during the Thaw, Kozin lived quietly in Magadan until the end of his days on 19 December 1994.32 His tiny apartment was decorated with pictures of Morfessi, Panina, and Tsereteli.33 His daily routine mirrored the humble dimensions of his lodgings. Basically I look after my cat. I get up, make the cat some breakfast. Then I go down to the store. You’ve got to buy a cat fresh fish, after all. Well, I’ll get some milk for myself, too. Then I put my eye drops in. And I sit down in front of the television. People start calling me in the evenings. They come to visit, too. They ask me to sing. And I sing.34

One of the reasons he stayed in the East, it was rumoured, was that some of Kozin’s singing rivals in Moscow with exalted political connections feared his return to the estrada of the capital. They asked, in the name of their careers, that death threats be issued against him. On a happier note, Kozin found that his friendships in Magadan were very hard to sacrifice; fans would send him – as they had Iur’eva – onions, garlic, fresh cucumbers, oranges, and fish. He himself said in 1989 that the “main thing here is that friends and grateful listeners are all close by.” At a time when Kozin felt estrada had become increasingly visual, when songs were watched and not heard, he preferred to stay where people were emotionally “transformed” by his songs, especially by the tangos.35 He admitted in 1987 that he was still “emotionally captivated” by the tango that is probably his best-known song, “Autumn” (see below).36 Kozin would sing this and other numbers in the automobiles of those who gave him lifts around town, “with a voice so pure and strong,” said one driver, “I thought the car would fall apart!” He perhaps was obliged to sing in this clandestine way because virtually all attempts by a local sound engineer to tape both Kozin’s concerts and domestic performances were forcibly erased.37 In spite of this, he kept performing and by the end of his career had approximately three thousand songs in his repertoire, about two hundred of which were the products of his own pen.38 In the year before his death, the city authorities of Magadan decided to honour Kozin with a music shop named after him and situated within

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his building.39 Until the last few months there persisted calls to make him a People’s Artist.40 He had been loudly championed by people like Shul’zhenko, who lauded “the amazing warmth of a soul that’s audible in his voice … and his ability to penetrate the emotional world of a song.”41 His application had first been examined in May 1991 and again one year later. On both occasions the application was turned down, although – in a somewhat futile display of decency – his private papers and belongings from 1944–45 were returned at this time.42 The reason for such refusals was that Kozin was still officially a criminal, following another conviction in 1960.43 Rumour had it that at a minor concert in a Far Eastern town, he had declared a preference for audience members in the back rows, since he had to make sure that even they could hear him. The minor dignitaries in the front row were most offended and instigated legal proceedings against the singer.44 As Kozin grew very old, big estrada stars would travel all the way to Magadan to perform in his honour at the city’s humble theatre.45 These visits continued through Brezhnev’s “stagnation,” Gorbachev’s perestroika, and beyond the end of the Soviet Union. Even after his death, people gathered at memorial evenings around the country to mark the sad anniversary of his passing.46 A man dies and his body gives up a ghost that now no longer lives in Magadan but in the memories of many people in many places. Those people remember Kozin in the face of the legal system’s forgetfulness: “Under Stalin, they imprisoned Kozin. Under Khrushchev, they forgot to rehabilitate him. Under Yeltsin, they just forgot him altogether.”47 Kozin himself, not long before his death, told a journalist about the power a vivid memory had over an ailing frame.48 “It’s strange quirk of age,” he would say. “The older you get, the clearer you see the images of the past … Your childhood, youth – things that happened sixty or seventy years ago.”49 Thanks to the affirmation of his admirers, Kozin became the junction of massed emotions, held in an expanding present. That present significance began to show signs of life when, in the eighties, the postexile veto on his records was lifted.50 A television program of 1987 by Anna Zelenskaia called “Two Portraits on the Sound Track” (Dva portreta na zvukovoi dorozhke) surprised many people by showing that Kozin was actually still alive.51 His star then rose rapidly during perestroika (“I’m becoming popular!”), in fact so much so that it troubled some of his living contemporaries.52 Muscovites were especially irritated because the man appeared to suffer little from “star fever” and was rather off-hand about his creative processes at times. The pianist David Ashkenazi, who frequently accompanied Kozin, complained (with a wry smile) that their concerts’ playlists would be

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drawn up only the day before. Once on stage, Ashkenazi would be lucky to hear Kozin start singing five of the songs listed. Heaven only knew what he would start singing next. Numbers supposedly scheduled for the first half of the concert would be ignored entirely, but then pop up for no apparent reason after the intermission. To the pianist’s consternation, Kozin would even start singing material from a previous concert, officially excluded from today’s performance. Worst of all, things never sung in public would suddenly sound from the front of the stage. Ashkenazi, though sweating profusely from the stress, knew at least that “the songs therefore always corresponded absolutely to the state of Vadim’s soul [dushevnyi nastroi]” on any given evening.53

passion and perestroika: a brief excursus Why, though, did perestroika become a time of Kozin’s renaissance, a time when this nastroi begins to expand, to gain in emotional intensity and happy irrationality? What follows is a brief attempt at an answer. Brezhnev had discerned the need for change during his period in office, although the unwieldy politics of his old guard had led to a “perceived lack of motion” that soon became very real.54 When Andropov subsequently introduced a series of harsh measures against those who abused governmental status for private (monetary) gain, it became clear that ideological change or movement would henceforth be deeply rooted in a reassessment of personal responsibility.55 As public mores and notions of rectitude became contestable, a multitude of “centres” was introduced; even within the ruling elite there emerged a series of competing factions, what has been called a “pluralism of values” in the definition of individual trustworthiness. Here begins the almost inaudible, nascent competition of views founded not only in communism, but in social democracy, monarchism, anarchism, capitalism, and Christianity.56 The dimensions of social change and movement were shrinking. From one initial grinding jolt within an immobile edifice, we then see competing elites, themselves increasingly based upon personal conviction. As change and motion got a little out of hand by the time of the August putsch, even Gorbachev was bemoaning the loss of an earlier firm sense of state (gosudarstvennost’).57 Gorbachev’s critics today maintain that his equivocation in domestic policy caused that loss. He felt paralyzed by a sense of enormous personal responsibility in managing national affairs. Ironically, though, with every day’s passage there was less of a nation to worry about. People’s sense of state had long since been eroded and what now constituted Soviet society was increasingly apolitical, as if being civil was more important than being civic. If we

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look, for example, at television in the last few years of the Soviet Union, from the time when Gorbachev was in private torment over public events, people’s attention was – amazingly – elsewhere. Even though 41 per cent of television broadcasts were political (a huge percentage for Western viewers to comprehend), an even greater 48 per cent were pure entertainment, in essence feature films and estrada.58 Given a broad, blank playing field of personal responsibility, not everybody could be bothered to get off the couch and join the team. Gorbachev increasingly found himself looking for ways to re-weave a social fabric, to marry private responsibility and civic continuity, all during the disintegration of a state (about which its constituent members cared less and less). He was obliged therefore to talk of an increasingly empty sociopolitical space, to speak with growing specificity about dwindling, disputed values. He was bound eventually to speak into and about the ineffable. His speeches tended to be both pretty and pretty vacuous. “Mikhail Gorbachev thought that the more beautiful his dream, the more beautiful the future would be. He demanded that workers embody the concepts of perestroika and the future’s ‘allure.’ The hard science behind these matters bothered him least of all. Policy makers bedecked perestroika and the ‘bright future’ with Gorbachev’s reverie. Socialism was stuck with various rhetorical frills: it was ‘democratic,’ ‘humane,’ [and graced with] ‘… a human face.’”59 These phrases, some old, some new, were all part of seeing “history through personality” in a way that might shore up gosudarstvennost’. The absence of ideology’s effectiveness meant that people had to defend things private in frequent skirmishes with the guerillas of mass culture.60 It also meant that they should seek to embody what Gorbachev would vaguely – yet most insistently – term a “process of transformations” (kurs preobrazovanii).61 If we take his Nobel speech at face value, too, then any transformational solution must also be free of the “stereotypes and provocative motifs nurtured by the Cold War.”62 Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Gorbachev’s widespread call (and personal quest) for a domestic, cultured, and cliché-free dignity comes from this rejection of political stereotypes. Their binary oppositions and linear progressive narratives are clearly rejected in the Nobel speech; less than a year prior he had also criticized Soviet politicians who were still held in the “power of nostalgia.”63 Linearity began to get a rough ride from its prior figurehead, and in 1998 he would be clearer still: “History has never stood still and does not do so now. Its development in no way displays a linear character. It constantly reaches new heights, multiplying its characteristics, both quantitatively and qualitatively.”64 Surely a prime reason that the old estrada of Kozin and Leshchenko, for example, was recognized by

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some ministers in the eighties and allowed its first state-funded nationwide vinyl pressings was that it embodied what Gorbachev sought – a dignified, domestic, and changing element in Soviet society, removed from the abuses and intransigence of political elites (or, in fact, politics in any form). Gorbachev himself decided to spend New Year’s Eve 1999–2000 (the most linear of all holidays) as a guest on an ntv estrada television show. He felt the most important place to be in Moscow was at a concert celebrating songs from the years under Stalin and before. He sat at a festive table for hours and danced to and toasted precisely the songs discussed in this study. He undermined that prior political status even more with a joke about himself, thus changing perceptions of his own attempts at change. Two men stand for ages in a Moscow queue for vodka during Gorbachev’s own much-maligned “dry law,” which was designed to counter alcoholism. “I can’t take it any more,” says one of the drunks. “I’m going to kill Gorbachev.” “Go on, then,” replies his friend. “Do it!” “You know what, I think I will!” With that the first man storms off around the corner, in the general direction of the Kremlin. Meanwhile the queue for vodka goes nowhere. After a couple of hours the first man reappears, looking absolutely furious. “Oh my God,” says the alcoholic still standing patiently in line. “Did you do it?!” “No,” said his friend. “I got to the Kremlin all right, but the queue to kill him was even longer!” Thus perestroika was a time of murdered, or at least tumbling, idols, but the movement of minor, modest estrada kept going as it always had.65 Gorbachev found its gentle, dignified movement correlated to social change occurring well within the radical extremes of conservatism and chaos. Why then, at the very time when estrada rose to the surface of media prominence (or even during Kozin’s initial years of a similar “freedom” after 1953), did the singer paradoxically often turn to a civic or explicitly “Soviet” air? He composed a Magadan Cycle of approximately twenty texts, known in their various incarnations as “I Love This Land” (Ia liubliu ètu zemliu). The cycle’s texts come from poetry by P. Nefedov, who had himself worked in Magadan. It is ironic that this public spirit is uttered to a lonely, lazily played piano in a manner more than redolent of his youthful romance heritage. The rhythmic structure of the song slips away beneath irregular waves of emotion, retarded or accelerated according to the demands of deeply felt civic verse. The gypsy turns to face the city; Nefedov’s text turns serious. Я люблю эту землю С ветрами ее и метелями, Волшебство этих белых,

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vadim kozin Ни с чем не сравнимых ночей, Гром Охотского моря Над причалами оледенелыми И картавую речь Несмолкаемых горных ключей. Я люблю эту землю, Навеки родную и близкую, Без нее мне не жить, Без нее – не дышать, не любить. И, как счастьем, горжусь я Любовью ее материнскою, Сердце отдал я ей, Чтоб достойным любви этой быть. [I love this land with its winds and storms. I love the magic of these incomparable white nights and the thunder of the Okhota Sea high above frozen moorings. I love the guttural speech of ceaseless mountain springs. I love this land, forever mine and treasured. I cannot live, breathe, or love without it. I am proud of my fortune and this land’s maternal love. I gave it my heart – to be worthy of that love.]

Here Kozin is “interested in the moral aspect of publicistic songs. The prime concern is the personal stance of an artist and citizen, of a singer and his rostrum.”66 Kozin has not turned to politics. He employs ethics in a radically politicized nation at a time when the capital’s politics was itself undergoing a metamorphosis into an ethical practice. Perestroika was state politics seen as personal responsibility; Soviet estrada was personal expression exercised as an ethically committed worldview. The two overlapped. They did not pander to or cause each other. As we will see with Vertinskii in particular, Russia is an area praised for the strongest concentration of audience feeling. Yet Russia does not totally own that power, since it reaches well into surrounding nations. Kozin’s love here is a sentiment for the workings of affect, not cartographers. As his emotions swell, a strength of feeling cancels loyalty to any one place within political geography: “I’m from Petersburg. I know it’s paradoxical, but living in Magadan, I’m also at home.” Showing a photo to a journalist, he then said: “This is my Leningrad here, my city, in which I grew up. Both there and here, I’m home.”67 The heart maps itself neatly onto politics of the eighties, since it institutes the emotions that politics itself drew upon for everything from sentimentalism to pathos. If these intersections or parallel movements of estrada and ideology are sometimes

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possible, then what on earth happened when Kozin was arrested? What went wrong?

the arrest: the mystery and some hypotheses Each of his songs is a musical tale of human destiny, of friendship, love, and fidelity.68

There exist many possible reasons for Kozin’s arrest. Several centre on the wartime Tehran conference of December 1943. Churchill’s birthday fell during the proceedings and he asked that Kozin perform, since he had heard good things about this Slavic singer of romances. (Others invited included Marlene Dietrich, Maurice Chevalier, and the émigré Russian singer Iza Kremer.) Stalin agreed – begrudgingly – and the British authorities financed an aircraft to fly Kozin to Tehran so that he could perform and be home again within twenty-four hours. Although the singer was never terribly fond of discussing his official repertoire during this adventure, he did finally open up in an interview of 1988. Kozin: I got called to Moscow, to see Beriia. [Aleksandr] Shcherbakov was standing beside him, who at that time was head of the Party’s municipal affairs. He asked why there wasn’t a single song in my repertoire about Stalin. “So … you wouldn’t sing a song like that?” “No,” I answered, and that cost me a holiday tour to Magadan. Journalist: How did you relate to Stalin? Kozin: He didn’t bother me … Beriia was doing all the nasty work. After all, he was the one who wanted to take Stalin’s place, but Stalin nonetheless [still] trusted him. They were a couple of buddies, two Georgians.69

A few alternatives to this account have been collected in Magadan.70 One concerns the possibility that the singer entered into a secret agreement to flee westwards during World War Two, with the assistance of some Polish generals and Anders’s army, made of Polish prisoners. Another story maintains that Beriia was jealous of Kozin and his flirtatious affair with the famous female pilot Marina Raskova. A third tells of Kozin’s drunken, wholly “improper” behaviour at Winston Churchill’s birthday party. Another Tehran rumour involves a passionate affair with a member of the local aristocracy, which must – if true – have been extraordinarily swift, given Kozin’s itinerary.71 There is even hearsay that he was homosexual, a story that appears to have

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grown from the singer’s work in the “female genre” of romances. These stories of Kozin’s possible gay tendencies are also the basis of yet another redaction, this one holding that he was blackmailed at home by the kgb and forced to denounce friends for similar desires – and then arrested, all the same. There has, in fact, been an increasing tendency in recent years to see Kozin in this light, as a wholly gay artist who is now mentioned in the same breath as Kuzmin, Kliuev, and other “outed” homosexual poets.72 The stories do not stop here. When Kozin was suddenly called to Tehran, we are told, he could sense the urgency in having to meet Churchill’s request very quickly and saw how he might even use the situation to his advantage. Kozin agreed to fly to Iran on the condition that his family, his mother and sisters, be in turn flown out from the Leningrad blockade. These prerequisites were agreed upon, but the bureaucrats tarried (perhaps deliberately); soon afterwards, a bomb landed on the Kozin family residence, killing the singer’s mother and one of his sisters. (Another version says that the politicians were so slow that the women died from hunger some considerable time later.) Kozin, insane with anger, abused Stalin and his government in their very offices and was sent very quickly to Magadan.73 Perhaps even more dramatic is the redaction in which Churchill’s presence and enthusiasm inspired thoughts in Kozin of escaping to England. One rumour, originating from this variant, states that the singer Iza Kremer, also in Tehran, whispered to Kozin that he should ask Churchill for help, since in London “the whole world would be at your feet, Vadim!” Kremer’s whispers were overheard, as were Kozin’s subsequent and insufficiently vigorous rejections of her plan.74

songs: overcoming distance and silence with desire [A melody is] confronted by the power of dissonance, it discovers a florescence of extraordinary accords, at a distance, that are resolved in a chosen world.75

Indelicate encounters with centres of power in Kozin’s life find many expressions in his songs, also. An especially striking example is related to estrada itself, to show business, capital, and the passage of time in “The Beggar Woman” [Nishchaia], one of the most “stripped,” musically bare works in his repertoire yet one of the most passionately resonant.

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in practice Сказать ли вам … Старушка эта Как двадцать лет тому жила. Она была мечтой поэта. И слава ей венок плела. Когда она на сцене пела, Париж в восторге был от ней. Она соперниц не имела … Подайте ж милостыню ей! Бывало, после представленья Ей от толпы проезда нет. И молодежь от восхищенья Гремела «браво» ей вослед. Какими пышными хвалами Кадил ей круг ее гостей – При счастье все дружатся с нами, При горе нету тех друзей … [Should I tell you how this old woman lived twenty years ago? She was a poet’s dream. Fame wound her a wreath. When she sang on the stage, Paris went crazy for her. She had no rivals … Spare her a little of your money! Sometimes, after a show, she couldn’t get through the crowd of admirers. Young people would shout “Bravo!” after her in their enthusiasm. A circle of friends flattered her with supercilious praise. Everybody’s our friend when we’re happy, but those friends are gone in sad times …]

As if this story were not maudlin enough, there is even greater sentiment at work in the very famous and equally sparse romance “Pair of Bays” [Para gnedykh]. Here the conflict of fame and linear time is transferred to that of an animal’s undying love and the fickleness of human interest, just as we will see in the next chapter with a song about Vertinskii’s faithful dog Douglas. Celebrity and fortune not only disappoint those who believe in their permanence; they also leave a trail of broken hearts in their wake. The unspoken love of a silent friend is greater than the transient bluster of high society or big business. Пара гнедых, запряженных с зарею, Тощих, голодных и грустных на вид; Тихо плететесь вы мелкой рысцою И возбуждаете смех у иных!

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vadim kozin Были когда-то и вы рысаками, И кучеров вы имели лихих, Ваша хозяйка состарилась с вами … Пара гнедых, пара гнедых … Грек из Одессы, еврей из Варшавы, Юный корнет и седой генерал – Каждый искал в ней любви и забавы И на груди у нее засыпал. Где же теперь? В какой новой богине Ищут они идеалов своих? Вы, только вы и верны ей поныне … Пара гнедых, пара гнедых … Вот почему, запрягаясь с зарею И голодая по нескольку дней, Тихо плететесь вы мелкой рысцою И возбуждаете смех у людей! Старость как вам, так и ей угрожает, Говор толпы безвозвратно утих; И только кнут вас порою ласкает … Пара гнедых, пара гнедых … Тихо туманное утро в столице, По улице медленно дроги ползут, В гробе сосновом останки блудницы Пара гнедых еле-еле везут. Кто ж провожает ее на кладбище? Нет у нее ни друзей, ни родных ... Несколько только оборванных нищих Да пара гнедых, пара гнедых … [A pair of bays, harnessed at the crack of dawn, thin and with a hungry appearance. You trudge along with a feeble canter that makes people laugh! You were trotting horses once upon a time and had energetic drivers. Now, however, your owner has aged with you, with this pair of bays, pair of bays … A Greek from Odessa, a Jew from Warsaw, a young cornet, and an old general; each sought love and diversions in your lady owner. Each slept upon her bosom. Where are they now? In what new goddess do they seek their ideal? Now you alone are loyal to her, you pair of bays … That’s why, harnessed since dawn and hungry for several days, you quietly trudge with a feeble canter and make people laugh! Age threatens you both, and your owner, too. The talk of the crowd has fallen

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in practice quiet and will not return. Only the occasional whip caresses. Pair of bays, pair of bays … A quiet, foggy morning in the capital; a hearse crawls slowly along the street. A pair of bays barely carries the remains of a whore in her coffin. Who is accompanying her to the cemetery? She has neither friends nor relatives. Only a couple of ragged beggars, a pair of bays, a pair of bays …]

What appears at least as the promise of escape from such tales is the movement of a gypsy existence. In what is once again a very well known song, “Farewell, My Gypsy Camp,” Kozin bids farewell to his wayfaring confidants and goes off to a “new life.” What fate awaits him, he does not know, but if friends remember him there is no cause for sorrow and no real sense of absence. “I do not know what awaits me in the new life, / But there is nothing to grieve about in the old. / Today I will sing a song with you, / Tomorrow I will be gone, I will leave you. / Remember the song of a gypsy, / Goodbye, my gypsy camp, I am singing for the last time.” As we have seen elsewhere, songs sung at the campfire confound the passage of time in one direction: they stop the pain of parting, loss, or regret. “Sing, my dear guitar. / Drive away yearning and sadness. / Oh you, my gypsy life, / I now regret nothing at all” [Biriuzovye kolechki]. The ability to overcome loss is strongest in songs of modest spaces. Dream worlds are easier to remember and save when the nomadic worldview is transferred from wide fields to private emotions. The landscape becomes internalized, and as if in a conscious move from gypsy geography to private reverie, the orchestration is slightly richer (and less ethnographically concerned). The lone guitar becomes the salon propriety of grand piano and paired violins: Снился мне сад в подвенечном уборе, В этом саду мы с тобою вдвоем. Звезды на небе, звезды на море, Звезды и в сердце моем. Листьев ли шепот иль ветра порывы Чуткой душою я жадно ловлю. Взоры глубоки, уста молчаливы: Милый, о милый, люблю. Тени ночные плывут на просторе, Счастье и радость разлиты кругом. Звезды на небе, звезды на море, Звезды и в сердце моем.

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vadim kozin [I dreamed of a garden in its wedding attire. In this garden you and I are together. Stars in the sky, stars upon the sea, stars in my heart. Greedily I catch either the whisper of the leaves or gusts of the wind with my sensitive soul. Deep gazes, silent lips. Darling, oh darling – I love you. Nocturnal shades float across the expanse. Good fortune and happiness are spread all around. Stars in the sky, stars upon the sea, stars in my heart.]

Kozin’s repertoire, though, does contain many songs in which memories are under threat from either a malicious ex-lover [Medovyi, ametistovyi] or geography. One’s memories of a distant love are menaced by doubt, since perhaps the lover at home will be unfaithful in the future and therefore ruin the past [Toska po rodine]. This slippery hold on time, on the ability of ardour to counter time’s one-way movement, is a big problem, one that takes a great deal of emotional effort to overcome. In songs such as “I Sing Again” [Ia snova poiu], the ability of song to defend or recreate a love comes only with spring; cyclicality comes before affect’s ability to do anything. In the song “Darling” [Milaia], a young guitarist stands beneath a woman’s window in the hope that she might bless him with a “tender gaze” or “the miraculous gleam of your eyes, brighter than a May afternoon.” Her emotion, not his, has that power and he seems unable to conjure it. The situation, nonetheless, can be rectified. In a triumphant manipulation of one-way metaphors, Kozin’s song “The Lilac Branch” shows how. His lover leaves on a train. She throws him a lilac branch at their tearful parting. Overcome by “streams of doubts,” he watches the train move away down the track forever, along with the “shades of the evening.” She leaves down a railroad, while he walks sadly down a street away from the station. “I returned to my lodgings … That evening took away / All hopes, the joy of all my striving.” Yet, with that intensity of love “the lilac branch blossomed from all the embraces and tears.” A powerful emotion holds an amorous movement – one that should slip away into the past – in the present. Commitment contra mundum … Which brings us to Kozin’s most famous song – or his “calling card,” as estradniki love to say – “Autumn.” Here, against the muted tones of a fading, faltering memory, we see how song and gypsy guitars can both resist the passage of seasonal cyclical time and dispute the need for a loved somebody to be physically near. With the help of sung memory, once the conditions for love are satisfied, emotion will overcome – or perhaps even celebrate – the claustrophobic, closed quarters of Soviet daily existence (byt). The gypsy song fosters a nomadic worldview, not the need to get up, leave, and actually walk about that world. It uses the philosophy of open fields in a tiny, private space.

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The small spaces afforded by Soviet life in a paradoxical way almost seem to foster a sense of privacy. Осень, прозрачное утро, Небо как будто в тумане, Даль из тонов перламутра, Солнце холодное раннее. Где наша первая встреча? Яркая, острая, тайная, В тот летний памятный вечер, Милая, словно случайная. Не уходи, тебя я умоляю, Слова любви стократ я повторю. Пусть осень у дверей, я это твердо знаю, Но все ж не уходи, тебе я говорю. Наш уголок нам никогда не тесен, Когда ты в нем, то в нем цветет весна. Не уходи, еще не спето столько песен, Еще звенит в гитаре каждая струна. [Autumn, a transparent morning, the sky seems covered by mist. In the distance, in tones of mother of pearl, the early sun is cold. Where is our first rendezvous? It was (or is?) bright, distinct, and secret. On that memorable summer evening it was lovely, as if by chance. Don’t leave, I beg you. I’ll repeat the words of love a hundred times. Autumn may be at the door, I know that for sure, but still do not leave, I tell you. Our little corner is never cramped. When you are in it, then spring blossoms. Don’t leave, there are so many unsung songs and every string in the guitar still resonates.]

The power of the heart is clear, yet not clearly available. The dimensions of a gypsy wandering philosophy can potentially be transferred to an immobile individual as an emotionally liberating enterprise. Kozin proved that this was possible, yet he battled periods of severe depression before he was able to counter the effect of exile with an outlook that allowed him to see audience sentiment as stronger. Only towards the end of his life was he able to be “at home” in Leningrad and Magadan simultaneously while actually being in the latter and only remembering the former. He could fold the past into the future and blur the boundaries of political geography (which create exile)

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with an emotional view of his sympathetic public (in and out of Russia) and thus overcome the antagonistic aspects of ideology. This is a matter of ideology and emotion; it is not a matter of Kozin being somehow sidelined from Soviet culture by exile. He remained a key player, loved by prison guards and prisoners alike. He was not a dissident. He was not really an exiled performer, either.

conclusion: an exiled singer, “loved by everybody” Kozin’s story is not an easy one, in all senses. He lived a life so far from centres of established or objectively documented information that his biography is today replete with rumour and mythmaking. He was also a man who, not surprisingly, had difficulty maintaining the transformational talent of sensibility under great social pressure. Nevertheless he did so and sang until the end of his days, loved by political prisoners and their jailers. There is no reason whatsoever why the following memory could not be that of a camp commandant. “Our parents first met to the sounds of these melodies [by Kozin]. This music accompanied the first shy touch of a hand, their wedding celebration, and our first birthdays. These songs sounded constantly on the radio, in the concert halls of Soviet ‘Palaces of Culture,’ in workers’ clubs, and on dance floors. Every family that had a gramophone certainly owned a collection of records by Vadim Kozin, the one and only unique author of songs and romances, loved by everybody. His popularity went beyond the realm of an artist’s usual success and was in no way less than that of those artists officially recognized or respected nationwide, such as Dunaevskii.”76 Let us not become too schmaltzy. Although, for example, Kozin was a great lover of cats and collected all manner of feline figurines, we should not let our gaze upon such saccharine matters mist over. One well-known actress, knowing about the collection, bought him several at the Magadan market when in the city on tour with her troupe. Hoping thus to impress the singer on her first visit, she also stuffed the cats with money and headed off to his building, where she knocked eagerly upon the door. Kozin answered and saw the china felines: “Oh,” he remarked. “I’ve already got those ones … Well, actually, since they’re full of money, they can stay.”77 On other occasions, although many people remember him in Magadan as very sociable, he would feign illness in order to avoid visitors, with or without money.78 We have seen how his songs struggle at times to counter the rigours of absence or linear time. Nevertheless, the proximity of friends and an adoring audience, be it pro- or anti-communist, allowed Kozin

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(barely) to counter the malevolent, bureaucratic elements of Soviet society. Both Kozin and Leshchenko were at least within reach of an audience that remained relatively immobile, even after the Revolution. What happens if we send a singer out on a very straight trajectory, moving ever further from the original audiences of St Petersburg or Moscow? Aleksandr Vertinskii, perhaps the most wantonly decadent of all our artistes, fled Russia after 1917 and kept moving, further and further, until he eventually circled the globe and came back to the Russian Casablanca, Shanghai. He left a political society and joined a kinetic theatrical one, only to come back to Shanghai during World War Two, where he pondered merging them both by re-entering the Soviet Union. When he did so, the enormous zeal of a now-foreign estrada star met its Soviet equivalent head on, at a time when military conflict radically increased the emotional aspect of political rhetoric. What happened? Looking back on such matters, a February 2000 article in the national journal Ogonek juxtaposed the notions of society as people or as politics, and suggested that Russia’s truly “folk or patriotic” songs of the early twentieth century are those that were sung or sold in the greatest numbers. These songs are not political and are overwhelmingly merry. Spirited sensation has not changed and therein lies the truly national culture.79 If it is indeed “national,” a culture must match any opposing force of meaning within its borders on equal terms – hence the need for those flung far from home by revolution to be at times very serious indeed in their advocation of gaiety. Cheerfulness defines the zealously, if not grimly, defended activities of distant communities, as large as a city or as small as a married couple in exile. The lyric rises to meet the civic because it must; it adopts a public pose to match or merge with state(ly) moods. The private works both within and without the public, saving and sounding that which is best.

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4 EXIT STAGE LEFT: ALEKSANDR VERTINSKII AND CABARET Stalin, having unexpectedly allowed the émigré Vertinskii to return home at the height of World War Two, said in passing and rather mysteriously, “Let him sing till the end.” It is well known that Stalin owned records by Vertinskii and loved to listen to them.1 I’d like to remind you that Vertinskii ended up abroad not because he rejected the Revolution, but because his artistic nature led him on various peregrinations.2

cocaine and youthful decadence in kiev On the first page of his memoirs, the book he would still be writing the day he died, Aleksandr Vertinskii made some observations on the nature of memory and its non-linear modus operandi: “I recall many things both clearly and distinctly, but a lot has also been erased from my memory. So what remains? Scraps … little, multicoloured scraps … excerpts, rags from the past, clippings, and leftovers. That doesn’t matter. After all, you can stitch together a blanket, for example, from such scraps. Or even a rug! True, it’ll be a little motley, but my entire life has been that way.” Much later, towards the end of his life and the final pages of those memoirs, he would write: “Life as such does not exist! There’s only a huge, vital space on which you can embroider your fancy. It’s like an endless roll of linen … Life as such does not exist. There exists only the right to live.”3 Aleksandr Vertinskii’s life as such began in Kiev, in March 1889.4 At the age of five he was orphaned by his father’s death, having already lost his mother from a blood infection two years before. His father had pined horribly for her and ruined both his career and health as a result, a fate worsened by bouts of consumption from long, silent sojourns at her snow-covered graveside. Vertinskii’s father had never been able to marry her, since his first wife was unwilling to grant a divorce. The consequent lack of a legally recognized family unit meant that after his parents had passed away, Aleksandr and his sister eventually ended up in different families. They in fact lived for many

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years in ignorance of each other’s fate. Only by chance would he see her name in a newspaper’s theatre listings after fifteen years apart. Despite their protracted estrangement, Vertinskii was nonetheless terribly distraught when he discovered anon that she had died from a cocaine overdose. He held many jobs for short periods during his youth, having been a very poor student at school. He sold postcards, loaded watermelons on river barges, and was employed as a typesetter’s assistant and a hotel accountant. Amid all of this activity he began to try his luck with a series of rather morose stories in Russian: Portret (“The Portrait”), Moia nevesta (“My Fiancée”), Papirosy “Vesna” (“‘Springtime’ Cigarettes”).5 He began to adopt the pose of a cynical dandy, sporting a flower in his buttonhole and socializing with the promising youthful intelligentsia of the city, which included Marc Chagall, Benedikt Livshits, and Natan Al’tman. He and similarly minded friends, inspired by such illustrious company, tried desperately to kick-start their thespian careers by hiring a very cheap hall, borrowing costumes, covering all surrounding fences with posters, and then distributing tickets to both relatives and acquaintances (just in case box-office receipts should be less than inspiring). Vertinskii also tried for the smallest possible role in a genuine Kievan theatre. The production required two boys to play Napoleon’s palatial guard, to do no more than stand immobile and announce “Emperor!” prior to his entrance. Yet given his persistent burr, Vertinskii could only manage “Empewa!” With the director’s angry abuse in his ear, the young man was dispatched from the theatre premises. They would meet again years later, long after the fall of the Russian emperor, but Vertinskii could never forgive him.6 Feeling the creative limitations of life in Kiev, he managed to save twenty-five rubles and set off to Moscow in search of fame and fortune. His first port of call after arriving was the Theatre of Miniatures. This phenomenon of minor art forms was hugely successful prior to World War One. In one especially busy year, twelve such theatres sprang up in St Petersburg as Christmas neared, just to deal with the seasonal demand. One of them, on the Okhta Canal, called itself simply Lavka (The Counter), since it briefly occupied the premises of (what would soon become once again) a convenience store. In 1913 he tried to get into the prestigious Arts Theatre (Khudozhestvennyi). This somewhat immoderate step in the young man’s ambition may perhaps be explained by his use of cocaine, the fact that it drove him to ecstatic states of graphomania and other “creative activity.” Despite (or thanks to) the narcotics, he was among, much to his

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own surprise, the final five candidates, but was frustrated by the director Stanislavskii, who was also greatly irritated by Vertinskii’s burr, the speech “defect” that would haunt him all his life and prove ample fuel for lazy satirists. Rumours of his drug abuse threatened to do much greater damage to his career, but intermittent (and timely) periods of sobriety saved the singer. He was not very keen to abandon the pale, attenuated beauty granted the chic devotees of hallucinogens,7 being without contest the biggest aesthete in this book. His slender aristocratic features lack the sprightliness of Leshchenko the dancer; Vertinskii’s sardonic grace betrays no intention of breaking a sweat. His condescending gaze and debonair dress sense seem perfect for the studied languish of a fin de siècle addict. In his memoirs, he describes the awful pain of one entirely solipsistic time between auditions: the private artist has bumped up against the introspective (if not vacuous) limit of asocial desire. He is – literally – eating himself up. In the morning [after the hallucinations], having read what you’d written, you could see that it was pure rubbish. You hadn’t managed to get your feelings across. So you took another pinch. That would give you energy again. For a few minutes, but less than last time. You sat with your teeth clenched, like a steaming cauldron clamped shut, one that lets nothing out because it’s screwed down so tightly. Later on, taking pinches more and more often, you’d reach the stage of complete stupefaction. Then you’d fall silent. And so you sat, pale as death, with blood-red lips, biting them to the point of pain. There would be the desire to cause yourself the most intense physical agony, and that desire would almost drive you crazy. But that was why you felt yourself a genius. It was all, of course, the narcotics’ cruel deception. You spoke rubbish and normal people literally ran away from you.8

These agonizing parallels between chemical and social withdrawal were forgotten to some degree when the young singer began to do rather well in the burgeoning movie industry.9 He played in only minor roles, which – sadly for the ego – were barely sufficient to warrant his inclusion in advertising materials.10 At this time, many films were versions of the most popular romances, dramatic renditions of their lyrical content. Some of the most successful were By the Hearth (U kamina), Chrysanthemums (Khrizantemy), Forget the Hearth (Pozabud’ pro kamin), There Goes the Postal Sleigh (Vot mchitsia troika pochtovaia), and A Pair of Bay Horses (Para gnedykh). There was even a film version, shot in 1917, of Vertinskii’s song “Your Fingers Smell of Incense.”11 These texts have been referred to as “artificial to the point of naiveté,

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the fanciful product of feigned oppressiveness and gloom.”12 In learning how to feign such matters on screen, too, Vertinskii studied “how to move my hands, legs, how to sit, how to bow …”13 He perhaps curtailed this aspect of his career a little sooner than was necessary when he was overheard by a journalist at a railway station criticizing his employer, the great director Ivan Mozzhukhin. When asked how much he was paid for a modest role, Vertinskii replied, “One hundred rubles. What a fool I was! Should have taken more!”14 Deciding henceforth to speak less and sing more, he developed his “miniatures” repertoire, in particular the one number that would become his most famous: “Pierrot.” This persona would be part of Vertinskii’s worldview for many years; it inspired an outlook that finds expression in some of his most popular songs: “Just a Moment” (Minutochka), “Little Creole Boy” (Malen’kii kreolchik), “Jamais,” Aleksandr Blok’s “In a Distant Blue Bedroom” (V goluboi dalekoi spalenke), and others. These songs came to be known as his “little arias” (arietki) and gradually made their performer the most “fashionable chansonnier of the period.”15 That fashion was founded on a style to which Vertinskii would remain true his entire career: one man on stage with a piano accompaniment. His songs at times are so simple and so ruthlessly dismissive of regular rhythms that they suggest poetry readings. He took the freer cadences of gypsy creativity and employed them as a vehicle for the decidedly urban emotions of ennui and cynical affection. If Iur’eva or Tsereteli retarded a song’s rhythm for the sake of dramatic delivery, Vertinskii did so for the twist of a literary phrase. If the women were expressive of raw affect, Pierrot was a spokesman of affectation, striking the effete poses of a slender, Nabokovian rake. His songs are very quiet and very caustic; their trenchant phrasing may be directed outwards (at the world) or inwards (in cruel self-irony). No pathos, just a piano. Here was a major move from within (but beyond) the tradition of romances.16 As a result, he was very much in vogue, yet on occasion inspired strangely subdued applause as people endeavoured to discern the style of his performances, which were distinguished by “occasionally obscure, yet sincere feelings.”17 That sincerity, in its insistence upon a full range of desires and emotions, would sometimes be criticized for using the underside of “morally decadent, politically depressing, tired and bourgeois” sensations.18 His depressing minor characters included humpbacked violinists, geisha girls, young Negresses, bishops, circus performers, forgotten kings, queens, gigolos, and Afghan rajahs, all of whom teetered “on the brink of banality.”19 One almanac published at the end of 1915 examined (and endorsed) theatres of Miniatures per se; and a mysterious “Pierre Pierrot” signed this manifesto:

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aleksandr vertinskii and cabaret People who drop by in their galoshes or overcoat can grab a soupçon of theatrical pleasure in these places … The raison d’être of such a theatre is a question of great complexity, maybe infinitely more so than that of a grand theatre with all its five-act dramas, tragedies, and comedies. In miniatures, given a very short period of time, the author and actor must together produce a very distinct impression; with the stroke of a theatrical brush they must seize upon the essence of a given contrast [of either characters or genres]. Thus, over the course of fifteen minutes, they might create that which a grand theatre would develop and resolve over several hours. The artist on this “bared stage” is in turn entirely bared before his viewers. He is the lone creator of his theatrical number. He must therefore be a virtuoso. A variety hall’s stage is a merciless place … [But] if the actor can indeed, completely and utterly, become that virtuoso – we won’t be afraid to call him an actor in the vein of variety’s café chantant – then the Theatre of Miniatures is saved. This kind of concept is in the air today; the idea of a new, ennobled form of variety, of a small theatre with big actors.20

As these “ennobled forms” were developed, Vertinskii became an increasingly prestigious artist and increasingly sought after by female admirers.21 According to many eyewitnesses and friends of the time, he juggled a great number of romances. Torrid or sordid affairs aside, his failed attempt to find himself in the dramatically asocial world of hallucination – in a rejection of immanence – became social on stage and was now an infinitely more promising philosophical enterprise. The self, as developed in songs of closeted emotion, needs the duality of fundamental social interaction (singer/listener). The self revels in the repetition of the same songs before myriad listeners on multiple occasions, all of which (in unison) allowed Vertinskii to maintain the timeless “now” or eternal present of his impassioned sung dramas. The mutual and mutually desired processes of affirmation from both audience and artist permitted Vertinskii’s atemporal or anachronistic selfexpression: everybody wanted to see him try everything and do the “same” thing every time (even though it would differ). These dramas of one self dissolved in multiple listeners also helped him escape the familial (Oedipal?) nightmare of lost – that is, bygone – maternity that drove him no doubt to drugs. Only when Vertinskii was very famous during World War One would he abandon the costume and perform in a more conventional outfit: a suit. Initially he remained both in the big city and in greasepaint. The philosophy of change, masks, and becoming was dependent upon the changing uses of an unchanging stage. He needed a venue with an (urban) audience from whom he might expect an affirmative reaction. Such a reaction could not at first be guaranteed from a

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distant or parochial auditorium. When he did venture beyond the city limits before the war, the melancholy of the Pierrot songs therefore still persisted, perhaps in his attempt to rely upon the popularity even far from urban centres of such a figure, at fairgrounds and in Blok’s modish poetry, in Goncharova’s paintings or Meierkhol’d’s widely lauded plays.22 (Vertinskii, incidentally, would remain a fan of Blok all his life.)23

decadence encounters world war one and revolution The hard labour of a provincial tour lessened the effeteness in Vertinskii’s songs; it, together with his doctor’s orders that he now stop using cocaine entirely, helped him to escape the world of decadence. World War One helped even more. The young man entered an entirely different world as he responded to a new fashion, working as the patriotic medical assistant of a hospital train, which ran back and forth between the front line and Moscow. He bandaged an enormous number of soldiers, one of whom, grabbing his leg, called out to the recognizable performer, “Sing to me, brother Pierrot, ’cos I’ll be dead in a moment.” (Vertinskii obliged with a lullaby based on Bal’mont’s poetry.) To entertain those who might live a little longer, he also danced the tango with a temporary nurse, the equally famous film actress Vera Kholodnaia, after whom the young singer Vadim Kozin had initially named himself and to whom Vertinskii would dedicate some early songs (much to her horror).24 In moments such as this we see that the singer’s wartime efforts were an emotional, not political, endeavour: “Nothing lofty or poetic … conscience alone was dictating his actions. Simply a typical human conscience.”25 Even as armed conflict spread from the fields of Belgium to the streets of Moscow and Petrograd, that patriotic conscience did not interrupt or contradict a career based on lyricism. On one occasion they merged in a most dramatic fashion. On 25 October 1917, a benefit performance was planned for Vertinskii, a concert for which he ordered a new Black Pierrot costume. His audience no doubt saw this change from the prior White Pierrot as most forbidding. Things had not been calm since the morning. Shots could be heard, rumours were rife about troop movements, about the soldiers, cadets, and sailors who had come [to Moscow] from Petrograd. Despite it all, though, the benefit concert continued along time-honoured lines. As they bestowed their many presents upon the artist, the audience members showed themselves as both stylish and graceful. The theatre’s main offices had already received perfume,

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aleksandr vertinskii and cabaret silver cigarette holders, silk scarves, statuettes, bronze candlesticks, baskets of flowers, astrids, and chrysanthemums wrapped in wax paper and then bound with silk ribbons. Horse-drawn carriages continued to arrive, all sent by various flower shops to bring even more bouquets. This charitable concert was truly the celebration of an artist and his admirers in a moneyed city. This air of prosperity, this bourgeois glamour, this lifestyle and its type of social interaction had only a few hours left to live.26

By the end of November he would give his final concerts in the north, which would conclude with an austere announcement: “Citizens, please remain calm! The concert will not be continuing. Please prepare your documents for inspection.”27 Such intrusions aside, bohemian life continued for a while almost untroubled in Moscow and Petrograd, perhaps because politics were effortlessly upstaging the estrada and simply ignored the “small” stage: “People were used to us by now and listened calmly, albeit with a rather condescending smile.”28 Unsure of what those smiles forbade, Vertinskii circumvented the Revolution during 1918 and 1919 by playing in towns and cities free from the Bolsheviks: Kiev, Kharkov, Ekaterinburg, Odessa, Rostov, and Ekaterinodar. The insurgent heart grew no fonder in his absence, however, for criticism of his performances could be heard louder and louder in the press at home. By 1919, reasons for chastising the artist were taking a depressingly similar shape. [When World War One began,] the decline of art became evident in a manner closely related to the devastation caused by [Western] Europe. It had engendered movements such as Futurism in painting and literature … There is a similar aspect to Vertinskii’s art. His romances are deficient in content and musically feeble. All of this is shrouded in some kind of perverted immoral sentimentalism that grates on the listeners’ frayed nerves with its senselessness and crude, utterly common experiences. Street culture, living as it does by the ideals of cinema directors, has made Vertinskii’s songs its own proud achievement. It has carried his songs across all of Russia, making his “cocaine girl,” who works on “the wet boulevards” of Moscow, famous. The same goes for his little “Creole Boy.” In the colourless irrelevance of daily life, the impassioned pretensions of petty yet curious emotions may once have seemed interesting. In the cigarette smoke of a restaurant, they could even conjure some idiotic tipsy tears. But the blast of a political tempest has cleansed the stuffy atmosphere of that prior narrow-mindedness. In the face of events that have recently broken out, the experiences of all Vertinskii’s heroes are so trivial and vacuous.29

In February of 1920 Moscow municipal authorities eradicated fourteen Theatres of Miniatures. In March a similar operation was carried

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out in Petrograd, all in the name of abolishing the types of establishment “that clearly cannot be tolerated.” Vertinskii, bowing to extreme pressure, emigrated from Russia in November of the same year, able to muster at least an initial sense of adventure. As he noted somewhat cynically, many who left with him were by no means fervent royalists; they departed for temporary reasons of safety, not political belief. “Who really cared about the White Army’s convictions, except for the White troops themselves? Nobody even remembered them [once abroad]. Currency speculators made a fortune as the intelligentsia rushed off to the big cities – Paris, Berlin, London … The young people asked to go to America, Brazil, Argentina – anywhere, in fact, just to get out and start a new life.”30 Some Russian critics in future decades would see this exit as an aesthetic rather than political move, to the point where his art became something of a religious state. What, I wonder, would Aleksandr Vertinskii have done in post-revolutionary Russia, even during nep? Would he have gone to work within gomèts [the State Union of Music, Estrada and Circus Arts]? Would he have performed in the two or three remaining cabarets, which had only one and a half or two years left to exist? Would he have tried in some way to modernize his repertoire, to mould it to the ideological demands of an audience made, of course, from workers and peasants? … I don’t think that the singer, who was still young back then, would have found anything good in “Red Moscow.” In the best possible scenario, he simply would not have been allowed to remain the same old Vertinskii. And in the worst scenario … It’s a rather dramatic paradox, but in order to be within Russian art, in order to enter – once and for all – the Russian artistic conscience, Vertinskii had to travel, along with thousands of other Russian people, the entire via dolorosa of exile.31

Perhaps since Vertinskii’s dramatic step along that path was not taken for political reasons, he began to feel pangs of conscience fairly soon after arriving in Greece, where he purchased himself a local passport and was thus freer to move within Europe or even beyond. He changed his name on paper to Vertidis, since it sounded “more Greek.” He could then work with greater ease than any (evidently) Russian citizen. He may have been experiencing bona fide regret from the beginning of these travels, as he himself suggests in this famous quote from decades afterwards: Even now I don’t understand it. I don’t know a single foreign language, so where did I get enough courage to quit my own country without even thinking about it? I was a capricious, spoilt Russian actor, a neurasthenic, completely unsuited to normal life. I had no life experience, no money, and lacked faith

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aleksandr vertinskii and cabaret even in myself. What prompted me to get on a steamship and head for a foreign country? Asking myself that question now [in the late fifties] after so many years, I still cannot find within myself a sincere and honest answer. Did I hate the Soviets? Not at all! The Soviets never did anything bad to me. Was I a follower of some other political system? “No” to that, too. I had no political convictions at that time. But why did it happen? What forced me to leave? Why did I tear myself away from the one land for which I would easily and happily surrender my life, if it were ever necessary? The whole affair is obviously attributable to mere stupidity on my part.32

the gypsy romance shapes a life: the romantic gypsy Vacillating between regret and bravado, Vertinskii performed all across Western Europe between 1922 and 1934, beginning in Constantinople, where he found regular work in several stylish restaurants and clubs. Here, fearing that the locals would not understand his earnest cabaret songs, he relied instead on simpler gypsy numbers: “Happy songs with a beat that allowed them to tap their feet, click their fingers and sway back and forth. They liked that.”33 When attending his shows, Turkey’s Russian population at this time was (and looked) most impressive: “Princes and counts, admirals and ambassadors, [fraternizing with] sultans, padishahs, crown princes and princesses, kings and queens, great artists and poets, composers and writers.”34 The Turkish government, however, was soon tired of these ostentatious émigrés, and as new anti-Russian legislation was introduced, Vertinskii moved on to Romania. Here the local authorities took strong exception to his song “In the Moldovan Steppe” (discussed below) and suggested that he was a Russian agent. “Sadly not,” replied Vertinskii, implying that such status would have allowed him to go home, if unceremoniously. This quip cost him a spell in a Bucharest jail, where he was soon singing with other “criminals.” He felt an odd sense of kinship with them: “The Russian song is something of vast, impressive power! Of total courage, patience, and pride from within the people. It reflects the people’s profound wisdom in its entirety. With a Russian song work is easier, woe is subdued, and not even death is frightening!”35 As the quote below shows, a painful sung proximity to the Russian land and the presence of real gypsies were precisely what inspired the troublesome song about Moldova. He had considered even swimming across one river in the region to reach Russian territory, but knew full well that “we [exiles are] just remnants of the past! Fugitive servants of a gentry household … How could we be useful now? We don’t even know how to wash floors.” Fearing both his uselessness and the bullets

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of border guards, Vertinskii found consolation in the gypsies who scorned political geography, living on both sides of a river he once described in typically emotive prose. A hawk whirled high in the azure sky. Swallows sat upon a telegraph wire, and all around, no matter where you looked, steppe and more steppe. It was all so similar to my Homeland! Sometimes in the early evening we would run across a gypsy camp. A real camp, which you’d heard about all your life in romances, written – incidentally – by the kind of people who’d never seen them. The fires were burning. Their tents stood in a semicircle marked by their raised shafts. We stopped, went over to the gypsies, sat down by the fire, had dinner with them, drank wine, and listened to songs. We all yearned for Russia to the sounds of too many guitars. The steppe was intensely silver from the moonlight. The sound of cicadas resonated together with bird calls, with the quail. There’s a great deal in common between these people and myself, all without a homeland. That’s how my song “In the Moldovan Steppe” came about.36

The years between 1923 and 1927 he spent in Poland, whence he toured nearby countries such as Latvia, Lithuania, Austria, Hungary, and Germany.37 Across the entire continent he charmed his predominantly female audience.38 He would on occasion be barred from leaving concert halls until promising to return at a later date.39 After one particular domestic argument, Vertinskii’s fame proved itself equally inhibiting when he sought refuge in a small rented room in an apartment building. He was forced to return home after two days, deprived of sleep by people in the courtyard below who (unaware of the singer’s presence) would gather to play his records – loudly.40 The success and influence of such non-revolutionary fervour in Eastern Europe prompted a rather ambiguous attitude from imperial quarters, as recorded in a brief and indecisive “parody” of the singer by one pro-Soviet Latvian newspaper in 1925: Эти песни пахнут ладаном, И ничтожна их печаль, Их давно бы бросить надобно, Но, конечно, бросить – жаль.41 [These songs smell of incense, and their sadness is petty. They should have been dumped long ago … but it’d be a shame to do so.]

This attitude, not only in Latvia, but in Bessarabia, too, would be void of self-deprecating humour by the early thirties, when acquiring visas for touring in either country became painfully difficult. Nevertheless,

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regardless of obstacles and opprobrium, Vertinskii’s songs continued to exist in the nebulous space between ideology and state-sponsored eminence, as they were published between 1920 and 1923 in both Petrograd and Moscow. Criticism of him in the press took a dramatic step downwards in 1927 with a personal attack by Party ideologist Bukharin: “Why are our cabarets full of Vertinskii and his foul songs, like ‘Your Fingers Smell of Incense’? It’s rotten and must stop. The sooner the better.”42 Other negative articles appeared in the national magazine Ogonek.43 Trying hard to ignore these problems while in the Polish town of Sopot, which would later become famous as the setting for many festivals of Soviet songs, Vertinskii met a lady by the name of Irene. They were married, and although their union would not last for long, she would inspire one of his greatest songs, Pani Irena.44 Sacrificing now political, residential, and marital constancy to his craft, Vertinskii moved on from Poland in 1927, to France, and then – after the autumn of 1934 – America. In France he met writers such as Bunin, Kuprin, and Tèffi while mingling with the Rothschilds, Vanderbilts, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and others. He did extremely well for himself in the French capital; for a few years he was even co-owner of a restaurant on the ChampsElysees. The company that made his sports jackets also made good use of his name in their advertisements, together with that of another equally valued client, Maurice Chevalier.45 One Parisian promoter even felt comfortable advertising his concert on 2 May 1931 as a show by the greatest singer in the world.46 Here his audience and clients were wealthy, titled Russian émigrés “suited for no work whatsoever, capable of no art except that of dining beautifully, making eloquent toasts, and kissing the hand of a lady.”47 His close friend, the renowned opera singer Chaliapin, also often visited him and applauded his “love for life.”48 Émigrés and Parisians loved him, the Soviet press tried hard to dislike him, but Vertinskii was still fondly remembered east of Poland. One Soviet singer in Russia by the name Kazimir Malakhov tried to mock Vertinskii in a satirical review entitled “My Grandmother’s Bouquet.” The public applauded not the parody, but the fact that a Vertinskii song was being played (and rather well, for the object of mockery seemed, willy-nilly, to demand a serious treatment).49 The rise of fascism in Western Europe worried our artist greatly, especially since French Communists and émigré turncoats had sometimes spread rumours of “connections” he had to the Soviet Secret Service.50 It was obviously time to leave, to begin American travels that would lead to concerts in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los

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Angeles. In New York he was compared to Bing Crosby and even dubbed the “Russian Crooner.”51 (The American, apparently, liked him, too.)52 Like Iur’eva in Paris, Vertinskii was offered movie roles in Hollywood, but his poor knowledge of English proved an insurmountable obstacle. The volume of big business in the big city also troubled him, and he felt that capitalist society was perhaps not the best place for an estrada personality, specifically of minor genres. “The hardest thing in America is to attract attention to yourself. In these large, densely populated cities, where people rush by in a perpetual stream, everything merges with an enormous roaring sound. It is hard to distinguish yourself with a lone voice in that type of endless, monotonic noise. It’s hard to get people interested in you or your personality [lichnost’], your ideas …”53 In another rejection of anonymous excess, Vertinskii shied away from enormous venues such as Carnegie Hall, fearing that such concerts would “lose their intimacy and become too magisterial.”54 He also saw the capitalist market that creates vast crowds in similar halls as harmful to the very well-being of artists, often impoverished by gross copyright violations. His description of this situation in New York is touchingly ironic, given the brutish nature of audio-video piracy in Russia today.55 Musicians may then have been officially protected by the law, “but that only concerns American and European music, registered with composers’ unions. With regard to Russian music, for example … you can plunder that to your heart’s content. It’s a problem that has evidently arisen as a result of great distances” between America and the Soviet Union.56 Meanwhile, though, in abuse of other legal agreements, Soviet music lovers were smuggling Vertinskii’s records into Russia in false-bottomed suitcases, then locking their doors tightly at home, so nobody would hear.57 Everybody loved him; nobody would say so officially. Travelling across America to San Francisco, the singer would cast a trajectory across land and then sea, all the way to China. Here he would spend eight years and marry once again, in regions whose Russian colonies were “barely distinguishable” from settlements of Central Russia, replete with the cupolas of Orthodox churches high above flourishing banks, schools, restaurants, and bars. “Here orchestras played in summer gardens and people skated over frozen winter ponds.”58 From 1935 until 1943, then, Vertinskii was in China, awaiting the time he could return home to Russia in curiously familiar surroundings. Bureaucratic processes and his delicate political status would delay matters horribly. Heartening promises would be made orally, then be denied or simply not affirmed on paper.

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life in shanghai and the desire to enter stalinist russia Ships had stopped running between Shanghai and Vladivostok, and the Japanese authorities were not keen to ease his passage home. In Harbin, for example, they showed their general antipathy to local Slavs with a boorish anti-Russian parade to mark the fall of Port Arthur and the still-painful battle of Tsushima. Some elderly Russian officers donned their uniforms and – amazingly – headed this parade, presumably in order to use the event as an anti-Soviet march, one marking the bravery of pre-revolutionary sailors. Vertinskii walked up to one of the officers and with no warning slapped him hard across the face.59 This was very much a period of limbo in the singer’s career, as it was for most people in a hostile Eastern context. In an attempt to institute some normalcy, he and his stunningly attractive Georgian wife had their first child. This new obligation and expense led the singer both to work extremely hard and alter somewhat the thematic of his songs. The exoticism of prior arietki passed in favour of quieter, more typical characters, people of less surprising attributes and desires. He was very aware of his membership in a large, weary community; throughout his time in China, Vertinskii was, like many of his neighbours, attempting to return to Russia. One of his more intriguing attempts at passing bureaucratic muster (when his career’s ideological content was investigated) was to obfuscate the release dates of various old records. He hoped thus to abbreviate the official period during which he had sung “old” songs and increase the total years when he was known to have performed socially responsible numbers.60 This masquerade nonetheless did overlap with a genuine desire to progress from the solipsism or somewhat precious aspect of early repertoires. In an essay on Iurii Morfessi and his nostalgic romances of horse-driven coaches, Vertinskii wrote that the Greek “just couldn’t break away from the dead-end of the past … Iurii, I told him, for God’s sake get down from your coaches! There’s no trace at all of those things any more. There’s asphalt everywhere and trucks plow away all the snow!”61 The singer also appeared on the tass radio show Voice of the Homeland in both 1942 and 1943, reading his memoirs and poems and singing “Other Towns” (Chuzhie goroda) plus “The Legend of Kitezh City” (Skazanie o grade Kitezhe). These endorsements by the media boded well, and indeed Vertinskii’s situation improved dramatically in 1943 after he wrote directly to Molotov, Soviet foreign minister. This act was not so much political as an appeal to a friend. They had studied

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in school together, where Vertinskii used to shoot small balls of wellchewed bread at Molotov’s protruding ears.62 Dear Viacheslav Mikhailovich! I am fully aware of the audacity of my application at a time when our Homeland is applying all of its energy to combat. Nonetheless I believe that there is a place in your heart, that of a conspicuous stately figure, for some understanding of other people’s despondency – maybe even mine. I have lived for twenty years without my Homeland. Emigration is a great and difficult punishment. Yet all punishment has a limit. Even prison terms without parole are cut short for decent behaviour and repentance. My own punishment has recently been unbearable. The most terrible thing of all is to live far from one’s Homeland and be helpless to assist her when she is bloodied. Soviet patriots [at home] are volunteering their dogged, superhuman energy, final kopecks, and even their life. Please, Viacheslav Mikhailovich, let me, too, volunteer my still-considerable energy and even my life for the good of my Homeland. I am an artist. I am a little over fifty and my art can still offer a great deal. I was once accused of decadent feelings in my songs, but was never anything more than my epoch’s mirror and amplifier. If my songs really were decadent, then the guilt is not mine; it belongs to the pre-revolutionary years of stillness, decay, and decadence. My songs have long since been of another type. Today’s heroic age inspires me to new and stronger songs. I have already done something in response to that inspiration, and my new songs now sound different, as the Soviet people here say themselves. Please allow me to return home. I am a Soviet citizen. Besides my profession, I also work at the Shanghai newspaper New Life and am writing my memoirs of people I have met in emigration. That book is almost ready; tass wishes to publish it. I have with me my wife and her mother. I cannot abandon them here and therefore am making this request on behalf of all three of us, i.e., 1. I myself – Aleksandr Vertinskii. 2. My wife, the Georgian citizen Lidiia Vladimirovna (twenty years old). 3. Her mother, Lidiia Pavlovna Tsirgvava (forty-five years old). That is all. It would be extremely difficult for me to break up the family. Please allow us to return home. I will still be of use for my Homeland. Please help me, Viacheslav Mikhailovich. I am writing to you from China. People know my address in the Tokyo embassy, as well as in the Shanghai consulate. I offer you my deepest gratitude in advance and hope for an answer from you.

The answer from Molotov was thankfully positive, at a time when Vertinskii’s patriotic songs in Shanghai brought both equal derision

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and cries of “Bravo!” “You’re absolutely right!” “Hurrah!”63 He left the complexities of émigré politics and began his life anew in a Moscow airport, dressed for the autumn of 1943 in a pale grey, heavy woollen overcoat: “He looked very ashen, yet radiant, also. Interest in his return had been enormous.”64 The Soviet newspapers declared in bold print: vertinskii called back to his homeland.65 Following the letter to Molotov, this “recalled” party consisted of Vertinskii, his wife, mother-in-law, and three-month-old daughter, Marianna.66 With them close by his side, he descended the steps of his aircraft at Vnukovo Airport and immediately went down on his knees to kiss the ground three times. On standing, he noticed that his hand luggage had been stolen. With a wry smile he said, “I recognize you, my Russian land.”67 By 16 December he already had permission to start work and to tour.68 As the war came to an end, the singer gave concerts for the wounded, orphaned, and widowed. He was working intensely, having “left the Russia of Vertinskii and returned to the Russia of [wartime Soviet songstress] Klavdiia Shul’zhenko.”69 The foreign press maligned him for the homecoming, whereas Russian domestic audiences felt sorry for Vertinskii and were eager to see this walking example of a pre-revolutionary phenomenon, “a living chamberlain from the court of His Imperial Majesty all in a parade uniform sewn with gold.”70 Nothing of the sort, of course, took place in his costumes to satisfy such curiosity.71 Vertinskii, like Leshchenko elsewhere in Eastern Europe, now performed in unassuming suits and, at most, the white smoking jacket of a middleaged man, much to the chagrin of some people who remembered him as Pierrot.72 Most people, though, found precisely what they sought in him after a war: calm, rest, and comfort.73 He was applauded the same way as Esenin had been after his own “exile.”74 Within the first three years after his return, he performed roughly eight hundred concerts, thus proving and maintaining the relevance of music that not even world war could efface. The government, however, still tried to be difficult by granting him only modest venues, when he could easily have filled enormous ones.75 His songs joined once again the nationwide force of musical emotion that did not need the relative peace of exile to survive. Take, for example, three representative signs on Leningrad’s Nevskii Prospekt during the horrific blockade of recent years, when there was no food, heat, fresh water, or money and thousands were dying within the city limits. – For Sale Immediately. Valuable items for mere kopecks. – I will make coffins or sew felt boots in exchange for a piece of bread. – I will buy any books concerning Tchaikovsky.76

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adventures in stalinist cinema and around the union As Vertinskii’s fame was once against established by these incessant concerts, he also returned after a very long absence in the early fifties to the Russian movie business, thus resurrecting a career for which he would even be awarded the Stalin Prize (on the same day as Dunaevskii).77 This most Soviet of awards may seem a little strange, considering the priests and nobles whom Vertinskii now depicted. In a 1954 version of Chekhov’s Anna on the Neck, for instance, he plays the story’s prince, a charming gallant regaled in pre-revolutionary finery. Even his oncedisparaged burr fits seamlessly with the portrayal, giving an air of French sophistication or foreign panache to Russian pronunciation. Calls of “Delightful!”(Prelestno!) across the ballroom are beyond the pronunciation of both actor and hero: Pwelestno! The movie as a whole is additionally odd in that it dissolves at times into the promenade jollity of Riazanov’s comedy Carnival Night, a quintessential comedy of the Thaw, released only two years later. This party atmosphere helps to spin a feature-length movie from Chekhov’s laconic tale, together with sundry touching details of daily life, in order that private pre-revolutionary normalcy serve the ends of post-Stalinist frivolity. Vertinskii’s exquisite wife also realized herself on the silver screen at this time. In 1952 she played the brief but memorable role of a phoenix in the folk epic Sadko. She lives in an Indian palace of gold, behind seven walls that bear her carved likeness. She tells the merchant Sadko and his fellow travellers that happiness will be found in tranquility, reverie, and by ending their journey. Her songs lull the men to the very edge of eternal sleep, but Sadko retaliates with his own equally impressive song and forces the phoenix to help them escape from her lair. Sadko then pushes onwards, wandering in his further adventures between the goals of trade and happiness, social concerns and private commitments. This film is thus akin to the Soviet tale of Don Quixote (1957), in which Lidiia Vertinskaia played the refined but heartless duchess who mocks the nomadic knight. Nevertheless she still feels obliged to ask him, since he is so sincere, if love really exists. In this film and Sadko, Vertinskaia’s characters become touchstones for the sensitivity of the hero, a typecasting continued in The New Adventures of Puss-in-Boots (1957); here she plays a vampish “young sorceress.” In reality, though, she is three hundred years old and able to change form at will, to appear from within flowers and propel fireworks at those who dispute her sullen dominance. When Puss-in-Boots questions her ability to

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metamorphose, in particular to become other animals, the scorned sorceress becomes a lion, then a mouse – and Puss-in-Boots promptly eats her. Building on her characterizations in the equally fantastic Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors, she plays yet another queen of the under world, Anidag, which, it later transpires, is “Gadina” or the Russian word for “vermin” spelled backwards. She speaks with birds of prey, carries a black cat, and contrives to do away with Olga, a young girl. Olga is trying to save a boy forced to work in the factory where crooked mirrors are constructed. These mirrors lie; they create false reflections but the kingdom allows no others to be made. Ultimately, of course, Olga triumphs and Anidag is herself turned into vermin, into a loathsome snake. Films such as these did much to create and perpetuate the aura of timeless stardom around both Lidiia Vertinskaia and her husband.78 The public’s enthusiasm grew, but – as ever – the authorities never seemed in their public declarations to show any real interest. “I exist according to the rules of the brothel,” said the singer. “Everybody goes, but it’s not proper to talk about it in high society.”79 This quiet disparity bothered the performer for several years.80 “Somewhere up there on high they’re still pretending I haven’t come home, that I’m not in the country. They don’t say anything or talk about me … But I am here. Very much here. The people love me; please excuse my arrogance.”81 During this time he would submit new songs to a censorship board and use the works of established (safer) authors: “Unbalanced Maestro” (Sumashedshii maèstro) by Maiakovskii, “In Our Room” (V nashei komnate) by V. Rozhdestvenskii, “Louis xiv” (Liudovik XIV ) by M. Voloshin, “Jewelry Box” (Shkatulka) by V. Inber. He also included the song “Chinese Watercolour” (Kitaiskaia akvarel’) and would claim the words as his own, knowing that any declaration of their actual provenance (Gumilev) would guarantee rejection.82 Vertinskii also wrote a song dedicated to Stalin that employed genuinely enthused terms, wishing him the permanence and poise of a lofty “silver poplar.”83 The text is one of personal gratitude and good citizenship: “Vertinskii’s patriotism was not born of the Russian soil [pochvennyi]”; it was not linked to a politically circumscribed space.84 It was born of transnational emotion. Vertinskii was at first an artist associated with exotic locales, but he overcame the stereotype through his acceptance of a latter-day Stalinist patriotism.85 That national loyalty displaced his initial decadent reputation so fully that at least during the Thaw, when things exotic were again officially embraced, Vertinskii, as a “Stalinist” artist, fell briefly out of favour.86 Some (elderly) fans will dispute this today, saying that

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his lyrics became at that time more popular.87 The singer’s periodization within ideologically defined culture was extremely unstable and unsure, yet his popularity was constant. That popularity was earned, not bestowed by dignitaries or decree; these years of touring required the aging singer to perform on average twenty-four concerts a month.88 Although estimates vary radically, one interview with Vertinskii’s pianist puts their total post-return concerts at four thousand.89 Despite fatigue and encroaching age, he kept performing, moving gradually backwards, so to speak, over time towards an eventually complete repertoire of all his songs – old and new – whilst working on his memoirs, in particular their longest form, By the Long Road (Dorogoi dlinnoiu). On what would become the last day of his life, he added another thirteen pages of text and went to a showing of his wife’s film Don Quixote. He then returned to Leningrad’s Astoria Hotel, ordered a cognac in his room, feeling increasingly poorly as he did so. Not long afterwards his condition worsened. He passed away quickly and quietly. In 1956, the year before he died, Vertinskii left a telling thought amid his correspondence. “In 30 or 40 years – and I am sure of this – when they drag me and my ‘creative work’ from the ‘cellars of oblivion’ … then this letter, if it survives that long, will acquire its true meaning.”90 How very true. Vertinskii’s call to memory is a call to affirm what, in another letter to his family, he saw as the enduring “truth above party politics: humanity.”91 His affirmation grew to such a degree that he was even able to see his return to Stalinist Russia in fundamentally human, not political, terms. His return was a matter of the heart. “Our Mother Russia has forgiven many people. Including me. In Shanghai, after many requests, I, too, was given Soviet citizenship. That was after the war, when our Russia experienced further immense pain. The hands of thousands of her children reached out from various far-flung corners. They begged her to be allowed home, to help her, to give their lives for her! I believed even then that our Russia would rise from the inferno of battle mightier still. I believed that she would flourish even more, become more beautiful and dearer to us all, even more beloved.”92 The significance of extended hands here as an emotional transmitter is not drawn upon by chance. Many articles and books on the singer mention his hands as the most memorable visual aspect of his songs in moments of emotional intensity.93 Even his daughter, Anastasiia, when an adult actress, would write of the same hands, of them cradling her head and inspiring her own grace on stage.94 A brief look at some of his songs will show how that emotion moved so freely between the three “families” of home, stage, and politics.

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songs of the soviet union’s “ f a i r y - t a l e p r i n c e ” 95 The little town is a long way off the main road. What with all the transfers or stopovers it was very hard to get to. But there’s a “Palace of Culture” here better than anything in Moscow! Pure luxury! Crystal chandeliers, marble, mirrors, carpets! That’s our Soviet life for you! Everything’s done for the people.96

Vertinskii’s songs embody and express much of what has been discussed in this book thus far. The workings of time take centre stage, even in the earliest numbers, and do so with such public success that one wag has suggested Ivan Bunin was given Russia’s first Nobel Prize for literature by mistake – it should have gone to Vertinskii.97 Take, by way of illustration, the hit song Minutochka, in which a small boy is told that love is “the silly month of May’s little joke.” The answer to linear or mockingly cyclical time comes in affection and its alternative, childishly pure narrative. In the singer’s early repertoire, calendars are exchanged for fairy tales, since they offer less “deceit.” Я сегодня смеюсь над собой … Мне так хочется счастья и ласки, Мне так хочется глупенькой сказки, Детской сказки наивной, смешной. Я устал от белил и румян И от вечной трагической маски, Я хочу хоть немножечко ласки, Чтоб забыть этот дикий обман. Я сегодня смеюсь над собой: Мне так хочется счастья и ласки, Мне так хочется глупенькой сказки, Детской сказки про сон золотой … [Today I laugh at myself … I want happiness and affection so much, I want a silly little fairy tale so much – a naive and funny tale for children. I am tired of white makeup and rouge, of an interminable tragic mask. I want at least a little affection to forget this insane deceit. I laugh at myself today. I want happiness and affection so much. I want a silly little fairy tale so much, the children’s tale of a golden dream …]

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This dream is not to be found in the “talentless” fantasies of politics or the incipient Revolution, as Vertinskii’s number “What I Must Say” of October 1917 indicates. The musical tale of callow imperial cadets sent to their tragic, pointless demise became very popular among the White troops of the Civil War, but only after they had edited one line in order to make a battle cry of Vertinskii’s apoliticism. The fifth line below, with its most unsuitable condemnation of emotionless urban affluence, was removed and altered to read: “They [the young soldiers] were laid in a row by an open grave.” Even with this new, rather gauche image, the song’s conclusion remains very skeptical of either politics or armed conflict as means to a lofty goal. Я не знаю, зачем и кому это нужно, Кто послал их на смерть недрожавшей рукой, Только так беспощадно, так зло и ненужно Опустили их в Вечной Покой! Осторожные зрители молча кутались в шубы, И какая-то женщина с искаженным лицом Целовала покойника в посиневшие губы И швырнула в священника обручальным кольцом. Закидали их елками, замесили их грязью И пошли по домам – под шумок толковать, Что пора положить бы уж конец безобразью, Что и так уже скоро, мол, мы начнем голодать. И никто не додумался просто стать на колени И сказать этим мальчикам, что в бездарной стране Даже светлые подвиги – это только ступени В бесконечные пропасти – к недоступной Весне! [I don’t know why and for whom this is necessary, who sent them off to death with an unwavering hand; they were released so mercilessly, so angrily and senselessly into Eternal Peace! Cautious onlookers wrapped themselves silently in fur coats and some woman with a twisted face kissed a corpse on its lips, already blue. She threw her wedding ring at the priest. They covered the boys with fir branches, mixed them with the soil and went off to their houses, to quietly reason: “It’s time to end this outrage, because they say we’ll soon starve.” And nobody thought simply to get down on his knees and tell these boys that in any country empty of talent, even the most glorious feats are just steps into a bottomless abyss, towards an unattainable Spring!]

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In the same year, Vertinskii penned another text of human capriciousness and juxtaposed it with canine fidelity, in the spirit, perhaps, of “A Pair of Bays.” Here love and memory undermine the fickle “forward-thinking” nature of politics or business. A living woman is discussed as if she were already dead, as if future memories (conjured tomorrow) will cancel the movement that creates or even permits a “tomorrow” and reinstate the pure desire or emotion of today. The desire here, just as with “What I Must Say,” is within and yet greater than institutionalized beliefs or practices. It deserves a different kind of celebration, solemnity or parade, in its honour.98 In a depiction of that parade, a dog’s fidelity exists within human relationships and institutions, yet is greater than both. В нашу комнату Вы часто приходили, Где нас двое: я и пес Дуглас, И кого-то из двоих любили, Только я не знал, кого из нас. Псу однажды Вы давали соль в облатке, Помните, когда он заболел? Он любил духи и грыз перчатки И всегда Вас рассмешить умел. Умирая, Вы о нас забыли, Даже попрощаться не могли … Господи, хотя бы позвонили! … Просто к телефону подошли! … Мы придем на Вашу панихиду, Ваш супруг нам сухо скажет: «Жаль» … И, покорно проглотив обиду, Мы с собакой затаим печаль. Вы не бойтесь. Пес не будет плакать, А, тихонечко ошейником звеня, Он пойдет за Вашим гробом в слякоть Не за мной, а впереди меня! [You often came to our room, where there were two of us: Myself and the dog, Douglas. Only I did not know which of the two you loved more. You gave the dog salt on a wafer. Do you remember, when he became ill? He loved your perfume and chewing your gloves. He always knew how to make you laugh. Dying, though, you forgot about us. You weren’t even

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in practice able to say goodbye … Good grief, you could at least have called! … Just gone to the telephone! … We will come to your funeral, where your husband will say to us, dryly: “Such a shame” … Then, humbly swallowing our hurt, the dog and I will hide our sadness. Do not be afraid. The dog will not cry but, jangling quietly with his collar, he’ll walk behind your coffin into the sleet … not behind me, but ahead!]

The heart remains true in a folded, nomadic fashion, remembering forever “today” and “now.” “Fidelity” for a man in exile, however, is obviously a complex and intensely emotional issue. When the potential movement of that heart is countered or limited by governmental affect, it becomes in some strange fashion a martyr to itself: the singer is “dying” from love for the one place whither he cannot go. The affect (desire) that by its very nature knows and recognizes no fixed home wants to go home. This is not defeat, but the desperate attempts of a man to affirm in Bessarabian fields of 1925 that which (until 1943) will reject him. The object of his desire is a country that does not love him. Тихо тянутся сонные дроги И, вздыхая, ползут под откос. И печально глядит на дороги У колодцев распятый Христос. Что за ветер в степи молдаванской! Как поет под ногами земля! И легко мне с душою цыганской Кочевать, никого не любя! Как все эти картины мне близки, Сколько вижу знакомых я черт! И две ласточки, как гимназистки, Провожают меня на концерт. Что за ветер в степи молдаванской! Как поет под ногами земля! И легко мне с душою цыганской Кочевать, никого не любя! Звону дальнему тихо я внемлю У Днестра на зеленом лугу. И Российскую милую землю Узнаю я на том берегу. А когда засыпают березы И поля затихают ко сну, 108

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aleksandr vertinskii and cabaret О, как сладко, как больно сквозь слезы Хоть взглянуть на родную страну. [The sleepy dray carts/hearses move slowly on and sigh as they crawl down a slope. A crucified Christ beside the wells looks sadly at the roads. What wind is this across the Moldovan steppe? How the earth sings beneath my feet! How easy for me to wander, with my gypsy soul, loving nobody! How all these scenes are dear to me! How many familiar features I see in them! Two swallows, like high-school girls, accompany me to the concert. What wind is this across the Moldovan steppe? How the earth sings beneath my feet! How easy it is for me with my gypsy soul to wander, loving nobody! By the Dnestr upon a green meadow, I can just hear a distant peal. I recognize dear Russia on the other bank. When pine trees drowse and fields grow quiet before slumber, how sweet and painful to catch but a glimpse of one’s native land through tears.]

This Christological motif, which now appears as if from nowhere in Vertinskii’s repertoire, could feasibly be traced to notions of the Fall in the period of Decadence; maybe a radical reversal of that style’s obsession with descent as the prior sweet failure of flesh here becomes a prelude to divine ascent. This deliberate loss is, in fact, part of the broader thematics in Vertinskii’s strangely patriotic songs after his return home.99 It is an extension of his inability to fully express or realize the object of desire. He chases that object in a way that transforms its elusiveness into something productive. There is no permanent, definitive synonymy between exiled singer and the worldview of the very politicized place whence he was exiled, even though he wants to go home. This situation is good and will continue to be positively elusive even after he gets home. A paradoxical statement of that nature needs some background. We need to look at his motifs of wandering birds, not so much in defiance of borders as in ignorance. When Vertinskii already knew in June 1943 that he was about to return home, he wrote “A Different Song.” Here a bird “tired of singing in a foreign land” returned “and suddenly recognized its Homeland.” The recognition is not prior to the return; the home is recognized as such only after the homecoming, which was effected by some other force – desire. Vertinskii then admits that his earlier songs had been “sad,” but a happier and perhaps even martial tone (during wartime) will now sound. “Having given my life to my Homeland with a smile, I’ll settle my accounts with her.” The happy, emotional accountancy will now begin to take place where a songbird makes its nest. A system of social, emotional exchange replaces the constant exchange of nations, one after the 109

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other. One process ends and a very similar one will begin. The shifting of desire between countries becomes a shifting between elements in one society, for example between the hearts of audiences. This striving does not end. Once again, as our argument proceeds, this continues to be something good. The references in this same song to stirrups and guns as forms of “settling accounts” are a touch discordant, and they in fact abate over the next few years as harsh patriotism merges with the postwar, passionate worldview of an innate songbird. In the number entitled “Song Birds” of 1946, written in Moscow, Vertinskii claims that a “song is more important than bread. It is in people’s hearts. It weaves a nest, like a bird.” Home is where the heart is.100 Home is a song and a song is an exchange of sensations with an audience that both has many members and always changes. Emotional influence is where it always was and will be – in mutual desire. The yearning or toska of his Petrograd performances is the same emotion as the nostalgia conjured by the singer’s post-Stalinist performances.101 Vertinskii fled but the sentiment stayed; thus he met his audience “like old friends.”102 Young girls or daughters among his early patrons had now become mothers but were still in the audience.103 If he comes back and affirms audience-affect (time and time again), it will continue to exist and to mean.104 After all, in the words of Aleksei Tolstoi, pre-revolutionary decadence was based on purely good feelings that were merely considered vulgar.105 The processes of exile created in Vertinskii’s mind the idea that the one place he could not go, Russia, was where that affect was strongest, since he existed in relation to it and “knew only one truth – the truth of the heart.”106 It sounded so strong in his absence, especially during wartime, that he with little effort found common ground between his own heart, that of the public (“the nest”), and for the moment – by less than ideal extension – the sociopolitical space in which that nest was found, Russia. The strength of feeling, sounding at a time of (and in time with) ideological vigour, created a strange temporary harmony of non-linear nostalgia, non-linear workings of the heart and the oneway street of Soviet social planning.107 Audiences, listeners, and patriots all become one. Decadents are Soviets, too. Мы – птицы русские. Мы петь не можем в клетке, И не о чем нам петь в чужом краю. Зато свои родные пятилетки Мы будем петь, как молодость свою! [We are Russian songbirds. We are unable to sing in a cage, and have nothing to sing about in a foreign land. Therefore we’ll sing of our own Five-Year Plans, as of our own youth!] 110

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This same thematically strange but emotionally similar reference to birds and bureaucracies is heard in his song of December 1950, “Fatherland,” written on the distant shores of Sakhalin. He quotes Pushkin’s poem, “The Prophet,” in particular the now worn-out lines in which the poet is incited by divine decree to “scorch people’s hearts with the tongue” of verse. Vertinskii sings that he, too, answers a prophet’s command: “No longer to burn hearts, but to warm them.” He aims again for the ineffable object of desire, with ineffable silence taken as the logical extreme of any process of wandering, transient minorization, of its becoming.108 (To desire everything is to become part of everything, to become “unmarked” and therefore unnoticeable or inaudible.) This modest goal of estrada, the minor voice of a simple soul, is broadcast on a major scale of state sentiment, since they are (for the time being) one and the same.109 Once again political rhetoric sticks its nose in: “Take my poor gift, Fatherland! But, opening that generous palm, I know that everything is recast into steel by the holy fire of communism’s open hearths.” The most popular songs employ or coincide with the emotional energy of ideology; they do not become it entirely. Vertinskii’s skill was in using that force of nationwide energy for subjective purposes, for a private philosophy. When on occasion he gets too close, he is sucked in and the object of desire is realized: the private becomes too public. The individual vanishes not in desire, but in the similar anonymity of socialist processes. If we can get away from such problems, then the free movement of yearning will be clear, where open hearts replace open hearths. It all finally comes together on 19 January 1952, when the heartfelt, the metamorphic, the patriotic, and the religious interweave. The loss of one’s subjectivity in processes of shared desire between many songs, people, and places dovetails with that of a Christological “divestiture.” The Decadent becomes the divinely Soviet, and if we steer clear of pure ideological replication, all is well. The Soviet singer champions the minor voice of the heart as the nostalgic becomes the nationalistic.110 The divine dissolution of self in the desire of others is a process prior to, part of, and yet more enduring than politics. It intersects with the emotional goals of socialism, not its doctrinal aspects, but since socialist dogma used the emotional power that existed prior to it, Vertinskii’s songs and socialist ideology may sound on occasion very similar indeed. Let us not, however, put the proletarian cart before the imperial horse. Я всегда был за тех, кому горше и хуже, Я всегда был для тех, кому жить тяжело. А искусство мое, как мороз, даже лужи Превращало порой в голубое стекло. 111

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in practice Я любил и люблю этот бренный и тленный, Равнодушный, уже остывающий мир, И сады голубые кудрявой вселенной, И в высоких надзвездиях синий эфир. Трубочист, перепачканный черною сажей, Землекоп, из горы добывающий мел, Жил я странною жизнью моих персонажей, Только собственной жизнью пожить не успел. И, меняя легко свои роли и гримы, Растворяясь в печали и жизни чужой, Я свою – проиграл, но зато Серафимы В смертный час прилетят за моею душой! [I was always for those people whose life is worse, more grievous. I was always for those for whom life is hard. And my art, like frost, even turned puddles on occasion into blue glass. I loved and love this transitory and mortal, indifferent, already cooling world. I love the blue gardens of an ornate universe and the blue ether of lofty heavens. As a chimney sweep, spattered with black soot, and as a labourer, digging chalk from a hillside, I lived the strange life of my characters … I just didn’t manage to live my own. Changing roles and makeup with ease, dissolving in sadness and another’s life, I lost my own life – but for that Seraphim will come at the hour of death for my soul!]

conclusion: decadent and socialist hearts coincide The myth of Vertinskii outlived the Soviet state, revolutions, world wars, and many other social changes, which are too much for the human heart to handle.111

The ntv New Year’s show discussed in the section on Kozin and Gorbachev in chapter 3 included a performance of the Aleksandr Vertinskii song that had made the nation’s all-time Top Twenty, “Magnolia Tango,” written in Bessarabia in 1931. (I describe the show fully in Chapter 9.) This most cherished of songs for Russian viewers was not a product of their own political geography. It tells of a young woman, Ivetta, pining away for a lost love from the “banana-lemony shores of Singapore.” She remembers a long-lost romantic summer, but there is now no sign of love. She is all heart but senses no love in

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return, no mutual happy affirmation. One-way ardour is therefore subject to one-way time. As we have seen, the enduring mutual affection of Vertinskii and his Soviet audience allowed him to avoid Ivetta’s fate and pull off a stunt of amazing courage (or stupidity).112 He runs from the Soviet Union, returns in 1943 under Stalin, and dies calmly in a gorgeous hotel room of natural causes after a brilliant career on the stage and silver screen, recognized in no uncertain terms by the very regime he had fled (and had once scorned).113 The jazz bandleader Leonid Utesov, also showered with government accolades in the same period, wrote eight years after Vertinskii’s tropical ditty that such art did not particularly upset him. After all, “it can only appeal to people with warped taste. Those people differ in no way from gourmands who have a penchant for malodorous pheasant.” When Vertinskii and others like him had left Russia, Utesov found time and space in his first autobiography to remark: “Good riddance, too!” Utesov would later pen two more versions of his life. By the third version, under Brezhnev, that nastiness had been edited out, voluntarily and completely. Several songs from Utesov’s jolly repertoire were also in that ntv Top Twenty. What was his problem? Why be so unkind to a man of similar aims and craft? The issue is more complicated (and interesting) than mere insurance on Utesov’s part in the face of possible persecution. We have travelled thus far from a wandering nineteenth-century romance to Vertinskii’s decadent arietki that manage at the last possible minute to come home and merge with the faithful heart of the nation. Utesov never left the Soviet Union, and his art therefore meets patriotic emotion on its own ground. Whereas romance singers performed usually to their own lone guitars, and Vertinskii or Kozin, say, sang to a mere piano accompaniment, Utesov conducted an entire orchestra and his big band began as a result to get considerably bigger ideas.

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5 AFFECTATION AND BUFFOONERY: LEONID UTESOV AND ODESSA JAZZ For a form of popular culture to flourish and endure, it must meet two conditions. First, it must be genuinely well liked. No amount of promotion or hullabaloo can sustain its validity if it is to engage the interest of a large number of ordinary people. If a tune is not whistled in public, it will never be popular in public. Second, when a form of popular culture claims the support of part but not all of the public, as often happens, it must be able to protect itself from the hostility or indifference of the rest.1

sentimental russian tales of a ukrainian youth Leonid Utesov, like a ridiculous number of other estradniki, was born in Odessa, and in many ways he is that city’s greatest mythmaker, even more so than Il’f, Petrov, Bagritskii, or Babel’.2 He lived within a fairytale atmosphere of jocund diversity, of happy difference, using the actuality or immanence of a southern port. “Greek mythology is a myth,” he once said. “Odessa’s mythology is reality.”3 His story begins among its streets in the spring of 1895, when he was born as Lazar’ Vaisbein (sometimes represented as Vasbein).4 Any educational biography at this point will be inescapably curt, since he spent little time in school and preferred instead to play musical instruments whenever humanly possible, to audiences both serious and sentimental. Synagogues and wedding parties benefited from his burgeoning talents. Music was everywhere on the shores of the Black Sea, thanks to sailors from all over Europe: Ukrainians, Russians, Moldovans, Jews, Greeks, Italians, French, Germans.5 As Utesov says in his autobiography: “In Odessa it seems as if all children study the violin. No child at the age of three knows how to be envious, otherwise I would certainly have envied the boys who strolled proudly down the street, with their ohso-musical ears sticking out. They would carry a violin case in one hand and a music folder in the other.”6 Inspired, all the same, by these vexing children, Utesov both played on the violin and then sang for the choir of a commercially oriented

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school he attended, at least until expelled for a series of loud altercations with the theology teacher. Even at this early stage, the young boy’s tutelage appeared to be a sentimental, not mental, enterprise, since he had an odd habit of sobbing with pity for the heroes of various maudlin songs often assigned for choir practice. In a more concrete departure from standard schooling, he was busking on the street from the age of ten, singing (tirelessly) a song that would later become part of his adult repertoire, “The Sea Has Spread Wide.” When his meagre playlist could attract no more customers or profit, he would sing instead to friends for pieces of cheap chocolate.7 Relatives, watching him play through rose-tinted spectacles, predicted a great future.8 At home, though, his parents were horrified by the expulsion. The boy partially redeemed himself only by professing to cherish – loudly and opportunely – his dream of working as an orchestra conductor. His father, who heard his son’s dreams, was also a person of “a distinct sentimentality, marked by a love for music, a tendency towards humour … and great dedication to his family,” who hoped to see his son develop the same qualities.9 In actuality, Leonid soon found work (and lost status) in fairground entertainment as a clown and acrobat. He worked for a ringmaster whose “pitch-black moustache stuck upwards” and whose bare hands sufficed to shatter horseshoes, rend metal chains, or hammer nails into wooden planks. Utesov, meanwhile, screamed across marketplaces and fairgrounds, attracting customers with a thunderous sales pitch.10 He was warmly accepted by the circus for such coarse invaluable services, yet because of his ability to recite many poems from memory, the men with red noses and huge shoes often labelled him an “academic.” As the big top was gradually exchanged for the small stage, our screaming acrobat became the Leonid Utesov we now know, in the sense that he adopted, once and for all, a stage name. He had been most struck by a certain local actor, Mr Skalov, whose name came, it was supposed, from the Russian word for “cliff” (skala). Utesov, impressed by this etymology, seized upon “mountain” (gora), but it quickly transpired that a certain Mr Gorskii was already gainfully employed in Odessa, as, incidentally, were Messrs Gorev and Gorin. Any “hill” or kholm seemed somewhat pitiful in comparison, and after much thought he stumbled upon the idea of “Mr Crag” (utes), settling eventually, after rejecting Utesin, on Utesov. Settling upon a name and the end to provincial touring allowed him to entertain grander notions of permanence when he began to perform regularly in one of Odessa’s Theatres of Miniatures. Here he worked upon “perfecting a sense of good taste, plus some principles for drama and life as a whole.” The reviews of his comic routines were

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positive, praising the “surprisingly graceful and pleasant” faculties of this “talented joker.”11 Morfessi, when touring in Odessa, would use him as the warm-up act to guarantee some local support. Here Utesov also began to read stories by Zoshchenko and Babel’ in a dramatized manner, employing an array of voices, as if for radio.12 Thus he established early in his career an aspect of variety that would flourish with great success under the Soviets and one with which he credits the very “foundation of estrada.” Through witty literary readings he learned to judge shifting audience reaction and let it dictate the content of an evening’s entertainment.13 The audience reaction also led him to the realization that “people have two types of perception: visual and aural. Both of these linear thought processes converge on me. I feel almost literally that each of those lines ends in a hook. It’s on the lines and hooks that I take listeners and viewers wherever I want!”14 So who leads whom? Does Utesov lead the audience on his hooks, or does audience reaction dictate the literary readings? Pandering to public taste had its risks, and Utesov was accused of cultivating the lowest possible denominator, so much so, in fact, that in subsequent years his voice was convincingly imitated for Soviet bootleg recordings of “semi-pornographic songs. They were virtual marvels of musical tastelessness.”15 This dubious reputation was fostered in places such as the backwaters of Kremenchug and its provincial movie house. In front of a blank screen, Utesov and his fellow performers would crank out two or three comic plays per evening, together with brief operettas and special solo performances. In an attempt to salvage this period of the actor’s career for subsequent reputable biographies, Soviet critics would later credit operetta with teaching him the art of multiple, mutable, and sometimes “grotesque” roles, all of which were of course grounded in sociopolitical “topicality.”16 By learning how to change characters, he learned more about himself as a person.17 Given often the parts of “lackeys or noblemen,” Utesov preferred not to learn stereotypical gestures by heart, but to improvise them in the process of each performance (and then again anew). Fifty years later he would liken this process to breaking in a suit of unyielding fabric!18 Sometimes, even poorly learned lines with awkward pauses could give the impression of improvisation, until the prompter would suddenly disturb the silence with a reassuring yell: “Got it! Page 83! OK, keep going!”19 Working in this manner, Utesov began to tour, and while in Aleksandrovsk he met the young actress Elena Goldina. She and Utesov fell in love; in 1914 they celebrated the arrival of a baby daughter, Èdit. World War One, though, seemingly interrupted family happiness; Utesov would see active duty close to Odessa. This, nonetheless,

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allowed him not only to visit his wife on occasion but also, remarkably, to continue working in local theatres. His prewar habits were also strangely protracted when White troops fled south to Odessa from portents of rebellion; the soldiers tarried in the city even during 1918 and 1919, thus supporting pubs and restaurants with their outmoded, pre-revolutionary entertainment.20 Soviet troops “liberated” the city on 7–8 February 1920, and Soviet estrada suddenly sprang up, as yet unsure of its own generic dictates. Keen for an audience, Utesov found work on an “agit-train,” railway platforms, hospitals, and the same clubs as before.21 His comic turns were always popular, for the new political context changed almost nothing: the young man was the soul of his drama troupe.22 His success was such, Civil War or not, that he decided in 1921 to leave Ukrainian soil and move to Moscow. By this time he was genuinely motivated by revolutionary romanticism, a sentiment that is manifest in his earliest memoirs. His attitude towards the recently emigrated Vertinskii is most telling. It was funny to hear some people say that Russia’s “saviours” had squeezed onto a few steamships [and left]. Good riddance! When the “smoke” dissipated, it turned out that Vertinskii, Morfessi, Lipkovskaia, and Kremer had left, too. I didn’t expect that. Their actions were totally inconceivable to me and at the time even seemed stupid. Let’s just forget about them. After all, you can’t expect too much from somebody who’s that muddled-headed or weak-willed or who can’t entirely envision what he’s supposed to do.23

In a later rendering of his autobiography from 1961, Utesov calls Vertinskii’s songs a style of “poeticization of the irreparable, of faithlessness. It is very sincere and refined but noxious and decadent, all the same.” He then says that after twenty years Vertinskii finally came home with new Soviet songs, graced by “noble and elevated motifs.” For all his failings, Vertinskii thus showed that “he wanted to be with us.” More important than any competition of ideologies had been love, the love of his public, who “valued his work and cherished fond memories of him.”24 The difference between these two men was certainly physical as much as ideological. Vertinskii’s attenuated elegance bore no resemblance to Utesov’s stumpy, stocky, yet obviously powerful body. Utesov, of all our male performers, seems most clearly to have been a singing representative of the proletariat. Slicked-back short hair (which he never lost) also added to his air of a working man, and his heavy broad face was in later years creased deeply from countless smiles. Vertinskii, who did not smile so much as jeer, stepped outside of Soviet geography, while Utesov pushed closer to its centre, finding

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work in an operetta theatre, leading him to muse upon the workings of chance and multiplicity in his life. Perhaps these were the same forces that had driven his colleague overseas, rather than poor political intuition. “Chance can turn your whole life upside down, as I have been convinced on more than one occasion … There’s a reason why people think chance hides the workings of necessity.”25 Having impressed the house staff and audiences with his acting, singing, and dancing, Utesov chose to place himself in the hands of those topsyturvy forces. He moved to Petrograd in 1922, to what he saw as the centre of innovative Soviet estrada. Maximum opportunity was to be sought with an art form that was maximally affirmative. Making more choices would leave him open to more chance, in a slow yet wilful erosion of self-determination. Songs of the new Soviet stage “had a more cultured text. Our new estrada was mobilizing viewers, teaching them, educating, developing, and perfecting their taste – while entertaining and making them happy.”26 Estrada is the art of making people happy, felt Utesov, and after all – by a reverse and self-justifying logic – the one reaction to great art is joy.27 The press agreed, declaring in the same year, “Laughter and fun are absolutely necessary today.”28 This official concurrence and cheerful successes in his new northern city led Utesov in later years to call Petrograd the place of his “creative becoming” after having left Odessa, his “cradle.”29 Soon afterwards, in the same city, he would encounter the very modern medium that turned endlessly acquiescent and guileless joy into a national form of emotional significance. I was standing on the embankment [in Leningrad] and looking down at the Fontanka Canal when a car pulls up behind me and an old friend gets out. “Hi! Want to see a miracle?” he asked. “A miracle? I’m always up for that!” I answered, and we drove off to the city port, to where a small ship was moored. I was asked to go down into the hold, which was pretty spacious. There were two boxes on a table. On one of those boxes were two big six-sided coils, all wound up with a fine green wire. My friend gave me some earphones. I put them on and heard at once Schubert’s “Moment Musical.” I had no idea what was going on: “What have you got in there? A gramophone? Record player?” “No! There’s nothing in there! That’s music playing right now in Germany! This is called radio.”30

increasing fame and flippancy in the big city Utesov’s reputation spread quickly as if in keen anticipation of radio’s scope. Even his first Leningrad shows were great successes, and people

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could be heard singing his jazzy songs on the streets or trams. They thought nothing of waiting for him by snow-blown stage doors in minus-forty-degree weather.31 Utesov felt the growing pressure to match that strength of emotion from his side of the footlights. Nevertheless, attracting the public was an increasingly tricky business, as shown in one poor attempt where the actors decided in their early days to create and advertise an exotic “John Johnson from Brazil,” news of whom filled the house in advance. People waited impatiently for him to come out on stage; the police, equally restive, felt obliged to calm the public. – So where’s your John Johnson, then? – You’ll excuse me, Mr Policeman, but he’s a wild man and they’ll let him out of the toilet only to come on stage. – Don’t mess about. Get him out here! “John Johnson” came slowly out of the toilet, not having had time to put his grease paint on properly. Half of him looked black and the other half white. – What are you, a Negro? – No, a Jew … – So why did you write on the posters that you’re from Brazil? – It’s the truth. I live in Odessa, in the hotel “Brazil.” That was the end of the conversation. The policeman cleared his throat and declared: – For deceiving the local authorities, I am forbidding you to perform any more. Get back to Brazil.32

The hubbub only worked in Utesov’s favour. Within a brief time he had roles in three silent films, but renown began to put considerable strain upon his marriage.33 One rumour circulated, for example, that Utesov had been killed in a theatre accident, and before the story was disproved, one of his female admirers had already committed suicide. When an affaire d’amour developed with another (less troubled) devotee, Mrs Utesov, in a display of brutal humour, sent firewood to her husband and his lover at their “secret” rendezvous, asking that she keep him warm, since he easily caught a chill. Such behaviour seemed to challenge Utesov’s theory that “a person with a sense of humour is hard to imagine as despotic or base.”34 Battling through years of his infidelity, Elena Utesova also lost another member of her family to the small stage when she saw her daughter become a singer and, after 1936, perform in her father’s ensemble. This was several years after Utesov had introduced what would become a major movement in the development of Soviet popular

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music – theatricalized jazz (tea-dzhaz), first presented to the Soviet public on 8 March 1929.35 Tea-dzhaz (from the Russian word for “theatre,” teatr) came at a time when Russian newspapers announced that “our society demands new themes, reflecting the sociopolitical and quotidian aspects of Soviet citizens’ lives, which are so diverse and appealing.”36 Before Utesov turned to these themes or content, though, he presented a brand new art form or two as follows. His band prepared six musical numbers, which they had been practising every day for seven months. They dedicated their first concert to all the ladies in the audience, since 8 March was Women’s Day.37 The band consisted of three saxophones (two altos and a tenor), two trumpets, a trombone, piano, double bass, banjo, and drums.38 When the performance began, the audience was amazed to hear that the music included sound effects: croaking, neighing, and a great deal of laughter. The ensemble organized their discord and constant rhythmic movement so that certain instruments came to represent particular people or the emotions of their songs – for example, a cantankerous trombone or fidgety clarinet.39 This novel theatrical style was designed to heal (unbelievably!) the persistent division between “bourgeois” jazz, the entertainment of nep-men, and truly proletarian jazz, the noble songs of the great unwashed.40 Utesov himself saw the roots of jazz in generically romantic terms, as a Franco-American “striving for impulsive enjoyment, plus elements of ennui (masked by joy) and bitter laughter at the expense of ‘lost ideals.’” In literature, he maintained, Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Remarque caught the mood perfectly.41 Nevertheless, the musician would often speak out against the American influence in jazz once it left the States.42 Soviet jazz was different, he said; it was more optimistic, incorporating overtly Jewish, Armenian, and other folk elements. Dunaevskii’s early composition for Utesov, “Jewish Rhapsody” (Evreiskaia rapsodiia), was one such example. He hoped to keep, perhaps, some of the Western “form, but change the [ennui or lost ideals of the] content … to give the words a lyrical and ironic tone, to use some aspects of parody and turn the jazz band into a small orchestra.”43 The fact that lyricism and irony would hardly be out of place in American light entertainment hints at the real addressee of Utesov’s remarks. He hoped to save and further advocate lyricism in a Soviet context, to institutionalize a marginalized affect. He wanted to lighten and vary state entertainment with emotions, not sung forms of policy. He worked inside the system to make it lighter and more lyrical, by being not super-voguish but supra-voguish in that the affirmation of sundry styles would involve a commitment to change above all, to maintaining a variegated present for as long as possible. “Fashion is but a moment,” he would say. “Contemporaneity is an [entire] epoch.”44 120

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Utesov would test all his musicians for a sense of humour as part of their job application, to make sure they were witty enough to handle this kaleidoscopic contemporaneity. One double-bass player quickly proved his worth. “How many symphonies did Beethoven write?” asked Utesov. Without thinking, the musician answered, “I’m not sure about the quantity, but I can certainly vouch for the quality!”45 The merry individualities thus developed would soon be so strong that Utesov’s role as conductor would lessen and he would simply be the detached heart or “spirit of the evening’s program.”46 Many recordings of his songs are interrupted by witty remarks, silly voices dramatizing a song’s hero, or flippant quips thrown back and forth between the bandleader and the myriad improvising jazz musicians over whom he had less and less control. Utesov would merge into a mass of his own making. The happy dialogue of selfhood and everything was used as a means of furthering subjectivity. When Utesov first heard jazz musicians in 1927, such as Ted Lewis abroad in the clubs of Riga, Berlin, and Paris, the style impressed him with its ability “to distinguish an individual from the general mass of an orchestra.”47 Nonetheless he was, ironically, irritated at first by its instigation of “outlandish dances” and avoidance of melody.48 Several Soviet critics, not just Gor’kii, were also unnerved by its apparent cacophony.49 Utesov, after his irritation passed, was thankfully soon charmed by the type of improvisation that allowed musicians to “give free rein to their fantasy.”50 Convincing his band members, however, that they could improvise or play without sheet music was not easy; these new skills proved to represent a “technical and psychological barrier.”51 Beyond that barrier, jazz was something synthetic, mixing dance, speech, and song in order, as suggested, that each member of the band could become “an independent character” in the show. If successful, this process would ultimately be a musical embodiment of all estrada, which is itself naturally “multifaceted and all-embracing. It is ready to accept any genre, even those as yet unseen, unusual, or unexpected. It’s hard to express the essence of estrada with a strict, bounded definition.”52 That synthesis would sometimes be seen as synonymous with Utesov’s “nature” or as even able to “live by itself.”53 One man’s nature is coincident both with all times, even “as yet unseen,” and all natural, self-generating processes. As certain genres rose briefly to the surface in estrada whenever employed, others would – equally briefly – subside, such as romances. The jazzman would make fun of them in exactly the same breath as he praised Iur’eva and Tsereteli. In one mocking performance Utesov maintained that romances are nothing more than emotional improvisations and asked audience members to challenge his own 121

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ability to ad lib such a text. One irritated individual called out that he stop pulling the audience’s leg, to which the musician quickly responded: «Утесов, не валяйте дурака!» Ну, как же я могу его валять – Ведь крикнули вы мне издалека, И мне до вас руками не достать.54 [“Don’t you pull my leg,” you say. I could not pull your leg, I fear – You’re heckling me from far away; I couldn’t reach your leg from here!]

This humour is part of a serious business, just as it was in confrontations with other hecklers.55 Utesov worked for as long as possible without using a microphone, but eventually audience size and age forced him to acquiesce. During one amplified concert there came from the hall the shouts of a drunk, balding heckler: “Hey, Utesov! You haven’t got the voice for it! They’ve put up a mike!” “Every one of us is lacking something or other,” he replied. “With me it’s a voice, with somebody else it might be …” He ran his hand over the crown of his head to wild applause.56

institutionalizing mirth and bending the rules This jazzy, madcap behaviour was inspired not only by Utesov’s trips to see ensembles in Latvia and France, but also by the local Leningrad tour in 1926 of a Black American ensemble, the Chocolate Kiddies. Similar bands had come to Europe for Belgium’s World Exhibition as early as 1910, and a little later the officers’ messes of World War One would – in bizarre surroundings – allow this music to sustain ebullient English-language audiences all over the continent. Utesov caught the same bug: “It was absolutely impossible to sit still … I saw that I was dancing – while sitting down! It was some kind of musical drug!”57 He found himself the only person clapping in a Russian audience raised on romances, foxtrots, and the Charleston. He would soon be facing a similarly restrained or chilly reaction from Soviet critics, who initially labelled jazz the “victory song of the bourgeois.”58 The first openly positive review of his work came in 1929.59 Yet, as one phalanx of the Soviet media surrendered some ground, fresh and more powerful attacks from rapm would quickly roil the waters,

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accusing Utesov’s early band of “affectation, buffoonery … a terrible hullabaloo … vulgar pub songs and some obscene twitching of the body.”60 In order initially to sidestep rapm, Utesov recorded many tangos and foxtrots, ironically the music that jazz hoped to replace.61 He took a brief step back from novelty but remained committed to the dance floor, “the one place were people could mix freely with their friends or girlfriends, where boys could get to know girls casually and without any hindrances.”62 He sheltered briefly in a different genre, one equally committed to the emotions of interaction. From the early 1930s, as the situation improved and he returned to jazz, Utesov became well known across all of Russia’s major cities thanks to considerable press, radio play, and endless touring. In 1931 he met Shostakovich and began work, together with Dunaevskii, on Allegedly Murdered (Uslovno ubityi), discussed in Chapter 1. The project sparked a lengthy friendship. Charmed by Shostakovich’s “boyish audacity” and willing acceptance of all styles, high or low, Utesov would in fact correspond with the bespectacled composer on birthdays and jubilees for the rest of his life.63 Utesov’s increasing renown, galvanized by 1933, did not lessen the accent on camaraderie. The following year saw the release of the film Happy-Go-Lucky Guys, which brought his name to every village movie theatre. Its wild and wacky tale of a shepherd who becomes (accidentally) an extraordinary bandleader would be seen in subsequent years as a slap in the face of rapm’s po-faced policies.64 The film grew from a stage production entitled The Music Shop (Muzykal’nyi magazin),65 and it pleased even the captious Gor’kii. Given Gor’kii’s bitter words from 1928 in the epigraph to this book, that shows how far Utesov was moving away from classical “Western” jazz in his creation of cheerful hymns for the masses.66 He was looking for the true mass song, “which people sing at home, on the street, at friends’ apartments, at weddings, and on birthdays.”67 Here was what he saw as the answer to “false pathos,” as he put it. Real pathos was funny, personal, and touching.68 The private was grander than the public.69 The main song expressing that grandeur is the “March of the Happy-Go-Lucky Guys.” It marks both the beginning of the film and an extended march by the shepherd Kostia Potekhin (Utesov) with his livestock through some rugged pasture and village streets. The original lines to Dunaevskii’s music read: Ах, горы, горы, высокие горы, Вчера туман был и в сердце тоска. Сегодня снежные ваши узоры Опять горят и видны издалека.

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in practice [Oh, hills, lofty hills, yesterday there was mist and a yearning in my heart. Today your snowy flourishes, visible from afar, gleam once more.]

Director Grigorii Aleksandrov shot the accompanying footage, but Utesov remained indifferent to the result and met secretly with lyricist Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach to quickly pen some better words.70 They did so, convinced the director of the new lyrics’ merit, and managed – with difficulty – to get the song re-dubbed.71 The footage, however, remained the same, which is why the lip-synching is so amazingly awful in the movie we know today. (There was, in fact, a later attempt to dub Utesov’s voice out altogether, in 1958.)72 We hear the words of Lebedev-Kumach while the shepherd mouths a silent paean to mountaintops and spends the first three minutes of the film looking upwards. The words usually anthologized in books today appear below; the movie’s endlessly, earnestly repeated invocation to “live and love” has now become exclusively the more civically minded “to build and live,” a phrase almost absent from the film. Нам песня строить и жить помогает, Она, как друг, и зовет и ведет. И тот, кто с песней по жизни шагает, Тот никогда и нигде не пропадет.73 [A song helps us build and live. It calls and leads us, like a friend. A person who strides through life with a song is never lost.]

The new song became – and remains – a folk classic.74 Although he had lived in Leningrad until the end of the 1930s, Utesov now resided in Moscow, both because of his incredible celebrity and because of the more favourable political climate for an unavoidably public artist.75 His ensemble, in the name of general “cheerfulness” and the capital’s social progress, started offering Soviet factory workers six free concerts a month.76 In this way their bandleader became the most famous person in Russia (after Stalin, of course …).77 When asked once if he was rich (and indeed he was), Utesov quoted the famous polar pilot Valerii Chkalov and said he was rich to the tune of 200 million. “Two hundred million what?” asked the journalist. “Dollars?” “No,” came the reply. “I’m two hundred million people rich.”78 At this time his band consisted of five saxophonists, two trombonists, two trumpeters, two fiddlers, a pianist, double bass, and percussionist.79 The 1940 state catalogues for estrada records declared that some of the band’s recordings could no longer be listed, because every single copy had been purchased, including, it would seem, the master copies

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that had made their way out of the recording studio and onto the black market.80 It was no secret that Utesov had many admirers in the Kremlin, but as a big “market” celebrity he was merely tolerated by jealous upper-level bureaucrats. Only in the communications department of the Party did he find a personal friend (Lazar’ Kaganovich) to help him administer concerts with ease. The following anecdote, recalled by the film director Leonid Mariagin, shows well that the songsmith floated between contradictory political influences at this time.81 I [Utesov] was walking along one afternoon, when coming towards me on the opposite sidewalk there’s [head of the State Radio Committee] Platon Kerzhentsev, the same guy who closed down the Meierkhol’d Theatre and sent everybody packing. He sees me and stops. Points to me and calls me over. “Listen, Utesov,” he says. “I’ve been told that yesterday, against my orders, you performed that song ‘Little Lemons’ again, plus ‘From an Odessa Lock-Up.’ You’re playing with fire! Things aren’t the way they used to be. If I hear about your stubbornness one more time, you’ll lose the right to perform altogether. Maybe that’s not the only thing you’ll lose …” And off he went. The next day we were working in a collective [sbornyi] concert at the Kremlin in honour of some military academy’s graduation ceremony. Well, anyway, we played the foxtrot “Over the Waves” [Nad volnami], I sang [the folkish] “Mead and Moorland” [Poliushko-pole]. Then the curtain closes and my guys start gathering their instruments. The mc comes up in a vaguely military uniform and says, “Hold on! Play ‘Little Lemons,’ and ‘Odessa LockUp …’” I shrugged my shoulders: “I’m not allowed to sing that stuff.” “But he asked for them,” says the mc and points over his shoulder into the auditorium. I look through a hole in the curtain – and there’s Stalin, sitting with the cadets. We went back on stage, played through our entire program. The cadets loved it and “him with the moustache” clapped along with the beat, too. That evening I’m walking along … and Kerzhentsev comes towards me. I don’t wait for him to call me over. I go right up to him and say that I didn’t do what he ordered ’cos I played today exactly what he’d forbidden. Kerzhentsev turned pale: “What do you mean, ‘didn’t do what I ordered,’ if I’ve already forbidden it?” “I couldn’t turn down a request from the audience,” I said in a despondent, guilty sort of way. “Who couldn’t you refuse, if I already said you can’t sing it?” “Stalin,” I said. Kerzhentsev turned around and minced off down the street as fast as possible. I never saw him again.82

Another version of this story, maybe embellished, has Stalin asking for S odesskogo kichmana three times in a row and singing along the entire time.83 Stalin’s approval, clapping or singing, certainly worked wonders for Utesov’s career. In the words of one journalist, it was a “miracle” that the singer was never imprisoned.84 This weighty endorsement never

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helped more than during World War Two. The years of international conflict required enormous enterprise from the people of the small stage. Between 1941 and 1945, estrada artists (singers, musicians, jugglers, puppeteers, storytellers …) gave 1,350,000 concerts, with more than 473,000 dangerously close to the front. More than a thousand estradniki were subsequently awarded medals; twelve of them became Heroes of the Soviet Union.85 Even the Red Army itself had managed to form a song and dance ensemble within weeks of the German invasion.86

war and its aftermath: dodging the flak “We sang about everything during war,” remembered Utesov. “The front line, the rearguard, both friends and enemies. It all worked towards one goal – finding the words and songs that reach a soldier’s heart.”87 Heartfelt requests were sent by those soldiers, in fact by their commanding officers, to Soviet headquarters: “We strongly request that Utesov’s jazz band be dispatched here, to raise the mood and spirits of our troops.”88 In rushing to meet these constant calls to duty, the ensemble reduced the grand, increasingly expensive theatrical dimensions that tea-dzhaz had been acquiring after its movie success. Now it would again be small, mobile, and willingly minor. As Utesov would later put it, “Anything big is simply too much.”89 Developing the same philosophy, he would elsewhere add that although estrada is the art of minor compositions, it is not a “minor art form.”90 In order to take these compositions from peacetime into political warfare, for example, a piano was often replaced at the front with a considerably lighter accordion. Mobility was an extremely good idea, as dogfights were often visible during concerts; the band members on several occasions threw themselves into a ditch to avoid attacks from the air. Twenty minutes later they would be playing again.91 Utesov knew that small “operative” genres met the immediate needs of immediately hazardous situations; here he had in mind short poetic forms and songs.92 Emphasizing these forms, the band lost its earlier stagy grandeur and became wittier once more, a trait seen in many wartime songbooks as a result.93 The barbed stanzas quoted here give a good sense of the powerful front-line drollness that allowed Utesov to move easily from peacetime to wartime, to avoid ideology and still meet with state approval. Чтоб напасть на наши земли, На советский огород, Гитлер долго тыкал мордой. И решился в этот год.

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le onid ute sov and odessa jazz С голоду скулит фашистик – Нет бензина, нет жратвы – Говорят, что с дуба листик Заменил ему штаны.94 [’Cos he wanted to invade Russian vegetable gardens, Hitler kept proddin’ us in the kisser. This year he gave it a go. Fritz is skinny from hunger; got no gas or grub. They say he’s wearing oak leaves instead of pants.]

These waggish emotions were in fact so powerful and useful that Utesov worked initially under orders not to perform any closer to the dangerous front line than thirty kilometres. Keen to be a little closer to the action, the band funded the construction of some fighter planes, which Stalin allowed them to christen The Happy-Go-Lucky Guys.95 Utesov also carried his influence further afield with a nowfamous show, recorded before an audience of Soviet troops, entitled simply “A Concert for the Front!” These successes were crowned when he became an Honoured Artist of the Russian Federation in 1942 and, not long afterwards, received a prestigious order – the Red Banner of Labour – in 1945.96 Estrada sings of emotions that are older and will live longer than Soviet ideology. The matter is that simple, as Utesov himself knew. “Why even ask me about the war? What did I do, see active service or something? I sang songs.”97 The vigour of both songs and Soviet ideology for a while travelled hand in hand. There was, of course, a limit to these degrees of coincidence. Stalin, who enjoyed the man’s work, was sometimes less than impressed with Utesov’s vocal abilities and stopped short of making him a People’s Artist, the highest honour in Soviet entertainment. These petty governmental problems would continue for some while at the increasing expense of Utesov’s health.98 In some ways the Kremlin’s standoffishness marked the shift after World War Two (or even Stalingrad) towards a bolder, less jolly aesthetic for a nation victorious.99 As Utesov himself acknowledged ruefully: “After the war, the most popular themes were a soldier’s homecoming and the restoration of decimated homesteads … Themes of construction.”100 The Party passed a declaration to that effect in 1946: “On the Repertoire of Dramatic Theatres and Measures for Their Improvement.”101 Arduous though it was to work in such conditions of obligatory optimism, Utesov was ultimately willing to acknowledge this shift in lyrical tendencies. His style temporarily changed, becoming less overtly “jazzy” – that is, Western – but the sentiment remained the same. He simply

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loaded a different style with the same intent, which was possible because he saw songs as “an attempt at the direct transfer of musical language into human speech.”102 Songs aimed to express something supralinguistic, and thus a shift to another style was of no necessary detriment to those attempts. The ideal resided a little in each style; moving between styles could actually afford a better “stereoscopic” view of an otherwise elusive object. Even the Soviet press was able and glad to see emotional continuity in his songs, irrespective of stylistic shifts or a fickle political climate. Newspapers praised his “emotional mobility, able to transform itself in each new song.”103 The bandleader was moving towards a broader, many-styled expression of desire or what would, towards perestroika, officially be termed an “openness of emotion.”104 From 1946 until Stalin’s death in 1953, however, and with the emergence of new arguments in the journal Sovetskaia muzyka, jazz would lie relatively low and Utesov was praised for using jazz less, for shunning prior “vacuous entertainment” (bezideinost’ – entertainment free of dogma).105 Ideologically zealous members of his audience, though, would attend his concerts and then use the political atmosphere to criticize the ensemble, in a strange purging of guilty pleasures.106 One critic in October 1952 attacked the band for a lack of purpose, scant progress, and an ideologically “undemanding repertoire.”107 These complaints soon grow fainter amid the enthusiasm of the 150 million people who attended estrada concerts in the same year.108 Utesov would point to these huge numbers in the press and counter his opponents with well-penned arguments defending saxophones or dance music, all the while rejecting hoary accusations that he sang “for fat people.”109 In this way the atmosphere that in earlier decades had forced jazz bands to call themselves simply “musical ensembles” was gently traversed.110 “For a little while at the start of the fifties the word ‘jazz’ seemed to some people a little out of place, somewhat unnecessary. So what did we do in a situation like that? Deal with it calmly. Play down the horn section and saxophones. Bring a string section into the orchestra and keep doing what we were doing earlier. Propagandizing the Soviet song.”111 It was possible, in other words, to propagandize songs of that kind even though the pomp of postwar Soviet society had little time for Utesov’s favourite types of music. What he “propagandized” was, in fact, the type of sentiment that any ideology could make good use of. Isaak Babel’ describes it well in the introduction to Utesov’s first attempt at autobiography, Notes of an Actor. The energy here means nothing in and of itself, he contends, it must be invested (like any force) with a meaning or context. The end of Babel’s praise quoted

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below shows, however, the kind of increasingly specific meaning that the Soviets were not terribly fond of in the late forties and early fifties. Stressing the Black American heritage of jazz did not help matters. Utesov is as much a propagandist as he is an actor. He propagandizes an indefatigable and ingenuous love for life, together with happiness, goodness, the deftness of an easygoing soul, somebody who’s bursting with a desire for jollity and knowledge. He propagandizes with musicality, the type of melodiousness that caresses our hearts. He does so with an unerring, devilish, magnetic, and Negro beat. His joyful, happy attack upon the audience is under the command of that feverish but precise rhythm.112

the thaw: songs for ailing – not fat – people Luckily, things would change for the better. The subsequent, postStalinist arguments over serious and light music are neatly encapsulated in Utesov’s famous dramatized discussion between fictional interlocutors of his own design, an Old and a Young Man. They represent the differing tastes of two generations, the problems of innovation after 1953, of canonization, and of high or low tastes.113 The elderly gent happily agrees that a great estrada song must have a striking “hook,” a “word or phrase that immediately penetrates the heart. It must be well turned, as a recognized mood, observation, or symbol. People remember these phrases, which start sounding like slogans,” especially in the songs of Dunaevskii and Lebedev-Kumach.114 Again we see genuine popularity as prior to policy, giving politics the passion without which it falls upon deaf ears. Utesov saw Dunaevskii’s work even now as the bridge between enthusiasm and patriotism: “He lived and created with the people, for the people, and in the name of their future. He knew how to ignite people’s hearts with the eternal flame of a tremendous love for his homeland.”115 The heart works side by side with ideology while proffering its own worldview.116 As one Soviet journalist put it, “genuine civic spirit is broadcast by the beating heart.”117 In that way, jazz and “music for fat people” cannot be conflated, since the ardour of the former is not subject to the socioeconomic criteria used to define a plump populace. “After all, Negroes in the United States aren’t that fat; in fact, quite the opposite. You won’t get fat on their life in America.” Utesov always claimed that pre-revolutionary estrada was music for the truly tubby, and he would keep arguing in favour of light genres as deservedly Soviet art all his life.118 Or would he? On other occasions he would claim that pre-revolutionary performers were bad only in that many grasping, meddlesome entrepreneurs

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had contrived those innocent artists’ repertoires in the name of profit.119 Pity and politics interweave, as popular entertainment exists on the edge of both, in the spaces between them. His persistence – forever back and forth! – would come in the late fifties and sixties to inform notions of Soviet jazz. Utesov’s views became the state’s views.120 The vivacious “friendliness” of his music became a form of détente within the various cultures and countries of the Union.121 People valued that friendship, irrespective of cultural context; they “loved him, and certainly didn’t rush for their galoshes and overcoats at the end of his [winter] concerts.”122 Arctic explorers may have been able to hear Leshchenko’s records on the radio at the North Pole, but Utesov’s fans took his records on expeditions with them.123 He, an artist of change, also became a voice of unchanging ethic constancy, of morals, during the Thaw. The emotional perseverance and stability of his career were perceived within and thanks to the repetitions of various styles, cultivating a good, changing, and conscientious “present.” On one radio show a woman wrote to him asking that he calm her own (troubled) conscience. She had been on a bus in 1965, sitting beside a skinny, hungry young man with a nasty cough. She promised to provide him with a spare jar of family jam that was in her bag, but at the next bus station, where they went their separate ways, she forgot to give it to him. The woman could not bring herself to eat the jam even months afterwards, and begged Utesov to apologize on her behalf in the hope that the young gentleman might be listening.124 Being in the public eye obviously had its downside. The removal of a benign tumour in 1955 crowned many rumours of illness and death that had hounded Utesov since the late thirties. He, so people maintained, had sailed to Turkey on an inner tube, worked himself sick in order to amass unheard-of sums of money, or passed away in the arms of a fan. Even in later years, his admirers would go to extreme lengths, such as selling all their possessions to buy him flowers or hanging from chandeliers during his concerts, thus prompting the bandleader to tell a joke: “Nurse, why is that man hanging from the ceiling?” “The idiot thinks he’s a lamp bulb.” “Take him down!” “But, doctor,” she says. “It’ll go dark in here.”125 Illness, both physical and emotional, manifested itself in earnest in 1962 when his wife passed away, ironically at a time when jazz had won widespread acceptance in the Soviet press, excepting the odd, cantankerous article in the humourless Sovetskaia muzyka.126 Utesov was devastated by his wife’s death and felt that he could only go on living if surrounded by equally kind people, those he envisioned in an ideal audience.127

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Four years later (just after gaining the longed-for prestige of People’s Artist) he had a heart attack on a notable Moscow stage and fainted.128 The award had already brought a sense of conclusion to his career, since, as Utesov once joked, “a Soviet artist is happy when he is given an award, but really happy when they don’t give it to somebody else.”129 Now that he was a People’s Artist, there seemed less to dream of and so, at the age of seventy-one, he began his retirement. This would prove to be an event of great significance, because when the Thaw came to an end, so did some of jazz’s brief freedom and, under Brezhnev, approximately sixty of the Soviet Union’s finest jazzmen would emigrate. Utesov’s retirement simply intensified the sense of emptiness. Nevertheless, he tried to bless and promote the emotional aspect of Brezhnev’s politics, with the result that he was seen during the Stagnation as a man of youth, humour, and energy.130 “You have to love life,” he said, “in all its manifestations. You must know how to struggle and be happy.”131 His combination of age and agility, granted by optimism, led one journalist to remark that he looked like a heavyweight boxer on a pension.132 Just like an elderly prizefighter, he became something of an institution, affirmed by an enormous public and some elite patrons. Since the nomenklatura was both “a very conservative benefactor” and bore equally long-term grudges, Utesov’s songs had survived with greatest ease when embraced by that elite,that is, by Stalin prior to 1945 and by Khrushchev during his leadership, even though the latter did not like jazz per se.133 Now, under Brezhnev, he was the walking embodiment of a jolly philosophy but played less and less. The state was happy to endorse his emotional dynamism, but less so the noises he made. Estrada had striven for an ineffable emotion, and that was exactly what the state was happiest with now: lots of emotion and little musical or textual specificity. Be happy: we’ll let you know how to apply that happiness … Retirement was extremely difficult for Utesov, with less and less social contact. Nonetheless, critics continued to assert that “there’s nobody in our immense country who doesn’t know this marvelous Soviet actor and chansonnier.”134 Exit Utesov, but the emotion lingered. Coming back to meet its tenacious presence, he would on rare occasions perform, doing so for the very last time on 24 March 1981 at a celebratory “anti-jubilee” organized by his friends and admirers.135 Similar appearances would help raise his career total of concerts to approximately fifteen thousand.136 In the spirit of the musician’s civic incorporation, his work on various juries and estrada committees grew rapidly.137 He was now, hopefully, a positive influence on the progression of estrada and simultaneously a “retro” performer whose work was forever “dear to

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the heart.”138 Indeed Utesov asked that younger performers affirm and match the standards of the past “with great love [and] unlimited effort” in their “search for heartfelt songs.” Yet they were not to copy him because “your repertoire is your face.”139 Younger musicians should repeat but better him, and do so through the mutually generative feelings of stage and hall.140 New songs that moved between the old hearts of the singer and audience would live longer.141 They certainly lived longer than their performers, as Utesov found out in Odessa. He was riding a taxi when a woman of ample girth shouted at the car, “Stop! Stop!!” Cradling her youngster, she rushed up to the vehicle, opened the door, pointed directly at Utesov, and said to her child, “Look, son! That’s Utesov. Look quickly, because by the time you grow up, he’ll be dead.”142 Sadly, a few months later Utesov’s daughter died of leukemia. The bandleader, very afraid of any more isolation, at the age of eighty-six married an ex-dancer from his orchestra, Antonina Revel’s. He had known her since World War Two; she was herself now almost sixty.143 For the final two months of his life, he was therefore happy. His official 1982 obituary in Pravda praised Utesov and multigeneric, multinational jazz from Odessa as “a priceless contribution to the Soviet people’s patriotic upbringing.”144 The people would remember him, the article claimed, and indeed they would, especially on the hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1995.145 Some theatregoers found him particularly hard to forget, as he had been working on a play at the time of his death and was therefore listed on promotional material for the show’s run as a(n absent) director.146 The man dies, but his name keeps going. Television stations ran innumerable shows, but because of big hearts and small budgets, these were more often chats with his contemporaries than restored movies or archival concert footage.147 This little scale suited a singer often lambasted for his poor voice but then forgiven because of his quiet, “heartfelt” delivery, even in his final tv interview.148 That cordial worldview had beaten history and even cultivated a dismissive stance towards birthdays in the man himself.149 The burial was, owing to public intrusion into family matters, conducted in Moscow’s Novodevich’e Cemetery, a resting place so prestigious that none of his admirers in subsequent days could get in. They were not the sort who could muster the prestige or panache to gain entrance, as an earlier letter to Utesov from one typical fan shows: “Dear Leonid Osipovich. Please send thirty rubles. I am sitting here with no trousers on.” Utesov sent the money and received a reply: “Thank you. I got the money, but haven’t bought the trousers yet.”150

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the heart of soviet songs: some examples To discover the importance of a man with half-naked pen pals, let us begin with the first song Utesov ever sang, “The Sea Has Spread Wide” (Raskinulos’ more shiroko), which actually has its origins in a Greek shanty translated into Russian in the mid-nineteenth century. It tells of a sailor who dies on board his ship from overexertion and drinking dirty water. The narrative is positioned in several broader contexts. The relation of a small, actively social ship to the wide expanse of the sea acts to objectify the song’s ethical commitment; it considers the sailor as one member of a crew and then again as one vessel upon boundless waves. In addition, the sailor’s (now permanent) absence from his mother puts the suffering of one man in a universal emotional framework. The song’s opening and closing verses make this clear. Раскинулось море широко, И волны бушуют вдали, Товарищ, мы едем далеко, Подальше от нашей земли. ................................ Напрасно старушка ждет сына домой. Ей скажут – она зарыдает. А волны бегут от винта за кормой, И след их вдали пропадает. [The sea has spread wide. Waves thunder in the distance. We’re sailing far, comrade, further still from the land we know … The old woman waits in vain for her son to come home. When they tell her, she’ll burst into tears. The waves run astern from the propeller; their trace will vanish in the distance.]

This use of emotion as a universal test for personal experience is clear even in “criminal” songs, which Utesov performed early in his career and of which Stalin was so fond. In “From an Odessa Lock-Up” (S odesskogo kichmana), two criminals have fled from prison and stop briefly to rest. One of them admits to his cellmate that he will soon die, having been badly wounded during the escape. His one request is that his mother be told her son died as a devoted soldier. The tragedy of the theme is vigorously undermined by the rhythms of massed banjos and a tuba, over which a violin has an awful time trying

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to sound plaintive. Utesov’s own maudlin wailing and emphasis of an Odessa accent at the saddest moments of the text make serious grief a complete impossibility. The song concludes with a comical invocation of the hero’s mother. The jazz stops and we step right into pantomime: Oi Mama, moia Mama! Товарищ, товарищ, Скажи моей ты маме, Что сын ее погибнул на посте, И с шашкою в рукою, С винтовкою в другою И с песнею веселой на губе. [Comrade, comrade, tell my mother that her son perished at his post, with a sabre in one hand, a rifle in the other, and a jolly song on his lips.]151

Thus, inspired in part by the stories of Babel’ he read on stage, Utesov weaves a myth of Odessa and the Black Sea. He creates a city of romance and adventure. The song “On the Black Sea” – U Chernogo moria – brings much of this together in a Soviet vein. The port here is a place returned to time and time again, always affirmed as a constantly new, blossoming venue of fond memories. Odessa is invariably in the present; it changes by being adopted in the heart. Even so, there is plenty of room for some patriotism and sentimental Sovietisms, all arising from the events of World War Two. Есть город, который я вижу во сне. О если б вы знали, как дорог У Черного моря явившийся мне В цветущих акациях город, В цветущих акациях город У Черного моря! Есть море, в котором я плыл и тонул, И на берег вытащен, к счастью. Есть воздух, который я в детстве вдохнул И вдоволь не мог надышаться, И вдоволь не мог надышаться У Черного моря. Родная земля, где мой друг молодой Лежал, обжигаемый боем. Недаром венок ему свит золотой И назван мой город героем, И назван мой город героем

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le onid ute sov and odessa jazz У Черного моря. А жизнь остается прекрасной всегда, Хоть старишься ты или молод. Но каждой весною так тянет туда, В Одессу – мой солнечный город, В Одессу – мой солнечный город У Черного моря. [There is a city I dream of. If only you knew how dear it is to me. It appears to me on the Black Sea, in blossoming acacia. There’s the sea in which I sailed and sank. Thankfully I was dragged ashore. There’s the air I breathed in childhood. I could never get enough of that air on the Black Sea. Native land, where my youthful comrade lay, scorched by battle. There’s a reason they wound Odessa a golden wreath and called it a Hero City. Life is always beautiful, whether you’re young or growing old. Each and every spring I’ve such a desire to go there, to Odessa, my sunny city on the Black Sea.]

This mystique is continued in several other songs, like the jaunty “Oh, My Odessa” (Akh, Odessa moia), sung to buoyant syncopation without the weighty intrusion of tuba or French horn. Here is the hop, skip, and jump of a light-hearted dance in the tea rooms of a holiday resort: “The years fly by, but you, as ever, are with me everywhere! Beckoning as before, you caress me, my dear city! … Without you I probably could not grow younger in my soul. I couldn’t sing or tell jokes!” The roguish charm of an often lawless port, which then turned the tide of foreign invasion during World War Two, allowed songs like S odesskogo kichmana to survive (quietly) in Soviet repertoires. Criminal adventures become partisan adventures. In one song (Gop so smykom) a thief expects to die in prison and plans his further work in Heaven, where they let such types “in through the back door.” He will then swindle God: “May the Lord bequeath us what the Lord has …” As there was a less heavenly authority that needed toppling after the successful German invasion of 1941, cockiness rang out elsewhere in a Soviet register. Perhaps the two most famous songs of World War Two in Utesov’s repertoire are “Baron von der Pschick” and “The Quiet Partisan Song” (Partizanskaia tikhaia). The former is a fine example of Utesov’s wartime craft; humour and patriotism are together emphasized in the final shouted phrase. Барон фон дер Пшик Покушать русский шпиг Давно уж собирался и мечтал.

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in practice Любил он очень шик, Стесняться не привык, Заранее о подвигах кричал. Орал по радио, Что в Ленинграде он, Как на параде он, И ест он шпиг. Что ест он и пьет, А шпиг подает Под клюквою развесистой мужик. Барон фон дер Пшик Забыл про русский штык, А штык бить баронов не отвык. И бравый фон дер Пшик Попал на русский штык – Не русский, а немецкий вышел шпиг. Мундир без хлястика, Разбита свастика, А ну-ка влазьте-ка На русский штык! Барон фон дер Пшик, Ну где твой прежний шик? Остался от барона только пшик! Капут! Очень хорошо! [Baron von der Pschick had long desired and dreamed of tasting Russian pork fat. He liked to be fashionable, wasn’t at all shy, and started bragging about his feats beforehand. He screamed on the radio that he was already in Leningrad, on parade and eating pork fat. Said he was already eating and drinking, that a peasant was serving him beneath the spreading cranberry bushes. Baron von der Pschick forgot about Russian bayonets, which haven’t lost the habit of knocking barons about. Gallant von der Pschick fell on those bayonets. German, not Russian, fat popped out! Straps come off the uniform; the swastika’s broken up. Come on Baron, up you get on the bayonet! Baron von der Pschick, where’s your chic now? There’s nothing left of him! Kaput! Good thing, too!]

The second song is less humorous by far and tells of partisans all over Europe working to subvert Fascist troop movements, communicating quietly with one another “so that the words sound only in their chest.” “Strike the enemy anywhere, strike the enemy with anything. A lot of them have fallen, but that’s still not enough! Not enough of them have fallen! We must strike more!” This “quiet song of forest

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partisans” is a work of rare severity in Utesov’s repertoire, and in fact as soon as the war turned in the Soviets’ favour after Stalingrad, his lyricism returned, specifically in the “Stalingrad Waltz.” В степи сталинградской над Волгой, Не спят до утра рыбаки И дикую песню, душевную песню Поют у родной реки. И звуки той песни протяжной Тревожат простые сердца – И брат вспоминает погибшего брата, И сын вспоминает отца … [In the Stalingrad steppe above the Volga, fishermen do not sleep. They sing a wild, impassioned song till dawn by their native river. The sounds of that drawn-out song excite simple hearts. Brothers remember fallen brothers and fathers remember sons …]

To the slow strolling tempo of “I’ve Returned to My Homeland” (Ia vernulsia na Rodinu) we hear again the new postwar thematic that dominated estrada, but Utesov holds true to tales of the heart. The slightly careless choir of musicians supports his sentimental croon. They emphasize comradeship and shared emotion, not expertise; this is a song of friends, not professional faculties. A soldier is demobilized and returns home to his seaside hometown, perhaps to Odessa. He goes first to his mother, now grey haired. He remembers places where he fell in love many times, “both in jest and in earnest.” Now he returns again and is enamored once more. He falls in love both with his girl, waiting beneath the willow at a pond, and with his homeland, thus repeating, renewing, and bettering a series of memories. From romances to waltzes, from peace to war and back again, private emotions exist within (or are perhaps even independent of) varying genres. In another number, now anthologized as a folk ditty, “Mead and Moorland” (Poliushko-pole), soldiers walk off to war, watched by their loved ones even as they near the horizon. The singer tells girls at home not to cry; he hopes that songs of war will soon sound louder than both their woe and the competing songs of the enemy. Sung sentiment can fix the problems of the heart caused by linear, bellicose politics. It brings the loved one back home as if he had never left (and indeed never will, if remembered and affirmed). Generations and genres also merge in the 1945 song “Granddad and Granddaughter” (Dedushka i vnuchka). A man records a song to help his daughter learn her lessons and does so using well-loved and

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-remembered old romances from the concert programs of Iur’eva and Tsereteli. The Tsereteli romance “You Are Nineteen” (Vam 19 let) becomes the parodic “You Are Twelve.” A grandfather mourns not the loss of a gypsy lover, but a little girl’s laziness. Тебе двенадцать лет, а ты еще не знаешь, Что слово «месяц» пишут через «я»! В тебе рассудка нет, и ты не понимаешь, Что солнышко стоит, а вертится Земля. Помнишь ли ты, где Гималайские горы? Помнишь ли ты, кто был такой Пифагор? Помнишь ли ты реки, моря и озера, Помнишь ли ты город Мисхор? Если ты будешь все знать, То получишь ты пять. [You are twelve and still don’t know that “moon” is spelled with two “o”s. You’ve got no sense at all; you don’t understand that the Earth goes around the Sun, which stands still. Do you remember where the Himalayas are? Do you remember who Pythagoras was? Do you remember all the rivers, seas, and lakes? How about the city of Miskhor? If you can learn all this, you’re sure to get an “A.”]

As a result of this emotional persistence, the classics keep on rolling through Utesov’s repertoire, such as “Heart, You Wish No Tranquility” (Serdtse, tebe ne khochetsia pokoia) from the film Veselye rebiata, in which we hear the exclamation: “Thanks heart, for knowing how to love!” Another song of equal fame is “Roll, My Song, across the Distance” (Leisia, pesnia, na prostore), which combines earlier maritime motifs, the absent love and the heartfelt return to a loved one. It does so with vague references to a civic duty that are sincere but outside of ideology. The “caravan” of the gypsy aesthetic here keeps moving through the roughest of waters, whipped up by politics. The rougher the seas, in fact, the more the sailor dreams of home. Лейся, песня, на просторе, Не скучай, не плачь, жена. Штурмовать далеко море Посылает нас страна. Курс – на берег невидимый, Бьется сердце корабля. Вспоминаю о любимой У послушного руля.

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le onid ute sov and odessa jazz Буря, ветер, ураганы – Ты не страшен, океан. Молодые капитаны Поведут наш караван. [Roll, my song, across the distance. Don’t yearn for me, my wife, don’t cry. The nation is dispatching us to assault the distant seas. The ship’s heart is beating; our course is set for an unseen shore. I recall my love beside me at a calm helm. Storms, wind, and hurricanes: you do not scare us, ocean. Youthful captains will guide our caravan.]

It is interesting in the light of such wayfaring worldviews to look finally at the place where they broke into the big time, with the Veselye rebiata. I have already examined the main song from the film and noted in passing that it was born of a variety show by the name of The Music Shop. One of the numbers from that vaudeville, Beseda s grammofonom, is rather political, yet in a strange way. It makes fun of political criticism and then inspires an avidly apolitical film, which is then criticized for being a critique of rapm! The song has two elements: a spoken mock censure of Utesov’s work and several segments from his songs. It begins thus: “So, Citizen Utesov, you say that you never directed any kind of jazz band. You say you never did anything so outrageous? Then please allow me to remind you … What do you have to say about this?” A section of jazz sounds loud and clear, followed by the accusing voice once more: “Yes, I’d say that’s a real American foxtrot. Oh, so you don’t remember having played that? You need to hear your voice in order to be sure? Be my guest! Let me oblige you!” Then we hear a section from S odesskogo kichmana. “So what’s all that, then? Ah, that’s not you either?! Then let me present another of your little ‘documents’ here.” Now the song becomes some lines from the song “Bagels” (Bubliki), the famous street song of a boy selling baked goods and associated, for obvious reasons, with nep’s nastiness for many years. Suddenly the critic announces that he can argue no more. Has he lost? No, it turns out that he is nothing but a voice on a record, talking to Utesov. Either the typical official critic is sufficiently boring to have justified such an analogy or Utesov is involved in a dialogue with his own tradition on vinyl. The record asks to be turned over, so it can go on, and on and on … Utesov obliges, and the record thanks him. After an excerpt from “Bye!” (Poka! a great hit in Utesov’s early Leningrad days), the record tells the jazzman that he should “switch over” to something else. With this severe criticism, the disc then wishes him “all the very best, my dear!” Utesov staged this cutting song in a

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show and that show became a great success. It attracted the attention of the state-run music industry, and Utesov made a musical comedy based on it. That film became a Soviet classic and one of the funniest movies Stalin ever saw. He loved it.

conclusion: joyful songs amid awful politics Time’s passage is relative not only to Einstein’s laws, but to the human heart as well … There is no stagnant water in the rivers of recollection. That’s good.152

In some newspaper articles of 1975 and 1976, Utesov said, “Personality (lichnost’) is neither talent nor a gift. It’s defined by an attitude towards life.”153 That attitude was expressed in his myriad “sadness-songs, joysongs, love-songs, joke-songs, and soldier-songs.” Nouns, not adjectives, define these odd genres: “joy-song,” not “joyful songs.” The joy has an objective existence of its own. It does not qualify; it simply is.154 That same material emphasis or thingness appeared in various posthumous memorials and plaques dedicated to the artist.155 Utesov himself was, towards the end of his life, grateful that prior performers or “labourers” of estrada were to be remembered in Leningrad’s then new Estrada Museum.156 He, however, had worked hard to twist the type of linear thinking that puts up plaques; he in fact dismissed musical modernism explicitly in an interview of 1976.157 His own repertoire was a labour of love, of memory and not memorials, since love stops an artist aging (and slipping into history).158 Estrada expresses what he called a “true taste,” which embraces everything and is therefore ever present.159 Music hall, both as a genre and place, has never been conducive to one-way thought with its interchanging motifs and motives.160 Works made in that place reflect and even solve, thought Utesov, “the most important problems and themes of their time.”161 As a result, perhaps, the bandleader in old age would resort to a critique of modern songs not as crude (the usual approach), but as devoid of ideas, thus – ironically – employing the pragmatic critique of estrada applied against him under Stalin!162 What he defined as his three greatest joys were also well within the parameters of a Soviet modus operandi. He was the first person to read Soviet authors from the estrada, the first to develop the theory and practice of tea-dzhaz, and the first to sing socialist lyric songs.163 Journalists would add that he was also the first “truly Soviet” artist to have

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his songs on vinyl and the first star of the first Soviet musical comedy.164 That comedy then stretched on the “white sheet of a movie screen all the way from Odessa to Kamchatka, through the prison camps and across the tundra, through the collective farms and border checkpoints …”165 It showed the forgotten, utterly normal, and sometimes joyful nature of popular entertainment in an awful political context. Even dictatorial regimes are themselves a motley palette of political intentions, some of which coincide with simple, laudable ethics. Utesov’s songs very often overlapped with that greyer, paler area of politics, beyond the dark or bolder designs of rhetorical bombast. Defining estrada as either in or out of politics is therefore difficult, a liminal status unintentionally captured by one Soviet newspaper. When Utesov was accused on one occasion of high ticket prices, he demanded a retraction. The politically motivated criticism was withdrawn, there appearing the following day this strange assertion: “Yesterday’s observation in our paper concerning Leonid Utesov in no way concerns Leonid Utesov.”166 Estrada, by living in these in state-approved spaces that somehow “in no way concerned” dogma, stayed fundamentally small and ironic. Utesov, for example, quipped that his songs should only be played on cheap gramophones; otherwise there would arise a contradiction of form and content, a disruption of the balance so dear to socialist art. He acknowledged the objective situation but remained on its periphery; he fostered a folded, timeless philosophy of the heart, even as his own was failing and his family was passing away. As he showed in a brief joke, affirmation can challenge state-sponsored notions of personal loss and political time. An eighty-year-old criminal is sentenced before a Soviet court to twenty-five years in prison. When offered the final word, he smiles slightly and says, “Thank you, Your Honour, for your display of confidence …”167 Utesov’s confidence in the workings of the heart was helped by the constant support of a female colleague; their names are very often mentioned together, even today. Having therefore looked at the work of our stocky jazzman, we must turn to his graceful contemporary and compatriot, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko.

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6 KLAVDIIA SHUL’ZHENKO: “LET’S HAVE A SMOKE, COMRADE!” A song. A little piece of life with all its joys, sorrows, contradictions, and victories.1

from childhood to the making of a “second vertinskii” Klavdiia Shul’zhenko was born in Kharkov, Ukraine, on 24 March 1906. Her father, an accountant at the local railways, was an amateur musician and responsible for introducing his daughter to music. He taught her Ukrainian folk songs, while she would read and recite the poetry of Pushkin, Lermontov, Nikitin, and Nadson. Her real introduction to performing, however, took place on an apartment balcony from which she would sing to neighbours, at first anonymously. I lit all the lamps in the room, opened the windows, and began to sing … Suddenly I heard applause: “Come on! Show yourself!” Well, of course I eventually poked my face through the curtains. And they’d applaud even more. That gave me some kind of courage, some audacity, and so I’d sing a little more. In fact, I’d sing a lot. Then, when everybody had gone on their way, passed by in one direction or another, I’d sit down on the windowsill and look at the beautiful Ukrainian sky, covered with stars.2

This thespian bent was further developed at the prompting of a neighbour, a university student who organized little open-air dramas starring local children. The shows were made of liberally embellished fairy tales, dance, and song. Shul’zhenko, because of the lack of available boys, would play everything from mermaids to a Vertinskian Pierrot. It was here that she first sang before a real (i.e., seated)

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audience. She chose popular romances for the occasion. The children sometimes sang and put on plays to raise money for an elderly neighbour who was paralyzed; the youngsters would carry the woman in a chair to her place of honour before the stage.3 At school her dramatic skills grew as she used literature lessons to learn more poetry by heart and performed it before the class. Noticing their daughter’s increasingly fine voice, Shul’zhenko’s parents took Klavdiia to see a professor at Kharkov Conservatory. Here she was accepted for lessons, began to study, and was promptly told that her talents deserved further attention, that she should seriously consider a musical education after school. At this time the idea of becoming a silent movie star was much more appealing to her: “I loved to sing, but I didn’t yet consider it my calling.”4 The Polish singer Èdita P’ekha always associated Shul’zhenko with this “age of silent movies, when the screen knew neither sound nor colour, and gramophone records crackled.”5 The same natural cinematic charm allowed P’ekha even in 1985 to call her a private lyric singer “at one with the Russian people.”6 As Shul’zhenko became a solipsistic teenager, long before her first civic proclivities, Lenin signed his August 1919 decree “On the Unification of Matters Pertaining to the Theatre,” which stated that many estrada or circus operations were perpetuating “unhealthy elements” in their repertoires. They would hence be administrated – together with all theatres – in the name of a centralized, ideologically and economically constant operation. Further decrees, signed by Lunacharskii, spoke of Tsentroteatr, an organization that would now superintend all performance arts. Permission for operating a venue, by way of illustration, would be granted and renewed only on the understanding that food and drink were not served in the same room as the entertainment.7 (Farewell, restaurant estrada.) This regulation and the red tape it spawned would later be very troubling for Shul’zhenko, given that variety work immediately after the Revolution was already hard to come by and decidedly transient. The number of performers who were able to find employment in any given month varied between 30 and 90 per cent.8 Artistry and artfulness would be needed to overcome such odds. Shul’zhenko, just like Utesov, drew on her dramatic faculties in order to further a singing career. In fact these two disciplines would always remain close, and Soviet journalists in future years would tirelessly refer to her songs as “little plays.”9 The first attempt to marry plays and songs came in March 1923, when Shul’zhenko and her friend tried to secure work as junior actors in a local theatre. The director was busy with rehearsals but found a few minutes to give two attractive girls an impromptu audition. Behind the piano, bizarre though it may

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seem, sat Isaak Dunaevskii, twenty-two years old and still (very) undiscovered. The girls sang a few songs and acted out a little scene in which they pretended to argue jealously over a boyfriend. Although her friend was asked to try again a little later, Shul’zhenko was accepted on the spot. She was soon afforded small or choral roles in operetta and even played Dostoevskii’s stormy heroine Nastas’ia Filippovna in an adaptation of The Idiot. One consequence of playing that recurrent role was that she missed Maiakovskii reading his poem 150,000,000 in a local establishment. She chose Dostoevskii over Futurism, but there are aspects of Maiakovskii’s work, for example recitals in the circus ring, that make Shul’zhenko’s estrada also seem somehow a kindred revolutionary enterprise. Social upheaval takes a festive, if not jubilant, form. “The living word, a dynamic presentation of the action, circus acrobatics, pyrotechnic effects, dressed animals … this was all subjected to one artistic principle, that of the circus’s revolutionary content.”10 Shul’zhenko’s link to insurrection was emotional, a sense of sympathy. Her social commitment grew on foundations of enthusiasm, fostered across the footlights. In one telling instance, she had an experience of reciprocal audience empathy identical to that of Tsereteli. Performing in a drama entitled The Execution (Kazn’), she sang a romance that would remain extremely famous, “I Dreamed of a Garden” (Snilsia mne sad). The applause was so loud that not only did the play come to a stop but she, purely from intuition, bowed in gratitude, which simply increased the volume of the applause and interrupted the drama even more. As she wavered in these mixed roles between song and theatre, Shul’zhenko started to consider the ways in which she might fashion a stable repertoire. Dunaevskii was the first to make something of a rude suggestion. He told her not to perform any more songs that happened also to be in the repertoire of romance chanteuse Iza Kremer. “Why’s that?” asked Shul’zhenko. The composer reasoned that Kremer had fled with the czarist troops after the Revolution and was now singing in Constantinople, he said, “to White officers. I read the newspapers! You decide for yourself what to do.” “How rude!” thought Shul’zhenko.11 Despite this tiff, she would later happily credit Dunaevskii with introducing her to Soviet songsmiths.12 When she sang those more modern songs, especially with Dunaevskii at the piano, the words would “fly right out of my heart.” “Soviet” for Shul’zhenko meant modern sentiment; she liked the composer’s analogy of his own songs with airplanes – they “flew” emotionally only when released in a packed auditorium.13 Klavdiia found her first substantial audiences, as we have already seen with other performers, in movie theatres between showings. Here

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she would sing material that differed from the usual fare of gypsy romances, foxtrots, and tangos. She put together a cycle called “Revolutionary and Soviet Genre Songs.” There were numbers that interpreted social commitment either as a mother’s care, as in “Negro Lullaby” (Negritianskaia kolybel’naia), or the jolly spirit of common jaunty venture, as in “Ex-cer-cise!” (Fiz-kul’t-ura!).14 These contemporary works remained acutely touching, since as she said herself, “Any song with profoundly civic content will be both bombastic and – ultimately – false if it hasn’t first passed through the soul [dusha] of the performer.”15 How, though, to fashion that socialist soul after decades of torrid romances? Shul’zhenko once paid a visit to the opera singer Lidiia Lipkovskaia, who was on tour in Kharkov. There the young woman was told that she had a refined vocal talent, deserving of appropriate professional attention. Elements of this meeting have passed down into legend. Lidiia Lipkovskaia took Shul’zhenko into the deluxe room she had in the Metropolitan Hotel … and asked her to step up to the piano. Shul’zhenko sang “Stars in the Sky” (Zvezdy na nebe) and one of the most recent songs, the cruel romance “Silken Cord” (Shelkovyi snurok). Lipkovskaia listened attentively to this story of tragic love and suicide. It told of a corpse, hanging by a silken cord from a rusty hook in the ceiling. All the ingredients of a horror film … Lipkovskaia spoke with the young woman for a long time. “You have to attempt to build a repertoire that corresponds to your lyric gift. You won’t be needing any of those ‘silken cords,’ either. Your voice has a soft signature, yet you insist upon scrawling with a very severe pen.”16

Shul’zhenko in adulthood would speak again of that grim romance. “I won’t hide the fact that I really liked it. I liked the fact that it was a song, yet akin to a play. I liked the fact that I could use it to present myself as a different person. I was young enough to see real tragedy in a romance. I believed utterly in the scene’s plausibility and my heroine’s feelings.”17 As her repertoire took shape, there was again talk of potential careers and renown, bolstered by a meeting with another future kingpin of Soviet estrada, Pavel German. He offered her several of his new works: “I Regret Nothing” (Ne zhaleiu), “The Note” (Zapiska), and “Daybreak Will Come” (Nastanet den’). Shul’zhenko was very taken with German’s songs, some of which brought her her first real taste of fame when they were set to music by Valentin Kruchinin, for example, “The Brick Factory Song” (Pesnia o kirpichnom zavode) and “Mineshaft No. 3” (Shakhta #3). The former song, known also as “Little

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Bricks” (Kirpichiki), was, she thought, an excessively saccharine tale of love flourishing to the sounds of Soviet industry. A factory is restored after World War One and so is the romance of two people who once worked there. She almost never mentioned this tawdry waltz in interviews, despite its enormous success (and various parodies). Sentiment gets too close to doctrine, begins to fuel it (rather than use it), and the singer backs off; successful estrada emotion may concur, but should not connive or collude with politics. In the revolutionary romance of the twenties, however, cynicism was rare; even when she performed Kirpichiki in workers’ clubs, she was often asked by the audience to write down and leave a copy of the words. Tours, increasingly northward, soon became an inevitability, and by 1928 she was singing in Leningrad. On 5 May she appeared at the distinguished Mariinskii Theatre, in a collective concert dedicated to the Soviet press. She sang of matters both social and amorous, civic and secret: “Red Poppy” (Krasnyi mak), Grenada, and “George and Katie” (Zhorzh i Kètti). She left the stage but to her great surprise was called out for an encore. She obliged with “Never” (Nikogda) by Pavel German, a popular number from her movie-house performances. Again she left the stage and again she was called out for another encore. She sang “Cigarette Girl” (Papirosnitsa). Even there it did not end, and in all she went out for five curtain calls, unheard of in sbornyi concerts. The administrators worried that the evening was turning into a solo show.18 All the same, she began yet another song – “Procession of Octobers” (Kolonna Oktiabrei). As a result of this success she was invited to join the Leningrad Music Hall, where Dunaevskii was now working as director and Utesov was the star actor. Shul’zhenko was a great admirer of Utesov’s tea-dzhaz – of its cinema/circus melange – and it was here that on 2 October 1931 she began to play with them in the revue Uslovno ubityi.19 When the two singers had first met socially at the jazzman’s Leningrad apartment, he had some blunt advice for the young woman and her music: “You need to put together a lyric repertoire. Krasnyi mak, Kolonna Oktiabrei – that’s all well and good for holidays and festivals, but … people won’t sing those songs, even if they are good. They won’t dance to them either.”20 Wise words indeed. A couple of years before, in January 1929, she had already begun consciously lyric performances in Moscow. Hostile rumblings could be heard from the offices and publications of rapm, chastising everything from foxtrots to the romance. Shul’zhenko later noted such vindictive fault-finding in her autobiography and offered, from rapm’s journal For Proletarian Music, an example of what today “simply can’t be read

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without breaking into a smile.” A keen disciple of rapm’s policies tells the story: I was walking by a railway workers’ club one day. A “ Gypsy Vengerka” could be heard through the windows. I went inside. A large number of young people were standing around and listening to a pianist. I also listened to the music for a while and only spoke up when the musician started hitting some peculiar chords. He was wearing a badge with the letters kim [Communist Youth International]. “Can’t you see, young man, that you’re playing harmful propaganda against the processes of socialist construction?” The youth opened his eyes wide with surprise. He looked down at my feet, then up at my face, and said with relative sincerity: “You what? Are you nuts or something?” I answered him firmly: “No, young man. I’m just stating the facts.”21

And so, in this humourless spirit, we enter high Stalinist estrada and some of the boldest contradictions to be noted in this book. Ideologically, variety was lambasted: “The most popular and accessible of all arts became something of a whipping boy.” As we have seen, though, Stalin was an enthusiastic supporter of many modern performers, and perhaps this enthusiasm accounts for the strange fact that estrada, usually, did not suffer the awful persecution undergone by literature or its publishers.22 As security against the dangerous vagaries of things unusual, Shul’zhenko began to include folk songs in her repertoire, which guaranteed less criticism from rapm until the problem went away in 1932. At least folk songs had what rapm lacked, “real human feelings,” which meant so much to her that she would in later years be referred to as an “encyclopedia of emotion.”23 Shul’zhenko was not fighting state policy but looking for common ground. She had been uneasy about the mannered nature of romances for some while now. Folk songs were less theatrical. “I wanted my songs to be lyrical so that they would express the emotions and experiences of their characters directly. I dreamed of a song whose heroes did not come from a gypsy camp or the aristocratic salons of the past. I wanted them to be dear to me, people I could understand, the kind of people I’d meet on the street, see in my audience. The kind of people you constantly bump into in daily life.”24 Folk fit the bill. As time went on, however, doctrine began to replace all notions of actual popularity. Shul’zhenko could not stand the fact that concerts, folksy or not, were being planned and approved by rubber stamps, not ticket sales. rapm’s constant meddling had become unbearable.

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The ability to sing fewer genres ultimately generated a desire to sing more. “Things are really bad with regard to Moscow repertoires right now,” she wrote on 6 February 1930. “I just raise my arms in despair and don’t know what to do, especially because I have to go on stage today. To use that [officially approved] kind of repertoire would be utter failure. I’m terribly worried. If I sing what I want, I’ll be risking a lot. They say that risk is noble, but it’s rather frightening, all the same.”25 The willingness to exist within politics (and sing folk) turned into fear when political vigour increased. The repertoire did not change, but the ability of any performer to determine that repertoire’s meaning did, hence Shul’zhenko’s worry. Private life offered some respite. In the mid-thirties, on a train bound for Nizhnii Novgorod, she met a young musician by the name of Vladimir Koralli. They soon fell in love, and Shul’zhenko swiftly cancelled her existing engagement plans. She married Koralli and gave birth to a baby. Thus began a vitally important partnership in Soviet estrada. Any such claims, however, would first have to pass the litmus test of a certain Ukrainian audience. When Koralli and Shul’zhenko appeared in Odessa, they were scared stiff; maybe they would be unable to match the high estrada expectations for such a city. The concert, thankfully, was a grand success, and a local compère announced from the stage: “Well there you have it, friends! Odessa had been waiting for a second Aleksandr Vertinskii … It seems to me, if I am not mistaken, that here we have the appearance of the first Klavdiia Shul’zhenko!”26 With Odessa’s approval replacing that of the recently defunct rapm, Shul’zhenko saw her first record come out in 1935, much to the young woman’s surprise. She had sung a number for the vocally challenged actress of a popular comic movie, On Holiday (Na otdykhe), but had no idea that the work would appear on vinyl.27 It was called “Tonia’s Song” (Pesnia Toni); similar records were often released all of a sudden to promote the songs from a given film and were even sold at movie theatres.28 They in some way represented a very modern shift in estrada’s significance, one designed to mirror audience demand and desire. Mammoth antique record players, which had played their becoming role amid well-waxed bourgeois furniture, suddenly changed into diminutive portable gramophones. “They were light and could be carried anywhere, to celebrate holidays at college or in a farm workers’ club or at a friend’s place. You could use them at a mass meeting, resting in a hotel, at the dacha …” Radios were not yet that widely available and in any case required an electric outlet; a gramophone needed only to be wound up. Television, as yet non-existent,

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would not begin regular broadcasts until March 1939, and even then there were only a hundred sets in all of Moscow.29

the big time: 1939’s all-union estrada competition Between 1936 and the advent of television Shul’zhenko toured Russia with the Skomorovskii Jazz Orchestra. As a result of this extended exposure, she was then asked in December 1939 to participate in the first All-Union Estrada Competition. These competitions sprang up all over Russia in the late thirties, just as the plot of the musical comedy VolgaVolga suggests.30 The invitation may have come as something of a surprise, given some lingering criticism of her work in Moscow newspapers over the previous year. “Shul’zhenko has a very small voice; she sings as though she were reading poetry … She should also take a good look at her repertoire and make it healthier, effective, without all that lisping [?] and undue sentiment.”31 The voice expressive of Shul’zhenko’s deliberately “minor” personality was able nonetheless to work wonders.32 When war broke out in 1941, that style was celebrated as the quiet speech of women who “are proud, know how to sense things profoundly, and therefore have sufficient strength to talk about the most painful or grievous of matters with courageous restraint.”33 In the peace of 1939, however, no such mythmaking had begun, and so Shul’zhenko entered the noisy fray of a competition designed to allow young performers (no older than thirty-five) the chance to enjoy a large, influential audience. The organizers also hoped to cultivate some good (or at least better) taste on the small stage. Dunaevskii was head of the jury, which also included Zoshchenko and Utesov. The jazz musician had written in a national periodical a few months before that the competition should return some generic “specificity” to estrada, which now (perhaps because of rapm’s indiscriminate barbarism) was nothing in particular. Current estrada stages did not host singers who – in time-honoured fashion – liked to use a little bit of all genres concurrently, but instead performers who used only established genres, each for a little time. Singers moved from genre to genre, without muddling them. At times it seemed that opera arias and “classical romances” were all that Soviet estrada was offering its audience. It was time to mix things up a little.34 Events were held for dance, literary readings, song, and the everambiguous “original genres.”35 All those who made it to the final three of their chosen category would have the right to henceforth call themselves “laureates.” The first round had 160 hopefuls (from 700 original

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applicants), who were slowly whittled down to 52 and then 12, including Shul’zhenko. She performed her allotted three songs for the final on 16 December and then left the stage. As before in Leningrad, however, loud applause from the audience forced her to consider an encore. Encores were forbidden at the competition, but Dunaevskii smiled at her from his chairman’s seat and so she went out to sing “The Note” (Zapiska). The jury awarded her fourth prize, having opted instead for a certain (and long since forgotten) Debora Pantofel’Nechetskaia, an opera singer who performed lyrical romances. This was in some respects exactly what the competition had wanted to avoid. The jury’s official explanation for this woeful choice was that they wished to recognize light entertainment in a more serious vein. Despite the jurors’ approval, Miss Pantofel’-Nechetskaia was less keen to be associated with variety’s ignoble genres and henceforth advertised herself on concert posters as “Laureate of an All-Union Competition,” thus avoiding any direct reference to vulgar estrada.36 Some of the audience suggested that a Muscovite prejudice against Leningrad performers had caused problems, and in fact one jury member admitted afterwards, in irritatingly nebulous terms, that the “ideological content” of the songs from Leningrad had been weaker. Dunaevskii, however, as jury foreman remained happy with the result and felt that estrada had proven its ability to present works free of vulgarity and poor taste.37 Shul’zhenko was less convinced and felt, no doubt, that it was time to move on. Following the competition, in fact on the next day, she and her husband had the chance to form a proper jazz band and cut their first real record, which included Zapiska, “Andrew Dear” (Andriusha), and “Rendezvous” (Vstrechi). In songs such as these she defines the style of her work until the late forties. The accordion that distinguishes so many popular ditties as Slavic plays wistfully in the background, creating a plaintive, if not melancholy, atmosphere to replace the simmering, sullen guitar work of romances. The shifting, passionate tempos of gypsy songs are now replaced by stricter, more uniform structures in waltzes, tangos, or foxtrots. This Western tendency grants the music a more rigid cadence against which the horn section of a small ensemble very often sketches breezy and overtly jazzier improvisation. This, as opposed to the songs of Iur’eva or Tsereteli, is music for the dance floor, for couples in peacetime and war when an unhurried promenade cheek to cheek was a priceless antidote to grand social planning or military conflict. The hope had been to catch all these earliest precious songs on a master disc with the first take, but Zapiska alone took an hour and a half. This was considered a snail’s pace by parsimonious Soviet

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standards. The reason for the problem was that music was recorded on beige wax discs, each of which was five centimetres thick. Any tiny bumps or bubbles inside the wax would spoil a recording, as would a single bum note from the musicians.38 Wax discs cannot be re-recorded: you scratch it, you buy it. Records required promotional touring, which slowly progressed further and further from the “two capitals.” So much so, actually, that Shul’zhenko found herself in Yerevan when war broke out in 1941. She rushed back to Leningrad, soon to be drafted for wartime entertainment. Unknown skills were discovered everywhere among both recruits and volunteers. Military entertainment brigades were often formed in an impromptu manner, drawing upon enthusiastic ingenues such as this young female conscript. – Chief Officer, sir! Red Army soldier Kornil’eva reporting. I’ve come for my further duties and to find out where you’ll be dispatching me. – What can you do? – I worked on the anti-aircraft guns. – No, no! Tell me what you can do in the circus! Why were you sent to me? – I can dance, sir. – That’s wonderful, then! Go and see the Sergeant Major and he’ll show you where you’ll be billeted. – Permission to leave? – Granted.39

front-line songs and shrapnel: the “blue kerchief” The drafting of estrada artists began on 23 June 1941, and it soon became clear why people on the Leningrad front line would say that Shul’zhenko’s songs were as important as stockpiled Soviet “bombs and bullets in this war.”40 The number of posed photographs of her was increasing rapidly at this time. Some Russian audiences felt that her slightly full silhouette spoke of familial or rustic (i.e., Ukrainian) domains lost to war, yet her style was essentially one of stagy glamour, a look very much defined in the forties. She was blessed with lush raven hair, wore (very) red lipstick, and sported fiercely plucked brows, which above her pale pronounced cheeks added to the striking chiaroscuro so indicative of wartime fashion. Dressed to the nines, she went to battle. By the end of the 1941, she joined the 3,800 theatre, estrada, and circus groups that had been created or organized to serve the troops, with 700 of them coming from Moscow and 500 from Leningrad. Overall, 42,000 artists served the front-line forces, giving

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a total of almost 500,000 concerts by the end of hostilities.41 (If we take a step back from the line of fire and look at the total number of wartime concerts given by drafted performers across the entire country, not just at the front, we reach the amazing total noted in the previous chapter of 1,350,000 shows.)42 Shul’zhenko’s ensemble was given a bus, for travelling punctually to concerts across the battlefields, plus the privilege of using the basement of a Red Army establishment on Leningrad’s Liteinyi Prospekt for rehearsals and rest. This ensemble alone played five hundred concerts in the first year of the war, over the course of which the bus disintegrated slowly.43 More and more holes appeared in its roof from bullets and shrapnel.44 Sometimes the ensemble, seeking greater safety, would move around in an armoured train, stopping every so often for a thirtyminute concert. If the band played any longer, German aircraft were able to plot their position and strafe the wagons.45 Thus Shul’zhenko travelled along the battlefields with songs of emotion and lyrics that would bring a smile to dirty, frightened, or fatigued faces. Oh, the smile that made me so happy at our first front-line concert! I recalled it so many times in later months … The smile of somebody dear to you, a smile of joy and welcome. Just to see me, soldiers would travel for miles along damaged roads; they’d endure bombing raids, be shot at, lose sleep, not eat enough, even forget about their predicament, forget about themselves. There, on the front, I understood what constitutes an artist’s highest honour: that smile, the love and the recognition of soldiers for whom your art, it transpires, is absolutely essential.46

There were stories from Shul’zhenko’s concerts of wounded, bandaged soldiers screaming down hospital corridors to “wait a little longer!” before the start of a concert, lest they miss anything on stage from trudging so slowly.47 When she played in similar venues, it sometimes seemed as if she came out on stage to a “wall of gauze.” On one occasion, when she herself was in a white dress, the visual connection between bandages and her dress was so close that she could not restrain from crying.48 That white outfit would be changed under advice to a more severe black number, without “frivolous” pearls or pronounced décolletage.49 Shul’zhenko’s repertoire during the war was also shorn of frivolity; it was made of songs “about love, tenderness, and fidelity.” These are songs in war, not of it, which allowed Shul’zhenko to say without selfcontradiction that armed conflict in some form has been the main theme of her work.50 Utesov, by a similar logic, said her songs of this

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time were imbued with “heroic romanticism.”51 Later journalists would discern, retrospectively, a leaning towards “heroics and drama, thus setting an original standard for the lyric song.”52 With a more conformist turn of phrase, that definition became: “Lyric songs with salon texts and democratic worldview.”53 We see perhaps the most extreme expression of Shul’zhenko’s work on the edge of ideology in her categorization as a wartime “actress-warrior”!54 Her husband saw this as no great stretch, however, given that she wilfully “transformed herself” on stage. “On the estrada she’d become a completely different woman: spirited, impassioned, and modern.”55 Her audience asked for one particular metamorphosis in their need for her “dream world, the world of naivety and beauty.”56 Before the quibbling over pearls and necklines, she had begun her wartime concerts singing in uniform, but the audience requested she change into a peacetime dress “so that things look the way they did before the war.”57 The audience asks for the dress, the state accepts and incorporates that stronger desire, making only a slight aesthetic adjustment (“Black, please, not white”). Thus Shul’zhenko’s timeless “dream world” contradicts the avidly “progressive” nature of battle, and even Soviet journalists would freely admit, in years to come, that her dream had indeed escaped the ravages of time.58 Some musical expressions of this worldview, such as her classic “Blue Kerchief” (Sinii platochek), were recorded on records, treasured by the troops. These records, beside their catalogue numbers, had stamped on them N.K.M.V.: “People’s Commissariat for Mortar Weapons” [the division responsible for their distribution]. In one sense, the lyrical and unassuming musical works on these records became a special type of weapon. Sinii platochek, recorded on one of them, went on a triumphant tour of the country. Many portable gramophones were completely burned out and now sounded hoarse, but they still played that melody day and night, both at the front and in the rear. Those tiny old gramophones! They had to be wound up carefully by patiently turning the crooked handle (for quite some while), so that the turntable would work until the end of the song. Then you’d put the stylus carefully on the record, having brushed it lightly with your fingertips. There’d be a gentle crackle and then the jingling sound of the melody. These old miracles of science were far from perfect! Nonetheless the gramophone’s small and convenient box meant that our reliable friend could find his place in the dugout, the trench, the field hospital or those crowded little rooms where modest wartime parties were held.59

Sinii platochek is perhaps Shul’zhenko’s most famous work.60 Utesov has called it the prime “symbol of every front-line soldier’s love, of

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fidelity to his beloved, his invincible faith in our common victory.”61 Even after the war it would be heard at all Victory Day celebrations, where “thousands of hearts would react to that voice.”62 The song has interesting origins. One day at the front Shul’zhenko was approached by a young soldier who told her of a song he had written to a melody that Shul’zhenko already knew. The melody, even then called Sinii platochek, was by Jerzy Petersburski, who also wrote the pretty tango we hear today with Russian words throughout Nikita Mikhalkov’s film Burned by the Sun.63 She had first heard the melody performed – with its original lyrics – on a Moscow summer’s day in 1940. The soldier offering her a new text, Mikhail Maksimov, had now – in March 1942 – turned the maudlin kerchief described in the original text into a powerful symbol of those patiently waiting for conscripted husbands and wives. Here is one of the very earliest verses, which Shul’zhenko found a little too pretty. Помню, в сиреневый вечер, Я приносила к реке Вам на свиданье горсть незабудок В шелковом синем платке. [I remember on a lilac evening how I brought you a handful of forget-menots at our riverbank rendezvous. They were wrapped in a blue kerchief.]

Maksimov added new, more bellicose lyrics, written from a male point of view. Помню, как в памятный вечер Падал платочек твой с плеч, Как провожала И обещала Синий платочек сберечь. И пусть со мной Нет сегодня любимой, родной, Знаю, с любовью Ты к изголовью Прячешь платок дорогой. Письма твои получая, Слышу я голос живой, И между строчек Синий платочек Снова встает предо мной

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klavdiia shul’zhenko И часто в бой Провожает меня образ твой. Чувствую рядом Любящим взглядом Ты постоянно со мной. Сколько заветных платочков Носим в шинелях с собой! Нежные речи, Девичьи плечи, Помним в страде боевой. За них, родных, Желанных, любимых таких Строчит пулеметчик – За синий платочек, Что был на плечах дорогих! [That evening was so memorable when the blue kerchief fell from your shoulders: you walked with me and promised to treasure it. Even though my dear beloved is not here today, I know that you hide that kerchief with love at the head of your bed. When I get your letters, I hear your voice come alive. The blue kerchief arises before me again, from between the lines. Your image accompanies me in battle and I feel your loving gaze is constantly near. How many treasured kerchiefs we all carry in our greatcoats! Tender words, girlish shoulders, are what we remember in the toil of battle. It’s for our own dear and desired ones that the machine gunner hammers away! For that blue kerchief that lay on dear shoulders!]

The song had the strangest, strongest effect on people. There is one recorded incident where a twenty-year-old officer, instead of shouting “For the Motherland! For Stalin!” as was expected, stuck a piece of navy cloth on his bayonet, screamed “For a blue kerchief!” and led his men into battle.64 Other soldiers would go into war imagining that they had a similar keepsake in the pocket of their greatcoat – and thus be inspired.65 Aircraft gunners promised to dedicate their direct hits on Junkers or Messerschmitts to Shul’zhenko and her kerchief.66 Some artillery personnel even asked for a photograph of the singer so that they could list those hits on the back. They would send Shul’zhenko the inked-up picture and she would send them a fresh one.67 Over twenty years later, reminiscences of the chanteuse’s concerts would still refer to her stage-prop kerchief as a “front-line banner.”68 Sinii platochek also saved the life of Shul’zhenko’s husband on one memorable occasion. When, by complete chance, the orchestra’s

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wartime tour took him close to his mother’s burial plot, he took brief leave of the musicians and went off to see the grave. The area was overshadowed with enormous barrage balloons, and Koralli’s aimless presence as he sought the resting place was seen as something very suspicious. He was spotlessly dressed for “Show Time,” yet in uniform, which again looked rather odd. How could a soldier be at the front, wandering around casually and clean as a whistle? He was arrested by those guarding the balloons and led off to their commanding officer. The officer saw Koralli’s very curious papers, which gave him – as a front-line estradnik – the unheard-of right to travel freely. Only when he explained (and proved) that he was Shul’zhenko’s husband did the officer exclaim: “Oh! Sinii platochek!” Koralli was then allowed to leave, not charged with the capital offence of military espionage, as had been possible ten minutes prior.69 In all these stories the song becomes something different: patriotic, lyric, privately specific, or publicly, commonly agreed upon.70 It almost came to mean too much, to challenge wartime governmental zeal, as did Shul’zhenko herself. One Soviet general complained that if his military intelligence staff knew the enemy plans as well as they knew Shul’zhenko’s birthday, the war would be going a lot more smoothly.71 Just as those intelligence officers defended Soviet home territory, so the lyric song they loved so much “defended all that was precious and holy, even,” in the homestead.72 The private song did double duty. It sang of quiet women but helped a loud, male conflict. It told of traditional roles but helped very novel ones. It defended and celebrated “all those lippy, easily amused girls in the munitions factories with their red headscarves … It helped all the wives and mothers who carried the incredible burden of war on their shoulders.”73 In essence, Sinii platochek was a palisade, raised in the name of “love for life.”74 When it came time to record the song for military distribution, the ubiquitous wax discs mentioned above were used. Once again they caused a problem. In the recording studio, the young female technician was so touched by the melody she began to weep and her tears fell directly onto the wax, spoiling the recording. She apologized profusely to the singer: “I suddenly remembered how I saw my husband off to the front, how he kissed our daughter for the last time. I just couldn’t hold back the tears.” Shul’zhenko, despite the expense of more studio time for a second take, could not bring herself to reproach the woman: “Any singer would be very proud of that kind of ‘waste’!”75 Emotion is the yardstick of success for a political song. Political effects then come from apolitical affect; people approve a song, and ideology then uses the emotion that made it popular. Shul’zhenko, for example, received a letter from a Soviet pilot who had been driven

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by estrada’s feelings to a point beyond even physical pain: “My plane was hit over enemy territory. I was wounded in both legs and thought the plane would never make it back to the front line. But your songs were coming in over the radio. I started to listen and flew to your voice. I managed to land at my own airfield. They had to amputate my legs, though.”76 (In later years many other invalids would write to her, saying that her songs had helped them through medical drama in field hospitals.)77 This pilot – as listener and then respondent to Shul’zhenko – helped to make the song an “emotional memorial.”78 It was a memorial of change, one that stopped the past and loss from becoming so.

victory! hooray! war, peace, and other erratic states The intensity of this mobile, emotional memorial was transmitted at “combat concerts,” often from the back of a truck, with singers and musicians shoulder to chilly shoulder. Instruments would seize up from the questionable decision to play outdoors in the Russian winter: saxophones and accordions would suddenly fall silent in mid-song and remain stubbornly mute until heated. Dismissive of such problems, soldiers would hang from fir trees to get a better look at the band and its elegant singer.79 Things became especially difficult during the famous concerts on frozen Lake Ladoga, where Shul’zhenko would manage a full outdoors program at minus forty degrees Celsius.80 The stress of performing in the cold was worsened by the noise of constant dogfights over the lake as ack-ack guns and Soviet fighter planes tried to stop the Luftwaffe from leaving huge holes in the ice.81 Doctors began to be concerned about the singer’s health in these conditions.82 On one occasion the temperature did indeed damage her voice a little and she made an offhand remark to a soldier that a glass of milk would help. Over an hour later, after much effort and the pulling of various strings, the soldier came back with some milk, something unseen (let alone tasted) on the Soviet front.83 Given their fidelity to Shul’zenko’s concerts, it was perhaps not surprising that the audience members sometimes put their lives at risk by sitting in large immobile groups.84 One enthused soldier on the shores of Ladoga watched a concert, expressed his thanks, and minutes later was dead from a surprise air attack that not only derailed the train wagons, but left them (completely intact) many metres away from the sleepers.85 As this audience affection suggests, Shul’zhenko had to travel far to meet the demand. Her war concerts soon moved beyond Leningrad,

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and by 1943 she had played for soldiers in the Caucasus, Central Asia, Tbilisi, Yereven, Baku, Tashkent, and other places. For all these endeavours she became an Honoured Artist of the Russian Federation and was also awarded the Order of the Red Star. The latter was especially touching, since Shul’zhenko had played till the war’s final minutes; she heard of its conclusion when returning to Leningrad after yet another tour. “People were shouting and yelling: ‘Hey, everybody! Victory! Hooray!’ … We laughed, hugged each other, kissed, congratulated one another, and raised our glasses to the day we’d waited for 1,418 times!”86 Those toasts were joined by songs “sung with all my heart.”87 The same toast to victory had been said by Leningraders during the Blockade to the sounds of Shul’zhenko, in the hope of reaching this same day.88 Her records interwove with tipsy paeons to military victory. (A stiff drink and a lyric song were then celebration indeed; during the Blockade Shul’zhenko herself had been amazed by a truly fantastic gift of white flour and three garlic cloves.)89 These accolades were an indication of public, more than of official, approval, of her stage persona and personal biography merging. “There is one truth you must understand on the estrada. The singer and the song are as one. They’re indivisible. A performer, when she talks of the feelings or thoughts of a song’s hero, is in some way talking about herself.”90 One touching example of that process came when she would sing “Let’s Have a Smoke” (Davai zakurim), which uses a shared cigarette as a symbol of friendship in hard times. Shul’zhenko took lessons in how to make a convincing roll-up and incorporated the “little pantomime” into the number. It helped to lighten the oddity of a woman singing the song from a male point of view.91 She did so with such conviction that many soldiers took her for a smoker and offered their own priceless tobacco after several concerts.92 She would play along and then jokingly say, “Tobacco?! How could you! I’ll lose my voice!”93 The joke caught on. “Davai zakurim sped its way to foot soldiers, gunners, tank crews, cavalry officers, sailors, pilots … Who in the Soviet army, whether an infantry soldier or general, did not know or sing Davai zakurim at the front? Everybody knew it. Everybody loved it.”94 Public awards came together with a shift towards public genres; as seen with Utesov, the likelihood of victory incurred a civic proclivity. Attacks appeared in the Soviet press against tangos, waltzes, and foxtrots: “The melody is not saved from an element of tango-like mawkishness”; “The song’s decadent, tearful tone is rather surprising”; “It’s hard to imagine how this whining music relates to our tireless youth, full of verve and ready to struggle against all manner of difficulties in

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life”; “Some of these songs aren’t bad, but a few sentimental or elegiac moments impoverish and in fact derail them”; “This song’s imagery is clearly harmed by the intonation of a soft salon romance”; “Several of the songs are not yet free of elements of jazz, of cheap foxtrot stuff.”95 The problems in essence were born in 1946, when the official battle against entertainment free of dogma (bezideinost’) – and against lyric songs – began, led by the central committees responsible for theatrical and performance arts. They published a list of three hundred ideologically undesirable or vacuous songs, including Shul’zhenko’s “The Note” (Zapiska), “Hands” (Ruki), “The Clock” (Chasy), “Rendezvous” (Vstrechi), “I Regret Nothing” (Ne zhaleiu), and even Sinii platochek! Recordings of these songs suddenly became less and less available in record stores. The state had employed estrada’s moods, felt their strength, and now, by curtailing their distribution, hoped to dampen their vigour. As these dogmatic critiques moved into the first two years of the fifties, Shul’zhenko felt pressure to remake her repertoire and did so only with great difficulty and awkwardness. She could be praised in one article as embodying the “best features of Soviet estrada” and at the same time be criticized for “performing songs redolent of cheap, primitive, and imitative hack work.”96 She had taken the decision after the war to perform solo on stage, just with a piano, which at least allowed her to shed the troublesome reputation as a jazz singer within Koralli’s ensemble. She continued to sing many of her front-line favourites but stripped them of fancy syncopation or rhythmic intricacies. None of this was pleasant; her style, mode of presentation, and public had already been formed. Her own personality had also coalesced, made as it was by those songs and their (equally well-established) heroines. She felt, after all, that “estrada has an unwritten law: the synonymy of a singer with the hero of a song.”97 In an attempt to continue the happy marriage of heroically private and public emphases (without the transient irritation of dictatorial intrusions), Shul’zhenko turned to student songs, in particular from the pen of Arkadii Ostrovskii. Student songs have existed in all historical periods, but there’d been no real Soviet student works until Ostrovskii. Students, of course, sang – just as they do today – works fashioned for [everybody else, for] a nationwide audience, but Ostrovskii understood the need to create some numbers depicting what’s unique about student life: the fact that it’s not terribly organized or that students aren’t terribly well off! He also composed a little romance, describing students’ dreams and desires, their plans. These are the kind of desires that occupy every person standing on the threshold of life’s grandeur.98

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These texts served well as a passage through high Stalinism. In the late fifties and early sixties, as performers such as Èdita P’ekha entered the arena, Shul’zhenko’s lyricism heaved a sigh of relief and staged a comeback. Official criticism, of course, did not disappear overnight; lyric songs, especially those of Shul’zhenko’s prewar repertoire, were sometimes assailed as “impoverished, amorphous, faceless and devoid of any specificity,” but in general such remarks became increasingly rare.99 She was ready for a more subjective repertoire, having said in 1956, “I look for songs that’ll be dear to me. My first concern is for the words, for the poetry and what it says. Poetry is the foundation of any song. Poetry can fill a song with profound content, genuine emotions, and significant images. If a song is lacking those things, then not even the best music will save it.”100

bequeathing a tradition and work ethic after stalin In the sixties younger newcomers, such as the tiny, silver-voiced Maiia Kristalinskaia, brought back romances, this time to a position of recognized emotional integrity. Shul’zhenko was happy to see this tradition, partly of her making, invested with a contemporary significance. As she herself said, “Each performer has the right to their own interpretation. The song itself will choose its master!” In her autobiography she would also note that multiple versions of an old song do not signal the absence of novelty or its mutation into cliché; a reworked tradition enables the development of subjectivity among those who embrace that work. The reinterpretation of any song’s meaning becomes an unavoidably introspective, contemplative process. Shul’zhenko was always in favour of new versions of established works, even by the same artist, so that performers could constantly invest old material with “the worldview” of younger, newer, and ever-changing audiences.101 Her own tours, embodying such a philosophy, had continued after the war into the fifties. This smooth process was interrupted only by the end of her marriage in 1955 and the subsequent problems of being a big star who was forced now by “democratic” housing regulations to live as a single woman in a small communal apartment.102 Koralli had felt it time for them both to embark upon separate careers, as she had eclipsed him to become, in his opinion, “the foremost artist in Soviet estrada.” Leaving a woman he had loved for so long and whose success he had shared was hard.103 Journalists, in a suitably elevated register, likened the secret of that enduring, enchanting success to the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa. The perseverance of

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Mediterranean jollity then inspired another – grander – parallel, this time with Odysseus and his considerable nautical mileage!104 Within two years of leaving Koralli, at the age of fifty-one, the Soviet Giaconda married a thirty-nine-year-old man who had corresponded by mail with her for many years.105 They remained together until 1964, when she could no longer hide her domestic discord or cultivate the type of “good cheer” in private quarters that her viewers saw publicly.106 Here we see the remorseless self-assessment and high standards she expected of others, both of which led to private altercations with the authorities. In this way she lost quite a few friends, who were afraid to be associated with such a hotheaded woman. One case involved the Order of Lenin, which she had just been awarded. Similar awards were usually bestowed in the Kremlin, but to teach Shul’zhenko a lesson the ceremony was instead scheduled for the less impressive Moscow Soviet building. She was furious: “I’ve just sewn myself a beautiful dress. If I’m fit to get this award, then it should be given to me in a fitting manner. Otherwise I can live without your tin scraps.” Personal and petty conflict with bureaucrats did not stop Shul’zhenko from becoming a People’s Artist of the ussr in May 1971, a decision that helped to show her approval rating in high places at least as a singer.107 She had admirers in the rarified realms above bureaucracy and doctrine: Brezhnev was a big fan of her work, especially the song Zapiska.108 Following one concert, she told him of her dreadful problems in obtaining some reasonably sized accommodation. Soon afterwards, and much to her surprise, she was quietly offered a new Moscow apartment with a very desirable address.109 This mutual admiration continued for some while; in June 1976 Brezhnev was himself happy and honoured to award Shul’zhenko yet another decoration in person, a prestigious Golden Star medal.110 Graced and sustained by official favours, she continued to work until the mid-eighties, though was always a little ill at ease with the novel medium of television, the extent of its reach, and the concomitant responsibility before frighteningly large audiences.111 She would often shake with fear before regular stage performances; working on television, she felt, would be infinitely worse.112 She was also less than enamoured with television’s tendency to interrupt or cancel estrada shows in favour of news bulletins or hockey. A huge invisible audience was unappealing to a woman who had cultivated a biography and philosophy of social contact. She was troubled by the manner in which modernity was sidelining an elderly performer, and her health began to worsen (as did her memory). She passed away in 1984 and was buried with great pomp and stately circumstance.113

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Eulogies made reference to her career-long conviction that there is “one approach to help you to avoid failure: hard work [trud]. Stubborn, unrelenting work that allows for no compromise.” In her autobiography, while praising modern singers such as Alla Pugacheva for “an enormous amount of work” (ogromnyi trud), she wrote – paradoxically – that “there’s a[nother] clear secret to success. An elegant melody, rhythmic freedom, heroes with concisely, fairly well defined characteristics, and an unexpected, amusing finale. The end of a song should conjure a smile from the audience, if not outright laughter.”114 (In fact many recordings of her work available today capture that merriment. Her postwar decision to perform often with piano alone allowed her to dramatize even the subtlest nuances of a song and not worry that they might disappear in the excessive volume of a loud ensemble behind her. The audience’s giggles are also audible.) These seemingly contradictory claims for labour and laughter dovetail in her belief that it takes major work to cultivate a minor genre; being funny is a serious business, as the comedian Arkadii Raikin noted when he celebrated her fidelity to lyric songs.115 Serious enough, in fact, for the death of Klavdiia Shul’zhenko “to be a harbinger of a great empire’s disintegration.”116 Her serious hard work was based upon an arduous folding of the past, upon a persisting remembrance of others, while hoping younger performers would do the same: “As long as people remember me, I will be alive.”117 To sing and remember is to do your job properly; remembering is both the professional and proper thing to do. The civic singer Iosif Kobzon, who emerged during Shul’zhenko’s twilight and is enormously popular today, saw her as setting a standard of “good-natured professionalism,” which was evidently lacking in late and post-Soviet entertainment.118 That good nature was not remembered, as mentioned above, in terms of individualism’s demise in massed tradition, but as something unique, in fact as the “charm of the unique” (oboianie nepovtorimosti).119 A re-employed heritage denied transience or forgetfulness, and Soviet newspapers often claimed that to talk of Shul’zhenko in the past tense was just not proper.120 In 1996, for example, when a collection of her songs was released, the reviewer wrote that they “do not age. They express the variety of human emotions, those which touch the heart and soul now, just as they did back then.”121 Utesov had said exactly the same in 1976, that “not aging” was the key to her œuvre.122 In the Leningrad Estrada Museum, her original blue kerchief was carefully kept under wraps,123 while memorial evenings today have helped to combat oblivion and neglect.124 In her hometown of Kharkov, a museum in her honour does the same.125 The greatest tribute, though, is done by the millions

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of people across the former Soviet Union who buy, sing, and remember her songs.

songs: “where are you now, my fellow soldiers …?” «Синенький скромный платочек …» Слышно который годочек. Выглядит, честное слово, Этот платочек, как новый.126 [We’ve heard about “the modest blue kerchief” for so many years. In all honestly, it seems even now as if it were brand new.]

The various forms of love – past and present, private and public – are all conceivable in Shul’zhenko’s repertoire because of her restraint. Because her love is quieter and less fervent than that of Iur’eva or Tsereteli, it easily moves into genres of affection and friendship. It does not commit itself to (and then exhaust) the expressive tools of any one genre. It may therefore be discussed in broader terms of desire, rather than love. It may, for example, be applied to the quiet chaste affection felt by two people sitting silently on a railway platform, waiting to be parted by different trains, be they either metaphorical or concrete manifestations of social duty or military draft (Davai pomolchim). Absence, when realized, between two lovers leaves her wandering in a dream-like state. She does not know why her lover appears (or desires an appearance) in her reverie (Dorogoi chelovek). Restraint or deferment in the depiction of fervour creates a broader, more malleable canvas on which to paint issues of desire, of movement between presence and absence. Friendship, as in the famous Davai zakurim discussed above, extends this sentimental restraint to scenes of both fidelity and martial comradeship, to presence both desired and institutionalized, to camaraderie and marriage. О походах наших, о боях с врагами Долго будут люди песни распевать, И в кругу с друзьями часто вечерами, Эти дни когда-нибудь мы будем вспоминать … Об огнях-пожарищах, О друзьях-товарищах

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in practice Где-нибудь, когда-нибудь мы будем говорить. Вспомню я пехоту, И родную роту, И тебя – за то, что ты дал мне закурить. Давай закурим, товарищ, по одной, Давай закурим, товарищ мой! Нас опять Одесса встретит как хозяев, Звезды Черноморья будут нам сиять. Славную Каховку, город Николаев – Эти дни когда-нибудь мы будем вспоминать. А когда не будет фашистов и в помине, И к своим любимым мы придем опять, Вспомним, как на запад шли по Украине … Эти дни когда-нибудь мы будем вспоминать! [People will sing songs for a long time about our campaigns and battles with the enemy. There’ll come a time when we’ll remember those days, in a circle of friends, often gathered for the evening. Somewhere, somehow, we’ll talk again about these fires and charred ruins, about our friends and comrades. I’ll remember the infantry, our company. And you – for giving me that cigarette. Let’s have a smoke, comrade: one each! Let’s have a smoke, comrade! Odessa will greet us again as if we owned the place, the stars of the Black Sea will shine for us. Wonderful Kakhovka and the city of Nikolaev – there’ll be a time when we’ll remember those days. And when there’s no trace of the Fascists and we all return to our loved ones again, we’ll remember how we went west across Ukraine … There’ll come a time when we’ll remember those days!]

As can be seen from several of Shul’zhenko’s songs, since she was a woman singing during wartime, the desired “friendships” or quiet romances are not necessarily going on in the present; they are memories of such emotions. As a result, many of her songs are of recollection. Perhaps the most famous is “Where Are You Now, Fellow Soldiers?” (Gde zhe vy teper’, druz’ia-odnopolchane?). Here friendship’s worth is made starkly manifest by war and is now in short supply. Memories can – and will – keep those emotions of amiable social contact alive. A friend who is “lost” during or after war can be offered forms of desired contact: camaraderie, social respect, and a bride in a “land rich with songs.” Where there is song, so there is desire. Майскими короткими ночами, Отгремев, закончились бои.

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klavdiia shul’zhenko Где же вы теперь, друзья-однополчане, Боевые спутники мои? Я хожу в хороший час заката У сосновых новеньких ворот; Может, к нам сюда знакомого солдата Ветерок попутный занесет. Мы бы с ним припомнили, как жили, Как теряли трудным верстам счет. За победу мы б по полной осушили, За друзей добавили б еще. Если ты случайно неженатый, Ты, дружок, нисколько не тужи, Здесь у нас в районе, песнями богатом, Девушки уж больно хороши. Мы тебе колхозом дом построим, Чтобы видно было по всему: Здесь живет семья российского героя, Грудью защищавшего страну. Майскими короткими ночами, Отгремев, закончились бои. Где же вы теперь, друзья-однополчане, Боевые спутники мои? [The battles are over and the thunder has ended with these short nights of May. Where are you now, fellow soldiers, my battlefield companions? In the sunset’s fine hour I go to the pinewood gates. Maybe a passing breeze will bring a familiar soldier here to us as well. We’d remember how we lived, how we lost count of all those difficult miles. We’d drink the bottle dry in victory’s name, then have another for our friends. If, by chance, you’re not married, don’t be sad, friend. Our district, rich in song, is full of painfully pretty girls! We’ll get the collective farm to fix you a house, so it’s clear from top to bottom that a Russian hero’s family lives there. He defended the country with his broad chest. The battles are over and the thunder has ended with these short nights of May. Where are you now, fellow soldiers, my battlefield companions?]

What makes this and several other of Shul’zhenko’s war (or postwar) songs interesting is that the metaphorical return in and of memory becomes the actual return of the soldier and vice versa. Memory and 165

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movement reinforce or even cause each other. In the number “Return” (Vozvrashchenie), a veteran in this overtly “male” text returns from war, having preserved the white (not blue) kerchief of his beloved, who appears for some reason no longer to be interested. The man hopes that her prior “tender love will shimmer once more,” but that will only happen if and when she remembers that love. If she does not, it passes away in time and will be forgotten (or remembered halfheartedly and then rejected). In other songs, memories attempt to overcome even more dramatic distances than that from the Eastern Front to a Slavic homestead. A Cuban folk song adopted by Shul’zhenko (and re-recorded by Pugacheva in 2001) marks nicely the return of lyricism and exoticism with the Thaw. The text presents a sailor remembering his love who stands on the long-absent, very distant shores of Havana (Golubka). Another song transfers the same emotion and absent traveller to the wastelands of the taiga (Znaiu, ty ne pridesh’). It makes no difference where we are. Desire and the heart know no boundaries; they try to erase geography and linear time, to remember and effect constant returns. In “A Little about Myself” (Nemnozhko o sebe), Shul’zhenko attests to the fact that “the secret” in all this is simply to “dream, love, and not grow old.” Given the awful times that she lived through, however, it is not surprising that stronger forces often challenge the power of nonlinear affirmation. Even when the tall and dashing poet of the Thaw, Evgenii Evtushenko, pens her a text (A sneg povalitsia), it contains a discernable degree of doubt. Memory is shown hard at work in the dark and swirling snow, but “suddenly, in the impartial light of day, my youth will abandon me like a dolled-up gypsy woman who has grown tired of toying with me.” The nomadic gypsy aesthetic of romances is clearly less attractive in an era when people had already had enough of being forced to act as nomads. There are songs of happy travels in Shul’zhenko’s work (Ia speshu, izvinite menia), but in general it is the heart that does the moving, not the legs. Another Evtushenko text, “Comrade Guitar” (Tovarishch gitara), mixes those two forms of motion as metatext in a moving song about songs on the move. Fate (which makes people travel) has here a “heart of gold,” but it sometimes endows a modern, guitar-bearing gypsy with adventures that are far from agreeable or “sweet.” Both the singer and his/ her musical instrument are scratched and scuffed from such trials, yet they remain together as friends – and together they sing. It is music that endures and remembers in friendships and heartfelt communities, like the farmland above that was “rich in songs.” Shul’zhenko again sings of sympathetic songs and instruments in “Take the Guitar” (Voz’mi gitaru), here with her most direct references 166

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to the romance tradition. She once more downplays the passion, yet places greater emphasis upon even minor emotions’ ability to endure, recollect, and fold “progressive” time back upon or into itself: “The guitar remembers, the guitar knows … In its breast live reminiscences. Misfortune, the passing years, and wicked cold spells mean nothing to her. The guitar is always young!”

conclusion: “we’d remember how we lived …” All of these themes come together, perhaps, in “Hands” (Ruki), a song that Èdita P’ekha performs regularly even today to tumultuous applause. The text was written by Lebedev-Kumach. The author of the most bellicose, ideologically committed song of World War Two – “Holy War” (Sviashchennaia voina) – also writes one of its most poignant love songs. The author of massive social cohesion is also the author of private parting and loss. Same event (war), same emotional force, but in one instance he “wins” by overcoming an opposing affect (German expansionism) and in another loses (when a lover departs, willy-nilly, to be absent for a long time). Music does much to help what is desired (the recalled/willed return of peace, patriotism, or a lover) and the person who is desiring (waiting to be returned to). Willing a return is perhaps as important as actually (physically) coming back, yet both actions are open to contradictory, more powerful forces, referred to on occasion above as “fate.” War and doubt come, like Evtushenko’s snowstorm or powerful steam trains, to surprise and separate even the most ardently committed individuals. In “Holy War,” the power of the German army is depicted as a huge black bird, flying above the Soviet Union. It will never be allowed to land by the contrasting, contrary forces of socialism. In Ruki, the same war transforms the two hands of a loved one into a bird that flies away. They had once played music upon a piano’s keys, but the more powerful force of a Fascist threat caused the private bird to fly away and defend “all that’s holy” from a larger kindred entity. Clumsy though it may sound, the solitary musical bird joins the flock defending a nation from the Fascist raven. Pathos and the lyric neither contradict nor depend upon each other; they exist separately but may inform one another with ease. The no man’s land in which they meet and match is ethical, not ideological. It is a moral space defined emotionally. Нет, не глаза твои я вспомню в час разлуки … Не голос твой услышу в тишине … Я вспомню ласковые, трепетные руки, И о тебе они напомнят мне! … 167

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in practice Руки! Вы словно две большие птицы! Как вы летали, как оживляли все вокруг! Руки! Как вы могли легко обвиться, И все печали снимали вдруг! … Когда по клавишам твои скользили пальцы, Каким родным казался каждый звук … Под звуки старого и медленного вальса Мне не забыть твоих горячих рук! … Руки! Вы словно две большие птицы! Как вы летали, как оживляли все вокруг. Руки … Как вы могли легко проститься, И все печали мне дали вдруг! [I will not recall your eyes at the hour of our parting … I’ll not hear your voice in the quiet … I’ll recall your tender, timid hands and they’ll remind me of you! … Hands! You’re like two grand birds. How you flew and enlivened everything! Hands! How easily you embraced and removed all sadness at once! … As your fingers glid across the keyboard, each sound seemed so dear … I can’t forget your fervent hands at the sound of an old slow waltz! … Hands! You’re like two grand birds. How you flew and enlivened everything! Hands! How could you leave so easily and give me back all the sadness!]

Of all the performers in this book, the one who embodies these two winged emotions most vigorously, completely, and famously is Mark Bernes. As an actor in many Soviet adventure and military films, he gained a reputation as a figure of socialist masculinity that was and remains beyond question. Despite that bold social persona, however, he became later in his career a singer of gentle, almost narrated, songs, thus continuing the tradition of Shul’zhenko as diseuse. He embodies maximum emotional strength, both actively (as an actor of social import) and passively (as a singer of quiet lyric texts). His inclusion in this book is justifiable on many grounds, but perhaps the best and simplest of all is that two of his songs were in the ntv Top Twenty list of Russia’s favourite songs – ever.

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7 MARK BERNES: HUSHED SONGS FROM THE SILVER SCREEN Bernes had – and I emphasize this – absolutely no theatrical or musical education whatsoever. All the same, he was able to become a famous and respected movie actor, dearly loved by his audience.1

from the small to the big stage Mark Bernes was born on 8 October 1911 in the small Ukrainian town of Nezhin. Because his father was a junk dealer, the family moved fairly often. They settled in Kharkov when Mark was five years old, and there he managed to finish (a) school. His parents hoped that Mark would plan for a career in accountancy following further education at the local academy. Once he had experienced the theatre at the age of fifteen, however, there was little chance that he would ever work as purser or bursar. Charmed by limelight and greasepaint, Bernes had first to overcome grave and enduring doubts about the stylized and often excessive emotion of contemporary artists in the provinces who performed traditionally intimate “salon” romances on the public stage. He also balked at the swank urban finery of women who would glide onto the estrada and then intone loudly through “the gaping mouth of a large fish.”2 In order to gain at least oblique contact with this world, he joined a team of billposters. He would also stroll the streets with a sandwich board, all in order to advertise local drama. He in fact did so with such aplomb that the owners of the theatre he was promoting soon invited him to join crowd scenes upon the stage. “He showed initiative, independence and self-reliance … Even in those days he was the same person he’d always be.”3 Here we see a good example of how the Soviet press would celebrate Bernes as an actor who was somehow both unique, in a continual process of “seeking” or “becoming” (razvivaiushchiisia), and the embodiment of constancy.4

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His parents were far from approving of such folly, and at the age of seventeen, in 1928, he found the conflict of interests was so great that he ran away from home, taking a train to Moscow. He spent the first few days sleeping in a station and looking for any theatrical work whatsoever. He managed, as in Ukraine, to participate in crowd scenes in two theatres, one of which – as luck would have it – was the Bol’shoi. By the beginning of 1931 a stable job manifested itself when he was listed as a regular troupe member of the Moscow Dramatic Theatre. By the middle of the decade his audience and status had grown further still, this time not on the boards but on celluloid. His good looks were key in this success. He was a tall, athletic man whose gentle smile and well-groomed appearance suggested much less theatricality than our other male performers and a more classical, even dashing deportment. When this gallantry donned the grubby duds of a socialist hero, public acceptance and admiration seemed guaranteed. His film first role was in the movie Convicts (Zakliuchennye) of 1936, albeit a role of no dramatic consequence. In the following year, he had a much more substantial character to play in the feature The Miners (Shakhtery). These early films fall only a few years after the institution of Soviet Socialist Realism, and critics often noted the admirable parity of his cinematic work and state policy. “The first movie in which viewers saw the young Mark Bernes was dedicated to an important modern theme of Socialist construction: the start of the ‘innovator’ movement in the Donetsk Basin. Bernes’s heroes are always masters of their [industrial] craft.”5 This observation, though, was made in 1955; the laudatory tone from a post-Stalinist academic hints at the manner in which Bernes’s films conflate two political tendencies. They are tales of Stalinist adventure and construction, yet do not avail themselves of Stalinist “varnish” or the prettying of reality typical of the period. He himself wrote with specific defiance against varnished roles, which he termed excessively “uniform” in the philosophical or social movement they scribe. “An actor must experience uneasiness and a hunger for ‘searching,’” he writes, thus employing a prime post-Stalinist metaphor.6 He sought and admired the type of hero who is given “room to move out into civic spirit [grazhdanstvennost’].”7 That searching, from his earliest published dicta, was conducted for the true heart of his viewer. Soviet Socialist Cinema was busy with the emotional rather than the socioeconomic welfare of the Soviet Union. The public scale of revolutionary drama was working for sentiment – not vice versa. “And what does sentimentalism mean [in early realist cinema]? We’ve begun to fear the word so much that we’re timid in the face of human feelings, before the kind workings of our spirit. I’m generally a sentimental person. It takes nothing to squeeze a tear out

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of me and I’m not ashamed of that.”8 Despite his bold claims here, however, many critics saw his film performances as expressing a modest, if not pacific, feeling within an active life, rather than as advocating existence by sentiment alone or at the expense of intellect. Bernes’s emotion is smaller than the actor claims, but still keenly active in the Soviet sense of social romanticism, of socially determined interaction.9 It takes effort to match ideological vigour, to run beside it and pronounce a minor variation upon (not contrary to) its theme. Sentiment does not contradict the societal goals of socialist drama; it simply concentrates upon smaller interactive units. An accent upon the individual was palpable in 1936 when Bernes received the role for which he became perhaps best known in his early career, that of a revolutionary enlistee in Man with a Rifle. The film shows two things: the internalization or subjective experience of a character and how songs speed that process. By way of example, he researched his part carefully in Leningrad’s Museum of the Revolution, looking for a rugged image to match his own solid bearing, likened by a peer – somewhat mundanely – to that of a joiner or an electrician.10 One day in the museum I saw a photograph of a group of Petrograd Red Army soldiers. I noticed a young lad who seemed about sixteen years old. He had a bright forelock and lively, audacious eyes. He was dressed in a Finnish fur hat, worn jauntily. He also had a leather double-breasted jacket and the kind of flared trousers that soldiers wear. He was covered from head to foot in cartridge belts for a machine gun. He also had two Mausers and as many grenades as he could carry. I wrote all of this down; not just his getup, but also everything that seemed so wonderful behind that external appearance … I began to invent a life for my hero.11

ukrainian sensibility in moscow cinemas: why sing in a drama? Bernes decided, once the intention of the research was clear, to add a song, and here begins the story of the extraordinarily well-known and lyrical “Clouds Rose above the City” (Tuchi nad gorodom vstali). The logic behind such a musical addendum requires a word or two, so let us over the next few pages look at why on earth Bernes sings. The songs themselves and movies proper are examined anon. The decision to include this particular musical number was taken to clarify, not decorate, his characterization, to the point where it becomes “a road or path to the creation of a principally new artistic image.”12 Music adds to the impression of a Ukrainian actor; it augments the sentiment unavoidably inherent in Bernes’s status as an actor from the

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distant, bucolic “provinces.” Unpleasant though such logic may be, it serves to mount a challenge to the emotional power of politics. Emotion, in fact, displaces doctrine, because the song has, by Bernes himself, been called the reason why Kostia is still loved today and remains “a hero of our time” (geroi nashego vremeni).13 The song Tuchi nad gorodom vstali also grew from the Museum of the Revolution, as one journalist has pointed out. “‘What did he see in that lad?’ we ask today. We’ve seen people that like a thousand times! Sure, but after Bernes. It was only later that the pictures of his hero began to be printed in untold quantities. And only after that was it turned into a hackneyed image. ‘I felt,’ said Bernes [considering the addition of a song], ‘that the boy was still missing something. I couldn’t make him carry a banner or a box of shells. Rummaging through an old storage building, in a pile of museum curios, I found an accordion! The simplest type, with two little keyboards [dvukhriadka]. That’s what he needs. So – if he’s got an accordion, now he needs a song, too!’” It was suggested by the film crew that he sing some early, strident revolutionary texts, such as “Bravely We Go into Battle” (Smelo my v boi poidem) or “The Sun Rises and Sets” (Solntse vskhodit i zakhodit). “No! Kostia can’t sing that stuff. He’s got a different character!” A new song was composed and shown to the film’s instrumental composer, Shostakovich, who liked it very much.14 Shostakovich had originally promised to write a song for this role, but had given up after being unable to marry the civic and subjective satisfactorily.15 Bernes, however, managed this feat and turned the Revolution into a personal incident. His emphasis upon emotional affinity, amplified by song, is evident from the outset. The skills of one of the Soviet Union’s most famous actors were thus best suited to ensemble playing such that “social” comes to means “small [cordial] groups.”16 Three years later, in 1939, we have the movie Fighter Pilots (Istrebiteli), a tale of two compassionate airmen and their relationships within the squadron. Bernes sings once more (“A Comrade Flies to Distant Lands” [V dalekii krai tovarishch uletaet or Liubimyi gorod]) and the film became the most popular of 1940. This movie was designed, as were its versified interludes, to foster a broad range of emotions: “Heroism, initiative, civic spirit, and love for one’s neighbour.” The music, held the press, helped give the film an extra “lyrical touch.”17 Bernes researched the role by spending time with a squadron positioned near Kiev so that he might learn not its military wartime duties, but its daily activities, interests, and habits.18 This relaxed, if not prosaic, type of method acting was a trait of Bernes’s metier.19 Bernes used the political reality and the people around him to help him find a common, non-political denominator and thus create a “tender, brave-hearted

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hero in precisely those years when people needed that kind of image.”20 Once again, the social scale is reduced. Soviet journalists often celebrated this mixing of documentary fact, dramatic interpretation, and, finally, singing. “It seems to me that Mark Naumovich never had any special loyalty to just one activity (say, movies) and then some offhand attitude towards another (such as estrada), even though he considered himself a movie actor. He came to the estrada from cinema and brought to the movie set a dramatic actor’s and filmmaker’s experience. His songs were always the musical interpretation of a dramatic image.”21 Once war had begun, Bernes would play another major and popular role, that of Arkadii Dziubin in the film Two Warriors (Dva boitsa). Though no songs were originally planned for the movie, the director decided eventually to include one, “A Dark Night” (Temnaia noch’). This song has been praised for an even greater dissolution of the personal in – and therefore displacement of – the public. “It included everything that kept a front-line soldier alive: dreams and worries over an abandoned home, worries about one’s parents, wife, and children. Since these concerns are the eternal lot of humankind [in or out of war], the song sounded very contemporary. It did and does not age.”22 The dualistic thinking of Marxist sociology dissolves as one man is now “lost” or reflected in many other people. Loss of subjectivity, ironically, creates the bigger star. This sense of loss or minorization is strong in the instrumentation of Temnaia noch’, since it could not be sparser or evoke a greater sense of diminution: one man playing his own guitar (very simply) and with no other musicians in sight. This modesty of presentation is central in all of Bernes’s work. Even when he became an established singer, granted both prime studio time and the best musicians, his cautiously jazzy arrangements were always restrained and hardly suitable for the dance floor. Bernes shows neither the wackiness of Utesov nor the cynicism of Vertinskii. Instead he is today associated with plain, dignified, and proper expressions of feeling, a balladeer more than anything. Despite this apparent aesthetic self-deprecation, the very simple, if not spartan, arrangement of songs in Dva boitsa certainly persisted through years of stately grandeur. The minor, barely audible emotion displayed the greatest staying power.23 Bernes had great trouble getting into the role of a man from Odessa for Two Warriors, not (obviously) because of having to represent Russified Ukrainian culture as a whole but because the city would judge any estrada performer by its own legendary standards. Adding a song helped. It was held, precisely as in Man with a Rifle and Fighter Pilots, that “these songs are not simply inserted into the role, but are an

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essential part of an image’s dramatic development, one that helps a hero discover his spiritual aspect.” In wartime, emotion rises to meet patriotic bluster and heartfelt sentiment raises itself to a “spiritual aspect.” That development was so closely tied with visual representation, with the films, that Bernes was often criticized for taking movie songs and subsequently performing them on the estrada.24 It was becoming hard to prevent the independent, post-celluloid existence of the songs. A further example is another song added to the script of Two Warriors, this one entitled “Flat Boats” (Shalandy). The poet Evtushenko noted that this hymn to a fisherman and the sunny city of Odessa “met with enormous success in the strangest of places,” especially in northern climes where the sun never shone: 1943. A wooden, decrepit club at Station Winter [in Eastern Siberia]. We are impudent youths, collectors of cigarette butts, able with great skill and a clicking noise to spit through our teeth. A movie screen darned with rough threads enchants us. There, on that screen, there’s an amazing man from Odessa in a sailor’s striped shirt, looking out from under his soldier’s coat. He winks slyly at a Leningrad girl who’s chilly, wrapped up in her downy shawl. He sits down at the piano and sings: “Flat Boats Full of Grey Mullet …” (Shalandy, polnye kefali). The song had some crazy, half-criminal words that had absolutely nothing to do with the blockade or the war. They were about some fishing-girl Sonia and dockers all dressed up for a wedding in their [best] shoes, which made a “dreadful creaking sound.” The song’s intonation and its impudent little devils, dancing in the eye of that man from Odessa, all wanted to show that a person can endure absolutely anything if he believes in life.25

The film’s songs and their sentimental leanings met with high praise during the war, even on the usually grey pages of Pravda: “Just as a front-line soldier needs letters from his dear family, just as he needs rest, sleep, and food, so troops need movies of a poetic tendency. They need lyrical films, ones that excite the heart. Musical films that conjure empathy for things beautiful or perhaps humorous films, to save a person who is tired and even tormented [by war].”26 This sense of beauty shifted from images to sounds in a major fashion at the time the film was being shown in 1943; the estrada began to steal the songs for itself. Bernes was shooting a new film in Sverdlovsk when some organizational problems arose on the set. The local authorities were able to sort matters out, but they did so only on agreement that Bernes would sing a few songs at a town concert. He agreed. He performed both numbers from Dva boitsa, and in this way, on 30 December 1943, his singing career moved onto the small stage, whence lyric songs even during war “could be a form of weaponry,” thus echoing a well-known thought by Leonid Utesov.27 174

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For his success in the movie, Bernes was awarded the Order of the Red Star. He even got an award, much to his relief, from the people of Odessa, who named him Honorary Resident of the City for his touching songs and portrayal of a local in Two Warriors. Bernes, said the jubilant press, had used song to underline the hero’s “internal state,” “which changed with each person to whom it was addressed.” By doing so, he attained the status of a movie actor “who knows no age. Time has no power over his [dramatic] creations.”28 Emotion is doing something strange to the forward linear drive of socialist construction by advocating the “ability to metamorphose artistically.”29 Bernes said in several of his articles that he strove to present emotion more than either erudition in his heroes or the elucidation of any thesis they might embody.30 He did this successfully and thus personified emotion’s very essence or force by celebrating that which does not change, that which is constantly now, and “thus the songs he sang and wrote will not grow old.”31 “Everything changes,” he once said. “Our life is nothing but movement. New factories and electric stations are being built; new towns are growing. Express trains fly in all directions, ships sail by, airplanes fly past. Everything changes. Only our love and faith do not change.”32 Irrespective of what Bernes sang, we now know why he did so: to reflect and advocate feeling, the affirmed and affirming guarantor of an actuality that is always here and always now.

postwar films: sung affect’s reverse effect Bernes’s career was not always a tale of plain sailing. He worked on the second part of 1939’s Grand Life (Bol’shaia zhizn’), known as Grand Dominion (Bol’shaia zemlia), the first film in which he would sing a song with an explicitly amorous lyric: emotion moved up from “civic spirit” to “spiritual aspect” and then to love. Bernes had problems making the film, apparently caused by his jealousy over the fame of other actors in the movie, in particular a star of Soviet musicals such as the merry Tractor Drivers, Petr Aleinikov. The film’s woes would not end on the set, though. Stalin did not like it, and it remained without distribution rights until 1958. Love – ignoring everybody in favour of somebody – had breached and worried the boundaries of shared doctrinal and private passions. He worked in other postwar movies, notably The Great Breakthrough (Velikii perelom [1946]), The Third Blow (Tretii udar [1948]), and Far from Moscow (Daleko ot Moskvy [1950]), for which he was awarded the Stalin Prize. Velikii perelom prompted the actor to further musings on his heroes, in this case a military chauffeur known by the nickname “Minutka”: 175

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in practice I give free reign to my fantasies, trying to see my hero as if in life, to see what he might keep in his car and where it would be. I knew that in his modest establishment there’d certainly be some special water he would use for polishing the car. Not polish, but a type of water that could make the car shine as if new. The little bottles with that liquid would only be used on the day when front-line camouflage could be washed off. Minutka was getting ready for victory. He was sure of victory. I knew that Minutka would keep a little book in his side pocket; I imagined that he read a lot but never showed it. He’d have two pistols: the standard tt and his stylish trophy Browning with the mother-of-pearl inlay. In those same pockets there was also a comb, a little mirror, and a tiny piece of velvet for buffing his boots. Minutka always carried letters with him from his father, plus a few snapshots … It seemed to me that he would write funny, witty letters to the people back home.33

These processes show how Bernes tried to “live in the image” of his heroes and “participate in all that happens around them.” He, by his own admission, tried to raise minor “insignificant details” to a major status and bring the significance of a character’s invisible (or seemingly irrelevant) past into the present shown on the screen.34 This, for example, is how he fashioned Minutka’s past, thus richly supplementing the screenplay with imagination: Minutka is a nickname. I invented a real name for the character – Vasilii Baranov. I imagined that he was born and lived in Moscow, that he was the youngest and a favourite child, though not at all spoiled. That’s because he had been brought up in a family of trained workers. People such as his father had become the backbone of the Party. His father had fought during the Civil War, then helped to restore a factory, after which he had been sent off to serve in the battle against the kulaks during collectivization. He’d returned to the factory and become one of the first Stakhanovites. Before wwii Vasilii, his father, and his two brothers had worked at the same manufacturing plant; they were long accustomed to playing a major role in all kinds of manufacturing business. Since childhood he had felt that his family was inseparable from the life of the Soviet people. This feeling of indivisibility with the nation’s fate helped me to understand the nature of my character’s heroic deed. It was unthinkable for him, Vasilii Baranov, to behave otherwise!35

The same minor tendencies were just as important when he sang the songs for these films. With regard to music, he preferred material that neither shouted “as if the song itself were deaf” nor fell into histrionic “paroxysms.”36 This difference in scale is paramount, for a song “carries our ideas into the world”; his statement draws a qualitative line between two possible quantities implicit in the possessive pronoun “our.” It could 176

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designate a small group of people (“you and I”) or the larger assemblage of “the world” as a whole (“all of us”).37 In the same way, Bernes’s contemporaries now saw his songs as small, inclusive bearers or reflectors of many past and larger events, which were made and experienced anew with every passage into the social context of a performance.38 Not only did the songs dissolve into their audiences, his spoken dramatic roles were convincing enough to carry them beyond the film set and into the worlds he researched. Here a show’s desire to be influenced by real life flows back into that reality: It was 1945. The war had just finished. The Soviet Army was taking part in some of the crowd scenes [for our film]. I myself would get dressed in uniform and then spend days on end with soldiers and officers. We, the actors, would try and see how convincing our personae were, whether or not we were behaving the way they would. We watched to see how they held themselves, how they talked to one another … One day, when I was sitting on a hillock near a car, some colonel or other – whom I did not know – approached me from among the soldiers in one of our massed scenes. “Sergeant-Major,” he said, “take me off to the bank. We’ll get the money I need while they get ready for the shoot.” He motioned to a group of cameramen setting up their equipment. I saluted and said, “Yes, sir!” Off we went in the car. We drove to the bank and got his money. The moment we got back, he realized that he had mistaken me for a real military chauffeur. The colonel was very embarrassed. I, however, was very pleased.39

Acting in all these “real-life” places would cause other troubles, whether Bernes was in costume or not. In 1951, when sleeping on a collective farm where filming was taking place, he was awoken in the middle of the night by a group of agricultural workers who, after explaining that they were not robbers, begged him to sing a song or two.40 This confusion of two scales would become a major problem: silver screen versus everyday existence and hero versus actor. As the two become confused, they can grow to a scale that troubles the state. These actors posed an affective threat, since they made no political statements. People liked them more than they liked (or cared about) the state. Here began a problem that blossomed with estrada performers during the Thaw.

problems with traffic policemen and other authorities Bernes joined the Party in 1952, having just shot the story of Ukrainian “national poet” Taras Shevchenko, a project soon followed by the adventure film School of Courage (Shkola muzhestva [1954]). Now, however, 177

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despite such expressions of concord between star and state, matters worsened. At this time, his wife was very ill and would soon die from cancer. There were cruel rumours that Bernes had not behaved very well in the situation, since he thought his wife’s ailment contagious and therefore avoided her, even in her final days. True or not, her death was such a terrible shock to him that he could not work again until the two movies of 1957, His Life’s Goal (Tsel’ ego zhizni) and Night Patrol (Nochnoi patrul’). These films were successful, but while Stalin was now thankfully absent from the critical process, Khrushchev was not very impressed by the actor’s vainglory. Difficulties continued. Bernes performed before Khrushchev at a Moscow sbornyi concert that had to run according to a strict timetable and therefore allowed for no encores. After he sang his allotted two songs, which met with great audience approval, shouts went up for another number. Bernes felt the need to oblige, but the stage manager would have none of it. The singer went back into the wings. Khrushchev thought this most disrespectful towards the audience, of which he was a member. Journalists, prompted no doubt by the piqued premier, used two newspapers – Pravda and Komsomol’skaia pravda – to attack Bernes for bad taste and the propagation of shabby “restaurant estrada.” Allegations were also made of other bad behaviour offstage, quoting the following episode. A traffic policeman had tried to stop Bernes’s car in Moscow after a minor violation, but the actor simply kept going. The policeman ended up on the hood of the car and was carried for a short distance before Bernes condescended to stop. A court case began, but during the trial it appeared as if the newspapers had fabricated the entire affair; the policeman, for example, could not even remember the colour of the automobile. These incidents, sadly, garnered the man a reputation of being somewhat standoffish and condescending.41 In the same year, the newspaper Sovetskaia kul’tura warned him that any such behaviour in the future would be punished with the removal of his status as Honoured Artist of the Russian Federation. He was also advised to deal with the “unbecoming quality of his concert repertoire” while he was at it.42 The public loved what was seen as awkward by the authorities, and admired his impulsiveness. Bernes was “good and bad tempered, intelligent and sullen, brave and indecisive, simple and cunning, trusting and suspicious, cruel and sentimental, jolly and dark.”43 These contradictions were better suited to the small stage than the ideological responsibilities of the silver screen, and his work after this legal hubbub tended more towards music than movies. A string of hit songs appeared: “Life, I Love You” (Ia liubliu tebia, zhizn’), the beautiful waltz “Sergei from Little Bronnyi Street” (Serezha s Maloi Bronnoi), “I Work as a Magician” (Ia rabotaiu volshebnikom), and others.

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He was soon married again, to Liliia Bodrova, a woman he met by chance when taking his daughter to school.44 It was perhaps on the basis of such socially perceived normalcy that Bernes made two fine movies. The early sixties saw renewed activity in the prosaic detective film of 1963 It Happened in the Police Station (Èto sluchilos’ v militsii) and the wildly popular ironic romance Eugene, Eugenia, and Katie (Zenia, Zhenechka i Katiusha [1967]). That role would be his thirty-fifth, shortly after which he recorded his final song, “Cranes” (Zhuravli [1969]), at a point in his career when he was extraordinarily particular about the wording of his texts. The song had begun: “It sometimes seems to me that Caucasian horsemen …” Bernes objected that no such men would ever sing this song, and so changed the noun to the more mundane “soldier.” The poem’s final stanza had originally read: Летит, летит по небу клин усталый – Мои друзья былые и родня. И в их строю есть промежуток малый – Быть может, это место для меня! [A tired, tapering flock of birds flies across the sky: my erstwhile friends and relatives. There’s a small break in their ranks. Maybe that’s a place for me!]

Bernes asked that a line he liked from a stanza that had been dropped be introduced here instead: “In the pre-twilight mist, the cranes …” (V tumane predvechernem zhuravli … ). The second line, furthermore, was altered to read “[The birds] fly in the mist at day’s end” (Letiat v tumane na iskhode dnia). These and later editorial changes are indicative of Bernes’s enduring attempts to make his songs, as he put it, more accurate, simpler, and yet more “painful.”45 This somewhat harsh worldview à la Hemingway came at a time when he was very ill. His car was in a slight accident and would remain unfixed, since its owner believed he would soon no longer need it. The film Zhenia, Zhenechka had, despite box office success, been coldly received by the press. Although Bernes insisted that true success was neither political nor governmental – it was popular and emotional – the media’s cold shoulder must have added to his depression. He continued somewhat stubbornly to affirm popularity over policy and to see himself as a two-way “conduit” of audience affect. In order to conceive the idea of a work correctly, [to understand] the pathos of an image embodied onscreen, an actor must contemplate those people who will watch his film. He must sense each viewer’s fundamental relationship to

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in practice life’s key issues, his relationship to the hero’s qualities, to the hero’s thoughts, habits, and actions. Without the “feeling of the auditorium” you’ll never get the right intonations or correct emphases. This “feeling of the auditorium” helps an actor in all his endeavours. The people are the best director, and we are simply conduits of their feelings and thoughts.46

He would say exactly the same thing about the songs in his films. “The main thing, I think, is the heart. You have to hear, understand, and then transmit a song. And in order to transmit all the warmth of a song, you need expressive eyes, mimicry, and gestures.”47 Warmth, referred to in specific terms, would be one of Bernes’s traits commented on by journalists, seen something indicative of an unassuming, unobtrusive mode of Soviet masculinity.48 Warmth, offered to an audience with a quiet, if not unimpressive, voice that was modelled, perhaps, on that of Yves Montand, was well captured in a witty poem of 1956 dedicated to the actor.49 Here a poet celebrates the vocals of a man who himself wants to “tell people about the life led by the heart, of its pain and joy. I want to tell them of love that does not scream about itself, but sings with a smile and gives wing to the soul with its song.”50 Bernes himself once joked that of the three necessary components of any singer – a voice, a musical ear, and the desire to sing – he was blessed only with the third.51 Поет Марк Бернес Мне слышится песня Бернеса, Мне видится издалека: Стоит он спокойный, белесый, Уже постаревший слегка. Поет, перед публикой стоя, Отнюдь не во фрак разодет, Лицо его очень простое. А голоса, собственно, нет. Но тут совершается чудо, И песни тревожат сердца, А это не так-то уж худо Для каждого в мире певца. Да, слышал певцов я немало, У них голоса хороши. Но им никогда не хватало Вот этой вот самой … души. 180

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mark bernes За яркой эстрадною кромкой, Верхов не бери, не звеня, Звучит этот голос негромкий, Ведя и волнуя меня. Мне юность прошедшую видно. В полнеба играет гроза. И, знаешь, нисколько не стыдно, Что вдруг повлажнели глаза.52 [Mark Bernes Sings. I hear a Bernes song and see him from afar. He stands calm and whitish, already a tad older. He stands before the public and sings, though not in a tuxedo; his face is very simple. Strictly speaking, he’s got no voice. But then a miracle takes place. His songs excite people’s hearts, which is no mean feat for any singer, anywhere. I’ve heard quite a few singers who have fine voices, but they never had that – what’s it called? – soul. Beyond the estrada’s bright fringes that quiet voice is heard. It does not sound loudly: Don’t go for the high notes! It leads me on and excites me. I see once again my youth in the past. A thunderstorm plays across half the sky and, you know what, without the slightest shame you sense moisture in your eyes.]

The ability to cultivate the type of comfortable philosophy that happily took raillery in its stride became impossible when Bernes discovered he was suffering from lung cancer. In the last fifty-one days of his life, spent in hospital, he lost eighteen kilograms. He died on 17 August 1969, a Saturday.53 His obituary described him as a Communist “with charm,” whose repertoire was “amazingly multifaceted … bringing indisputable joy to his listeners and viewers.”54 On the Monday (only then because of the weekend), he was proposed as a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union, but it was pointed out from anonymous quarters that such awards are not presented posthumously. The idea was dropped. Bernes was buried to the music of four of his own songs: “Life, I Love You” (Ia liubliu tebia, zhizn’), “Cranes” (Zhuravli), “I Have Dreamed of You for Three Years” (Tri goda ty mne snilas’), and “Roshchin’s Romance” (Romans Roshchina [Pochemu ty mne ne vstretilas’]).55 People were so surprised at his early departure from life and the swiftness with which his disease had advanced that expressions of disbelief could be heard beside the funeral procession from elderly ladies, only just informed that Bernes had passed away.56 A little over a year later, there appeared a modest memorial in his name in Moscow, its unveiling attended by the most important people – “relatives, friends and comrades.”57 In order to guarantee 181

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the permanence of Bernes as a symbol for the Russian people, a group of Russian astronomers named a star after the singer in 1994. As one journalist pointed out, the name was a fine idea, if only because “Planet Bernes” sounds better than “Star #3038.”58 It would appear that his influence had travelled well beyond the “estrada’s bright fringes,” in fact 280 million kilometres from Earth, which is a very long way for a quiet voice.59

some quiet songs: life, i love you! I always try to metamorphose into the person in whose name I’m singing the song. Sometimes that person is me, on other occasions the person’s not synonymous with me.60

Now that we know why Bernes sang, let us examine several of his songs to see how emotion from the outer empire comes into the centre of that space with such success that it then radiates outward, representing the same empire at a distance of 280 million kilometres. It makes sense to look at his repertoire chronologically, starting with “Clouds Rose above the City” of 1936 and shown in the film Man with a Rifle. A text of the Stalinist Purges, as already mentioned, this song shows no kinship with contemporary politics. It has, perhaps, some of the marchlike qualities we see in the big successes of Dunaevskii and LebedevKumach, but depicts a man full of early revolutionary romanticism, a spirit with more devil-may-care demeanour than we might expect from the writers of Pesnia o Rodine. A young man heads off to join the ranks of workers’ brigades in the name of “the people’s happiness.” Тучи над городом встали, В воздухе пахнет грозой За далекой за Нарвской заставой Парень идет молодой. Далека ты, путь-дорога … Выйди, милая моя! Мы простимся с тобой у порога, И, быть может, навсегда. [The clouds rose above the city and a storm could be sensed in the air. Beyond the distant Narva outpost walks a young man. Road and path of mine, you stretch far into the distance … Come outside, my dear! We’ll say goodbye on the threshold, perhaps for the last time.]

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In literature of the initial post-revolutionary period, many metaphors of home and hearth were sacrificed to those of movement and departure. This song, reflecting historical actuality, is unable to tell a merry tale of sheltered sweethearts, but what it does do is validate memory. Remembering is affirming, which is saying yes, no matter how hard the context or how long it will endure. Приходи же, друг мой милый! Поцелуй меня в уста. И, клянусь, я тебя до могилы Не забуду никогда! [Come my dearest darling! Kiss me on the lips. I swear that from now till the grave I’ll never forget you!]

By the time World War Two is approaching, dramas need no longer look over their shoulder to find and reference a stirring military context. The threat of foreign intervention is growing and the theme of love grows correspondingly small, self-protective, and very precious. Cities no longer have clouds flying over their sweeping expanses; now the city is a “dear” place, one that is very quiet and almost an inverted (i.e., urban) idyll as the soldier returns from the noisier and dangerous (battle) fields. В далекий край товарищ улетает, Родные ветры вслед за ним летят. Любимый город в синей дымке тает; Знакомый дом, зеленый сад и нежный взгляд. Пройдет товарищ все фронты и войны, Не зная сна, не зная тишины. Любимый город может спать спокойно, И видеть сны, и зеленеть среди весны. Когда ж домой товарищ мой вернется, За ним родные ветры прилетят. Любимый город другу улыбнется: Знакомый дом, зеленый сад, веселый взгляд. [A comrade flies off to distant lands; native winds fly behind him. His beloved city dissolves in blue smoke. A familiar building, a green garden, a tender gaze. This comrade will experience everything on the front lines and battles, knowing neither sleep nor calm. His beloved city

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in practice can sleep peacefully. It may dream and blossom in spring. When my comrade returns home, those native winds will come behind him. The beloved city will smile to its friend: a familiar building, a green garden, and a happy gaze.]

Here the final adjective is “happy.” The one thing missed, treasured most, and granted last is happiness. In one of the two songs from Two Warriors, entitled “Flat Boats” or “Kostia’s Song” (“among the people”), this logic continues. One man (Kostia) from one city (Odessa) sings of one man and one girl, because “Odessa is very [or too] big” for a single text. Nonetheless, as this urban canvas contracts to depict just two people, it becomes increasingly happy; it moves from happy work to a happy home. It shrinks, but intensifies, as it were, to the point stressed by Soviet criticism: Kostia, the hero of his own song, is no longer seen as somebody from Odessa or even as Ukrainian; he is every man (or at least every Soviet man). The more joyful the story, the more it means; the more private it is, the more public relevance is accrued. Шаланды, полные кефали, В Одессу Костя привозил, И все биндюжники вставали, Когда в пивную он входил. Синеет море за бульваром, Каштан над городом цветет. Наш Константин берет гитару И тихим голосом поет. «Я вам не скажу за всю Одессу – Вся Одесса очень велика … Но и Молдаванка и Пересыпь Обожают Костю моряка.» Рыбачка Соня как-то в мае, Причалив к берегу баркас, Сказала Косте: «Все вас знают, А я так вижу в первый раз! …» В ответ, достав «Казбека» пачку, Ей молвил Костя с холодком: «Вы интересная чудачка, Но дело, видите ли, в том» …

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mark bernes Фонтан черемухой покрылся, Бульвар Французский весь в цвету. «Наш Костя, кажется, влюбился,» – Кричали грузчики в порту. Об этой новости неделю Шумели в море рыбаки, На свадьбу грузчики надели Со страшным скрипом башмаки. [Kostia brought flat boats, full of grey mullet, to Odessa, and all the local dockers stood up whenever he went into the bar. The sea is blue beyond the boulevard and above the city chestnuts bloom. Our Kostia takes up a guitar and begins to sing gently. “I won’t sing to you about all of Odessa. All of Odessa – that’s a lot! But I’ll tell you that Moldovanka and Peresyp’ (districts of the city) adore Kostia …” One May Sonya the fisherwoman told Kostia, after she’d tied her long boat to the shore: “Everybody knows you, but this is the first time I’ve seen you!” Kostia replied by getting out a packet of “Kazbek” cigarettes and saying to her, a little coldly: “You’re an interesting piece of work, but, you see, the thing is that I won’t sing to you of all Odessa …” Fontanka (another district) is covered in birdcherry, French Boulevard is all in bloom. “Looks like our Kostia’s fallen in love!” cried the stevedores on the docks. The fishermen shouted the news at sea for a week. For the wedding the stevedores put on their best shoes, the ones that make an awful creaking sound.]

German troops broke through Odessa’s defences on 16 October 1941. To say the very least, this placed the local processes of affirmation in a position of having to work hard. In Two Warriors we also have the song “A Dark Night” (Temnaia noch’), sung by an inhabitant of Odessa who is forced by Fascist skirmishes to hide, stay perfectly still, and sing very quietly. His song of reminiscence and devotion from a place of maximum retreat is fraught with verbs such as “love,” “believe,” and “know.” Desire and reality go head to head as degrees of faith and fear do constant battle. Darkness on the battlefield and in a nocturnal dwelling are the same; the task is to fill that emptiness with a conviction strong enough to overcome distance, doubts, and even death. Темная ночь, только пули свистят по степи, Только ветер гудит в проводах, тускло звезды мерцают. В темную ночь ты, любимая, знаю, не спишь, И у детской кроватки тайком ты слезу утираешь.

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in practice Как я люблю глубину твоих ласковых глаз, Как я хочу к ним прижаться сейчас губами! Темная ночь разделяет, любимая, нас, И тревожная, черная степь пролегла между нами. Верю в тебя, в дорогую подругу мою, Эта вера от пули меня темной ночью хранила … Радостно мне, я спокоен в смертельном бою, Знаю, встретишь с любовью меня, что б со мной ни случилось. Смерть не страшна, с ней не раз мы встречались в степи. Вот и сейчас надо мной она кружится. Ты меня ждешь и у детской кроватки не спишь, И поэтому знаю: со мной ничего не случится! [A dark night, when only bullets whistle across the steppe. Only the wind howls through the wire; the stars shine faintly. I know that on such a dark night, my dear, you won’t be sleeping. I know you’re secretly wiping away a tear by the baby’s cot. How I love the depth of your tender eyes. How I want to press my lips to them right now! The dark night separates us, dear, and an uneasy steppe has spread out between us. I believe in you, my dearest darling. That faith has saved me from a bullet in this dark night. I’m both glad and calm in this fatal battle. I know that whatever happens, you’ll meet me with love. Death is not terrible. We’ve met more than once on the steppe. Death hovers above me even now. You’re waiting for me by the baby’s cot, not sleeping, and that’s how I know nothing will happen to me!]

In both of those sung stories, Temnaia noch’ and Shalandy, polnye kefali, affirmation somehow survives and happiness is produced with sufficient success to last until the Thaw. In Bernes’s signature work, “Life, I Love You!” (Ia liubliu tebia, zhizn’) of 1956, that joy sounds loud and clear, if for no other reason than it contracted to the smallest possible dimensions during the Purges and World War Two, only now to breathe a loud, long sigh of relief. Here in this text is all that Bernes stood for: hard work of civil consequence; the broad expanses of masculine enterprise; the smaller, eternally precious domain of a home; and the ethical consequences of estrada. It is all passed on to other listeners or generations, together with the potential for it to happen over and over again, producing one jubilant present. Я люблю тебя, Жизнь, Что само по себе и не ново. Я люблю тебя, Жизнь, Я люблю тебя снова и снова. 186

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mark bernes Вот уж окна зажглись, Я шагаю с работы устало. Я люблю тебя, Жизнь, И хочу, чтобы лучше ты стала. Мне немало дано: Ширь земли и равнина морская, Мне известна давно Бескорыстная дружба мужская. В звоне каждого дня Как я счастлив, что нет мне покоя! Есть любовь у меня. Жизнь, ты знаешь, что это такое. Как поют соловьи. Полумрак. Поцелуй на рассвете. И вершина любви – Это чудо великое – дети! Вновь мы с ними пройдем Детство, юность, вокзалы, причалы. Будут внуки потом, Все опять повторится сначала. Ах, как годы летят. Мы грустим, седину замечая. Жизнь, ты помнишь солдат, Что погибли, тебя защищая? Так ликуй и вершись В трубных звуках весеннего гимна! Я люблю тебя, Жизнь, И надеюсь, что это взаимно. [Life, I love you, which is nothing new in itself. Life, I love you; I’ll do so over and over. Lights come on in windows as I walk home from work, tired. I love you, Life, and hope that things get better. I’ve been granted a lot: the sweep of the earth and the sea’s expanse. I’ve known unselfish masculine friendship for a long time. In the hubbub of each day I’m so happy that I have no peace and quiet! I have love – and you, Life, know what love is. How the nightingales sing! Twilight. A kiss at dawn. And the pinnacle of love, that wonderful miracle – children! With them we’ll pass through childhood, youth, along stations and quays. Then there’ll be 187

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in practice grandchildren – and it’ll all start again. Oh, how the years fly by; we grow sad, noticing grey hair. Life, do you remember the soldiers who died defending you? Celebrate and be alive in the trumpeted sounds of a spring anthem! Life, I love you and hope the feeling’s mutual.]

progression and discovery in the films of mark bernes A Soviet star performer could stay successful for decades with two or three hit songs! Relations between these darlings of the Soviet public were sufficiently affable that they had no need to keep overtaking each other.61

By now examining the plots of Mark Bernes’s movies separately from the sung texts as their raison d’être, we can justify the Soviet journalist quoted above, who claimed, “These songs are not simply inserted into the role. They are an essential part of an image’s dramatic development, one that helps a hero discover his spiritual aspect.” The most interesting aspect of this song/story interface is that the songs advocate a state in avoidance of linear time while the films themselves are radically longitudinal, as any ideological “development” or “discovery” must be. The teleology of Soviet Socialist Realism happily harbours (fosters, even) lyrical resting places en route, when progress stops, if only briefly. These resting places are where retrospection takes place, where affective strength is gathered, which inspires and engenders further “development.” The rest allows for and creates discovery; the popular lyric fuels the narrative of public political progress at the same time that politics permits the lyric. They use each other just as civic “progress and discovery” engender an individual’s “spiritual aspect,” his or her dissolution of subjectivity into many (recalled and affirmed) events, all of which are celebrated in song. What follows is an outline of how these films scribe their progressive tales, how they display their genuinely Soviet aspects, for if this process is to be mutual, if stories and songs are to inform each other, then the screenplay must also be of considerable emotional power. What kind of tales do these films tell? They must both match the emotional intensity of Bernes’s songs and be themselves sufficiently moving (emotionally or socially) that a singer would desire a dissolution of him/herself twice over: in the numerous recalled events of a song’s musing and in the positive, multiple personae of a social drama. If this works, then the happily minor voice of a quiet, lonely lyric is simultaneously a willed humility amid many other events, people, and places.

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What sounds like isolation is actual dissolution: the lyric hero sounds like he is nowhere, yet he is actually everywhere – and contented! The earliest of Bernes’s movies of discovery still remembered today is Chelovek s ruzhem (1936), the research for which was discussed above.62 It tells of a peasant soldier, Ivan Shadrin, and his adventures just after the Revolution. The story actually begins just prior to that event, with a group of soldiers huddled in the trenches of World War One, writing a letter to Lenin with the request that he end this suffering in the name of “universal happiness.”63 Shadrin has his leave cancelled by an officer when he is caught reading revolutionary materials. The officer claims everything concerning Lenin is stuff and nonsense, since the Germans have long since had him on their secret payroll. Shadrin meets Bernes’s character, a “Red Guard” by the name of Kostia Zhigulev, in Petrograd a little later; together the two men evict some wealthy tenants from their mansion on the Neva so that revolutionary soldiers may billet there. As the soldiers rest, Kostia sings them Tuchi nad gorodom vstali while he cleans and greases his rifle. “That’s a good song,” says Shadrin. They then sing it together, developing a sense of comradeship that is later strengthened by a magical meeting with Lenin himself in the corridors of Smolny. Singing the ditty again as they march down the streets of Petrograd, Kostia and Ivan join in the defence of Pulkovo Heights at the south end of the city. Though several of these ardent young soldiers are too young for conscription, they fight with a will. Kostia takes some grenades and blows a railway line to hold a White armoured train in a trap. As the ensuing standoff appears to be going against them, new guns sent by Lenin suddenly save the day. Kostia sings Tuchi to console his dying comrade. Lenin tops this rousing conclusion with a speech, claiming that now, after the Revolution, we need not fear a “man with a gun,” because he will be defending, not threatening, the people. The film Istrebiteli (1939), even more famous, substitutes a love intrigue for exploding trains.64 Here Bernes plays Lieutenant Sergei Kozhukharov, who visits his old school at the time of the draft for World War Two.65 Two competitive friends from that old school quickly find – after the draft – that they have unexpectedly been given the same squadron, even the same missions. The squadron commanders are a little uneasy that two men so patently competitive are flying together. Scenes of friendship still predominate in the screenplay, though, and it is here in the genial pilots’ mess that Bernes sits down at the piano and sings Liubimyi gorod.66 As on screen, so in real life, Bernes was seen as the embodiment of friendship and the champion of unobtrusive human relationships in a very grand society.67

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All the same, Kozhukharov is shown as a man with a prickly character who distinguishes between ideals and ideologizing. He snaps at his superior officer. These elements compete inside him until he faces the greatest challenge of his life: blindness. He loses his sight when saving a boy from a possible firework accident. He can fly no more and turns quickly to the bottle. The girl he and his friend once fought over comes to visit as soon as she hears of the accident; she is told a lie, that Kozhukharov is married, to stop her from making a proposal to him simply from pity. Time passes by. In days to come the two friends are surprised when they find themselves brought together by thick fog in a tiny, isolated aerodrome. No apparent change has taken place, but Kozhukharov is on a flight to have an operation and hopefully save his sight. The operation takes place, and in the moment of truth, the bandages are slowly removed from his face – “Light!!” Only now, recalling his blindness, does he realize the value of friendship and the support of others. He makes friends with his fellow pilot, meets the young girl once again, and this time marries her. The film Bol’shaia zhizn’ (1939) has already been mentioned in the chapter on Izabella Iur’eva.68 It merges the personal and public with greater ease than Chelovek s ruzhem or Istrebiteli. The opening scenes show an angry Bernes (as a certain Comrade Petukhov) listening to a record by Iur’eva and storming with gypsy passion out of the mining town where he works, having been offended during an argument. Nonetheless, he calms down and is later made temporary head engineer of a local mineshaft. There are problems among the younger shift members: drink and truancy. In this film Bernes’s character is twenty-six years old and has a girlfriend in distant Moscow. This bigcity intellectual is quickly unpopular, and in fact an extremely unpleasant local official deliberately tries to stir up bad feelings between Petukhov and the other workers. One of the unruly men, Khariton, gets horribly drunk and breaks a window at a women’s dormitory, trying to get a girl’s attention late one night. During his trial, a shaft collapses at the mines, an event that can be seen as a broader, metaphorical expression of the same disorder. Petukhov, having had prior trouble with the accused, wonders if he is somehow to blame. However, saboteurs and “wreckers,” it turns out, caused the troubles. All is soon well, in fact so good that the prior drunks now band together to break the shaft record. Social order is shown to be both spoiled and mended by personal (ir)responsibility or choice. To celebrate this discovery an extra song sounds loud in the final minutes: “Onward, Stakhanovite Generation!” (Vpered, stakhanovskoe plemia!).

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Four years after that rousing cry, Dva boitsa (Two Warriors) was released.69 Here Bernes’s quieter but no less determined character is Arkadii Dziubin. Two conscripts of the Leningrad front of World War Two are initially shown with other soldiers in complete silence as they write home from the theatre of war to their loved ones. Dziubin sings them Temnaia noch’ before he is himself saddened by news from his home, whose sunny streets and city gardens are being bombarded by German artillery. This consoling song deserves an extra parallel with the screenplay. It was, like the film, composed in Tashkent in 1943, but it caused the composer (Nikita Bogoslovskii), poet (Vladimir Agatov), and director a great deal of trouble.70 They could not make it capture the desired state of what they called “spiritual penetration and lyricism.”71 Finally Bernes’s voice brought the music the “one and only unique tone” they had all sought.72 They knew in advance it would be a success, because as they went out at daybreak with their new song some of the studio hands were already singing it, having heard snippets in the making throughout the night as they had passed by, surreptitiously checking on how the work was progressing.73 As one journalist would later say, Bernes gave composers his emotions and thus songs were born, pure and simple, with no great deliberation.74 The film as a whole was a bit of a rush job, too. It was based on a recent newspaper story about two front-line soldiers: “a story of two soldiers’ friendship, one man from the Urals and the other from Odessa, a tale both funny and sad.” The screenwriter had no time even to edit his draft. He only managed to read it out loud to his dog, just to check how it sounded. The dog, it appears, did not object, and thus a manuscript was produced. Although it draws upon the hero’s Ukrainian origins, in fact the screenplay allows the emotions or sentimental heritage of Odessa to overshadow that city’s geographic significance. The hero is Soviet, not Ukrainian, as the national press made abundantly clear and I contended above.75 In the same way, perhaps, that an aforesaid emotion makes Odessa part of everywhere, so – held the Soviet media – the film’s popularity spread beyond Russia to Poland, for example, with great ease.76 The private philosophical consequences of a dissipated subjectivity (one’s self or “home” being everywhere at once) do double duty as Soviet détente. Nobody objects or is offended. Domestic and diplomatic metaphors help each other. In the search for domestic comfort and love, Dziubin and his comrade, Sasha, go to look for a girl Sasha had seen in a queue buying lemonade months before. With a little detective work they find her. Dziubin sings her the Pesnia pro Kostiu and she is lost in light-hearted reverie. Thus begins the friendly sparring between Arkadii and Sasha over this very pretty and good-natured young woman. The rivalry

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continues, and Bernes sings the same verses a little later when he finds a guitar buried in some dust after a bomb explodes and the soldiers’ shelter is destroyed. Sasha himself is wounded amid these ongoing hazards, but because he is still miffed at Arkadii’s romantic success, he refuses his friend’s hospital visits and flowers. In actual fact, Arkadii has been sending food and poetry to the lemonade girl (Katya), all in Sasha’s name to help him win her. Sasha eventually has the same idea to help Arkadii when his friend is stuck in a neighbouring dugout, now singing the quiet praises of “Leningrad, blessed city.” The matter appears decided when Sasha saves Katya after yet another bombing raid targets her home and four previous potential champions are unable to extricate her. Friendship helps Sasha to beat illness and bad moods and to win the lemonade girl. Camaraderie at war is also the central theme of Velikii perelom (The Great Breakthrough, 1945).77 Here Bernes plays the small but almost legendary role of the military chauffeur, Minutka. He talks of the forthcoming battle in Stalingrad with great vivacity, optimism, and good humour, for which the officers around him are very grateful. His dauntless affirmation of comradely strength in numbers leads the officers to see Minutka as an equal. He is christened the “General of All Drivers.” Brotherhood deserves films both lyrical and loud; Soviet commanders and lemonade girls welcome its strength and authority. This apparently easygoing intimacy hides a rousing heroism, however. During one attack, when an essential wire is fractured between a communications post and some men in the field, Minutka crawls a few hundred metres through the mud, beneath bullets that whistle by inches above the ground. He finds the broken wire, and unable to lift his arms from both pain and the low enemy fire, he puts the two frayed ends in his mouth, clamps his teeth shut, and dies in the mire of no man’s land. Just as the development of an Odessa heritage in Shalandy, polnye kefali turns one man’s import into a trans-Soviet expression of affect, so Bernes’s films grow in spatio-temporal scale or relevance. The kind of friendship shown both in no man’s land and on Civvy Street is now shifted to other contexts. Emotion is shown at work in the past and in other places. Bernes turned away from modern events in 1951 with a historical drama about the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, in which he adopts the role of a certain Camp Commandant Kosarev.78 The film, entitled Taras Shevchenko, begins in St Petersburg, 1841, with the news of the poet Lermontov’s violent death. Bernes breaks almost at once into a song of mourning: “A raven will call upon the roof; the autumn rain will pass” (Na kryshe voron prokrichit / Osennii dozhd’ proidet).

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Kosarev is an officer in the Orenburg Special Corps during Shevchenko’s exile on the Caspian Sea in 1847. He brings the rebellious poet into the officers’ mess, ignoring his lowly rank as a shamed demoted private, officially banned from writing or even painting. Bernes’s figure sympathizes with Shevchenko, just as the Soviet officers admired Minutka; the Ukrainian is thus allowed to paint. Despite Kosarev’s compassion, he is, all the same, a part of the regime that oppresses Shevchenko; this is made clear in an episode in which he executes a prisoner for striking a garrison officer. Bernes no doubt drew upon the resulting complexities of psychology or aspiration, since, in a newspaper article, he praised the film’s director (I. Savchenko) for “feeling the internal state of the actor.”79 Other memories of honing his character endorsed such a view: veracity to the complexity of desire, to “the truth of life,” is uppermost. He aimed to show all emotional aspects of a character, over and above ideology. Even ugly characters are afforded great attention such that they do not regress into social stereotype: When I say that Bernes fashioned his images according to the truth of life, I mean he would stubbornly, step by step, stroke by stroke, grow closer to his role. In the film Taras Shevchenko as the officer Kosarev, he defends Shevchenko, who has been sent to the fortress. Bernes sought but could not find the gestures that would allow him to show his personal dislike for a particular captain who had treated a lesser soldier unsuitably. He put his foot on a stool near him, hatefully waved a guitar near his face, and then, as if to create a barrier between the captain and himself, held the guitar close to his chest. He asked what costume he should wear for the episode and was overjoyed when the director suggested he wear a [traditional] red silk blouse, buttoned on one side of the collar.80

How, though, do forward-looking, linear Soviet stories combine with this tendency to endorse all emotional aspects of an individual? The didactic tendencies of dogma are mollified in tales of a correct, sentimental education. Bernes ages as an actor and comes to play kindly father figures, as in Maksimka of 1952.81 The film takes place on the high seas of 1864, where his character works as a doctor aboard the ship Bogatyr’. The opening scenes are loudly punctuated by Russian cannon fire, directed at an American vessel loaded with slaves, several of whom end up overboard, especially after the Americans order all their human cargo be jettisoned. Bernes examines one of them, a little boy whom he tells sensitively: “You’ll soon be a hero.” The child seems hardly fit for scribing a hero’s narrative or entertaining any other

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social business, since he never smiles, speaks only English, and answers to the rather sad name of “Boy.” Little by little, Boy is charmed by the smiles of the Russian soldiers, but his mistreatment at the hands of the Americans results in his being standoffish towards even the fatherly Russian captain. One of the sailors, Luchkin, thus decides to play “nanny” to Boy. His guardianship means that the little slave need not be handed over to a (cruel) British governor for legal safekeeping in Hong Kong. Luchkin gives up the bottle and starts behaving like a father to the youngster, whom they now call Maksimka. After some initial problems, Luchkin’s paternal intentions are sufficient that the ship can officially adopt Maksimka. He works as his small body allows, helping out on deck. The child is stolen back by the slave trader when Luchkin is drugged in an onshore bar, and both the sailor and Maksimka are dragged aboard the Mary from San Diego. The Russian sailors only find Maksimka again when they sail among the moored American vessels at night and sing, hoping that Maksimka will hear, recognize, and answer the familiar Slavic melodies. He does so, and thus he and Luchkin are both saved. He joins the crew again, this time for good, and is now given a last name in honor of the ship – Bogatyrev. Maksimka is an exotic marginal figure used to test a coming-of-age narrative. His successful experiences are dispersed or universalized in The Freezing Seas (More studenoe) of 1954.82 This ensemble drama takes the good and proper emotions of Maksimka, an insignificant Black boy, and makes them of sufficient social, if not ubiquitous, application so that one child becomes several men and the time of the story’s action seems almost irrelevant. Propitious emotions and moral principles refer to anybody, anywhere, at any time. The rejection of doctrine in favour of compassionate mores, however, does not allow us to escape politics, since the timeless applicability of social values includes Soviet society, whether More studenoe takes place two hundred and fifty years ago or not. Some eighteenth-century sailors from the far north of Russia run into pirates and find themselves stuck on an uninhabited island. Except for one faithful girl, all the women at home assume after several years that their loved ones are dead. The men, however, have somehow managed to survive, inspired by a text they find scratched on wood by other sailors who many years before had also been marooned on the island before eventually dying from starvation or being killed by bears. One story inspires another. Bernes here plays Okladnikov, a genuinely hard-hearted merchant who after four years refuses to send out search parties for the men. Meanwhile, only in their sixth year of frozen exile do the men find a wrecked ship on a

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distant shore of their island and begin to build a smaller ship from it. Their hut is destroyed in a fire, however, and the work on the vessel has to be scrapped, since the sailors must use the same planks to construct another shelter, lest they freeze to death. Finally, the men are discovered and taken home, stopping the marriage of Okladnikov to one of the understandably doubting sweethearts, minutes before it takes place. Here Bernes is outside the ensemble that embodies and explicates the emotional or ethical passages undergone; he plays a wholly negative character in order to emphasize the sailors’ gradual enlightenment. In the same year, though, he re-enters the noble fray with the very popular movie School of Courage (Shkola muzhestva).83 Bernes is a weary soldier, Afanasii Chubuk, returning home from the trenches of World War One. A boy asks him if he has seen his father and Chubuk tells him (truthfully) that the man deserted, having been charged with the distribution of anti-czarist propaganda among the troops. The father himself returns soon after and speaks romantically to his son of the coming Revolution, when people will “sing like nightingales from happiness” at the Czar’s abdication. The boy’s interest in things revolutionary grows, especially under the additional benevolent influence of Chubuk, since the father is constantly on the run. “He’s almost my son,” says Bernes. The young man lies about his birthday in order to see active service in the Civil War after revolution does indeed take place. He is injured in an explosion at the front and then almost killed by a White soldier of his own age. When he is reunited with Chubuk, the boy tells him he cannot wait to grow up in the “radiant kingdom of socialism.” As if to guarantee that radiance, he saves Chubuk’s life during a surprise raid by the Whites on a farmhouse where they are resting. The older man is captured, though, and executed when he refuses to give information of the Reds’ whereabouts. The boy sees this happen and – though stunned – is later taken on by his comrades as a fully fledged adult scout. He finds Chubuk’s killer and takes violent revenge. For such deeds of bravery he is adopted by the Party. Stalin passes away, and the movies – thankfully – become much lighter, initially with a football comedy entitled The Reserve (Zapasnoi igrok).84 It concerns some factory football teams in Leningrad, where Bernes (Kolomiagin) works as athletic director at a radio assembly plant. He is a tough leader, shown early on when he benches the team’s captain for doubting their ability to win. The teams head off to a summer tournament in the Caucasus, transported on a cruise ship together with some ethnographers (who are studying longevity in the South) and movie actors. One of the elderly scientists, saddened at the lack of songs in Soviet estrada dedicated to old people, sings that

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“the passing years don’t worry us … never let your soul grow old!” Even though it transpires that this senior citizen is actually one of the actors, testing his mimicry skills, the fact that a “pensioner” would defend the enjoyment of estrada by all generations is not at all odd. It fits our picture of estrada movies as tales of private feeling doubling as vehicles for socially universal and desirable practice. Bernes’s wife said that the people who listened to her husband’s songs included “old men and people around forty, even those who are still very young … Each person found in his songs something of their own, something that was understandable only to him or her.”85 Subjective and Soviet significances are one and the same. Neither is doctrinal. Private becomes public in this film when the actor challenges one of Bernes’s shy, less competent players to a boxing match, which the trainer stops just in time and, in the name of friendship, declares a draw. The now feisty young player has shown his grit and thus wins a place on the team. After the keeper is injured in a match, the young player takes his place, having already scored two goals. The opposition draws even, but the same player then scores a last-minute penalty and Bernes’s team, the Blue Arrows, wins 3–2. The private triumph has raised the team effort above itself. Even amid such sporting merriment, revolutionary bluster was sadly not yet a thing of the past, returning in They Were the First (Oni byli pervymi) of 1956.86 It begins in 1918 in Petrograd, where Bernes (Rodionov) is a regional official amidst the post-revolutionary chaos. He is unwilling to “varnish” over these problems and in fact tells a journalist that if times are tough, “Say so.” He asks a young man recently back from the front, Alesha, to organize the local youth in a positive and productive manner, while a less desirable colleague suggests doing so with booze, pretty girls, and – heaven forbid – popular music. We see first young people strengthened by love for a girl, and then we see their social resolve firm when a friend is lost to a wrecker’s ruinous sabotage. The film goes to considerable and irksome effort to draw connections between these wreckers, their aristocratic backgrounds, and decadent aesthetics. Rodionov calls those who can shake off these influences “Young Warriors of the Revolution.” One such man shuns his own “degenerate” impression of women, for example, by loudly asserting instead, “Woman is human life.” He then heads off for service in the Civil War to fight for the Reds, as does his girlfriend. She dies on the front line, “Will anybody remember us?” she asks. “They will and must,” comes the answer. “Those like us were the first.” Affect loads itself with excessive dogma, becomes tied to one (past) event, and loses its contemporary relevance. The film is large, loud, and unpopular. Bernes’s later films avoid such pathos and artfully “historical” themes.87 Take, for example, Case No. 306 (Delo No.306),88 which 196

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begins with a speeding car hitting an elderly lady and a policeman late one night. Bernes here plays Gradov, a senior detective involved in the Moscow-wide search for the vehicle. Despite the vigour of some younger policemen, the wise and wily Gradov comes to play the greater role in this 1956 case and catch the bigger fish. It is he who stages the final exposé, when the truth is revealed to a group of dismayed criminals and flabbergasted suspects. (It turns out that the victim had refused to accept a bribe and was run over as a result.) The fatherly roles continue in the next year, albeit with a radical twist, in Night Patrol (Nochnoi patrul’).89 Here Bernes plays the truly novel role of a criminal, Ogonek, in fact a repeat offender. The story at first concerns some inaccuracies found in police accounts. Then the station’s safe is abruptly stolen, plus all documents therein, and the house accountant murdered. Ogonek comes back into town, speaking English and hanging out in dance halls. People are suspicious. Ten years prior the police had told him: “Go away. Work hard in prison. Do some thinking.” They believed that, with time and devoted guidance, he could be refashioned as a good man once again. Ogonek stays mum, but – in a musical moment – sings, “Not even birds can live without a homeland” and appears genuinely glad to be back.90 Seeing the marital and familial happiness of another ex-inmate also does much to dissuade him from crime (and persuade us of his innocence). The heart is the best judge of (and for) a socialized man. Meanwhile, the person closest to the felony, it happens, is a jazz chanteuse who insists on whispering sweet words in English. She wears what is called “excessive” makeup. Such questionable types are soon revealed as the real culprits, not Ogonek. He is shown instead remembering the wise words of a police officer: “You have to take a risky step in the name of real life.” He had done so and became a better man for it, hence the praise that soon came from the Soviet press: the movie celebrated the “humanity” of socialist society.91 Unfortunately, the role was played so convincingly that at one point Bernes’s life was in danger; some real-life criminals planned to murder him, taking him for a bona fide ex-con after having seen the movie.92 (Absurd, but true.) The realm of criminal work proved such fertile ground for stories of emotional drama that it was used again for It Happened in the Police Station (Èto sluchilos’ v militsii) of 1963.93 Bernes plays another senior police officer, Troshin, who helps to find people in the sixties lost during World War Two. (Finally we reach the sentiment of the Thaw, almost shorn of ideology.) The work in Leningrad allows for some criticism of fat, stupid bureaucrats and (once again) excessively madeup secretaries who slow down important, passionately earnest police work. Here the crash and bang of battle are vigorously toned down. There are several scenes about infant, wartime orphans and how they were 197

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given names by local officials or doctors to rectify their anonymity, all of which (twenty years later) makes hunting for them and their relatives almost impossible. The film, thankfully, concentrates on the happy reunion of an elderly man and his son, a scene of perfect emotion set against the (admittedly inconspicuous) bureaucracy of Troshin’s own office, which he himself finds distasteful. The workings of state machinery are humanized in this film, and the same is done for belligerent, militaristic bluster in Eugene, Eugenia, and Katie (Zhenia, Zhenechka i Katiusha), where sensibility is placed even further forward.94 It tells of how a certain Eugene or Zhenia meets his future wife on the front in August 1941; he does so by stumbling, with soap in his eyes, into the female wash area at the front. Bernes is Karavaev, an elderly general seen walking across screen fairly often, although he says virtually nothing. There is even the occasional joke about this strange man who wanders about the battlefield remarking only that the sweeping bleakness reminds him of a painting by Turner. Two soldiers discuss his identity. – Have you seen the film Dva boitsa? – What’s that got to do with anything? – Quite a lot. That colonel looks just like Mark Bernes …

Bad or dangerous behaviour is hidden from the charitable general, such as when the young hero, stumbles – again – upon a Nazi New Year’s party and is forced to see the old year out according to Berlin time! He is given a present, fortuitously dumped on the way back (it turns out to have been a bomb). In the Soviet celebrations a couple of hours later, we see a treasured military gramophone with a small stack of Utesov records. These strange, unplanned encounters occur between front-line lovers, too, who cross paths in a manner reminiscent of Doktor Zhivago. When the sweethearts finally meet alone and kiss in an abandoned mansion, it turns out to be the family residence of one of the carolling Fascists from New Year’s Eve. The Fascist, now, psychologically deranged by the German defeat, chases and shoots the girl. In this quiet, sometimes witty and self-referential film, lyric and civic themes are very closely interwoven indeed, even once aggressive swagger is removed. The Soviet self is never entirely private.

conclusion: the civic commitment of a lyric performer Bernes often said that in his lyric songs he sought to create a “civic [yet not military] spirit.” That spirit meant a lot to the front-line

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soldiers; those in battle did not want to hear about battle. Soldiers during World War Two would, for example, trade their entire daily rations for a Bernes record. “Why? The song on it would be universally human, simple and full of civic spirit. Bernes’s civic air was quiet and unobtrusive.”95 That unobtrusiveness was, all the same, part of Soviet and state-approved culture. Bernes’s wife, again a valuable chronicler of her husband’s feelings, did not believe in 1996 that a bona fide memorial would ever be built to her husband, since the plans to do so had fallen apart, both financially and politically in 1991.96 The Soviets were, ironically, the one political faction that could be relied upon to celebrate Bernes’s modest social commitment, fashioned through introspection and contemplation. Capitalist enterprise had (and has) no time for the reflective and ultimately altruistic dissolving of subjectivity in various social and sociable processes – none of which are in a hurry to get anywhere. Bernes’s whispered songs, emotion, and compassion heralded the Thaw, and to some degree we have reached the first pages of Red Stars, since Èdita P’ekha entered Leningrad State University in 1955, a decade and a half before Bernes’s passing. In order to do full justice to the significance of song, though, we should now, as we come full circle, cast one last, long glance across the twentieth century. We should look at the oldest form of singing celebrated in that century – traditional folk lyrics – and see what they meant as Soviet doctrine permitted, ignored, or employed an art form much older than itself. What could twentieth-century politics possibly do with songs performed chiefly by women hundreds of years ago?

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8 PRISON AND PRESTIGE: THE FOLK SONGS OF LIDIIA RUSLANOVA AND LIUDMILA ZYKINA Zykina: I think it’d be hard to find somebody in this multinational country of ours who doesn’t know Lidiia Ruslanova … I learned all her clever folk verses and laments by heart from old gramophone records.1

“think of me on a spring night …” In the rather melancholy comedy of 1987 Forgotten Melody for the Flute, director Èl’dar Riazanov depicts with increasing cruelty a grey, crumbling department within the central Soviet bureaucracy. One of its directors sends a large group of female folk singers on a tour of the provinces. As the film goes about its business of disclosing the primary plot, we are offered frequent shots of these women, who simply cannot get home. The pen-pushers in Moscow have bungled the travel plans so badly that the singers appear caught in a lazy, permanent orbit around the shabby backwaters of the world’s largest country. All the same, the folk ensemble, despite its problems, becomes an oasis of genuine sentiment as the arid workings of the capital’s bureaucracy manifest all their nastiness. The one song used in the film is performed to multiple audiences, both military and civilian, old and young. Everybody smiles and breathes a little easier as they hear the musical invitation to “think of me on a spring night, think of me on a summer night.”2 This folk number, from a stylized text by Evtushenko, unites people in a manner that an ideological organ endorses yet cannot equal. The bureaucrats, the supposed champions of social change, cannot match a social coherence that is considerably older than any political ideology hatched in the industrial wastelands of nineteenth-century England. The Soviets enjoy, endorse, and approve of bucolic folk songs. Folk singers are happy to accommodate their patrons, but ethnic, emotional affirmations have an increasingly hard time, since the death

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throes of Soviet doctrine appear to be dragging them downwards with it. Why did Russia’s most popular comedy director lean on folk songs as an emotional crutch when Soviet claims to social charity began to ring hollow during perestroika? Why, conversely, would an art form eagerly endorsed under the Soviets have more moral integrity than the new expressions that glasnost proffered? Let us take a look at the twentieth century’s two greatest exponents of native Russian song, Lidiia Ruslanova and Liudmila Zykina. The difference between their styles of performance is important here. The infuriating hiss and crackle, which inevitably accompany any of Ruslanova’s scratched recordings today, seem to match the older technique and tradition of her rendition. Her delivery and instrumentation do not have the polished “academic” feel of Zykina’s lush, refined style, where one balalaika, discerned somewhere amid the scratches, is replaced by fifty, playing in seamless unison. Ruslanova’s discs are redolent of a few villagers gathered in a barn or tavern and then – as if inadvertently – put on tape. Whoops and cries of joy and grief pepper Ruslanova’s “ethnographic” recordings, while Zykina’s express a severe respect for all that her colleague achieved several decades prior. Joy and grief enter the canon and deserve the greatest deference.

lidiia ruslanova: the darling of the red army Songs are sung by and from the heart … It seems to me that the heart, more than anything, acts as an artist’s principle director.3 Nature ordered Ruslanova to sing. It shared with her the most important knowledge of all – knowledge of the human heart.4

Before the first year of the twentieth century had drawn to a close, a peasant couple in the town of Saratov celebrated the birth of their daughter, christened Praskov’ia Leikina. Despite her parents’ love, however, she would be orphaned at the age of five and spend the next eleven years in a children’s home. Here begins the very humble tale of a girl who would later be known as Lidiia Ruslanova, the darling of the Red Army. Even Soviet critics were willing to admit that in making such an ascent, her Old Believer background had granted her direct access to a rich emotional tradition, to the faith and “heart of the people.”5 Further sacrifices to the nation (good) or capitalism (bad) helped to inscribe that tradition in future biographical sketches: her father had been killed in the disastrous war 201

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with Japan; her mother had endured many years of toilsome work in a profitable brick factory. The girl’s uncle eventually removed her from the horrors of an institutionalized childhood, but offered a dubious alternative instead: two years of factory work making furniture. Amid this industrial misery she was obliged to beg alms by singing loudly beneath the windows of “rich, fat merchants.”6 Here, though, at their lowest possible ebb, her fortunes improve. She was heard singing by one of the owners at the furniture plant, who recommended she study vocal performance at the Saratov Conservatory. (When Ruslanova was originally overheard, she was somewhat less than willing to declare the voice as her own, fearing punishment for inactivity.) She was accepted into the conservatory, but World War One, during which she worked both at the front and on a hospital train, interrupted these studies. The conflict found her a male companion, Vitalii Stepanov, by whom she had a child in May 1917. Not surprisingly, it was only after the cessation of hostilities that Ruslanova began singing professionally. She was sixteen when she gave her first concert, in a small opera theatre to a military audience. She sang all that she knew, quickly ran out of material, and asked the audience what to do. “Start from the beginning again!” came the answer.7 This early repertoire has been described (or imagined) by Soviet journalists (who were not there) as profoundly emotional: “Rising and falling intonations of both happiness and sadness – laughter through tears. A secret hope for joyful laughter, shining through tears.”8 In the name of objectivity and credibility, I should add that Utesov (who did observe her) also saw the essence of her career in these same terms, as “bringing people joy.”9 The old folk songs that bore these emotions in the adolescent singer gave rise at times to the strangest of descriptions, as even Ruslanova’s heavy, rustic features were seen to exemplify a similarly ancient, profoundly non-urban affect. “From under lowered Mongolian eyelids her Scythian eyes looked at us with both wisdom and vivacity, while a broad smile never disappeared from her wide, pale face.”10 Vigorous touring took her all over the “wide” geography that she apparently embodied, a lifestyle that unfortunately led her consort to abandon her within a year. The facts surrounding that abandonment are moot, given a dearth of information caused in part by Ruslanova’s own unwillingness to write autobiographical material. What the Soviets see as a marital problem here, however, may have been political. A recent brief study of her life published in Saratov makes the claim that she had a husband who was (or became) a White officer, that he had died in the civil war, perhaps without ever leaving his wife. If so, the

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ardour of a fervent “Scythian” singer proved strong enough to hide political problems; a woman’s passion for her work was offered as the truth – and convincingly for decades – instead of the messier tale of czarist allegiance. Passion is stronger than politics and is thus used by politics. But there are also several sources that distinguish between Stepanov and this officer, insisting by way of proof that she took the latter’s name and thus became Ruslanova. As if matters were not sufficiently complex, the singer herself stepped in to muddle the rumours further; she insisted that the name was from the village where her forefathers had resided, in the Archangel region.11 Maybe she was using emotional matters to mask political ones, knowing that the Soviets would be convinced. After these confusing times, she lived with a Cheka official and stayed with him until 1929, when she found yet another spouse. She was now on the threshold of a decade that would bring her enormous popularity. In assessing the roots of that esteem, Soviet critics had surprisingly little trouble making youthful Ruslanova the positive product of prerevolutionary fairgrounds, travelling street singers, and even those who performed for a tipsy clientele in pubs.12 The emotional force of folk songs once again betters that of doctrine’s history. Or does it? Ideology tried to hold its own; such observations would quickly be tempered by the further remark that the period under discussion was just prior to the Revolution, when “folklore” was beginning to adopt a more urban and politically aware tone. This dubious, almost political aspect to native art was often employed in Soviet reviews: it may be pre-revolutionary, but from just before the Revolution. Whenever genuinely old and politically suspicious (i.e., vacuous) texts were performed, the Russian public would be assured that Ruslanova had at least transformed them with modern, post-revolutionary rhythmic manipulations.13 Liudmila Zykina wrote of Ruslanova: “Where she changed the rhythm of a song unexpectedly, I can see now that she often added something illogical or incorrect, but it was nonetheless remarkable, unique, and it created an unparalleled sound.”14 A few years later Zykina said that her own rare moments of free time were spent studying, among other things, “the rhythmic structure of folk dances … and listening to jazz.”15 Throughout all these performances and interpretations inspired by Ruslanova’s ghost, the “image of the work” would remain the same.16 Same goal, same philosophy, different aesthetic approach. Given the inherent conservatism of native cultures, it may seem surprising that a folk artist could inspire heterogeneity. Nonetheless, Ruslanova straddled several wobbly fences, one of which stood between received notions of good and bad taste; she was not infrequently accused of slipping over into the excesses of tsyganshchina,

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even when singing Russian folk songs.17 Her full repertoire caused these problems because it was indeed mixed to the point of provocation. It contained romances (in her early years), the staple of folk songs, and modern standards from the repertoire of other estradniki, such as Raskinulos’ more shiroko, which we now associate with Utesov. In addition were songs from factories, soldiers, and prisoners (like Po dikim stepiam Zabaikal’ia discussed below), and several by Soviet composers, including M. Blanter’s Katiusha celebrated in Bernes’s twilight movie, Zhenia, Zhenechka.18 Modern critics would later marry these odd components by saying that when Ruslanova sang Soviet songs they became “folk.”19 The woman’s rhythmic and generic experiments symbolized a constant reworking of history, which in turn cancelled history. New and changing spaces and generic arenas were folded into and out of each other. Lidiia Ruslanova considered – and rightly so – that the old urban romance is neither an antique curio nor out of place on the Soviet estrada of today. Prerevolutionary workers cherished an entire spectrum of romances for their memorable melodies. There’s a very good reason why belligerent revolutionary songs were written during the Civil War to the tunes of old, “cruel” romances. Later on, the tone and melodies of mass songs in the 1930s again forged a relationship with the identical pre-revolutionary, everyday romances.20

Hostilities and Hope on the Road to Berlin Ruslanova’s success, as with several artists in this book, was cemented during World War Two.21 She performed absolutely everywhere along the front line, inspiring and comforting soldiers, sometimes in “the intensely bright colours” of folk costume, sometimes in “a plain brown dress, with her hair worn simply and smoothed down.”22 Since Soviet journalists defended that very bright costume as wholly appropriate to her status as a rustic Russian woman, its exotic, fairy-tale charm was described as seemly comme il faut; after all, what really mattered was that “she behave herself accordingly.”23 Her most important deeds as a performer, dressed as either a plain Soviet or a colourful peasant woman, were a matter of emotion. Seemliness was defined as the productive social employment of reasonable feeling. One day I sang in a field hospital, just for one man. A severely wounded military intelligence soldier asked me to visit him the moment he heard the estradniki had arrived. I sat at the top of his bed, with his bandaged head on my lap. The young man kept losing consciousness, but looked at me and listened as I sang to him softly about the steppe, forests, and a girl who waits

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lidiia ruslanova and liudmila zykina at home for her beloved … I sat that way for almost half the night. A doctor came in and got ready to send the wounded man into the operating theatre. I stood up and the doctor looked at me with an inquiring look, after which he said, “It’s hopeless, but we’ll do all we can …” Two nurses put the soldier carefully onto a stretcher. He woke up, opened his eyes, and as he was seemingly overcoming his terrible pain, he turned his head and managed to smile at me. I thought he wouldn’t survive, but I was so happy when I got a letter much later and discovered that my soldier had beaten death, had been awarded the Order of Lenin, and had continued to fight against the enemy.24

At this time, it appeared as if everybody in the Soviet Union knew Ruslanova. She became known as the “Nightingale of the Front-Line Roads” for bringing her affectionate songs to frightened and wounded soldiers, who saw and heard in those texts “the best medicine possible.”25 The emotional damage done by Soviet combat was remedied by non-partisan sensitivity that inspired a return to the field of battle. Soviet soldiers perceived the sensitivity in that manner; ideology gave it (and therefore its singer) a meaning on its own nationwide scale. A brief and famous story attests to that scale and status. Touring once at the front, Ruslanova heard her own folk songs coming from a small group of soldiers. “Taking a break?” she asked. “No, we’re on watch,” came the answer. “You’re on watch, but sitting here winding up the gramophone.” “None of your business, Granny. Take a hike.” “Who’s that singing?” she asked. “Granny’s not very bright, either! It’s Ruslanova, the famous singer. You’ve what – never heard of her?” “How can I not have heard of her when I’m Ruslanova. I’ll show you my papers, if you like!” “Maybe they’re false …” “Well at least my voice is real” – and she broke into song.26 As a result of her doughty wartime efforts, Ruslanova was made an Honoured Artist of the Russian Federation and celebrated nationwide for songs such as the comic “Felt Boots” (Valenki), “Steppe, Steppe All Around” (Step’ da step’ krugom), Katiusha, and “Oh Volga” (Ai Volga). The number entitled Valenki (discussed below) is perhaps her most famous and a rarity in that the words are Ruslanova’s own. The celebration of such a simple (and very Slavic) domestic object turned out to be of great propagandistic value, as she herself noted. The Germans found humour in the fact that Soviet troops could expect no more than felt boots from the state coffers; Ruslanova’s self-deprecating song turned tragedy into emotional triumph.27 Her wartime enterprise was crowned with a concert of enormous symbolic importance, held on the steps of the smoking Reichstag in Berlin to an audience of battered, haggard Soviet troops.28 Now, in Germany, exactly the same familiar songs were claimed by the emotional pull

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homewards; folk works inspired nostalgia, not nationalism (since the goal had been reached). Ideology had less need for the songs, yet the singer was still priceless. The lingering danger in Berlin led Soviet officers to hold Ruslanova back from entering the city until they knew it was safe; nobody wanted a dead idol on their hands.29 “It wasn’t easy singing there,” she said of the devastation. “The soot and ashes in the building were still giving off flames.”30 The Reichstag’s main dome had collapsed from all the shelling and now covered the central hall like a gigantic tent. In that hall and the adjacent rooms were puffs of acrid smoke. The soldiers’ boots stamped across ashes that had yet to cool. A marble statue of Kaiser Wilhelm, three times larger than in real life, had spun around from the shock wave of an explosion, so that he now faced the wall … Here in this wrecked hall a victory concert was staged … and Ruslanova sang. She put all of her grand Russian soul into the song Step’ da step’ that people love so much. Before each of us, before each soldier, there arose images of our broad, mighty, and invincible native homeland. Ruslanova sang with such emotion, such joy and exultation, that the warriors’ severe faces lit up with smiles, even though they’d recently stared into the eyes of death. Tears of gladness rolled down their cheeks … It was hard for Ruslanova to breathe in the fumes and when the soldiers saw this, they asked her to go out onto the square. The concert continued under the sky of conquered Berlin. More and more soldiers, attracted by the songs, came over to the Reichstag. The crowd began to grow in size. Requests came thick and fast, and Ruslanova, inspired by this immense happiness, sang and sang without feeling tired.31

This joyful thematic in her songs earned her the official accolade of propagandistic “song-orator.”32 Happiness made an ideological statement in this epic context; this was the first estrada concert anywhere near Berlin to last into the night, since it was now safe(r) to operate bright lights after sundown.33 In war, Ruslanova gave people genuinely Soviet joy, which they needed “like the air they breathed: old songs, tested by time and easy to remember. Songs about selfless love, fidelity, the willingness to do the impossible for one’s beloved.”34 Soldiers at the front line told her that analogous folk songs “were as good as a visit to our abandoned homes, to the friends and relatives we love and to whom we’ve dedicated our lives.”35 These impulsive familial metaphors even took shape in real life, when troops on occasion would ask her to help with the abandoned or orphaned children found throughout heavily bombed villages.36 Ruslanova sang of mothers to many soldiers and thus became one for many children. There could be no better example of a transformational feeling.

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The Nightingale’s Descent into Prison and Silence Attempting to find empathy once again in her own life, she soon got married one more time, to an officer in the regiment of Marshal Zhukov. Her new husband, Vladimir Kriukov, was a widower; his previous spouse had poisoned herself after the authorities spread a false rumour that the kgb had arrested him. Perhaps Ruslanova was, in the wake of such melodrama, now trying to fashion a sentimental haven too close to the centres of power, since she would very soon herself run foul of the same authorities. She was arrested on the night of 24– 25 September 1948 in Moscow, then charged with both anti-Soviet activity and the propagation of decadence. It transpired that some erstwhile friends, looking to lessen their own sentences, had denounced her to the authorities. As for the “decadence,” she was found to own 208 diamonds (of what size, we do not know). She claimed to have collected them since 1930 and to have continued doing so during the war, when there were both ceaseless opportunities for additional concerts “on the side” and diamonds were a means of currency accepted in all theatres of conflict. It also transpired that the Ruslanova family owned two country cottages, three apartments, four cars, much antique furniture, together with 130 Russian paintings of considerable value and importance.37 None of this made her lot any easier or more pleasant; in fact, it merely provided the raw material for further rumours and gossip.38 Radio stations stopped playing her songs, and her entire catalogue vanished from stores. There was later an order to destroy all her discs, no matter where they were. As a result, the cds of “archive recordings” on sale today in Russian markets are precisely that: re-recordings taken from private archives kept for decades in the homes of aging, tight-lipped collectors.39 It is hard to imagine that this reticence was one of the eventual consequences of the loud front-line rhetoric Ruslanova offered soldiers as she pointed the way eastwards and homewards: Dearest Guards! You lads are so wonderful! Your relatives, sisters and brothers, wives and fiancées are very much waiting for you back there, beyond the rear guard. People there will stop at nothing for you and for our common victory. They’re denying themselves absolutely everything, all in order to bring closer the happy day when war will end … I’ve decided to buy, at my own expense, a battery of the Katiusha rocket-launchers and give them to you. Destroy the Fascists day and night, lads; don’t let them catch their breath.40

Much of the subsequent duress she suffered was connected with the postwar status of Marshal Zhukov, himself sent packing to the bearable

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climes of Crimea. Her husband, Kriukov, was forced to admit to having had many anti-Soviet conversations with the marshal and to corroborate other fatuous rumours, for example that he, Kriukov, had been involved in running a brothel. What was true, at least, was that Ruslanova had once, by her own admission, happily accompanied Zhukov on the bayan. Of greater and related consequence was the wrong (i.e., “misguided”) decision in 1948 made by Zhukov’s fellow commander, Konstantin Telegin, to award her the “Patriotic War Medal” (First Class, too).41 The biggest and most dangerous faux pas, though, had come after the war at Zhukov’s dacha. During a grand dinner party, Ruslanova proposed a toast. She lamented the fact that there were no official medals for the wives of Soviet soldiers and so spoke in praise of Zhukov’s wife, after which she unpinned the diamond brooch from her dress and gave it to the marshal’s spouse as a present. Whether or not this was actually a crime, or precisely with which crime she would eventually be charged, appeared a matter of no concern: “Just give us the person we want, and the crime will find itself.”42 The legal objection finally and anonymously proffered was that Ruslanova’s action had hinted at the state’s apparent unwillingness to award wives with medals. The singer had arrogantly adopted that role for herself.43 Ruslanova was convicted and (depending on the information source) sat in prison, the town of Vladimir, and/or the Ozerlag camp from the summer of 1950 until after Stalin’s death. When she was released on 4 August 1953, she had difficulty walking. She was “thinner, as slim as a girl, but completely gray.”44 Before she began to lose weight, in fact before she had even reached the prison camp, Ruslanova’s fame had travelled ahead of her and she – just like Kozin in Magadan – was begged by the prison guards to perform in the camp canteen. It was forbidden to applaud (the condition set by the camp officers), but when the head officer (a certain Comrade Evstingeev) could control himself no more, he clapped and at once the place exploded with applause.45 In the camp, over the next three years, Ruslanova was constantly treated to presents by people in the nearby villages who wanted to help their favourite singer. They brought her, according to various sources, felt boots, lard, honey, and coats made from either sheepskin or hare pelts.46 Once Zhukov had renewed contact with (and had regained influence in) the Soviet Ministry of Defence, he did all in his power to get Ruslanova out of the penal colony. When her release was eventually effected, she was thankfully able to enjoy Kriukov’s freedom in exactly the same month. She returned to performing and touring almost at once, despite her enfeebled voice. Concert reviews appeared, but the

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arrest went unmentioned in the press for decades, even in Zykina’s very lengthy and heartfelt tributes. We hear, for example in 1971, that Ruslanova’s songs “are an inexhaustible source of inspiration, of faith in our tomorrow, in communism, our beautiful ideal.”47 Interestingly enough, her emotional songs had fallen out of favour in Moscow (whence such monstrously specious bluster), but they remained wildly popular in the rural parts of the country.48 They began, in fact, to move beyond the capital – or any other city – and to reflect a universal feeling. The small relevance of an emotional text matched the big one of a political equivalent. The quote offered here shows this growth or growing complexity of an emotional art form. You think all folk songs are drawn out and sad, or maybe cheerful, rapid tongue twisters? You don’t know anything! I’ll go through the types of song that exist, and you see if you can remember them! Right, then, here we go … songs in memory of somebody or other, tales of knights, spirited young fellows, epic adventure, historical songs, songs of the present, laments from weddings and funerals, dining songs, Ukrainian ballads, those drawn-out songs, doleful ones, happy, playful, choral, songs for a round dance, dancing in general, fairground, river boat songs, minstrel, festival, or wedding songs, village fete songs, women’s songs, and those for winter gatherings … Well, how’s that then? Remember them all? That’s the richness of the Russian song for you!49

This hidden (or forgotten) complexity within a folk heritage reflected neither ideology nor ethnography but the relation of singer and audience, in other words, professional practice on the estrada. Emotion and genres cultivated on that estrada needed therefore to continue their growth or intricacy. Scared though she would later be by the ebbing or simplification of folk traditions, Ruslanova always hoped that “songs today could be a little more varied, a little brighter in their colours.”50 She continued to remember and renew tradition, fully aware that unchanging repetition was less than “colourful.” By recalling and affirming the “richness of the Russian song,” she made sure it did not age: its status remained the same by altering. Only change guarantees permanence. The permanence of a sung present was made (yet again) palpable in 1973 during the shooting of a governmental film about the storming of Berlin. The movie included a dramatization of the Reichstag concert, and after unsuccessful attempts to have a younger artist take Ruslanova’s role, she was asked to “play” the part. Despite her age, she agreed, thus demonstrating the power of song over time’s passage and performing almost for the last time. The final concert came two

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months later, at an outdoor sbornyi event in a Rostov stadium, after which she granted the viewers a lap of honour around the athletic track on the back of a truck so that everybody might see her. In a few weeks, in September 1973, she passed away after a career that Liudmila Zykina praised as unique, for she had been able to fill concert halls all the way from the 1930s to the 1970s. Zykina was at Ruslanova’s funeral and she cast two handfuls of dirt into the grave: one for Ruslanova and the other for herself, that she might remember her.51

liudmila zykina: folk songs from moscow’s suburbs A folk song is equivalent to Revolutionary marches, the great songs of struggle, giving voice to dungeons and prison cells. It’s akin to the pitiful wail that comes from the factory regions [of our cities]. It’s the old urban romance. It is the historical ballad. And the numerous forms of peasant song: lament, witty little verses, and fairground buffoonery … People without song are like abandoned villages. The houses are still standing, but there’s no life in them.52

Zykina would later say that there were two prevailing voices in her life: her grandmother’s and that of Ruslanova, from whom she also learned the art of emotional restraint, as her mentor never cried on stage. Dignified restraint, perhaps strangely, has on occasion been called the very spirit of folk culture (narodnost’) under the Soviets.53 Listeners would nod in tacit agreement, though they wanted a little more of what the state approved. Even in the “epicentre of the Stagnation,” as Riazanov has termed the year 1976, we hear that “Ruslanova led the lyrical folk song away from the path of dry museum folklore and down the road of lively, enthusiastic interpretations of her songs. What is a song worth without excitement, without emotion? Who needs it if it doesn’t thrill or worry the heart, make it beat a little faster? After all, she sang for the people and not for academic specialists who go around making recordings of wedding or funeral songs.”54 Liudmila Zykina’s career epitomizes the middle ground in folk culture, between the heart and the eggheads. She embodies a proud, emotive art form with great dignity. Zykina was born in 1929, not terribly far from Moscow, in countryside that would vanish under the capital’s spreading environs by the

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time she was institutionalized as the nation’s most famous singer of folk songs.55 The odd idea during the Stagnation of a folk singer from parkland rather than pasture sometimes produced accusations of a pseudo-heritage. She was dubbed a “singer of the suburbs” but would later become a “pillar of Brezhnev communism with her liberal pathos.”56 In an increasingly urban and cynical nation, it became very hard to maintain an explicitly rustic art form as such, to separate the emotions of Ruslanova’s biography from the urban or political context in which she sang. The minor familial emotion was suffering under the grander equivalent of Soviet social planning. Even Zykina admitted that socialist urbanization was supplanting the emotional integrity and existence of country family choirs.57 Since Zykina performed folk songs to huge audiences all across the new extended family of the Soviet Union, the media could ask seriously in 1970 – even in the satellite republics – whether there was anybody left who did not know her voice.58 Despite such fame, she has never forgotten the small, humble origins of her craft; the numerous autobiographical tales of how she forged a traditional skill are all set at home, in the family surrounded by older, truly rural generations. Zykina speaks often of this family circle in interviews. On the grandest of Soviet tours, she would practise with local amateur groups and family ensembles; when she was especially worried about the fate of folk art after 1991, the singer would call for a revival of familial singing, identifying it as the place where traditions and taste are fostered.59 Urban Soviet sentiment originated in prerevolutionary farmsteads, or at least in czarist literary perceptions of that acreage. She learned her own craft from her grandmother, who taught her ancient songs from Riazan’, and her mother, who worked as a hospital cleaner.60 Friends and family would gather in the two-floor wooden house for impromptu concerts, with each person present taking his or her turn.61 Outside the house, village festivals, such as important weddings, could go on for three days with constant song. It was not long before Liudmila had both the courage and skill to join in. Here she learned that “the Russian song has a clearly expressed confessional character. Its narrative of life’s woes and sadness comes [to us] not from helpless people, but from those strong in spirit. Their confession is woven not from complaints but from the desire to battle fate, to stand one’s ground.”62 In doing that self-respect and its expressive tradition due justice, Zykina would “play with the theme, with words, both freely and with virtuosity … I’d play with the sound and its movement.”63 Tradition and change, canon and revision, informed each other through the “strength of [national, pre-political] spirit.” Thus

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she would follow in the footsteps of Ruslanova, who mixed the lonely, confessional strain of her vocal music with the “national character.”64 When World War Two broke out, she was only twelve but still took brave part in air-raid duty, watching German bombers from the rooftops of residential buildings and, after direct hits, kicking the flaming remnants of incendiary bombs down onto the ground. A little later she went to work on the lathes at a local factory, as did many other girls, taking the place of absent brothers and fathers. Her own father, however, was so worried by the way she lost weight and colour during the long shifts that he arranged for her to work in a bread factory instead. Bored stiff, Zykina soon moved to a position in a tailor’s workshop so that she might aid the war effort doing something she at least enjoyed. She challenged friends to stitch the greatest number of soldiers’ shirts, but this patriotic zeal would soon find another outlet.65 While in the bread factory, she had by chance met a local singer who had offered her work in the (already traditional) format of performing between shows in movie theatres. Here she began to sing beyond her immediate family, to sing publicly.66 She also studied traditional choreography at the local hospital club and soon understood that her songs “could be more useful [to the war effort] than any spare part I could turn out on the lathe.”67 After the war was over, it was again by chance that, en route to the cinema, she saw an advertisement for the famous Piatnitskii Choir. Prompted by friends, she decided to try and beat the odds of fifteen hundred people competing for four places. Her friends joked about the impossibility of being accepted. “Go on and sing, Liuda! Maybe you’ll become an artiste some day!”68 She was – by the laws of such stories – chosen, defeating odds that turned out to be even stiffer than first calculated, for three of the four young people chosen were boys. Zykina had joined a great choir. The reputation of the Piatnitskii Choir was in fact so great that when the results were announced she did not believe her fortune and went to the choir’s secretary to see if there had been a mistake.69 Here began her true commitment to a serious, “academic” folk repertoire. She would leave behind the waggish blend of folk songs, cruel romances, and urban songs from around her parents’ dinner table.70 What she would take from the family gatherings was feeling: just like romances (or any other style), one “must know how to open folk songs in order to perceive their value – the cry of a woman’s soul.”71 There is a limit to that feeling, however, as we will see in Zykina’s counterpart to Ruslanova’s dignified restraint. In the meanwhile, Zykina praised the salon (i.e., “academic”) romances of Tchaikovsky, for example, for being free of excessive sentimentality,72 or drew parallels between folk

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songs and the work – in one breath – of Tchaikovsky, Pushkin, and Rublev.73 Sentiment was reigned in, canonized, and taken very seriously, an attitude just as evident in her appearance. Zykina is a singer raised within “institutionalized” native music; her ample figure is today swathed in expensive urban gowns rather than the layered, motley folk costumes of her compatriot. Ruslanova’s hair was usually hidden beneath several headscarves; Zykina’s is tightly gathered in a severe bun in the sombre, mature style (to this day) of the seventies. En route to that seriousness, she began touring with her choir almost immediately, most notably to Czechoslovakia for the “Prague Spring” festival of 1948, where the heartfelt emotion of folk songs began to do its diplomatic duty in the name of reconciliation or rapprochement between the two countries. The easier atmosphere in Czechoslovakia made itself felt in other sentiments, too: on one occasion Zykina was bewildered by a young, avidly amorous couple she noticed in a Prague park. She fully accepted the group leader’s explanation that these young “athletes” had found a place to burn off a few calories in exercise.74 She would treasure other amusing and cheery memories, in particular of how she had learned to make a single voice the result of, and participant among, many others – one voice as the result of abundance.75 This double analogy of soloist/choir with estrada/state is often made. In 1949 her mother passed away, and the break Zykina thus felt from her traditions was so great that for some while she was unable to sing and actually left the choir. Zykina has spoken frequently of going “further” than one’s tradition, but the rude absence of her private past (until recently residing in the present) left her abandoned, not “furthered.”76 Grief, as an expression of dispossession, needed to be replaced or countered with a sense of duty equal to the loss. Great loss inspired great effort. She returned to singing only in the following year, this time to join the Soviet National Choir of Radio and Television. Her sense of duty, expressed through political activity, increased tenfold as she took on new responsibilities as a Communist Youth League organizer and then attempted to join the Party. Since, however, the singer had just divorced her first husband, the Party was “disquieted” by her private problems; it shied away from personalities who smelled of marital instability. The state embraced emotional expression on stage but did not reciprocate with empathy off stage. Shrugging off such silliness, Zykina continued to sing with the choir until 1960, when she went over to the capital’s Moskontsert organization in the hope of finding more solo work. She hoped to develop what she called a sense of self (svoe “ia” ) within the “themes of spiritual

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beauty, our people’s lofty and noble love.” In making this move, she was leaving behind the security of a choir with which she had performed over seven hundred traditional folk songs on radio and the small stage.77 Many had expressed an explicitly female point of view: “My heroine is strong, steadfast, with a kind yet decisive and bright character.”78 The theme of Soviet woman arises in innumerable interviews with Zykina as “the theme of the Motherland.”79 She sings of “the Motherland, of Russia, and of the fate of Russian women”80 and was often lauded as the “organic combination” of all Soviet and folk songs, as their embodiment.81 In essence she bonds the lyric and the civic (or ideological) by making each woman, sometimes herself, in some way a symbol of the entire land.82 We require a brief digression to explain that symbolic “bond.” Excursus: “Complex” Dialectics and the Land as Joy By combining ideology and the space in which that ideology is practised, we can explain parallel pairs invoked elsewhere in assessments of Zykina’s work, those of emotions and the Russian landscape,83 or what she terms superbly in one article “the land as joy.”84 Ideology is replaced (or tinted by) emotion in estrada and the politico-geographical space of the Soviet Union becomes nature itself; thus Zykina can be described as a performer who is rarely political but often civic.85 She has talked of lyric, civic, and heroic developments in her career as both parallel and equivalent.86 She can therefore say in one interview that “my songs are my politics” and, in singing ancient texts, that “my creative work is not apolitical”!87 What the listener gets as a result is lots of feeling but relatively little dogma; the art of minor forms changes and expands borders to the point where even Japanese audiences can understand the emotion in her songs.88 Throughout Zykina’s career, this deeply felt social science is described in visual, territorial terms, such as “breadth and expanse, an emotional saturation and sincerity of feelings.”89 We read as early as 1968 that “in her song is the breadth of our steppes, the beauty of endless Russian expanses, the grandeur of a Soviet citizen, the wealth and generosity of his soul.”90 Twenty-one years later her “voice embodies the blueness of lakes, the expanse of rivers, the green carpets of fields – and the boundless riches of the Russian soul.”91 Zykina herself has written: “My earliest childhood impression has stayed within me forever. An early summer evening. Lilac-blue twilight and neither the wind nor any other sound to be heard. My grandmother sits on the porch of our home in Cheremushki, near Moscow. She strokes my hair and sings a

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meditative song she composed herself: ‘I bore my son in the field / Grant him happiness, grant him a happy fate.’”92 One audience member has described her songs in a similar manner, as the invocation of civism in visual, geographic (and pre-Soviet) terms. “She comes out on stage, stately, with a crown of chestnut hair … It’s as if she is saying to us: Look around, there she is, our [Mother] Russia. Her Volga, her willow and silver birch … Listen to them, they are singing you their songs. They are waiting for your love.”93 Soviet civism is founded upon an ancient, affective relationship with myriad natural phenomena! When we do hear an overt or even overzealous political statement in urban, doctrinal terms, it is made offstage in journalistic work and is used to create a related definition of estrada, not to define estrada prior to going on stage. Duty calls and prompts. “Do we really get things done so that, as Comrade Brezhnev justifiably showed at the Party’s Twenty-fourth Congress, ‘topicality is not hidden by other drab matters that have little to do with art’? … There’s a reason why Lenin often stressed that a new culture can’t be created without going deep into the sources of vibrant folk creativity.”94 Three years later, in 1981, the concrete historical references to Lenin have receded further still, to the point where universal morals have replaced socially specific doctrine and Mother Russia starts to sound matronly. “‘Introducing somebody to artistic culture and an aesthetic instruction can produce substantial results if begun in that person’s youth,’ said Comrade Chernenko at the Writer’s Union commemorative congress. ‘I am convinced that the young generation’s ideological and moral development deserves no less attention than, say, instruction in the most basic scientific principles.’ I [Zykina] believe that our school [of folk art] has reached that same juncture, where radical changes are required in educating the generation of today’s teenagers.”95 As the 1980s begin, then, ideology becomes increasingly “ethical” and less dogmatic; thus the dignified feeling of a “joyful” folk estrada grows closer still to “new-style” ideology. A similar harmonization of statesmanlike doctrine and natural emotion is heard elsewhere. Again in 1981 Zykina remarked, “My repertoire develops according to the laws of dialectics – from the simple to the complex.”96 She used some of these binary structures to show how her work increases in complexity: the relationship of singing to manual labour, the kinship between singers and sailors, the bridge between stage and listener.97 Each time an artist goes out on stage, “she becomes an image of the person whose life she is creating in today’s performance. The art becomes an emotional one; only then

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will it truly excite the viewer, when the performer lives through the passions, thoughts, and feelings of her hero.”98 One artist dissolves the (simple) opposition of stage and hall in a (complex) series of differing emotions amid many viewers. Even throughout the seventies we hear that Zykina, “like any true artist, metamorphoses into the heroine of her song.”99 She displays a “high degree of transformation, of true artistry and genuine skill.”100 As we see, that artistic skill on stage conjures visual, emotive images of various native spaces. Soviet journalists liked to describe the imagistic structure (obraznyi stroi) of her songs. They held that it came from early studies of art and cinematic history and that it was always tempered by understatement.101 (Say less, feel more, and conjure grander images.)102 The quintessential composer granting Zykina songs of this type is herself a woman, Aleksandra Pakhmutova.103 This petite though very influential composer wrote in 1970 of Zykina’s ability to raise noiseless feeling to the level of Klavdiia Shul’zhenko’s “Blue Kerchief” (Sinii platochek) with her own work, “Orenburg Shawl” (Orenburgskii platochek).104 Zykina actually sang that former song to troops during World War Two, a fact that gives substance to Pakhmutova’s conviction.105 The small emotional centre radiated to great, complex dimensions; the greater the feeling, the greater the movement outwards across the “land as joy” and the more complete the erasure of political lines or mappings. The individual received and now participates in nationwide sentiment; the further afield her empathy is felt, “the warmer one’s heart becomes.”106 Thus, emotions are the way to one’s sense of self (svoe “ia” ). They are the way to the development of personality, in or out of folk art. Personality is talent, according to the Soviet press.107 It is the serious facility to affirm, affect, and be affected; it is also the ability to go “beyond very intimate and petty stories.” Emotion, which creates subjectivity, feeds into civic spirit, which proffers objectivity – and vice versa.108 This is possible, since Zykina has always defined her singing as an act of affirmative happiness more than duty: “I am happy to do what I love. I sing with joy.”109 Let’s return now to Zykina’s biography and look at this optimism in action. Home and Abroad: The Kremlin’s Joyful Artiste, 1964–1985 Liudmila Zykina was able to affirm and embody an entire nation with the assistance of its minister for culture, Ekaterina Furtseva. Thanks to political connections, the singer toured a great deal and with much success, both domestically and overseas, where she would garner the help of kindred spirits like Maurice Torez, the head of the Communist

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Party in France. Zykina thus played in Paris’s Olympia hall, as had Piaf and Aznavour. She was, in 1974, even awarded a medal by the French for “Artistic Training and Education” (or “nurturing”: vospitanie).110 Despite a warm welcome from the Parisians, Zykina felt that the bourgeois press criticized her excessively and “almost went so far as to call our troupe’s genre music hall.” She, in turn, criticized Little Richard, who had played the same hall days before and had somehow “wounded” people by throwing his shirt in the audience.111 Being affirmative overseas was obviously not easy. This French connection and in particular the concerts at the Olympia are things of enormous prestige to other Soviet artists of the Stagnation or zastoi (Alla Pugacheva, for example). Zykina, however, uses foreignness (despite her occasionally mean rejoinders) not to bolster a cultural hierarchy but supposedly to serve as a fraternal leveller of nations.112 The Russian song goes – just as in Japan – from “heart to heart,” ignoring borders.113 Once that playing field has been levelled, there is (or should be) a space for free emotional exchange. One little schoolgirl wrote from France to her Soviet pen pal: “How I envy you! What happiness it must be living in the same country as Liudmila Zykina!”114 Given the transformative potential of a stirring repertoire, it is no surprise that this musical ambassador came to consider the process of selecting songs as “issue number one.”115 Her attention to what should and should not be sung also won her fans in high places.116 Khrushchev, as one example, loved her work, the most public proof of which came in April 1964 when she was asked to perform at his seventieth birthday party in the Kremlin. He asked for his favourite number – “The Volga Flows” (Techet Volga) – and got it, a song that she has called “an erasure of the barrier between auditorium and the stage, between a performer and the listeners.”117 Zykina had always been proud of actually effecting such an erasure by going as often as possible into the crowd after concerts and walking among the members of the audience.118 Promotional films made at this time show her on similar sentimental promenades, so Khrushchev’s tender and friendly address to the singer was not so surprising or unusual.119 Drawing upon the lyrics of the song Zykina had just sung, he stood up and said, “Zykina says that I’m seventeen. Well, generally speaking, I’m still healthy and can work a little if you [the influential audience] will help me.” Six months later he was kicked out of office; estrada would keep going. Zykina’s career suffered little from this change of audience, as Brezhnev also considered her the best singer of folk songs in the country. This enabled her to extend travel plans even further afield, to complete a fifteen-state tour of America in 1964 and, after returning

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briefly home, do it again in 1965. The same year saw a trip to Japan, and 1967 one to Australia.120 During that final, antipodean excursion one émigré viewer thanked her for “showing” him Russia, even though he was of a generation born in Australia.121 The genuine attraction that certain aspects of state policy held for her made it easy for her to play this international role of “The Kremlin’s Singer,” even when foreign journalists asked deliberately awkward questions or staged demonstrations against the ussr outside her concerts.122 She was seen in the West as a representative of political, not physical, geography, which is easy to understand, since on occasion she got too close to ideology and joyful patriotism became jingoism. In England in 1973, she complained of how the British did not like to praise foreigners, and then launched into a tirade against the nation’s economic woes, its unemployment figures, its inflation and crime rates, all of which she saw symbolized by the drug addicts who littered Piccadilly Circus.123 She could not love a country so emotionally impoverished and decorated on the peewee scale of “mown and tended lawns, puddles, traditional umbrellas, and copper kettles,” all enveloped in aromatic smoke from Sherlock Holmes’s meerschaum. In America she criticized indigence, the Klu Klux Klan, department stores in New York, drugs, alcoholism, suicides, and muggings. In her early autobiographical writings, these sociological observations sometimes completely displace any description of her concerts. When in Canada, she saw Wayne Gretzky on television and thought: “So that’s who he is … We’ve got loads of players like that … And here there’s only one for an entire continent.”124 Corresponding nonsense diminishes rapidly with each new edition of her memoirs and today has vanished completely. By maintaining this degree of activity and political integrity, by dedicating entire concert programs to themes such as Soviet cosmonauts,125 Zykina became a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union in 1973, and she quickly (just as Shul’zhenko had in years gone by) credited hard work as the only key to her success.126 Her continuing status as a non-member of the Party may have caused the relative tardiness of this award. The initial rejected application probably left something of a bitter aftertaste in her mouth. She has, in fact, claimed elsewhere that she was subsequently asked by the Party five or six times to join, but she had never felt like it.127 The death of Furtseva in October 1974 also did little to help. The rumour was that she had committed suicide with cyanide drops following a scandal that led to accusations of misused funds. Supposedly she had built a dacha for her daughter in a manner that was somewhat less than legal. Furtseva hastily “donated”

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the dacha to the state, but the ensuing cold shoulders grew too numerous and she killed herself.128 The seventies closed in a happier manner with the Order of Lenin, and the early eighties became a time of great success, with tours to America, Cyprus, Canada, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and equally farflung places.129 Perhaps the most exotic destination was Vietnam, and once more we have the tales of a supralinguistic, cordial comprehension of songs.130 In another diplomatic role, she played for the army in Afghanistan, “for as long as was necessary” to bring the troops “a little piece of our native land,” as one soldier put it.131 This rigorous schedule earned her the fitting decorations of the Glinka Prize for concert work in 1981–82132 and Hero of Socialist Labour in 1987.133 Here, though, as perestroika got moving, the political context changed again, this time both swiftly and severely.134 We know that Zykina and her folk ethic ran happily with the shift from specific social policy to policies of broader ethical import,135 but what of old dogma and new fashions? Did she stop accusing her émigré audiences, for example, of giving her flowers to assuage their conscience at leaving Russia, or defining them as a mixture of “friends and enemies”?136 Folk Constancy and Political Change after Gorbachev Even at the outset of Gorbachev’s reforms, Zykina was already lamenting the passing out of fashion of the mass song, which she still saw in its ideal form as an aggregate of Soviet and folk traditions.137 Fashion shifted westwards, and she warned folk ensembles not to follow the same route.138 At the time of perestroika, novelty for its own sake was a troubling tendency. “Progress” was instead something she saw as defined by and effected through retrospection, through “contrasting shifts in rhythm” or style, à la Ruslanova.139 At this worrying time, her metaphors for progress seemed to be replaced by metaphors for defensive cohesion: “Songs could unite people; they could form the people’s spiritual unity.” Maybe the zastoi of the thirties and seventies had not been very conducive to such a process, but now new life had been breathed into estrada. Maybe folk songs could survive, after all. Zykina’s worry gradually became affirmation. Death, she said, is immobility, so this new vivacity might express itself in song as syntheses of abundant “impressions, thoughts, and strivings. It’s all there, in one great tale of the past.”140 That tale was made of different traditions, feelings and skills, traditionally passed down from grandmothers to babies via lullabies, as one article on Zykina had it.141 Sung tales of the past were not going to be forgotten.

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Zykina’s voice, in defence of such an argument, was called “a synthesis of an opera or chamber singer’s refinement with legendary, elemental storytellers, the symbiosis of a life-affirming spirit with deep woe and monumentalism, which perhaps only an entire choir could embody.”142 The one voice was the big choir, just as Zykina actualized many old traditions and mixed altogether numerous little lyrics, private laments, and other minor genres in her program to show what she called “time’s gigantic gait.”143 In precisely the same way, her memory would merge the voices of her grandmother and Ruslanova whenever she “mused upon life” and its grand scale.144 The past was guaranteeing the future. To be fair, even the occasional Soviet critic well before perestroika had also described the grandeur of her songs, not as politically driven, but temporally: the lyric songs she sang were grand because they were already historically invested with great meaning.145 Each song was a combination of the “lyricism and dramatic tension” that came from its heritage.146 One review of 1970 even went so far as to talk of her “temperament, national spirit, and fire,” all of which had accrued over the centuries.147 In order to maintain the grand scale and spirit of Russia’s folk heritage, Zykina adopted something of a managerial role so that she could help defend the ethical role of traditional music in the face of television’s “fashionable” vulgarization.148 She also criticized (with very good cause) television for ignoring copyright and plundering Soviet estrada for profit, thus exacerbating the damage caused by the already huge industry of pirate recordings nationwide.149 The grand and true philosophy of estrada, she insisted, has little to do with the big plans of market moguls. In her defence of either pre-capitalist or Soviet folk art, she drew upon Tolstoi’s authoritative assertion that public demand is never a guarantor of artistic quality.150 Since that demand was especially fickle in the modern marketplace, Zykina had for a considerable number of years been asking newspaper readers to start saving old records at home. Songs by singers such as Ruslanova were only available in private collections, she complained, and “so many of those wonderful records have been smashed or destroyed. So many priceless pages of sheet music have been thrown out!”151 Her warnings sounded even louder in the late eighties. Sensing that native customs were under considerable duress, she had also long considered founding an Academy of Folk Culture, one designed to foster the talents of young performers and embody her own belief that training and learning are an eternal process for estradniki.152 (This was especially true for folk singers on tour, who found themselves, willy-nilly, in the role of ethnographer, always collecting

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new songs.)153 The institute was conceived in the seventies, planned in the eighties, and opened in 1993. Its directors immediately named Zykina as president.154 In this new role as educator, she gave voice to great sadness at the passing of communism and the political faith that had asked for (and deserved) such sacrifice during wartime. On occasion she talked interestingly about Christianity as a logical heir to communism in Russia. Orthodoxy would, like socialism, be a guarantor of civic and civil spirit.155 In 1997 we read with slight surprise that “God always gives me help when I ask. You know, He led me to those people I should be with and away from those that I should avoid … But I’ve led such a grand life now that I’m basically not afraid of anything any more. Even if God were to turn away from me … But I don’t think that’ll happen.”156 Faith was an ongoing process and the object of its attention had to be affirmed as such. Zykina affirmed that object, denied transience, and for decades was proclaimed by many journalists as “always contemporary.”157 In a key interview of 1989, she spoke of perestroika’s arrival and folk songs’ permanence. She denied any requirement to “seek” for a new repertoire, since all the old folk songs were in her heart. This being true, perestroika – although commendably ethical – did not really touch her aesthetically. “You cannot rebuild [perestroit’] roots.” She talked of her folk songs as her faith or ideology, as if they were a superior philosophy to whatever comes and goes in Moscow. The Soviet people, she said, were (and are) held together by those songs, by love for the Russian song, by their common need for joy and kind words.158 As a result, Zykina wrote much on the post-Soviet state of her chosen genres. Some enduring worries were the feeble attraction of folk music for young people; the poor quantity of amateur folk ensembles and how this would influence the general quality of song in the future; and the difficulty traditional works had competing in the capitalist marketplace.159 Competing under capitalism took considerable effort and many charity concerts, organized as estrada came to its own aid. As further troubling proof of waning “Soviet” emotion, she discovered upon divorcing her third husband and finding a fourth that faith in public performers was also declining, since she had to contend with all manner of disparaging jibes from the tabloid press. Some barbs concerned her support in 1993 of the openly gay choreographer and singer Boris Moiseev. “I love everything beautiful,” she said defiantly as acceptance outstripped censure.160 Many journalistic wisecracks concerned her wealth, though she was admired for her business savvy, perhaps in a way strangely parallel to the approval of Ruslanova as a wealthy peasant several decades before.161 Zykina herself insisted,

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however, that her salary in 1991 was a measly 450,000 rubles: “Can anybody really live on that?” She also worried that her ensemble was unable – even as a group – to afford the payola needed to join the play lists of central television and radio.162 Part of the civic stand that Zykina took in order to challenge the status quo was an active role in Nash Dom – Rossiia (Our House Is Russia), the political party of enlightened conservatism whose most famous spokesperson today is the director Nikita Mikhalkov.163 His films, the party, and our singer have all made much of the “nation as family” metaphors with which Zykina begins her autobiographical prose. In her new, overtly political guise, she continues today to enhance her career with conspicuous Soviet-style milestones, such as a concert in the Kremlin celebrating fifty years on the stage on 27 April 1997. The newspaper Today (Segodnia) assessed the atmosphere of prestige and cordiality convincingly:164 “There was an air of kitsch about the concert, plus an atmosphere of staying power, of loyalty to the powers that be. There’s been an unhurried and friendly pace to recent state occasions here … Zykina showed the main thing, that she still has the ability to sing professionally. It seems sometimes that she has been singing forever … that she has endured like the ruby stars atop the Kremlin towers and the banks of the Volga.”

songs, felt boots, handkerchiefs, and shawls There is an inherent problem is discussing the “enduring” repertoires of these two women, one that did not present itself in the prior chapters. The foundation of both is the folk song – that is, vocal music neither penned by nor for the performers. These women – although freely assembling a repertoire – operate at a considerably greater distance from their material than, say, Shul’zhenko or Iur’eva. An examination of a large number of their songs would therefore lead us to conclusions about Russian folk songs as a whole, not to conclusions about the work of Ruslanova and Zykina. Let us instead concentrate here on the “calling cards” of these artistes, on the few songs that received prolonged or close attention, both in the press and by the audience. I will be looking almost exclusively at the texts of songs mentioned in previous pages, such as those sung in the smoking Reichstag. One of those songs was Ruslanova’s most famous, “Felt Boots” (Valenki). The charm this text held for the Soviets is not hard to see. The reason for its performance in Berlin I have noted above: a tale of felt boots countered German propaganda mocking shoddy footwear

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in the Red Army. What replaces leather boots here are felt ones; what replaces felt boots (in very tough times) is a big heart. There is no loss and few tears. Валенки, да валенки, ой да не подшиты, стареньки. Нельзя валенки носить, не в чем к милому ходить. Валенки, валенки, эх, не подшиты, стареньки, Валенки, валенки, эх, да не подшиты, стареньки. Ой ты, Коля, Николай, сиди дома, дома, не гуляй. Не ходи на тот конец, ох, не носи девкам колец. Чем подарочки носить, ой, да лучше валенки подшить. Чем подарочки носить, лучше валенки подшить. Суди, люди, суди, Бог, как же я любила, По морозу босиком к милому ходила. [Felt boots, oh those felt boots worn (through), not sewn up and so old. I’ve got no boots to wear, I cannot visit my beloved. Felt boots, oh those worn felt boots and so old. Oh my Nicholas, stay at home, at home, and don’t go wandering … Don’t go to the far end of the village, oh don’t give rings to other girls. Instead of taking presents, you should sew up my felt boots. See for yourselves, good people, how I loved him: I ran across the frost to my beloved – barefoot!]

These bold, jolly emotions make it easy for us to understand why such old songs would enjoy the permanent contemporaneity referred to above with regard to Zykina, affirming and affecting what would otherwise be forgotten. Another of the Berlin songs, “Steppe, Steppe All Around” (Step’ da step’ krugom), works in precisely the same manner. Its theme – the request of a dying man, far from home, to a comrade – was certainly enjoyed and played upon by performers such as Utesov (S odesskogo kichmana). Here we hear Ruslanova tell of a coachman who shows even greater affirmation than the young girl of Valenki, since he places his wife’s happiness above his own desires. He affirms that which she will want, no doubt, even in the years after his death, even though those desires might cancel her memories of him. He remembers his wife that she might forget him; he is suggesting his own erasure from the world in the name of another’s love. Степь да степь кругом, Путь далек лежит. В той степи глухой Замерзал ямщик.

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in practice И, набравшись сил, Чуя смертный час, Он товарищу Отдавал наказ. «Ты, товарищ мой, Не попомни зла, Здесь, в степи глухой, Схорони меня! А коней моих Сведи к батюшке, Передай поклон Родной матушке. А жене скажи Слово прощальное, Передай кольцо Обручальное. А еще скажи – Пусть не печалится. Пусть с другим она Обвенчается. Про меня скажи, Что в степи замерз, А любовь ее Я с собой унес.» [Steppe, steppe all around. The road ahead is long. A coachman was freezing to death in the depths of that steppe. Gathering his strength and sensing death, he gave his friend instructions. “Hey, friend! Forget our bad times and bury me here in the depth of the steppe! Take my horses to my father and give my farewells to my dear mother. Say farewell to my wife. Give her my wedding ring. Tell her not to grieve, that she should marry another. Tell her I froze in the steppe, that I carry her love with me.”]

These songs, if remembered, sung, and treasured, could mean a great deal during a twentieth-century conflict or loss. The 1938 song “Katie,” or Katiusha, by Mikhail Isakovskii employs those old motifs in

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a very modern context of absent lovers, displaced along the contours of “a distant frontier,” and nothing seems out of place. Расцветали яблони и груши, Поплыли туманы над рекой. Выходила на берег Катюша, На высокий берег на крутой. Выходила, песню заводила Про степного сизого орла, Про того, которого любила, Про того, чьи письма берегла. Ой ты, песня, песенка девичья, Ты лети за ясным солнцем вслед И бойцу на дальнем пограничье От Катюши передай привет. Пусть он вспомнит девушку простую, Пусть услышит, как она поет, Пусть он землю бережет родную, А любовь Катюша сбережет. Расцветали яблони и груши, Поплыли туманы над рекой. Выходила на берег Катюша, На высокий берег на крутой. [The apple and pear trees were in bloom and mists floated above the river. Katie went out onto the riverbank, on the high, steep riverbank. She went and sang a song of the steppe’s grey eagle, about the man she loved and whose letters she cherished. Oh, maiden’s song, fly after the bright sun and greet the soldier on a distant frontier. May he remember a simple girl and hear how she sings, may he defend his homeland; Katie will defend their love.]

The enormously powerful “Across the Wild Steppe, Beyond Lake Baikal” (Po dikim stepiam Zabaikal’ia) merges the above themes and presents a combination of loss, absence, marginalized social status, and – despite all – the enduring presence and power of affirmed emotion. Here we have not a soldier, but a bona fide criminal on his (very long) way home. The wandering, nomadic gypsy of romances

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has become something very different, but the workings of the heart are the same and just as strong. (Ruslanova omits several verses with even more explicit social references to convicts.) По диким степям Забайкалья, Где золотo роют в горах, Бродяга, судьбу проклиная, Тащится с сумой на плечах. Бродяга к Байкалу подходит, Рыбачью он лодку берет, Унылую песню заводит – Про родину что-то поет. Бродяга Байкал переехал, Навстречу родимая мать. «Ах, здравствуй, ах, здравствуй, мамаша, Здоров ли отец, хочу знать?» «Отец твой давно уж в могиле, Давно он землею зарыт, А брат твой давно уж в Сибири, Давно кандалами гремит. Пойдем же, пойдем, мой сыночек, Пойдем же в курень наш родной, Жена там по мужу скучает И плачут детишки гурьбой.» [Across the steppe, beyond Lake Baikal, where they dig for gold in the hills, a wanderer trudges with a bag across his shoulders, cursing his fate. The wanderer reaches Baikal and takes a fisherman’s boat. He begins to sing a woeful song, something about his homeland. The wanderer crossed Baikal and his own mother came to meet him. “Hello, hello Mother. Is Father well, I’d like to know?” “Your father is dead and has long been covered with earth. Your brother has long been in Siberia, rattling his convict’s chains. Let’s go, my son, to the family hut, where your wife misses her husband and a bevy of children is in tears.”]

Strong and lasting parallels can be drawn between the more famous songs in Ruslanova’s repertoire and those among Zykina’s standards. A counterpart to Valenki would be “Sable Brows, Sable Eyes” (Chernobrovyi,

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chernookii) by A. Merzliakov and D. Kashin. Here the risk, charm, and unorthodox demands of love transfer with ease to a tale of youthful desire, irrespective of the political background. Чернобровый, черноокий, Молодец удалый, Полонил он мое сердце – Не могу забыти. Как понять такую радость, Что мил меня любит? Побегу ему навстречу, Крепко обойму я. Обойму я молодого, Парня удалого. Объясню свою любовь я – Авось умилится. Не ходить бы красной девке Вдоль по лугу, лугу. Не любить бы красной девке Холостого парня. А за то его любила, Что порою ходит: Поутру раным-раненько, Вечером поздненько. Чтобы люди не сказали, Ближние не знали – Про меня бы, молоденьку, Отцу не сказали. [Sable brows, sable eyes, a daring young man has captured my heart and I cannot forget him. How am I to understand the joy from my darling’s love? I’ll run to meet him and embrace him tightly. I’ll embrace my young lover, that daring lad. I’ll declare my love; maybe he’ll be moved. A pretty girl shouldn’t walk along the meadow; a pretty girl shouldn’t love a bachelor lad. I love him because sometimes he comes very, very early or leaves late in the evening. So that people wouldn’t say anything, so that family wouldn’t know, so that they couldn’t say anything to my father about me, a young girl.]

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The theme of separation, absence, or departure, to which Russian history has given such generous opportunity, is felt clearly in a couple of Zykina classics: “Sing in the Garden” (Ty vospoi v sadu) and “Orenburg Shawl” (Orenburgskii platochek). The former has a rarely sung appendix, a call to a nightingale so that it might sing to lessen the woe of a young girl who has suffered much. There is considerable distance between the girl and her loved one. Because the nightingale has lost its voice, song cannot overcome spatial barriers. The two remain apart, there is no music, and only sadness is heard loud and clear. «Я по батеньке плачу вечерами, Я по батеньке плачу вечерами. Ох, а по маменьке зарею, Ох, а по маменьке зарею. По милом по дружку ноченька не спится, По милом по дружку ноченька не спится, Ох, во сне милого видала, Ох, во сне милого видала.» [I weep for my father in the evenings and for my mother at dawn. I cannot sleep at night, for I dreamed of my darling, of my nearest and dearest.]

In order not to be overwhelmed by these (woefully traditional) songs of loss, there must be songs of consolation to match the threat of that deprivation. The old-fashioned love letters and wedding rings of Ruslanova’s songs, those earthbound symbols and guardians of fidelity, are replaced by Zykina with a new symbol with the same (old) meaning, a shawl that directly invokes the Sinii platochek of Shul’zhenko from a couple of decades earlier. Here, though, the scarf once exchanged between man and woman is now a shawl given by a daughter to her mother in an expression of loyalty, the one trait Zykina claims that she learned, irrespective of politics or passing fashions, from her wartime colleague and her blue kerchiefs.165 В этот вьюжный неласковый вечер, Когда снежная мгла вдоль дорог, Ты накинь, дорогая, на плечи Оренбургский пуховый платок. Я его вечерами вязала Для тебя, моя добрая мать. Я готова тебе, дорогая, Не платок, даже сердце отдать!

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lidiia ruslanova and liudmila zykina Чтобы ты в эту ночь не скорбела, Прогоню от окошка пургу. Сколько б я тебя, мать, ни жалела, Все равно пред тобой я в долгу. Пусть буран все сильней свирепеет, Мы не пустим его на порог. И тебя, моя мама, согреет Оренбургский пуховый платок! [On this severe, windswept evening, when a snowy darkness lies along the road, throw the downy Orenburg shawl across your shoulders. I knitted it on evenings for you, my kind mother. For you, dear mother, I’d give not just this shawl, but my heart! So that you’re not sad this evening, I’ll drive the blizzard from the window. No matter how much I take care of you, mother, I’ll still be in your debt. Let the snowstorm grow angrier; we’ll not let it across the threshhold. The downy, Orenburg shawl will keep you warm!]

This contemporary significance grows even stronger with “The Madonnas of Riazan’” (Riazanskie madonny). The maternal theme strengthens in a manner that gives it a permanent, timeless status as the historical context shrinks to a specific time: World War Two. One time has links with all others; one woman is and will be all others. Lyricism slips on a civic costume as it vanishes in the implicit crowds of a very social canvas. Ты встаешь, как из тумана, Раздвигая грудью рожь. Ты ему навстречу, Анна, Белым лебедем плывешь. Мягких трав великолепье, Тишина у той тропы, Где глухой разрыв над степью Поднял землю на дыбы. Уходят эшелоны И ты глядишь им в след … Рязанская мадонна, Солдатка в двадцать лет. И уже в дожди косые Под прощальный перестук

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in practice Встали женщины России Изваянием разлук. На продымленных перронах Да с грудными на руках Наши матери и жены В русских вязаных платках. И матери и жены. Дороги без конца … Рязанские мадонны, Прекрасные сердца. Не изменят, лгать не станут И у смерти на краю. Встань меж ними равной, Анна, Твой солдат погиб в бою. И какой на свете мерой Нам измерить эту боль, Пожилой солдатки веру В невозвратную любовь. Пустая стынь перрона, Далекая верста … Рязанская мадонна, Российская звезда. [You arise, as if from the fog, parting the rye with your breast. You sail towards him, Anna, like a white swan. The splendour of the soft grasses, the calm of that path where a dull rumble sounded above the steppe and made the earth bristle. The troops leave, and your gaze follows them … A Riazan’ madonna, a twenty-year-old soldier’s wife. In the slanting rain, to the sound of its farewell tapping, the women of Russia arose as a monument to farewells. Our mothers and wives, wrapped in Russian wool shawls, stand on misty railway platforms with babies in their arms. Mothers and wives, endless roads … Riazan’ madonnas, beautiful hearts. They won’t be unfaithful or lie, even at death’s door. Stand among them as an equal, Anna, your soldier died in battle. What on earth can measure that pain or the fidelity of an aging soldier to a love that will not return … The empty cold of the platform, a distance growing great … A Riazan’ madonna, a Russian star.]

Zykina’s most famous song, if not the most famous of all Soviet folk songs, is “The Volga Flows” (Techet Volga). Here it all comes together:

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gypsy nomadism, family, loss (of youth), and the monumental scale of maternal themes expanded by wartime affect to the dimensions of nature’s own cyclical processes. Nonetheless, private recollection and change or flux temper that epic scale both happily and willingly. Memory and change create the eternal present, the eternal becoming that frustrates linear teleology and (simultaneously) helps to make the Soviet folk song eternally contemporary. The song is both Soviet and non-Soviet, both public and private, a tale of both now and then. Note the repeated references to various ages in a manner that is of constant relevance in the workings of private, positive memory. Издалека долго Течет река Волга, Течет река Волга – Конца и края нет … Среди хлебов спелых, Среди снегов белых Течет моя Волга, А мне семнадцать лет. Сказала мать: «Бывает все, сынок, Быть может, ты устанешь от дорог, – Когда придешь домой в конце пути, Свои ладони в Волгу опусти.» Издалека долго Течет река Волга, Течет река Волга – Конца и края нет … Среди хлебов спелых, Среди снегов белых Течет моя Волга А мне уж тридцать лет. Тот первый взгляд и первый плеск весла … Все было, только речка унесла … Я не грущу о той весне былой, Взамен ее твоя любовь со мной. Издалека долго Течет река Волга, Течет река Волга – Конца и края нет …

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in practice Среди хлебов спелых, Среди снегов белых Гляжу в тебя, Волга, Седьмой десяток лет. Здесь мой причал, и здесь мои друзья, Все, без чего на свете жить нельзя. С далеких плесов в звездной тишине Другой мальчишка подпевает мне: «Издалека долго Течет река Волга, Течет река Волга – Конца и края нет … Среди хлебов спелых, Среди снегов белых Течет моя Волга, А мне семнадцать лет.» [The river Volga flows long and far. The river Volga flows; it has no end or boundaries. Amidst ripe grains and white snows my Volga flows and I am seventeen. My mother said, “Everything’s possible in life, son. Maybe you’ll tire from your travels. When you come home at the end of your road, lower your hands into the Volga.” The river Volga flows long and far. The river Volga flows; it has no end or boundaries. Amidst ripe grains and white snows my Volga flows and I am already thirty. The first gaze and the first splash of the oar. There was everything, borne away by the river. I do not mourn that past spring. In exchange I have your love with me. The river Volga flows long and far. The river Volga flows; it has no end or boundaries. Amidst ripe grains and white snows I look at you for my seventh decade. My moorings and friends are here, everything without which life is impossible. From the river’s distant stretches into the starry calm another boy is singing to me: “The river Volga flows long and far. The river Volga flows; it has no end or boundaries. Amidst ripe grains and white snows my Volga flows and I am seventeen.”]

conclusion: folk songs’ “endless, boundless flow” The craft of Lidiia Ruslanova and Liudmila Zykina is one and the same. I have chosen here only two representatives of a tradition symbolized by many men and women. Even today folk music has a strong presence on the Russian estrada, taking many forms unknown

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to either of these artistes. The slightly audacious, ribald nature of many songs appears in the work of Nadezhda Babkina, while traditional melodies are set to modern rhythms with great success by ensembles such as Golden Ring (Zolotoe kol’tso). Both accordion players and singers of folk limericks (chastushki) are sought by national television for talent shows. Eastern Europe’s least photogenic residents grin and display both wonderful skill and awful dental work as they celebrate timeless art forms, learned and practised in tiny cottages across the world’s biggest country. Quaint though “folk” songs may seem to us, they are a prime form of entertainment and consolation all across rural Russia at the start of the twenty-first century. Ruslanova and Zykina, as two women who respected and admired each other, guaranteed the enduring relevance of an old rural art form through seven decades of urban, heartless dogma. As a result, one line from Techet Volga takes on an added though unintended significance: “Amidst ripe grains and white snows I look at you, river Volga, for my seventh decade.” Zykina was sixty-two when the Soviet Union fell, beginning her own seventh decade. Perhaps like Russia’s Volga, the significance of folk traditions “flowed long and far” as the rigidity of doctrine began to undermine itself. Folk songs changed and outlasted the Soviet Union. Although Zykina is without doubt the most ideologically “Soviet” of all the performers in this book, her common ground with Soviet doctrine was almost always a moral, not sociopolitical, issue. Certain aspects of human existence commonly and long perceived as fair or principled struck her as preferable to the cruelty of capitalism. Even when she did succumb to political rhetoric, it was either used in programmatic newspaper articles (to improve the standing of an ancient art) or saved for feisty foreign journalists. Once on stage, the old songs, again as the Volga, “flowed with neither end nor boundaries.” It is somewhat ironic, therefore, that this one form of early Soviet popular song, which folds huge sheets of time and space into itself, would be the form closest to ideology at times. Why is this so? The obvious answer, apart from the common moral views I have discussed, is that Ruslanova, Zykina, et al. were playing it safe. Toe the Party line and breathe easy. Surely the situation is not that sad after everything we have said about the potential of memory and affirmation. We need to make a closing inspection of estrada’s lumbering sputnik, Soviet ideology itself. I have spread that inspection over two chapters. The first synthesizes and furthers key issues we have employed throughout this book – specifically the relationships of emotion or affect to ideology as forms of social cohesion. The second, the book’s concluding chapter, takes some aspects of affective philosophy from

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Deleuze and develops them within the context of work by Slavoj Žižek. The Slovenian writer has written extensively about the way in which ideology harbours its opposite: the constraints of socialism simply had to suffer, contain, and embrace the unconstrained workings of estrada. I aim to show that estrada’s worldview both was in and outlasted a dictatorial society, so let’s start by seeing what all of these aged songs mean in today’s media. When Russian television held a huge nationwide party on 1 January 2000, did anybody think of putting these old 78s on the turntable?

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PART TWO

IN THEORY: SOVIET ENTERTAINMENT SEEN FROM TODAY’S PERSPECTIVES

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9 TIME TO SPECULATE AND TAKE STOCK: 1 JANUARY 2000 IN RUSSIAN LIGHT ENTERTAINMENT I’d really rather not see my country divided into things before 1917 and those afterwards. There’s one Russia and one culture.1

now and then: a game show to end the millennium Win a new Volkswagen Beetle on New Year’s Day! Just take a guess at the twenty most popular songs of the century and we’ll give you the car on Red Square! Live on national television! The insanely long odds against such a guess being correct did not deter countless Russian viewers from playing this intriguing game as the year 2000 approached. A few months previously, the television station had invited its entire audience, all the way from the Baltic to the Pacific, to submit a list of its dearest songs – in any language – and then at 00:01 on 1 January to defy insobriety and start guessing the country’s aggregate preferences. When the broadcast went live and then moved into the wee hours, however, even the host station was forced to consider the mathematical obtuseness of its task. A blindfolded presenter (Evgenii Kiselev) eventually agreed to draw one of the letters in which a viewer’s personal favourites corresponded at least in some vague manner to those of the nation. The winner, it transpired to nobody’s surprise, was a Muscovite, living only twenty minutes from Red Square. She had just enough time to drive her old car even further into the ground and reach the walls of the Kremlin for a floodlit presentation.2 Did these songs include any of the names, works, or styles we have encountered in this study? Did anybody want to remember a socialist tradition? Neither the aggregate list nor that of the winner contained very modern songs and only a few were in English, such as “Go Down

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Moses,” “Summertime,” “Let’s Twist Again,” and “Strangers in the Night.” Nearly all were of domestic origin, in many instances from the arduous years under Stalin and now familiar to readers of this book in the guise of Vertinskii, Utesov, Bernes, and others. None of these songs were pro-Communist. Love lyrics, comic songs, and a little satire were most evident. Private concerns had eschewed and outlasted public plans, as many other television broadcasts proved simultaneously on other channels. In a similar avoidance of today’s politicized business, an erstwhile Soviet vocalist – Iosif Kobzon – walked into a plush, modern broadcasting studio on 30 December 1999 and remarked proudly, “Our tv station was never like this, but then we had the songs …”3 (Our songs outlasted their policies back then. That makes them better than your studio now, funded by the same money that runs today’s politics.) Another holiday overview of songs from Kobzon’s era and before also celebrated the constancy of light entertainment in the face of transient politics before 1917 and after 1991. The show contended that estrada’s songs had woven a better story than either socialism or syndicates, in fact the only story really worth telling: “We have cabarets today, just as we did back then [before 1917]. There were a few gaps in between, but we don’t talk about them now.”4 State oratory had been an unwelcome and loud infringement upon an ongoing, sung, and superior narrative.5 The nation spent New Year’s Eve remembering superior songs. While presenters were busy not talking about Soviet social science, the audience was nonetheless frequently and happily reminded of another artiste who flourished amidst rhetoric, in this case during Brezhnev’s term in office – Alla Pugacheva. She had been endorsed and loved by the Soviet Union, yet by some means outlasted it. Even today there is “no way you could find a person anywhere in the ex-ussr who hasn’t heard at least one of her songs.”6 Our red-headed diva and other older performers were featured and honoured in forms both old and new. Their cherished music sounded from many reruns of dusty Soviet holiday broadcasts, which somehow managed in their less entertaining moments to reference both pre-revolutionary traditions (circus footage) and socialist production with insistent ovations to industrial, not festive or spiritual, “miracles.”7 Amid colourful songs, colourless socialist presenters reminded their viewers that hard work makes fairy tales come true, not fairies.8 When the callow starlets of today were interviewed on 31 December 1999, they too praised the same “Soviet” industriousness that they had learned from predecessors: “It’s a tricky thing, making your fantasies come true on stage. It really comes down to hard, physical work.” This

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curvaceous showgirl in particular expressed appreciation for those times when she had been able to perform with retired stars of the Soviet footlights. She then remarked that her schooling in labour and make-believe from such stars continues today, every time she encounters children. Laudable attitudes towards hard work, fantasy, and performance from before 1991, then, are found in today’s tots because the Kremlin’s crooners and kindergarten children are all good people. “I … value the opinion of children, because they’re good, gentle, and kind … Only they can evaluate a person as he really is.”9 The past, irrespective of its ideological context, was thus used on television at the end of the millennium to fuel and evaluate a current, childlike sentiment of ethical import: “We have to educate our audience. You won’t do it with bare legs.”10 The need to affect the audience’s heart and in turn be thus affected was even portrayed off the musical stage, in various television dramas over the New Year. Another female artiste, Tania Bulanova, who has bared a leg or two in her time, acted in a wildly popular detective series; on this occasion it concerned the theft of some taped back-up vocals for a lip-synching ensemble.11 Lip-synching (fanera in Russian) was anathema for our performers after the fifties and the epitome of deceit, especially during provincial tours; in the popular imagination today it exemplifies a minor talent and major cupidity. It turns the heartfelt contact of stage and auditorium into detachment; it turns the power of emotion into mere decibels and is all the weaker for its attempt at posturing. Displaying the same desire to “police” and promote genuine contact or feeling, old Soviet performers from precisely that fanera-free tradition appeared endlessly on television over the holiday in order to wish their audience emotional, rather than material, success.12 Their songs from deepest socialism were quoted aphoristically in interviews and speeches as treasured invocations of honest sentiment. In one such quote we hear that “if a person walks along smiling, it means that all’s well with him!”13 Songs and smiles were everywhere. Early Soviet repertoires were referred to and fondly remembered even when a super-modern show concentrated entirely upon the music of 1999. They were welcome and fitting additions. The grand scale of initial Soviet history here became the big-hearted sentiment of old songs, which, “just like people, are alive as long they’re remembered.” The most successful postSoviet composer, Igor’ Nikolaev, was awarded a prize named after Isaak Dunaevskii, and inspired by that same socialist tradition, he remarked how the workings of fashion today pale before the eternal ability of Stalinism’s songs to “harmonize with one’s personality.”14 Utesov’s (very) old prewar jazz standard “Windows of Moscow” (Moskovskie

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okna) sounded forth and was immediately praised as a timeless expression of “comfort, warmth, hope, and the future.”15 Other kindred comments were heard throughout the entire evening as singers old and young shared their common emotions: – I’ve never parted with my childhood dreams … I wish us all peace in our families, our country, and our souls. – The most important thing is to be loved and treasure the moments of this holiday warmth, plenitude, and comfort for the entire next century! – [With regard to my love songs of the sixties,] boys still look at girls today! – I wish everybody comfort – both physical and spiritual. – I hope that you are with your nearest and dearest, that you spend the year calmly and with confidence. – I want only to wish you all a love that’s both honest and faithful. – I wish you happiness. Lots of it.16

In these quotes from various generations we hear emotional forces born of Soviet experience; they employ that very experience in a manner that nonetheless ignores ideology and thus they outlive doctrine. These forces are heartfelt empathy, sentiment, and affirmation; in other words, they are not the critical selection, absence, or lack inherent in political bombast. Popular entertainment in 2000 still says yes to everything; it embodies a “maximalist” philosophy where “the main thing is feeling” and the consequent ability to “remake oneself” or, “like a phoenix, be reborn from one’s ashes. Every so often you have to shed your skin and be renewed.”17 The act of affirmation, saying yes to all phenomena (then, now, and later), can in fact redirect or amplify the sentiment evident in so much pro-Soviet ideological art, thus offering a bigger or better conception of that to which the state has no evident objection.18 Estrada tried very hard to keep an open heart and mind, to champion phoenix-like changes over any notions of one-way progression at the very time when linearity was about to plant a stately milestone on 1 January 2000. It advocated the constancy of friendship and love in a “changing” world, because the affirmative forces of friendship and love know more about change than ideology does – and they do it better.19 At the millennium’s close, performers who claimed never to have advocated a worldview of “lack” or exclusion based upon sex and race announced repertoires for the New Year designed explicitly to celebrate maximum change or maximum variation.20 At the end of 1999, journalists and artists noted this practice of accepting and applying as much as possible as part of a socialist heritage.21

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As the past was remembered piecemeal and dragged into the future to do double duty, it started to affect the person who wished to affect it: innovation influenced the innovator. Linear time was bent out of shape: “In the new century or this new millennium, maybe I’ll change both my Christian and last names. Maybe I’ll do it just in order to start everything all over again!”22 Other stars also refused to pay much attention to linear time at all; they refused to acknowledge y2k as an event of any particular significance.23 This nomadic philosophy (amidst different times, genres, and so forth) was even expressed spatially and hence quickly charmed Russia’s foremost travel magazine. Two stars who constantly tour overseas and wander through their own changing, multigeneric repertoires were shown on the magazine’s front cover: “Have fun travelling! Take the example, once again, of Pugacheva, this time with her husband Filipp Kirkorov. Be happy and never sit at home if you want to love your home all the more.”24 The paradoxes inherent in decades of “happy,” nomadic entertainment became so widespread that they slipped effortlessly into the editorial blurb of travel brochures.

now, then, and now again: be affective and emotional! You’re a very “Soviet” singer, in the sense that you’re near and dear to us.25

We have seen in earlier chapters how that emotional, “effortless slip” happened and how it keeps on happening, a process where the song has tried (at times desperately) to have fun travelling, even in the nastiest political weather. This study, documenting a long struggle with inclemency, has been the last in a series of three introductions to the popular song in twentieth-century Russia. It has covered the earliest decades but was written last of all. The logic underlying such apparent perversity has been saved for this chapter. Here we will build ourselves a theoretical framework using applicable philosophies, such as those of France after 1968. I will first note that the three texts were designed primarily to counter much of the contemporary research into Soviet culture, which continues to reflect Cold War rhetoric replete with its binary opposites, structuralist leanings and linear logic or chronologies, born of exclusion and simplification. Political and structural discourses have been very vigorous bed partners. Second, it is hoped that these books revise received notions of Soviet mass or popular culture as activities defined relative to politics, as positive or negative degrees of compliance and dissidence. Let us

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instead try for a moment to consider what it is that makes any culture popular. “Popular culture is always more than ideological; it provides sites of relaxation, privacy, pleasure, enjoyment, feeling good, fun, passion and emotion. Popular culture often inscribes its effects upon the body: tears, laughter, hair-tingling, screams, spine-chilling, eye-closing, erections, etc. These visceral responses, which often seem beyond our conscious control, are the first mark of a work of popular culture: it is sentimental, emotional, moody, exciting, prurient, carnivalesque, etc.”26 Surely the time has come to assess Soviet culture according to two new benchmarks: what did people really enjoy and did those moody preferences operate in a manner often independent of – not necessarily opposed to – the linear workings of Soviet dogma? Preference per se tends to ignore linearity with its inclinations and leanings towards something(s), all for the following reason. At the root of preference and liking is affect, a term employed throughout this book and usually defined as the demonstrative aspect of emotion, as the consequential “doing” of a feeling. Affect means being open to and using emotional influence. Consequently, it is a force of some description, one that both precedes the person who is affected (she or he draws upon it) and outlasts the time the person actually spends leaving an emotional imprint on (or view of) the world for others. In broad terms, “power-relations are the [basic kind of] differential relations which determine affects.”27 By implication, therefore, the power behind affect is greater than both emotion (since this power admits, bears, or conditions the emotion) and the person who senses it; it is greater than the subjective self usually associated with (introspective) emotion or sentiment. It is a supra- or pre-personal state, one of manifold “becomings that spill over beyond whoever lives through them.”28 It is drawn upon and dispatched, recalled and released. In the influential “active discharge of emotion … affects are projectiles, just like weapons … There is a relation between the affect and the weapon, as witnessed not only in mythology, but also in the chanson de geste, and the chivalric novel or novel of courtly love. Weapons are affects and affects weapons.”29 It indeed requires little effort, for example, to find such forward, froward emotions in Don Quixote, whose chivalric transformations and attacks upon the world are surely spurred on by grand tales and a big heart. The contest between emotions becomes a battle to coerce or influence the world. “I follow the narrow path of knight-errantry … I have redressed injuries, righted wrongs, punished insolences, vanquished giants and crushed monsters. I am in love.”30 These feisty affects are not only “feelings or emotions that exert a force. [They are also] a capacity to be affected.”31 There is often a

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discernible reverse action: for example, the very force Don Quixote projects upon an unyielding world also transforms him, as his desire to see the outside world through chivalric passion makes him passionately chivalrous. For every projected emotion, there is the potential for an equal and opposite sentiment, one that defies description. Heartfelt actions speak louder than words. When asked to describe Dulcinea, the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha says that “if I could pluck out my heart and lay it on a plate … it would spare my tongue the pain of telling what can hardly be thought of.”32 She influences him to the degree that he hopes to influence her. Within the Russian tradition, too, even the greatest poet of all fared no better when faced with the need to render precisely his own heroine, Tatiana. “The author said that for a long time he could not decide how to make Tatiana write [a letter to the hero] without infringing on her female personality.”33 The men of La Mancha and Mikhailovskoe (odd though the comparison may be) both try hard to utter a powerful, sentimental affect “in which feelings are the driving force of all that transpires.” The force of that sentiment lends itself neither to social expression nor to society as a whole, which perhaps is why Soviet critics felt happier with the loud, convivial exuberance of the sister Olga in Pushkin’s work than with Tatiana’s frequently silent and shifting states.34

be happy! how desire can reveal an affective world His life was [and is] spent in endless service of the people’s happiness, in granting them a sunny, happy disposition, helping them everywhere, making things easier, both in times of rest and work, in the trenches of the Great Patriotic War [wwii], in military field camps, and at the lathes of factory floors.35

All of this supra-linguistic demonstration or emotional “doing” is positioned within a very broad series of forces or a process of desire – in the course of desiring, I act. Don Quixote acts only because of a passionate, obsessive desire. By “desire” here I mean simply a mutual or productive connection between two entities. Desire in this sense “does not refer to an attraction or interaction between bodies, but designates pure, social relation, a change in direction [over time, of attention or affect] that could not have been anticipated.”36 Desire results both from and in unexpected, fluid, and short-lived connections.

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It shapes the world in pairs of powerful mutual or two-way affect. It is supremely social and perfectly simple in its ubiquity, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari claim so crudely when defining such pairings or “machines” in the opening salvoes of their wordy attack upon Freudian territory, Anti-Oedipus. Here they describe the power of being open to, of exploiting, or of using emotional influence all the time and everywhere. [Desire] is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts … Everywhere it is machines – real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth is a machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing-machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. For every organmachine, an energy-machine: all the time, flows and interruptions.37

This cannot be a social coupling that comes from pleasure alone, since pleasure is an end in itself. Pleasure concludes a process or flow of power. Power or “force is never singular but essentially exists in [constant] relation with other forces, such that any force is already a relation, that is to say power: force has no other object or subject than force.”38 Desire is the free (inter)relation or (inter)action of at least two entities, themselves affecting others, and so on and so forth. It is easy to see how desire can power the wandering structures of emotional, chivalric novels or estrada stage traditions. Desire or contact “flows” between hero and lover, subject and object, between things that want and are wanted, are using and used; yet each active (flowproducing) half of a machine also wants (something or someone else), and thus the binary relations of subject/object or passive/active vanish in a fluid web of interaction. That interaction is measured in degrees of power, “actualized as a function of the assemblages into which the individual or thing enters.”39 Ultimately, therefore, power determines being rather than gender or species. Affect is the way in which that greater social power of desire is actualized, often emotionally. “In the case of the sad affect, the power of the other thing [in the coupling or assemblage] and your own would be subtracted since all your efforts at that moment would consist in struggling against this sadness and hence your power and the power of the thing which affects you would be subtracted. When,

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on the contrary, you are affected with joyful affects, the power of the thing which affects you with joyful affects and your own power are combined and added so that your power of acting, for that same power of being affected which is your own, is increased.” Happiness means desire is maximized. Don Quixote tries very hard to be a happy book. Joy amplifies the power of affect, and vice versa, but not in a way that increases standard notions of a restful and contented selfcontained self or subjectivity.40 One dissipates and becomes part of a machine, of an assemblage and networks of powers or what Deleuze and Guattari call a haecceity – an “event, as opposed to thing or person.” The examples they often give are those of a day, a season, and similar eventful flows: “Climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that populate them, sleep and awaken within them. This should be read without a pause: the animalstalks-at-five-o’clock … Five o’clock is this animal! This animal is this place!”41 In creating assemblages of events, in connecting the affected and affecting, desire is so free, so flawlessly social, that it creates a radically novel mode of interaction, one of willing submission to a weakened form of subjectivity. One becomes part of everything; binary structures become multiple and opposites multiply. The events of desire begin with a productive coupling, one rooted in terrene existence. As a rather drab example, desire for a cup of coffee is not directed simply towards the drink; it is produced by and produces an entire context or assemblage (agencement in French) associated with the drink, such as company or everything that constitutes a busy café.42 It is then willed or assembled into useful, productive, and successful groupings or the aforementioned “machines.” An endlessly machined emotional world is a supremely social state, the “social unconscious” that uses and then opposes all hierarchical structures, such as Soviet dogma. Desire only exists when assembled or machined. You cannot grasp or conceive of a desire outside of a determinate assemblage … [Enduring, long-term] organizations of forms, formations of subjects, “incapacitate” desire: they subjugate it to law and introduce lack into it. If you tie someone up and say to him “Express yourself friend,” the most he will be able to say is that he doesn’t want to be tied up. The only spontaneity in desire is doubtless of that kind: to not want to be oppressed, exploited, enslaved, subjugated. But no desire has ever been created with non-wishes. Not to want to be enslaved is a non-proposition. In retrospect every assemblage expresses and creates a desire … Desire is not restricted to the privileged; neither is it restricted to the success of a revolution once it has occurred. It is in itself an immanent revolutionary process.43

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With the complete recognition or release of desire, individuals are then driven by the power of “appetite” for affirmation, the “effort by which each thing strives to persevere in its being” by being altered and altering.44 This existence is no longer conditioned or convinced by linear thinking, since if I am constantly affected and then myself affect, I am always open; I am eternally in flux. The fixedness of me in the here and now evanesces. My being is now becoming, as unfettered desire. “Pure becoming is entirely without measure or limit, to the extent that not only does it never rest, but it also moves in two [or more] directions at once, an infinite identity of both [or all] directions or senses at the same time, causing future and past, too much and not enough, more and less, and so forth to coincide in the simultaneity of a rebellious matter.”45 Despite such abstractions, we must not forget that affect is a force in the material world and that art, as an intensely emotional process, celebrates matter “as it exists in itself, apart from its use-value.”46 In avoiding the utilitarian aspects of Soviet materialism, we are still dealing nonetheless with “worldly” feeling, not faith; we are dealing with immanence, not with the immaterial or a rush towards spirituality. Our feet are firmly on the ground or stage from start to finish, no matter how far we go in the processes of dissipation that desire both invites and invokes.

now, now, and now! desire, eternal returns, and “folds” Time has shown that her art does not age. Her songs express the diversity of human emotions; they touch people’s hearts and souls, just as they did before.47

Thus far we have seen how the solidity of material experience may be subjected to a force that recognizes a priori limits in neither time nor space. Time in the world of affect is made. It is made by whichever things are liked, because the more that is affirmed, the more matter changes and the less either solidity or an individual’s form enjoys extension in time (over the course of which that form is recognized). In Estrada?! I married this loss of subjectivity and solidity of form to Nietzsche’s eternal return. If we affirm all things, all traditions, all audience members and all times, and therefore abandon the idea of an objectively recognized “now,” linear time enters into a state that will never slip into the past. It is constantly becoming; everything slips into it. By constantly being, it never stops (in order to become the

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past); the past keeps coming back into the present and simply refuses to go away. This is the eternal return; not the return of the same, but the return of everything, of all that is affirmed, because a powerful, happy affirmation means more desire, more machines, and more flows. “One [type of ‘return’] is revolving, the other evolving.”48 We need and wish for the latter. In some ways, since we are dealing with literary texts and the cultural importance of poetry in Russia, we could certainly draw a parallel with rhyme, which, while driving a text forwards, at the same time reiterates its past (its first half) in the process of becoming a rhyme.49 This observation, made by Deleuze, has also been made by Joseph Brodsky, which would explain in some small way why the poet was also able to use the “repetitions” of Kierkegaard’s philosophy in a manner akin to Deleuze’s employment of both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. The Dane advocates endless willed movement through a series of repetitions in the sense that one moves from the logical endorsement of ethics (a correct choice) to the illogical aspect of spirituality. The latter notion, however, eludes both codification and permanence, hence the need that faith be affirmed and reaffirmed as a constant summation and enlargement of prior choices and philosophies. This affirmative process, as with Nietzsche, “is itself being. Being is solely affirmation in all its power.”50 The philosophy of joyful affirmation moves both forwards and backwards, since it never stops embracing the past. It is constantly becoming – but only if willed as such: “Whatever you will, will it in such a way that you can also will its eternal return. Much laziness, stupidity, cowardliness, resentment, and so on, drop out of this construal … Nihilism is vanquished by its own reactive nature when tested against constant becoming. Only something that can change its nature, that is, become itself, can survive.”51 Perhaps, then, rhyme also undermines itself in order to survive, with a similarly constant production of inconstancy. The aspiration of all official and most quotidian language towards semantic stasis, towards unchallenged meaning, is made mobile and mute by rhyme. Words want to mean one thing and do so for a long time; rhyme frustrates that desire. Songs do the same thing, hence this aside. This loss of immutability becomes an enormous gain. By meaning less (by losing the proud perceived forms of long-term stable subjectivity), a thing can come to mean more, a paradox connected not only to the equally proud fixed forms of linguistic meaning but to representation as a whole. Both the eternal return and the desire that embodies it are above and beyond figuration: “Repetition is the formless being of all differences, the formless power of the ground which carries every object to that extreme ‘form’ in which its representation

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comes undone.”52 Repetition and the return embody both past and future, and therefore subvert the temporal relationship in which subject and object, performer and perceiver, are usually designed or positioned. The roles of subject and object merge or dissolve with the “totality of being in the world.” Sameness (being today as it was yesterday) vanishes and differences burst forth from all corners of the subject’s broad embrace. The eternal return affirms difference, it affirms dissemblance and disparateness, chance, multiplicity and becoming … The eternal return eliminates precisely all those instances which strangle difference and prevent its transport by subjecting it to the … yoke of representation. Difference is recovered, liberated only … by repetition in the eternal return. The eternal return eliminates that which renders it impossible by rendering impossible the transport of difference. It eliminates the presuppositions of representation, namely the Same and the Similar, the Analogue and the Negative. For representation and its presuppositions return, but only once; they return no more than one time, once and for all, thereafter eliminated for all times.53

In Estrada?! I drew upon part of this elimination, primarily in its temporal significance; I examined the manner in which songs’ allembracing endorsement and their return eliminate the fixed, enduring meaning of linear time, of Soviet progressive teleology. Affirmation refuses the negative selectivity of linearity, which operates according to some “lack” or other; it refuses to plot only a few graph-points at the expense of the majority. The assenting, happy estrada – as we have seen – accepts and endorses all points on all graphs. What results, since there is also no recourse to spirituality, is no longer a statesponsored linear trajectory, but a space reminiscent of a flat, twodimensional piece of graph paper (no third, perpendicular axis) absolutely covered in dots. All dots were, are, and will be joined as desire moves freely towards and away from them, constantly revisiting. Since there is no longer even a logic dictating the passage between two reference points via all those in between, what results is a process of “folding,” of bringing distant points in from corners and edges to the centre(s). Linear time is cancelled in favour of folds back and forth, in and out. Memory, for example, is then not synonymous with political retrospection, teary-eyed nostalgia, or even amor fati, but is part of a joyfully willed process. Memory is the real name of the relation to oneself, or the affect on self by self. According to Kant, time was the form in which the mind affected itself, just as space was the form in which the mind was affected by something else:

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time to speculate and take stock time was therefore “auto-affection” and made up the essential structure of subjectivity. But time as subject, or rather subjectivation, is called memory. Not that brief memory that comes afterwards and is the opposite of forgetting, but the “absolute memory” which doubles the present and the outside and is one with forgetting, since it is endlessly forgotten and reconstituted.54

A word about this state of endlessly reconstituted “timelessness.” If what we have here is not transcendence as an escape from material experience, then perhaps the illogical domain of Kierkegaard’s spirituality, of Nietzsche’s return of the eternally novel, is here replaced once and for all by the emotional. For Kierkegaard, faith undermines logic, linearity, and objective representation; for estrada, affect does the same. We are not dealing with religion, so perhaps “spiritual entities or abstract ideas are [indeed] not what we think they are. They are emotions or affects.”55 Affect becomes a material activity to use and reuse materialism, to reference and redefine it. In estrada, within free desire, it embraces existing Soviet (ideologically approved) emotion in the real world and radically redirects it; estrada uses its power for alternative, different purposes, since affect is – in and of itself – meaningless. It is a vehicle, not the cargo; it is a force, not the thing being forcefully moved. Affect can never define, by itself, why things should matter. That is, unlike ideology and pleasure, it can never provide its own justification, however illusory such justifications may in fact be. The result is that affect always demands that ideology legitimate the fact that these differences and not others matter, and that within such differences, a particular term becomes the site of our investment … Affective empowerment is increasingly important in a world in which pessimism has become common sense … Affective relations are, at least potentially, the condition of possibility for the optimism, invigoration and passion which are necessary for any struggle to change the world.56

Russian popular culture wanted (and wants) to affirm Soviet affect, to accept and embrace its power, while working all the time like the Nietzschean archer of philosophy who picks up another’s fallen arrow in order to shoot it further, albeit in another, excessive direction. The minor language – sung or musical estrada – wants and uses the major discourse. This is neither subversion nor political deviance, but a cheerful complication of what “Soviet” means. Sung sentiment posits the notion of Sovietness in constant flux by being emotionally excessive, to the point of an impassioned silence. Not only does it call upon something beyond representation, beyond the sound of language (as music or the now-noiseless past), but it returns the many silent voices

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of the past to (a less populated) now. “Under the impulse of affect, our language is set whirling, and in whirling it forms a language of the future, as if it were a foreign language, an eternal reiteration.”57 It folds the hushed multitudes of past and future into the present, those who have long since spoken or perhaps have yet to do so. These willed, wanted intrusions of silence (or at least of a forgotten, now-minor tongue) into a major language come at intervals; like rhyme, they are rhythmically positioned, forgotten and remembered, lost and found. The resulting folds of our graph paper mentioned above are spatio-temporal refrains, ever-recontextualized knots of significance. They bring into the present their own power and are then in turn subjected to new forces of signification. In Estrada?! I drew upon Deleuze’s own understanding of “refrain” in the sense of animal noise that claims territory; a recognized refrain is applied to a new (and newly claimed) space. Songs use the refrains of poetry and music together: “Music exists because the refrain exists also, because music takes up the refrain, lays hold of it as a content in a form of expression, because it forms a block with it in order to take it somewhere else.”58 The repeated uses of affected (or affecting) tradition claim new ground from sung Soviet immanence; old emotion (or emotional baggage) is used to travel to a new philosophical destination, which is mapped assuredly in the here and now. If the minor state of becoming or returning, of reterritorializing rhythmic refrains, is one that merges (or dissipates) subject and object, it must surely merge the one who effects the refrain with the refrain itself. The sensor and the sensed are unified. In a situation of philosophical immanence, therefore, the material space of the poet or performer is altered by the alterations he or she effects upon space’s significance with folded, non-linear affect or emotion. As hinted above in the discussion of memory, the body itself becomes a “thermometer of becoming”;59 it changes spatio-temporal significances and includes itself in those changes, in the “non-human becomings” that artists call upon and create. The body “disappears in what it develops: the compound[s] of sensation.”60 From one writer to another, great creative affects can link up or diverge, within compounds of sensations that transform themselves, vibrate, couple, or split apart: it is these beings of sensation that account for the artist’s relationship with a public, for the relation between different works by the same artist, or even for a possible affinity between artists … It should be said of all art that … artists are presenters of affects, the inventors and creators of affects. They not only create them in their work, they give them to us and make us become with them, they draw us into the compound … Whether through words,

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time to speculate and take stock colors, sounds or stone, art is the language of sensations. Art does not have opinions … The writer uses words, but by creating a syntax that makes them pass into sensation that makes the standard language stammer, tremble, cry or even sing … This is, precisely, the task of all art.61

conclusion: soviet and post-soviet russian popular songs exploit desire and affect much more than they express politics Like rhyme, an initially binary structure, Soviet estrada has effected such stammering (see quotation above) by drawing upon a system of opposites (or at least acknowledging it) before invoking rhythmic processes of complication and change. Rhythm is an act positioned between opposites of calm and chaos, borders and boundlessness, avoiding both with its complex “repetitions” that seem to invoke similarity but in fact reject it. Reterritorialized affects are regularly stolen from a pre-existing line of verse, text, or territory; from the edges or suburbs of an imperial territory there comes a nomadic, desirous philosophy – hence my own desire to order my three books on estrada in a strange manner. In Red Stars I acknowledged, accepted, and affirmed the linear, dialectical perception of estrada among seven of its prime practitioners after 1955. That perception was born of an ethical, binary relationship between stage and hall, performer and audience. The dialectical structuring of Soviet performance was gradually drawn upon to foster a relationship not of stage and state(ly) audience, but of (one) performance and myriad viewers. The role of validating what happens on stage shifted from state sponsors to the audience; what was liked and desired by millions of viewers defined estrada. The songs then began to reterritorialize existent (even pre-revolutionary) affects, once they were placed in the hands and hearts of millions. Just as on 1 January 2000, forces of meaning moved in multiple directions across the years and the footlights, multiplied by the number of viewers and the number of times each song was affirmed or remembered. The singer and what he or she was singing defied rigid significance with rhythmic, endless deterritorializations. This process of becoming, validated irrespective of political context, has operated under capitalism just as successfully as it did under Communist rule; the limitations of dialectical materialism were no more constraining than those of the marketplace. As a response to politics either before or after 1991, estrada changed and changes. It becomes and therefore is nothing in particular. On the edge of a

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dominant aesthetic or philosophy today (one of financial progress), it uses that old aesthetic (with its accumulated emotional power) and fuels an ongoing process of change by dissolving in multigeneric, perhaps “tasteless” desire. Just as satellites steal the gravity of distant planets for a slingshot trajectory into deeper space, so the nomadic, folding, reterritorializing philosophy of estrada uses a constrictive but grand status quo for a bigger and better goal, not necessarily an alternative or oppositional goal, but one that is bigger and better. With these three monographs, I have hoped therefore to show one aspect of this hidden complexity (or complex normalcy!) of what it meant and means to be Soviet. The books aimed not to simplify, but to complicate, to unfold. Yet there still lies, of course, an inherent contradiction in the writing of a history of such folds. How can the linear processes of writing and history reflect the eternal return of nomadic overlays? The least I could do was start in the middle – with volume two, Red Stars – with a respectful treatment of estrada’s stateapproved dialectics. The next volume, Estrada?!, concerning estrada between 1982 and 2000, introduced and expanded the consequent Deleuzian notions of folds, of chance and affirmation. With Songs for Fat People, the third (and first) book, we have come back to the beginning, to early estrada that now (as a third publication) has a very different meaning, one that also holds the seeds of its future development. The past is – and now was – the future. With these texts I have hoped to capture a little of this flux, “where art leaves the domain of representation in order to become ‘experience,’” since difference must surely be shown differing.62 Change is everything, accepts everything, and outlasts everything.

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10 CONCLUSION AND UNSOLICITED ENCORE Rain, rain, and more rain … In the distance some trams hurry along a street, but here, on these avenues, it’s so dark that this old lamppost looks like a crucifix. Over there is an outdoor estrada … It has long since rotted through. Now it just stares at the trees in the avenue with a dark, blank gaze. I held her waist tightly. My tiny wife died as she danced. I remember how feebly she hung her head, how her eyes, those light-blue diamonds, flashed something for the last time … She danced four steps as a dead woman. She danced at her own funeral.1

what’s past is prologue And so we come to the end of this evening’s entertainment. It remains only for us to create a brief framework around our study of estrada between 1900 and 1955, to look at where it began and at a couple of performers who show us where it went. We will also draw some final conclusions even broader than those of Deleuze and Guattari, which with their Parisian origins are very much a product of post-’68 France and socialist endeavour. Can we be bolder still and ask some questions about the relationship of sentiment to dogma per se, irrespective of leftist loci? Our closing pages will try to do so; they will summarize what Anna Ferenc wisely calls, with regard to wholly instrumental music, the difference between “political structuring of the art [in the Soviet Union] on one hand and actual music-making on the other.”2 This aesthetic structuring in Russia was always extremely tricky for an immature socialist government, since the nineteenth century had plotted a disconcertingly clear vector of estrada’s winged ascent. The number of entertainment establishments over the prior ten decades grew from 12 public theatres in the entire Russian empire to 2,134 venues of various shapes, sizes, and statuses (pubs excluded): circuses, clubs, concert halls, and musical, dramatic and literary societies.3 The production of recorded performances also showed no signs of sloth. The first factory to produce records for the Russian empire opened – in Riga – on 2 January 1901 and was owned by the British firm Gramophone. Within a year the Russian engineer Vasilii Rebikov had

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performed the same industrial feat on the banks of St Petersburg’s Fontanka Canal. By 1915 there were six factories in the country, producing 20 million records per annum. The factories kept growing in number and output. By 1960, for example, the four biggest plants in the Soviet Union alone were pressing 100 million recordings.4 What songs, though, should a revolutionary culture record on all that vinyl, given the enduring vogue for “decadent” estrada among the proletariat? The answer would appear clear: Soviet songs should be and were rhythmic, rhymed expressions of doctrine. Yet over the course of this book we have certainly seen that even in the most awful organizations, such as rapm, there were some redeeming elements, complicating – or enriching – the received picture of state and mute subject.5 rapm had aimed to remove bourgeois urban tendencies in the Russian song through the efforts of its original seven members in June 1923. Teachers were to be sent across the country to train young people in the way of genuinely proletarian expression. Even the mawkish melodies and saccharine librettos of Tchaikovsky were to be purged from as many future activities as possible. The simple harmonies of songs like Kirpichiki and the gypsy ardour of tsyganshchina also produced scowls of disapproval, but rapm had neither the money nor the staff to send its message very far for very long. The members’ own journal was swiftly replaced by the long-lived, even-tempered, and more influential Sovetskaia muzyka after rapm was officially disbanded on 23 April 1932. Hardly a happy tale of effectual dogma. Nonetheless, rapm’s bungled program did at least bring prolonged attention to the one aspect of song that its members considered the most troubling and most in need of a quick fix – a song’s mood or emotion. Decadent passion on the estrada, born of literature such as Vertinskii’s macabre stories quoted in this chapter’s epigraph, was to be swapped for a positive alternative in order that emotion’s transformational ability be used to ideologize feeling. Sentiment was already the prime concern of innumerable songwriters and their critics, irrespective of doctrinal persuasion. The fact that sentiment was (even then) a formidable power when practised in a smaller, lyrical, and apolitical domain can be shown by some figures for the sale of sheet music just before rapm’s conception. Sheet music publication was nationalized by a decree of 19 December 1918. The subsequent governing body, which became known as muzo, was overseen by the Commissariat for Education, Narkompros.6 Most of what these organizations published initially was rather strident and politically conscious, showing as well an occasional leaning towards folk aesthetics. Policy took precedence over popularity.

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On 12 December 1921, however, another decree made the private entrepreneurial publication of music legal. Lyricists, no doubt a little surprised at their good fortune, needed some time to pen some material, and as a result only a few texts were published in 1922. The next year the figure shot up to two hundred.7 Private, profitable songs were back in town. Brazen foxtrots, tangos, gypsy choirs, balalaikas, and drunken shouts could be heard from every bar on every corner.8 Tangos in particular brought back what (even three years prior to the Revolution) had been reprimanded as “the subterranean rumblings” of sexuality.9 Perhaps the defining moment in this three-way competition of big hearts, fat wallets, and centralized policy came on 13 March 1926 with the First Soviet Conference on Musical Enlightenment. Here were some of the earliest protracted discussions of what a Soviet popular or (ideally) mass song would be. It was to have a clearly defined “mood.” It should “without great effort” (bez spetsial’nykh usilii) be able to bear the various emotional loads of sorrow, joy, humour, and heroism. In the process of defining and deciding such measures, the production of accordions and balalaikas was to be accelerated.10 The light, portable, and emotional nature of the song appears not to have been in doubt; doctrine was making some concessions to the lessons of the New Economic Policy. Which genres or texts people propagated with those instruments, as we have seen, was another matter. Maybe ideology knew it was fighting a losing battle. It rejected the most radical measure of all at the conference, which even rapm thought silly, that cheaper water-filled bottles be used in the countryside instead of accordions so music could be brought to even more people, who could then be “enlightened” in the ways of proper Soviet songs. This would not have changed anything; most accordion players, even in the first unionwide Soviet competitions, could not read music and only played the estrada songs they had learned by heart. Stick-wielding villagers surrounded by glass bottles would hardly improve the situation. By a simple logic, one eternally discounted in academia, “Soviet” songs were those sung by the largest number of people inside a space known as the Soviet Union. Anything else was nothing more than wishful thinking on the part of those who happened to own large printing presses. Producing and distributing obscene amounts of sheet music or vinyl was of little use if potential customers decided to whistle another tune on the way to work. The Soviet industry made great concessions to their whistling consumers, and if we wish to free Slavic studies from the binary oppositions championed by rapm, muzo, Narkompros et al., we need to pay greater attention to the public, not to public policy.

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Ruslanova’s problems during World War Two with the prohibition of profitable extra concerts on the front were indicative of how most estradniki, their composers, and their poets played for that very public. They wanted to in part because there was serious money in the proletariat’s incurable desire for emotional lyric songs. Even before Ruslanova’s problems, there were calls in December 1941 that a uniform percentage or monetary commission should be set for songwriters, to stop those like Lebedev-Kumach from becoming acutely prosperous.11 There is much more evidence to favour a populist approach to Soviet culture, even if we stay within the jingoistic time-frame of World War Two. Radio shows such as This Is the Western Front Speaking, Listen Up, Front Line! or Letters to [and from] the Front received two million letters each over the course of World War Two; eight hundred thousand came from the battlefield itself, despite the obvious lack of regular, reliable mail. We can only imagine how many other muddy letters did not reach the radio studios. Listeners and moviegoers at home in Russia were often able to enjoy these same performances, plus brief documentary films of songs (fil’m-pesni), as sung to the troops. The involvement of soldiers, spouses, and siblings in this process guaranteed the massive popularity of the shows, but broadcasting anywhere near a theatre of war tended to make the transmitter a sitting duck. As a result, driven by his love for song, one wartime broadcaster by the name of Vladimir Gertsik flew randomly around the night sky, playing estrada as he dodged German ack-ack fire on over one hundred missions, earning him the nickname “The Airborne Announcer” (Vozdushnyi diktor). People were risking their lives to meet the emotional intensity of an industry that prior to the outbreak of hostilities had, for example in 1935–36, produced eight hundred thousand record players, never mind the number of records for those felt-covered turntables.12

arms, armistice, and the same old songs Even though the war caused an enormous drive for vinyl, as explained in the story of Vadim Kozin, incalculable numbers of records stayed at home and were played in the homes of families long after peacetime reunited them. I have described how the tangos and romances of Petr Leshchenko were smuggled into Russia from abroad. Vertinskii actually came home and continued touring, Shul’zhenko never went away, and Utesov became conductor of the Soviet Union’s State Estrada Orchestra. Feeling mapped itself onto the mood of the nation while playing its old approved standards. Every evening’s repertoire mixed and matched touching songs of various years, thus refusing to acknowledge

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one-way chronology. Those repertoires also refused to acknowledge the flipside of linear thought, revisionism. After the Party’s Twentieth Congress and the “revolutionary” re-plotting of (yet another) social trajectory, estrada simply went about its business. Sometimes it corresponded with governmental proclamation, sometimes not. In moving towards Stalin’s death and that congress, I should by way of documentation offer very briefly a couple of performers. They began their career in the Thaw, are not covered in Red Stars, and display the persisting significance of what drove the careers of the singers in this book. A desire to let sentiment change both one’s world and oneself endured, regardless of whether one was a performer of civic or lyric inclination. Elsewhere I chose Iosif Kobzon and Èdita P’ekha respectively to represent public and private songs. Two of their contemporaries and comrades were Muslim Magomaev and Maiia Kristalinskaia. Magomaev’s breakthrough as a tall, dapper, and classically trained singer came in 1963 at a Moscow celebration of Azerbaijan culture. Both masters and neophytes had come to the capital from the far-flung republic. He felt uneasy in the imperial, imperious dimensions of Muscovite concert halls, but only later would he learn truly to “fear” these venues and the ideology they represented. Aided by a little youthful swagger and his anonymity (“I was too young and nobody yet knew me”) he made use of Soviet grandeur in a manner outside of doctrine.13 The “provincial” singer employed Russia’s stateliness, not the State: “These huge halls suffocate you somewhat. They make you smaller but somehow they make your voice much bigger at the same time.” Even his repertoire on this first outing did not stay faithful to grandeur for very long. He sang excerpts from Faust, an aria from an Azerbaijan opera, and the estrada song “Do the Russians Want War” (Khotiat li russkie voiny). Magomaev was aware that the diplomatic purpose of such concerts outweighed their supposed intention as a display of love for either Azerbaijan or estrada. As an expression of “friendship between peoples,” this initial concert was in fact designed both to show Russian supremacy and to please Khrushchev alone. “Everything revolved around Khrushchev. No matter what was done or said, everyone was trying to please the boss.”14 Magomaev’s ascent to bona fide celebrity was swift indeed. Consequently, like Zykina, he was dispatched as a musical diplomat to unfamiliar shores and unusual problems. Zykina’s trips abroad have shown how early foreign tours for estrada stars produced a strange push and pull between emotion and duty, self-promotion and selfdefence. She wanted to promote a pre-Soviet art form, but when provoked by foreign journalists, she found herself parrying with patriotic, if not nationalistic, remarks. These views were stronger than she

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would ever have wanted (or needed) to verbalize at home, yet – ironically – they were exactly the views ideology was happy to see her advocate and advance. Magomaev encountered the same problem when he was sent to a French music festival in Cannes. “When my record sales were referred to at the festival, the audience gasped and people said that the Soviets were telling fibs. It couldn’t be that high. They didn’t know our country was so huge; the population then was more than 250 million people. Records were cheaper, affordable for all – and in almost every home. We didn’t just read more than any other country. We loved music profoundly, too.”15 The singer was upset to see feeling dismissed and overshadowed by political prejudice. When he performed a second time at this festival, in 1970 with Èdita P’ekha, Magomaev sang the trenchant pre-revolutionary number “Along Peter Street” (Vdol’ po Piterskoi); P’ekha sang the civic masterpiece “Boundless Sky” (Ogromnoe nebo). Furtseva, Zykina’s great sponsor, was unimpressed and told him to stop singing these modernized “pseudorussian songs.” He had turned a “Soviet” classic into “some sort of estrada ditty.” Most of the time, however, Magomaev’s problems were exactly the opposite, that he was too classical. At Sopot in 1969 the jury told him: “We can see you’re an opera singer. Even if you sang ten times worse, you’d still get first prize!” He was unhappy. “It was as if I was in the wrong place.” In other times, “under Khrushchev and under Brezhnev and during perestroika,” censors would sometimes complain to Magomaev that his rhythm, style, or lyrics were not quite proper. He would happily agree to the censors’ demands and then go off to sing instead “what the public liked.”16 These problems are to a considerable degree expressed in a metaphor I discuss in Red Stars: “Seeking.” During the Thaw and zastoi, the term appears in countless articles or interviews as an expression of post-Stalinist romance and adventure. In reality, of course, the room for aesthetic manoeuvring was sometimes minimal, and bureaucrats would often use the same idea to dismiss an artist’s efforts as “searches” in the wrong direction. Magomaev shot at both goals (estrada and opera), and on each occasion he was told he missed. In time, though, generic changes and seeking expressed not what bureaucrats might like but what the public did want. Hence Magomaev became a People’s Artist; people had kept going, while the Union had vanished. He is proud of his Soviet title even today as a people’s artist: “The country left. The title remains.”17 His views of the old Stalinist estrada examined in this book extend the same logic. Should modern Russia decide to adopt a truly representative anthem (as it recently did), it should express the size and

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perhaps moral proclamations of the grand Soviet past, but it should also be a song of genuine popularity. Take, for example, Dunaevskii’s “My Native Land Is Broad” (Shiroka strana moia rodnaia). Magomaev feels a genuine coincidence of patriotism and passion in this song: it is loved by people who love their country and therefore deserves the status of anthem. He has a doubt or two about the words, but we should not forget that the anthologized text of this song today, like Marsh veselykh rebiat, contains some shrill versified praise for Stalin’s legal system not in the film for which it was written. Magomaev’s critique is for ideology’s intrusion into the home of the heart. That’s an anthem for a nation. A real anthem. Has anything happened [to the song] because the state structure has changed? Or because a great country has passed away? What about the fact that its words aren’t very modern now or even the object of harsh ridicule? The song’s none the worse for all that. Why can’t we write some new words for it, ones that would correspond more to today’s times? We shouldn’t drop the songs of years gone by just because their texts have aged a little. After all, songs from that [Stalinist] period are the memorials of our culture. Who could write a song like Dunaevskii’s now? Nobody! And that’s not because there isn’t enough talent around. There’s just not enough love for one’s native country. Not an ostentatious, declamatory love, but one that comes from the heart.18

This is the same love and the same heartfelt civic spirit that we can find in evidently lyric singers, such as the petite, plump Maiia Kristalinskaia. Her own breakthrough came at the same time as Magomaev’s but via the more modern public medium of television, on the private holiday program Little Blue Light (Goluboi ogonek), 7 April 1962. “Everybody watched that program. It was a show for the entire nation [narodnaia].”19 This broadcast of song, comedy, and vague political festivity began on a weekly basis but was subsequently used to celebrate any number of socialist holidays honouring “fishermen, builders, teachers, or miners.” An increasingly civic stance grew in the seventies, to the point where Goluboi ogonek helped to mark the biggest, most serious dates on the Soviet calendar. Now – long extinct – it has been returned in the popular memory to its original private domestic role, as it is fondly referred to and referenced on New Year’s shows today through well-known studio sets and songs. Interweaving a heart and social hubris in the same manner, Kristalinskaia’s wistfully private ballads were able with little effort to mix with the public songs of Iosif Kobzon. He had in his repertoire a couple of songs concerning a young man’s life and the yard of his apartment building, “In Our Courtyard” and “That Courtyard Once

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Again.” The composer Arkadii Ostrovskii felt that a female series of answering or echoing texts was required. He telephoned Kristalinskaia and offered her the project. Her song, celebrated all over again by the most popular songstress in today’s Russia (Kristina Orbakaite) on a recent New Year’s extravaganza, adds lyricism to Kozbon’s civic tendencies. The two need each other. Why, though? I began Red Stars with a broad, social canvas – an examination of the Soviet philosopher Il’enkov – but have gone further and further down a road of lyricism or of private expression. I should therefore try in conclusion to marry the public and the private, rather than reveal a breach or gaping divide between them; otherwise I merely reinstate (or exacerbate) the very binary thought I am trying to overcome. If I am arguing that ideology allows or ignores lyricism, are there perverse instances where, by the same logic, ideology somehow helps lyricism? That would be a strange conclusion indeed.

desire, drive, and THANATOS: the gain of loss Revolution … is a repetition that realizes the hidden possibility of the past, so that a proper view of the past (the one that perceives the past not as a closed set of facts but as open, as involving a possibility that failed, or was repressed in actuality) opens only from the standpoint of an agent engaged in a present situation.20

Is estrada, despite its common ethical ground with dogma, in ultimate opposition to Soviet ideology, or does any ideology itself somehow contain a broader, and even metaphysical, element of what estrada represents? If the former is true, then an opposition is simply reinstated and my argument has gone nowhere. If the latter is tenable, then we have a much more interesting, complex, and even subversive situation on our hands. I have endeavoured over these three volumes to show how estrada moves with, against, and parallel to Soviet dogma. Anything can happen. Can we briefly reverse our emphasis? What makes it sometimes possible for ideology to incorporate or suffer its opposite? Are there latent issues of political doctrine at work here that encapsulate something universal? Recourse to the work of Slovenian critic Slavoj Žižek will be of great help to us. Even though doing so, given his undying allegiance to Lacanian teachings, may seem an unorthodox manner in which to expand upon the radical anti-Freudianism of Deleuze and Guattari,

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Žižek’s psychoanalytic investigations of ideology will help us find a surprisingly common and disconcerting multiplicity in the modus operandi of dogma. In any case, Deleuze and Guattari do share with Lacan an interest in how society and the social unconscious trespass crudely upon subjectivity; indeed, they wrote Anti-Oedipus as an explicit response to Lacan and were desperate to know his reaction. Žižek maintains that fanciful ideologies, be they of performers or politicians, often “create what they purport to conceal, their ‘repressed’ point of reference.”21 If so, can we reveal the underside of state bluster, the fears or cherished (maybe unconscious) fantasies of bigwigs, either those in the Kremlin or those – wearing the wigs – on stage? The logical way to attempt such a (further) disclosure is again through the issue of desire. Deleuze and Guattari, in their discussions of affect, adopt an anti-Freudian stance by comparing the Marxist dyad of ideology and consciousness with the psychoanalyst’s pairing of desire and consciousness. They reject all things Oedipal, claiming instead that any restraint or quelling of desire is a sorry, modern, and academic construct, something far from anything unconsciously innate or essentially social. In rejecting Freud (or even Marx), though, can we ever really hope to reach a point of truly free (non-linear) desire, since we are using ideology to say what we do (or do not) hold as true? At the very least, claims Žižek somebody else’s dogma is needed to strike a novel pose: “An individual subjected to ideology can never say to himself ‘I am in ideology’; he always requires another corpus of doxa in order to distinguish his own ‘true’ position from it.”22 A second problem in establishing one’s desired dictum or a “free” form of sung expression also emerges. The expression of any fancy is, says Žižek (via Lacan), never an indication of the subject’s actual state or wish; it is imbedded in fantasy’s “radical intersubjectivity.” “The original question of desire is not directly ‘What do I want?’ but ‘What do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I to others?’”23 I can only desire what others apparently desire from me. Žižek’s interpretation of desire, therefore, contradicts that of Deleuze and Guattari in that he marries desire’s performance to the hypnotic presence of an “other,” which with little effort we can make synonymous in the Soviet context with the State. Given the psychoanalytic tradition at work here, Žižek then joins desire to a discussion of drive. Drive in this implicitly Freudian reference is lacking all the Deleuzian freedom of productive “machinic” desire. For readers of Freud today, drive is in fact synonymous with thanatos, or the “death drive” inherent in obsessive-neurotic behaviour. Mental control over a traumatic event comes from repeating it over and over until it seems familiar enough to allow a modicum of calm or relief. What kind of freedom is that?

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Drive is a perverted form of desire and in some sense lies on the far side of that desire, since the free choice to want something becomes – in the neurotic – a wish that starts running itself, a power stretching further than life can go (or bear). Here “the eternity of drive [pits itself] against the finitude of desire.” In this context, Žižek invokes the Nietzschean eternal return of the same as a famous example of obsessive drive, that of the citizen repeatedly striving to please the State. His analogy, however, only works if “same” actually means that: exactly the (deathly, static) same. The Deleuzian approach is to see return as constantly willed and happily so. This is the merrier return: not the restoration of the same, but the return of all that is affirmed, ideally of everything, because a powerful, affirmative, and happy affect means more desire, more “machines,” and more flows. Everything in the State is affirmed and I dissolve between every thing. The “French” return, so to speak, is the constant dragging of all yesterday’s phenomena back into today, with all the pain that this brings, since it works against the comforting finitude of a (soon to be) satisfied desire, as well as against the body’s integrity. The loss of that integrity Deleuze and Guattari see in terms of a more social subjectivity. Žižek via Freud, sees it as a sadder, painful corporeal loss, adding, “Crucial here is the basic and constitutive discord between drive and the body: drive as eternal-‘undead’ disrupts the instinctual rhythm of the body. For that reason, drive as such is death drive: it stands for an unconditional impetus, which disregards the proper needs of the living body and simply battens on it. It is as if some part of the body, an organ, is sublimated, torn out of its bodily context, elevated to the dignity of the Thing and thus caught in an infinitely repetitive cycle.”24 So what is desire, a happy philosophical end in itself, or does the Slovenian version cancel it out with its insistence upon a sadder, psychoanalytic interpretation? Can there be any ground between these two ideas or camps – Žižek with Lacan (“Back to Freud!”) and Deleuze with Guattari (“Back off, Freud!”)? Yes, there can, and it comes from a comparison of Deleuzian desire with Žižek’s drive. For Žižek desire is, as mentioned, fashioned by the dogmatic Other and all she or he (seems to) stand for; it is fuelled by an awful lack in the subject, one filled by the apparent significances and unfathomable wishes of the Other. Drive, on the other hand, is engaged in an explicitly repetitive process and is therefore in constant orbit around an unfound, never won (singular) object. Desire is always trying to go somewhere; drive is (vaguely) content going nowhere, finding what Žižek terms in the spirit of his mentor, Lacan, a “satisfaction in its own pulsation,” hence its association with non-productive neurosis.25

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Here we can already hypothesize an unexpected semblance between Deleuze’s Nietzschean affirmation and Lacan’s drive, since the latter defines drive as the initial (though often failed) will to make oneself fully and finally evident (se faire voir), to stop doing so through the prism of the Other. It begins as a gaze of sorts at the Other; yet no matter how one directs that inquisitive gaze of fantasy at something else, there is always the lack inherent in the empty place I cannot discern, from which I am seemingly gazed at myself. I cannot tell what the Other wants or what is discerned in me from that spot. The origin of that dim discernment is akin to a stain in my field of vision, or an “impervious foreign body” in the canvas of my purview, the frustratingly indiscernible essence of my desire. I can escape only by giving in, as it were, by taking a risky leap into what I have desired, only able to guess what I may find. I acquiesce to what I desire by falling into or through it. Žižek offers the fine example of James Stewart at the end of Hitchcock’s Rear Window. When Stewart is (thankfully?) pushed through his own window by the murderer, he “falls into his own picture, into the field of his own visibility. He changes into a stain in his own picture, he makes himself seen in it, i.e., within the space defined as his own field of vision.”26 He goes through the “frame” of the glass, literally into and through the fantasized realm beyond it. The object of desire is attacked by acquiescence: Stewart enters the thing he is looking at. He learns by losing (himself), just as a child speaks its way into lonely selfhood by gaining independence from its mother and doing so with speech, itself a frustrating chase for desired meaning, round and round the lexicon, time and time again. Drive then arrives and enters this guessed-at lack or darkness; it faces or chases death and returns in what Lacan called “loops.” Desire “gazes,” while drive “does” (over and over in faint hope). The eternal loops or returns of drive have brought the perverse satisfaction sought on the far side of desire by dissolving the identity of any independent “subject.” This dissolution, claim Žižek and Lacan, comes from the challenge of a lack. Deleuze and Guattari maintain that it is born of affirmation. Surely, though, in the long run both come from a form of rectification, from the want – or at least willingness – to alter a current state. They are both, to some degree, born of deficiency. That paucity needs to be answered with a wholeness of some description, with “the cause of love, which is either imagined (Lacan) or pursued through a revolutionary return to natural Eros (Deleuze). The Hegelian effort to transvaluate or supersede all negativity into an all-encompassing Being remains the constitutive desire of these [two] ostensible post-Hegelian positions.”27

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With this recognition of Hegelian substance in the projects of Deleuze, Guattari, and Lacan, we get a hint of what will later manifest itself as an inherent aspect, perhaps, of any late or post-dogmatic project in Russia. Thus far in these rather abstract proceedings, we may already notice a Hegelian “asymmetry”: change and progress are conferred upon fairly abstract immateriality, while nothing much happens on the ground. Yet what about the insistent emphasis of these estrada books upon the tangible, upon the Il’enkovian material project or Deleuzian immanence? A solution is found in the way performers chase and constantly, gainfully lose themselves in traditions they constructed.

soviet romanticism and the desire for a “lost” object To begin with, the reader may remember that in Red Stars I made the case for an oddity within the workings of Marxist ideology, that of the estradnik as romantic. I drew upon a Soviet distinction between active and passive romantics, between those singers who are socially committed to change either within or contra mundum and those who lapse into reverie far above or beyond the world’s sensible limits – prospective doers and retrospective dreamers. Given the endless movement in and out of earnest social commitment by even the most lyrical Soviet performers, the active romantic is a much more suitable model. In referencing even these polite forms of romanticism, there still resides the received semantic baggage of the movement as a whole, romanticism as the celebration of motion between a disorderly, unkempt spirit and (a veneer of) orderliness on earth. In romanticism “it is not madness which is a secondary and accidental distortion of normality; rather, it is normality itself which is nothing but gentrified/regulated madness.”28 Deep in the recesses of active romanticism there also lies the need to satisfy a lack, in this case to answer a social call for greater “normality,” for sanity or a vaguer form of amelioration. Is it, though, answered with recourse to another aspect of the same social sphere, to earthbound common sense, or does it lean towards an idealist realm, towards a disconcertingly illogical domain? Do the dialectics of sixties’ estrada, for example, call to abstraction (a tenacious, covert “Hegelian” spirit) or sensible Marxist matter in order to “negate the negation” of the lack that fuels their social desire? Do they look back in order to remember Hegel; do they yearn for an ideal over and above the material world? I made much of memory in the Estrada?! volume, of how remembering undermines progressive ventures. Žižek helps to extend this conception and my argument as a whole by linking retrospection, romanticism, and lack:

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conclusion and unsolicite d encore Romanticism in its opposition to Classicism can be best grasped through the different logic of memory: in Classicism, memory recalls past happiness (the innocence of our youth, etc.), while the Romantic memory recalls not a direct past happiness but a past period in which future happiness still seemed possible, a time when hopes were not yet frustrated – memories here are “those of absence, of that which never was.” The loss deplored in Classicism is the loss of what the subject once had, while the Romantic loss is the loss of what one never had. Therein lies the Hegelian ‘loss of a loss’; another way to put it is to paraphrase the Gospel – in the double renunciation, the subject loses that which he does not possess … The lost object which transfixes his [the Romantic’s] desire never existed in the first place. The structure of this double loss is then concealed by means of fetishizing the longing itself: the typical Romantic gesture is to elevate the longing as such, at the expense of the object one longs for. It is easy to discern the narcissistic satisfaction derived from such a reflective reversal: we only have to recall the Romantic infatuation with the artist who is subjected to everlasting longing which will never be satisfied.29

In strictly Freudian terms, this type of longing, based as it is upon folding increasingly large swathes of time into the present, may seem a neurotic drive, that is, more an act of repetition per se than one of remembering. The increasingly regressive instincts of repetition are indeed at times neurotic if they do nothing novel with the folded past, if it is not folded into the present. As I have shown, however, the oddly persistent reworking of the past by post-Soviet artists does not have the neurotic air of desperate nostalgia, of the Freudian death drive backwards, nearer and nearer to an increasingly inanimate state. True, estradniki may advocate a death of standard subjectivity, but it is far from morbid. In fact, if desire and drive per se premise the symbolic order (in which desire finds and chases a lack), if an active romantic never lost anything in the first place, does not that suggest something else? Performers both create their own symbolic order in the space where “desire never existed” (previously) and discover lack therein to chase with desire. Does estrada not create ab ovo a system of Deleuzian, productive machines on the back of Soviet culture? It creates a tradition and then – in good time – dreams of matching the standards set by it. Estrada grafts aspects of many songs, people, and cultural processes (including Soviet) together in order then to wish for something never lost, but also never gained once and for all: the selfless, timeless ethical categories of friendship, trust, and other “familial” notions lacking in the big political family. Estrada creates a parallel family alongside, which grows with every song and show as they are fondly remembered. Memories (the raw material of folding) are therefore desired, sought, found, and made from scratch, too. Affirmative memories call

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upon and reuse emotions otherwise forgotten, repressed, or absent in prior cultural phenomena. Each emotion is remembered and employed. What gradually takes place, then, is a Freudian abreaction or affective release, made possible by recalling (the emotionally loaded) past. Emotions are relived, released, and thus relieved. A risky, driven emptying takes the place of the subject; I become increasingly part of a very big picture. The more I remember, the less space I occupy in that picture. This willed loss of “one-self” is not a death drive, but something (thankfully) very different in an ideological culture, which we are gradually defining. The supposedly morbid emptying of subjectivity is something we have seen in various guises throughout these three books. The wholly Marxist dialectic of stage/hall in the late fifties becomes a series of oscillating, multiplying meanings back and forth that lead to the dissolving of a performer’s sense of self into his or her audience. When post-Soviet performers extend this same philosophy after 1991, they do so for two reasons: the socialist philosophy of entertainment is still efficacious and it is the right thing to do. The logic of post-Soviet estrada is ethically driven; post-Soviet estrada says yes because it must. Yet it keeps saying yes. Why? Post-Soviet estrada evidently represents a life-affirming loss and not a death drive in the classical sense. A possible parallel would again be with Kierkegaard’s dizzy third stage of philosophical challenge: the teleological suspension of the ethical.30 Estrada says yes to something and therefore no to something else, but the right thing to do, driven by a socialist ethic, is to keep going, to negate its negation(s), as it were. This odd deduction leads me to draw again upon Žižek who begins here with an excellent quote from Brecht in order to reach some equally odd, yet logical, conclusions. Brecht: “ Who fights for communism must be able to fight and not to fight; to speak the truth and not to speak the truth; to perform services and not to perform services, to keep promises and not to keep promises; to go into danger and to keep out of danger; to be recognizable and not to be recognizable. Who fights for communism has only one of all the virtues: that he fights for communism.” … What Brecht is aiming at is not the standard opportunist attitude which compels us to follow our interests, to tell the truth when it does not hurt, to tell a lie when the lie profits us, etc., but an inherent self-negation of ethics, i.e., an ethical injunction which suspends ethical universality. It is precisely because of this “suspension of the ethical,” that … what we have here is not the usual ethics of self-obliteration for the sake of the cause: one must, so to

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conclusion and unsolicite d encore speak, effectuate another turn of the screw and obliterate the obliteration itself, i.e., renounce the obliteration qua pathetic gesture of self-sacrifice.31

Hopefully what we are starting to unearth here is Lacan’s assertion, employed in turn by Žižek that Marxism is in fact not really justifiable as a worldview per se, since the people (narod) adopt and embody their role as revolutionary only when knowledgeable of that historical role. Choice is uppermost, not dogmatic determinism. The historical subject, the proletariat, has (or should have) a subjective position based upon freely chosen self-knowledge. “The ‘knowledge’ proper to historical materialism is [therefore] self-referential, it changes its ‘object.’ It is only via the act of [unsure drives for] knowledge that the object is what it truly ‘is.’”32 Dogma is starting to overlap with estrada, for we see here the relationship of a risky, yet sage, drive and the curbs of ethics.

a kantian ethical moment: rejection and sacrifice Perhaps in this freely investigated and chosen ethical suspension of sensible ethics we are in fact invoking an approach much more fundamental (and less modern) than that of Kierkegaard’s risky vertiginous leaps; perhaps we are invoking Kant’s earthbound recognition and positive employment of seemingly negative limitations. Kant’s categorical imperative does not, after all, create freedom per se. In being ethical, in being “free” between reason and comprehension, one in fact constantly sacrifices total liberty, which is in any case unknowable. The resulting irrational but ethical forfeitures to limit or rectitude will lead not to egotistical happiness, but to a negative achievement of sorts: disinterestedness, the marriage of selflessness (with zero need), and a social dedication to others. This duty or drive to reach a loss of “total” freedom via ethics has led Žižek to equate Kant with the morbidity of Sade’s own “drives,” given their shared “coldness of the unconditional injunction: Do your duty or Enjoy!”33 In a manner worthy of the Danish pastor, Kant does indeed define a thrill beyond (or via) constraints, such that “each term, brought to its extreme – that is, fully actualized – changes into the next; [for example] an [earthly] object which is thoroughly beautiful is no longer merely beautiful, it is sublime.”34 A universalized category can no longer be an isolated, exclusive, or exclusionary category; it is everywhere and everything. Total employment of all that an ideology applies to will by implication touch upon its opposite, too.

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This profoundly social ethical “enjoyment,” which comes from a driven relationship with or affirmation of the Law’s apparent limitations, is of direct relevance to our discussions of ideology below. Despite his distaste for the lingering metaphysics in Kant’s (eternally valid) categorical imperative, even Nietzsche was able to see and admire in Kant a rigorous affirmation or advocating of truth’s paradoxes through freely chosen “rejection and sacrifice.” This admiration allows us to sneak the down-to-earth categorical imperative into the affirmative and (supra-personal) Nietzschean drives that formed the basis of my argument in Estrada?! The energy and emotion that Nietzsche saw as latent in Kant’s thought allow us to link social ethics and something bigger within a materialist framework, and we can do so without obligatory reference to the explicitly spiritual framework and destination of Kierkegaard’s passionately desired suspension of the ethical. Kant allows us to stay grounded and, unlike Kierkegaard, foster a more social philosophy. Our Soviet singers of the Great Russian populace do what is socially proper but keep driving forward, to the point where selfhood evaporates in, not for, that same populace. They close their eyes and vanish into an ethical, yet ever-unpredictable, sea of audience desire. What we then get, instead of the endless leaps towards unobtainable stasis in the divine domain of which Kierkegaard dreamed, is jouissance, the dogmatic romantic’s endless pleasure from limit or pleasure-in-pain that, for the psychoanalyst, is drive. Sacrifice to (or simply an inability to fill) the lack in one’s desire with each spoken or sung memory, deeper into a sea of slippery signifiers, becomes the fall or leap into ever-present, ever-repeated drives towards and around the ineffable or elusive. “The psychic apparatus finds a sort of perverse pleasure in this displeasure itself, in the never-ending, repeated circulation around the unattainable, always missed object.”35 Here is Kant’s “sadistic” (but tempting) imperative, the private gain of repeated pleasure in pain (jouissance) for which the Other or the Law unwillingly provides the context. “Do we not encounter here [in Kant] the Freudian/Lacanian paradox ‘beyond the pleasure principle,’ as pleasure-in-pain – of das Ding which can be experienced only in a negative way – whose contours can be discerned only negatively, as the contours of an invisible void? Similarly, is not the (moral) Law itself a sublime Thing, in so far as it also elicits the painful sentiment of humiliation, of self-debasement, mixed with a profound satisfaction that the subject has done his duty?”36 The very word jouissance not only carries the French connotation of orgasm but also becomes in practice a strange, broader mélange of freely ranging pleasure and obligatory productive obstacles. Lacan

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equated it with the frustrating impediment created “by an [elusive] object in which desire is alienated.”37 It is also employed in its legal sense (from the Latin usufructus) as the right to enjoy something. This raises one last time the stubborn, awkward issue of how my enjoyment (even if pained) is bound to the big Other, be it the Law or the State or any other imposing body, for its (and not my) enjoyment.38 Performers may transform (and gain from the unreasonable application of) ethical tenets or limits, but they are still the State’s limits.

do law and ideology generate their own antitheses? If the Big Other as the State is really that big, then does this scenario somehow suggest a classic Oedipal set-up, such that the leap, or fall, into drive or the pursuit of jouissance is a different kind of loss, in fact an enabling castration? Perhaps, but an explanation is needed, because such a suggestion would again seem to invalidate the applicability of Deleuze and Guattari to these three books. Žižek for one, claims that the Frenchmen are wrong in attacking Freud, since “the most powerful anti-Oedipus is Oedipus itself.”39 Elsewhere he goes even further and claims that “the only true anti-Oedipus is Oedipus itself.”40 What on earth does he mean? Let us begin by removing Oedipus from his complex, since the latter is a neurotic version of a potentially enabling process.41 Limitation can produce liberty. Freud stresses the limiting illness, Lacan the enabling. Lacan’s break from Freudian tradition comes from proposing that the Law, once universalized, contains in itself everything that contradicts itself, such that “law appears as the sole true transgression.” Žižek hits the nail on the head with this quote: The law coincides with its opposite, with universalized crime. In other words, the law in its “abstract identity” – opposed to crimes, exclusive of their particular context – is in itself supreme crime. This is how the tautology “law is law” has to be read. The first law (“law is …”) is the universal law in so far as it is abstractly opposed to crime, whereas the second law (“… law”) reveals the concealed truth of the first: the obscene violence, the absolute, universalized crime as its hidden reverse. (We sense this concealed dimension of violence already apropos of the everyday, “spontaneous” reading of the proposition “law is law” – is not this phrase usually evoked precisely when we are confronted with the “unfair,” “incomprehensible” constraint that pertains to the law? In other words, what does this tautology effectively mean if not the cynical wisdom that law remains in its most fundamental dimension a form of radical violence which must be obeyed regardless of our subjective appreciation?)42

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We agree, but now take this argument one step further and negate Žižek’s negation. Ethical, stately admonitions do radical violence even to themselves if taken to their logical extreme, if affirmed in toto. Walking with the Law can be the greatest transgression of all.43 In unveiling such a paradox, we see again how “subjectivity” may be realized relative to the Law. There is the dogmatically socialist subject who follows the Law dutifully (or “regardless,” in Žižek’s terms) and the utterly social socialist subject who shifts from reasonable desire into unreasonable drive, into social jouissance by losing “one self” to everything (wild Nietzschean affirmation) and the resulting state where selfhood dissolves completely. There is a contradiction within limits and the Law that creates the template for a similar schism between dutiful adherence and its very opposite.44 Living within the socially minded Law shows us how to live without (outside) it and be truly, desirously social. What looks like acquiescence to the Law is not. If this is true and it allows us to find a happy blind spot in dogma, what about capitalism, since I write about estrada’s philosophy of affirmative drive as applicable after 1991 as well? Marx’s views on the value or commodification of an immaterial work force within capitalism help us to answer. Marx does not merely wish for workers in capitalist societies to be paid fairly or in full and to then rest contented. His ideas on the manipulation of capitalist surplus value are not designed to meet a level or fair exchange. “The workforce is exploited precisely when it is paid its full value … exploitation is thus not opposed to the ‘just’ equivalent exchange; it functions, rather, as its inherent exception … Every [moral] ideological universality gives rise to a particular ‘extimate’ element, to an element which – precisely as an inherent, necessary product of the process designated by that universality – simultaneously undermines it.”45 If this is so and every all-encompassing ideology contains its own worrying opposite, then perhaps the only way to love an ideology’s intentions is to betray them.46 By an implicit reverse logic, maybe the only way to subvert ideology is to enact it and to do so utterly. If either proposition is true, estrada’s affirmative work within socialist society is therefore not necessarily endorsement of a purely political dogma. It is an expression of a more radically “social” self. The transgression of ideology or the Law by affirming or acquiescing to all it stands, stood, and will stand for, by desiring everything, is the ethical way to subjectivity beyond ethics.47 This sounds like calm obeisance, but it in fact reveals the dramatically antagonistic relationship between subject and the processes of subjectification in dictatorial societies.48 Songs enable that productive antagonism rather well, since with rhythm, rhyme, melody, and so forth they hint at an elusive, perhaps ineffable, meaning beyond the inflexibility of linguistic signifiers, a

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state closer to ineffable jouissance.49 The songs of Soviet socialist society move in and out from the object of their desire or drive; they have a wavering attitude towards it, yet this attitude comes from adhering with fantastic vigour to the practices of state-sponsored entertainment. The Law’s adherents, be that law socialist or capitalist, sponsor its subversion with their devotion. Does this not allow us, then, to suggest that Marx be elevated to the status of postmodernist philosopher, especially in the light of Žižek’s following thought on faith? “We enter postmodernism when our relationship to the [all-significant] Thing becomes antagonistic: we abjure and disown the Thing, yet it exerts an irresistible attraction on us; its proximity exposes us to a mortal danger, yet it is simultaneously a source of power.”50 On the basis of what has been said, we can now hazard a three-way parallel between Marx’s stance towards capital, the Marxist critique employed by Deleuze with Guattari, and, finally, Žižek’s or Lacan’s discussion of jouissance. Marx mourns the loss of “free” excess value or (work) force to the “thing” of capital, just as the freedom of jouissance is dependent upon the uses of and direction in which excess joy is employed.51 Lacan, in fact, on occasion uses Marxist phraseology to fashion his own talk of enjoyment. Given Deleuze’s and Guattari’s better-known attack on capitalism, it seems thus reasonable to suggest that the liberating “driven” philosophies of Deleuze, Guattari, Žižek and Lacan all find sufficient origin in Marxist thought to beg a total reconsideration of Soviet culture.

a closing introduction: estrada’s soviet “social” self Whatever the framework we choose, the point is that we should muddle and roil the clear waters of current Soviet studies. We need in doing so to remember four things. First, ideology’s claim that “the law is the law” is an axiom containing the seeds of its own confusion, its own opposite (and demise). The monological tendencies of Soviet ideology cannot, therefore, be as such and should not be used as a two-dimensional template for the structure of Slavic studies. Second, if a subject sees this opposite at work, the best way to selfhood is to show one’s “respect” for the Law by embracing and affirming all that it stands for. Third, as an extension of the same idea, we must ask what the nature of this contrariness is. Is it (a) (as usually maintained) conscious political subversion in ignorance of ideology’s contradictions or (b) a transgression proffered and generated by ideology itself (by the contradictions of my first point)? Fourth and perhaps most importantly, we should not forget how often in Soviet entertainment popularity has preceded politics.

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Hopefully this book and those before it have gone some way to showing how public Soviet ideology is replete with myriad projects of private philosophical enterprise, even under the most hopeless conditions such as imprisonment or penniless exile. In Red Stars I began with (and respected) the binary “objective” oppositions in Soviet thought during the Thaw; only now have I moved towards a picture of how the grandest and most “self-conscious” socialist canvases engender discrete, sometimes subconscious endeavours. By beginning these three texts in the middle of the century (in 1955), I hope I have showed that the non-linear Marxist views of Deleuze and Guattari are a logical consequence of one-way Soviet philosophy. Marxist thought always held in itself the seeds of a Freudian or Lacanian drive/sacrifice, groundwork for the dissolution of desire in a pantheistic or Deleuzian network of desires and affirmed phenomena. We cannot always equate doctrinal compliance with philosophical acquiescence, especially when that compliance is discussed primarily (as in estrada) as ethics, not socioeconomics. Either as the Law that knowingly incorporates its own opposite or as the Law that encourages ethical desire, which then becomes driven jouissance beyond the Law, Soviet ideology is very complicated. Soviet estrada lives before, after, above, and within all those complications. If we remember and affirm them, hopefully our discipline can escape from the platitudes or crude generalizations of political bombast in order that the myriad subjects of a past empire are granted a little dignity outside of tenacious structuralist schema. It remains only for the reader to now pick up Red Stars (again?) and see the dialectical social philosophy of post-Stalinist Russia in a new and varicoloured light.

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NOTES

chapter one 1 The Latvian Soviet composer Raimonds Pauls lauding (in 1999–2000) traditional aspects of estrada song-writing, which fostered his career in the 1970s and had themselves been fostered by the pre-revolutionary performers examined in these initial chapters. Geroi bez galstuka, ntv, 29 January 2000. 2 A restored print of this short can now be found in the series Early Russian Cinema: Before the Revolution, vol. 2: Folklore and Legend (New York: Milestone 1992). 3 Thomas P. Hodge, “Mutatis mutandis: Poetry of the Musical Romance in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University 1992), 25–7, 30–1. For a much briefer, Soviet-style introduction, see, for example, “O romanse,” Molodezhnaia èstrada 1 (January–March 1996): 8–9. 4 Ibid, 111, 114, 120, 131. 5 Ibid, 134–9. 6 S.F. Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union (New York: Limelight 1994), 23. 7 I.V. Nest’ev, “Muzykal’naia èstrada,” in A.D. Alekseev et al., Russkaia khudozhestvennaia kul’tura kontsa XIX –nachala XX veka (1908–1917), vol. 3 (Moscow: Nauka 1977), 483. 8 “Smile” [Ulybnis’] by Izabella Iur’eva. Music B. Fomin, words P. German.

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notes to p age s 11–14 9 G. Skorokhodov, Zvezdy sovetskoi èstrady (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor 1982), 12. For a recent collection of parlour, “classical” romances, see Klassicheskie russkie romansy (Bomba-Piter 1998). 10 G.S. Smith, Songs to Seven Strings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1984), 64–5. 11 “Concerning the Unification of Matters Pertaining to the Theatre.” See V.V. Frolov, “Èstrada v gody grazhdanskoi voiny,” in E.D. Uvarova, ed., Russkaia sovetskaia èstrada: 1917–1929 (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1976), 41. This was certainly no surprise, given the hopes of those such as Lunacharskii even in 1918 that estrada’s “wealth of artistic enjoyments” could attain the status of high art (Evgenii Gershuni archives, National Library of Russia [St Petersburg], ed. #85: “Mastera khudozhestvennogo slova”). See also Boris Metlitskii archives, #328: “Legko na serdtse ot pesni veseloi: 50 let sovetskoi èstrade.” 12 V.A. Vasina,”Romans i pesnia,” in B.V. Asaf’ev, Ocherki sovetskogo muzykal’nogo tvorchestva, vol. 1 (Moscow/Leningrad 1947), 215. 13 Gershuni archives, #110: “Muzykal’naia èstrada 1917–1967,” from broadcast of same year. By 1958, Lengosèstrada would be staging 30,000 concerts per annum for 20 million viewers in 148 towns, together with innumerable villages and farms (Gershuni archives, #104: “Sovetskaia èstrada”). 14 B.A. Savchenko, Kumiry zabytoi èstrady (Moscow: Znanie 1992), 72. 15 M.I. Zil’berbrandt, “Pesnia na èstrade,” in Uvarova, Russkaia sovetskaia èstrada: 1917–1929, 204. 16 Metlitskii archives, #219, from broadcast of November 1987, “60 let nazad.” 17 B. Savchenko, Kumiry rossiiskoi èstrady (Moscow: Panorama 1998), 390–4. 18 Izabella Iur’eva in “Dusha tebe po-prezhnemu verna,” the introduction to V. Safoshkin, Gori, gori, moia zvezda (Moscow: Èksmo-Press 1998), 5–6. For more of the “difficult” relationship of estrada to profit, see A.N. Anastas’ev, “Osnovnye tendentsii razvitiia sovetskoi èstrady 20-kh godov,” in Uvarova, Russkaia sovetskaia èstrada: 1917– 1929, 31ff. 19 Gershuni archives, #107: “Iskusstvo èstrady,” from a broadcast of 1960. 20 A quote from Gershuni, #78: “Vstupitel’noe slovo,” from a broadcast of January 1969. It was an extremely common motif in interviews with Leonid Utesov. 21 Smith, Songs to Seven Strings, 31, 26 respectively. 22 M. Zarzhevskaia, “Opyt izucheniia pesen na demonstratsii,” Proletarskii muzykant 9–10 (1930): 59–60. Discussed in R.A. Rothstein, “The Quiet Rehabilitation of the Brick Factory: Early Soviet Popular Music and Its Critics,” Slavic Review, September 1980: 373–88.

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notes to p age s 14–16 23 E. Petrushanskaia, “O ‘misticheskoi’ prirode sovetskikh massovykh pesen,” Russian Literature 45 (1999): 91. For a similar muddle, see Gershuni archives, #103, on Soviet circuses. Lenin himself was a fan of circus clowns, as noted by Maksim Gor’kii with faint humour. Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 17 (1952), 44. 24 The song, replete with political verses, appears to have been published very soon after the film. The ideologically biased text appears in early collections, such as Kniga pesen (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura 1938), 14–15. Later collections sometimes change the song’s imperative “construct and love” back to “love and live,” as emphasized in the film, but otherwise sad references to the Komsomol and abstract “enemies” persist in all printed post-movie texts. See Lebedev-Kumach’s collections in Pesni (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii 1947), 195–7; Stikhotvoreniia i pesni (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’ 1950), 37–8; Pesni (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura 1953); and Pesni i stikhotvoreniia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura 1960), 21–3. 25 Veselye rebiata (1934), directed by Grigorii Aleksandrov. An English translation of the song in its political form has recently appeared in J. von Geldern and R. Stites, Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays and Folklore: 1917–1953 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1995), 234–5, 340–1. 26 M.I. Zil’berbrandt, “Pesnia na èstrade,” in E.D. Uvarova, Russkaia sovetskaia èstrada: 1930–1945 (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1977), 235. 27 The three credited with establishing the genre are “Marsh Budenogo,” “Krasnaia armiia vsekh sil’nei,” and “Aviamarsh.” Pesnia na èstrade, 207–9. 28 Gershuni archives, #83: “Tantsy i original’nye zhanry,” from a broadcast of 1969. 29 Skorokhodov, Zvezdy sovetskoi èstrady, 42; and “O narodnoi i psevdonarodnoi pesne,” Iskusstvo i zhizn’ 5 (1939): 7. 30 I. Dunaevskii, Izbrannye pis’ma (Leningrad: Muzyka 1971), 199. The letter is dated 17 November 1953. 31 As evidence, see the introduction to V. Model’, Pesni i romansy A. Vertinskogo (Leningrad: Sovetskii kompozitor 1991). 32 A.V. Pozdniakov and M.M. Statsevich, Tango i romansy P. Leshchenko (Moscow: Niva Rossii 1992), 10. 33 With regard to rapm and Klavdiia Shul’zhenko, see I. Vasilinina, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1979); and Pesnia na èstrade (1930–1945), 256–7. Shul’zhenko herself recorded her despondency in Kogda vy sprosite menia … (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia 1985), 62–4. Critical techniques learned from rapm spread even to journalists in her hometown of Kharkov, where they were practised for as long as

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34 35 36

37

38 39 40

41 42

43 44 45

46 47

possible. See V. Khotulev, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko: Zhizn’, liubov’, pesnia (Moscow 1998), 150–1. Skorokhodov, Zvezdy sovetskoi èstrady, 14–15. L. Utesov, Spasibo, serdtse! (Moscow: Vagrius 1999), 211. D. Minchenok, Isaak Dunaevskii: Bol’shoi kontsert (Moscow/Smolensk: Olimp/Rusich 1998), 192–3. This text notes again the role played by Soviet publishers and their anthologies in the shift away from a cinematic, jollier, and romantic use of Marsh veselykh rebiat: “A song helps us build and live” had originally been much more of a “song [that] helps [one] live and love.” Dunaevskii preferred the original emphasis (277). Ibid., 299–300. Utesov reconciles these differences a little by calling Dunaevskii “a patriot and a romantic” on page 315 of Spasibo, serdtse! The song at the end of Circus does include antagonistic references to an “enemy,” yet the foreign villain of the plot justifies these. Nonetheless, an ideologically oriented text is the one remembered today, with its explicit celebration of Stalin. Politics once again borrows from and overshadows the popular. R. Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997), 92–3. The work was recently recorded for the first time by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (Gala Records cacd1020: 1993). There are at least two well-known photographs of all three men together. One of them appears in several books, including Riadom s Utesovym (9) by his wife, Antonina Revel’s, which has perhaps the best collection of visual materials concerning the jazzman (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1995). G. Skorokhodov, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor 1974), 33. Iu. Dmitriev, Leonid Utesov (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1982), 111. Utesov himself was also unhappy with the play’s final form, as he notes in at least one version of his biography, S pesnei po zhizni (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1964), 153. I. MacDonald, The New Shostakovich (Boston: Northeastern University Press 1990), 75. E. Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (London and Boston: Faber and Faber 1994), 101. Ibid., 518, 529. The song is from the 1940 film Svetlyi put’, directed by Grigorii Aleksandrov, who was responsible not only for Veselye rebiata but for Tsirk also. M. Shaginian in A. Medvedev and O. Medvedeva, Sovetskii dzhaz: Problemy. Sobytiia. Mastera (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor 1987), 500. Starr, Red and Hot, 183, 186.

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notes to p age s 18–22 48 Metlitskii archives, #142: “Frontovoi konstert,” from broadcasts of 1968–69. 49 In Moscow the two major factories (Aprelevskii and Noginskii) stopped pressing after the autumn of 1941, and recordings began only at the end of 1942 in the capital’s Dom zvukozapsei factory. 50 Ibid., from a broadcast of January 1988, “A muzy ne molchali.” 51 Metlitskii archives, #176 and #178. These records were produced at the Leningrad Experimental Record Factory at 13, Solianoi pereulok and in a studio on Liteinyi prospekt. The factory also produced songs from musicals prior to the films’ release. This was important in instituting musical scores as the first real source of nationally popular songs. 52 Metlitskii archives, #222: “Zveniashchie golosa,” From broadcasts of February and March 1988. 53 Metlitskii archives, #205. These record players are also mentioned on page 34 of the clown Iurii Nikulin’s wartime memoires, Pochti ser’ezno. 54 Ivanovo detstvo (1962), Mosfil’m. 55 Metlitskii archives, #221. Dunaevskii’s work had instituted a snowballing genre of the decade, not only “March of the Happy-Go-Lucky Guys” and “March of the Enthusiasts” mentioned already, but also “March of the Shock-Workers” and “March of the Miners.” 56 Photographs of Firsova can be seen in Leningrad’s Museum of the Blockade, also on Solianoi pereulok. 57 Gershuni archives, #106: “Nezabyvaemye dni. Iz zapisok frontovoi agitbrigady.” 58 Gershuni archives, #99: “Frontovoi tsirk,” 33, 37, 40. 59 Gershuni archives, #79: “Vokal’nyi zhanr,” from a television broadcast of 19 January 1969. 60 Gershuni archives, #24: “Frontovoi tsirk” – a beautiful album of watercolours depicting the labour and love of all those on the front line during wwii in the Leningrad region. That labour is shown clearly by some of the busy, dog-eared wartime schedules for the troupe, preserved in these documents. See #11: “Uchet vystuplenii kontsertnoi agitbrigady pri ldka (1941–1942).” 61 L. Utesov, “O pesne i legkoi muzyke,” Sovetskaia muzyka 11 (1953): 39–41. 62 “On Love and Friendship” by Izabella Iur’eva. Music and words A. Turgel’. 63 For an obituary, see Lenta.Ru: . Additional honours came from Acting President Putin almost at once: . 64 “Pozdravliaem!” Kul’tura 18 (4 July 1992): 2. 65 I. Geguzin, “Znamenitaia Izabella Iur’eva,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 3 (March 1974): 22–3.

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notes to pages 23–7 66 Savchenko, Kumiry zabytoi èstrady, 116. 67 For a picture of Iur’eva only weeks before she left, see the front cover of Novyi zritel’ 14 (7 April 1925). 68 B. Savchenko, Èstrada retro (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1996), 352. 69 Her gratitude to the city would always remain. Even at the age of 98 she was able to perform two romances on stage to celebrate the city’s 850th birthday. “Po zvezdnomu priznaku,” Ogonek 13 (31 March 1997). 70 Savchenko, Èstrada retro, 361, 365, quoting articles from Tsirk i èstrada of 1928 and Rabochii i teatr after the campaign against romances was over. 71 A. Tsybul’skaia, “Pet’, kak dano prirodoi,” Televidenie i radioveshchanie 7 (July 1987): 32–3. 72 I. Stasova, “Legenda ‘beloi tsyganki,’” Rossiiskie vesti 110 (12 December 1992): 6. 73 V. Safoshkin, “Prima èstradnogo Olimpa,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 17–18 (August 1992): 28. 74 L. Sidorovskii, “Ta samaia Izabella Iur’eva,” Smena 281 (5 December 1991): 4. 75 This is included among the “Twelve Most Famous Things about Izabella Iur’eva,” in Fakty i kommentarii, 7 September 1999. 76 Savchenko, Kumiry zabytoi èstrady, 120. 77 In issue 4, as recorded by Èstrada retro, 376–7. 78 T. Egorova, “Ta samaia Iur’eva,” Sovetskaia torgovlia, 26 November 1983: back page. The article is interesting in that Iur’eva praises Alla Pugacheva, which is at variance with her frequent and vigorous praise for the civic-minded Iosif Kobzon from among the younger generation of performers. 79 Safoshkin, Gori, gori, moia zvezda, 280. This song would later become an equally great hit for Klavdiia Shul’zhenko. 80 One of Iur’eva’s romances (Belaia noch’ ) appears at the start of the first instalment of the 1939 film Bol’shaia zhizn’, directed by Leonid Lukov. The hero, played by Mark Bernes, is angrily packing his bags, offended by an admittedly sanctimonious Party official. On the gramophone spins Iur’eva’s record and the official criticizes all such “gypsy stuff”: “Leaving? Look at what music you brought to the village! It’s gypsy stuff. No morality! It’s full of outsiders’ ideas!” The songs of the movie’s subsequent second instalment in 1946 also came under serious attack from the Composers’ Union for a lack of ideological commitment. 81 Safoshkin, Prima èstradnogo Olimpa. 82 Issue 5, as recorded in ibid. 83 For example: A. Tsybul’skaia, “Izabella Iur’eva: K stoletiiu so dnia rozhdeniia,” Vestnik 19 (14 September 1999: 226); Ia. Varshavskii, “Schastlivyi bilet na kontsert,” Gazeta Kuzbass, 14 October 1999; 278

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notes to pages 27–8

84

85 86 87 88 89 90

91 92

93

“Kogda ukhodit koroleva,” Listovka.Ru, 23 January 2000, ; N. Konygina, “Sto let koroleve patefona,” Segodnia, 26 August 1999; “Belaia tsyganka,” Kommersant Daily, 8 September 1999; “Grustnaia novost’,” Dovod, 25 January 2000; “Lenta novostei,” Russkii Deadline 100 (9 March 2000); and “Skonchalas’ narodnaia artistka” at . A concert was held in the Rossiia hall in her honour, attended by some of the nation’s most established performers . For a rather cutting impression of how overdue this praise was, see V. Vasilenko’s piece, “Dosrochnyi iubilei” at . V. Suslin also offered a brief overview of such materials at . One newspaper in distant Iakutsk even compared Iur’eva on this occasion with England’s Queen Mother: “Bozhe, khrani korolevu!” Iakutiia, 18 September 1999. An announcement of Iur’eva’s passing in the same paper can be found at and an announcement of the funeral at . E. Èpshtein, “Roman s romansom,” Kul’tura 33 (30 August–8 September 1999): 10. V. Krylov, “Koroleva sem’ia,” Sem’ia 417 (22–28 November 1993): 24. I. Veksler, “Esli mozhesh’ – prosti,” Rossiiskaia gazeta 216 (1 October 1992): 8. “Iubilei I. Iur’evoi: Pozdravlenie Presidenta,” Sankt-Peterburgskie novosti, 7 September 1999. For some stills from the film, entitled “Ia pomniu chudnoe mgnoven’e,” see Televidenie i radioveshchanie, 10 (October 1981): 23. V. Reznikov and È. Tserkover, “Izabella Iur’eva,” Nedelia 50 (10–16 December 1979): 11. For a similar juxtaposition of new songs and the eternal song, see D. Kantor, “Izabella Iur’eva – èto ‘belaia tsyganka,’” Smena 227 (4 September 1999): 2; S. Tanina, “’Zvezda’ spravliaet iubilei,” Vechernii Peterburg, 7 September 1992: 1; and G. Menglet, with O. Efremov, “Vashe zdorov’e!” Kul’tura 23 (3 October 1992): 7. Her fame or memory is officially fixed by a plaque on the “Square of Stars” in “Govoriat, pod Novyi god vse mechty sbyvaiutsia,” Sem’ia 52 (27 December 1994): 24. “Muzykal’nyi kalendar’: Sentiabr’,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 15–16 (August 1992): 32. L. Babushkin, “Esli mozhesh’, prosti,” Èstrada i tsirk 10–11 (1992): 15. The most influential organizations mentioned are gomets (State Union of Music, Estrada, and Circus Programs), vgko (Touring and Concert Union), Lenkonstert, Roskontsert, and Moskontsert. S. Biriukov, “Pro validol ia zabyvaiu,” Trud 202 (1 November 1994): 7. 279

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notes to p age s 28–31 94 A. Tsybul’skaia, “Vozvrashchenie Izabelly Iur’evoi,” Muyzkal’naia zhizn’ 13–14 (July 1993): 10. 95 “Izabella Iur’eva,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 3 (March 1974): 23. 96 L. Babushkin, “U menia est’ eshche sily kupit’ pomadu …” Rossiiskie vesti 236 (14 December 1994): 4. 97 S. Zhil’tsova, “O moe solntse!” Nevskoe vremia 165 (4 September 1999): 3. 98 N. Meskhi, “Tol’ko raz v zhizni byvaet vstrecha,” Èkran i stsena, 10–17 September 1992: 16. 99 N. Tikhonova, “Belaia tsyganka,” Èkran i stsena 10 (March 1999): 8–9, with some fine photographs. 100 N. Tairova, “Obryv?” Moskva 9 (1988): 167–75. 101 L. Sidorovskii, “Izabella Iur’eva: Belaia tsyganka,” Ogonek 11 (March 1992): 22–4. 102 G. Skorokhodov, “Koroleva romansa,” Molodezhnaia èstrada 1 (January– March 1996): 47–8. See also the end of N. Velekhova, “Izabella Iur’eva,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 3 (March 1974): 22–3. 103 “My Soul Is Filled with You” (Dusha napolnena toboiu) by Tamara Tsereteli. Music N. Shiskin, words M. Shevliakov. 104 Dzhaparidze (1901–68) studied in the same conservatory as Tsereteli and began her career on the same stages as Iur’eva, but her later career kept her in further-flung climes, such as Khabarovsk and Tbilisi, with the local orchestras. Her prewar concerts have been remembered as the epitome of estrada’s genre-mixing, with songs, drama, stories, satirical pieces, and other performances (Metlitskii archives, #223). 105 From articles in Krasnoe znamia of 1927 and Vlast’ truda of October 1926, quoted in Savchenko, Kumiry rossiiskoi èstrady, 386. Some feistier elements of rapm, though, were not surprisingly unconvinced, grumbling about estrada’s troubling use of “tavern music under a smokescreen of revolutionary words.” Tsereteli adopted a few Russian and Georgian folk songs in her repertoire to deflect any such fleeting criticism. For a good picture from this time, see Novyi zritel’ 44 (1 November 1927): back cover. 106 Skorokhodov, Zvezdy sovetskoi èstrady, 10. 107 Zrelishcha 78 (1924): 10. 108 A Iaroslavl’ paper of 1927, quoted in M. Tabukashvili, Tamara Tsereteli (Tbilisi 1975), 48. 109 Safoshkin, Gori, gori, moia zvezda, 343. In Tabukashvili, this cumulative figure is given much earlier in Tsereteli’s career: in her late thirties, not after thirty years on the stage (51). 110 Metlitskii archives, #254. 111 A. Gromov, “O nei pisal Iulius Fuchik,” Teatral’naia zhizn’ 23 (1968): 27. 112 N.N. “Tamara Tsereteli,” Zrelishcha 63 (November 1923): 11.

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notes to pages 31–8 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120

121 122 123 124

“Tamara Tsereteli,” Zrelishcha 68 (1924): 18. “Khronika: Tamara Tsereteli,” Zrelishcha 74 (February 1924): 17. N. Shirinskii, “Varia iz Tbilisi,” Mir zhenshchiny 4 (April 1997): 14–16. E. Ukolova, “K proshedshemu iubileiu,” Molodezhnaia èstrada 1 (January– February 1992): 69–72. As noted in G. Skorokhodov, “O Tamare Tsereteli,” Molodezhnaia èstrada 1 (January–March 1996): 41–2. A. Alekseev, “Pamiati druga,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 6 (1968): 23. A. Menaker, “O Tamare Tsereteli,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 3 (1980): 23. Bregvadze, born in 1936, has in many ways continued the traditions of Tsereteli and Dzhaparidze. Her success has been such that she became a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union in 1983. Tabukashvili, Tamara Tsereteli, 56. A year after the funeral, her remains were taken south to Georgia. “Zakonomernaia metamorfoza,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 8 (1964): 20–1. G. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press 1983), 39–40. Ibid., 193–4.

chapter two 1 Boris Krasnov at the May 1998 Ovatsiia award ceremony for contemporary music. Plaques were unveiled to the memory of Leshchenko and Aleksandr Vertinskii, among others. “Igor’ Krutoi otkazalsia ot ‘Ovatsii,’” . They were referred to a few days before as the “leading lights of Soviet estrada.” “Ovatsii na ‘Ovatsii’ budut zvuchat’ ob”ektivno,” . 2 Understandably, the philosophical reason for any émigré returning home to a (very) troubled country was of particular interest at the time of perestroika, when such matters could be discussed. The reasoning of some estrada artists under Stalin was presented in publications like Pochemu my vernulis’ na Rodinu: Svidetel’stva reèmigrantov (Moscow: Progress 1987), with Vertinskii discussed on pages 71–82. 3 These forces were also more numerous, given the fact that those who fled Russia entered not only a second political arena, but a second temporal domain, too. They were out of place and out of time; they ran away from the (or a) present. Vertinskii, for example, like Leshchenko and Morfessi, was accused because of his years in Paris as “the White officers’ nostalgic bard … So what was the main theme of his songs? At the start of the century in St Petersburg, the epithet ‘intimate’ became popular.” Feeling and a minor status were sidelined; the exponents of a sidelined sentiment were pushed to a distant

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notes to p age s 38–42

4 5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15

place. Yet even Soviet critics in the early eighties admitted that an “artistry, a harmony of his art bore the basic element of his creativity through the storms and inclement weather of a complex destiny – his own individuality.” A heartfelt subjectivity is (with great effort) made impervious to political weather. V. Ardov, Ètiudy k portretam (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’ 1983), 265, 270, 273 respectively. G. Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1998), 76. G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press 1994), 56. There is, of course, a limit of acceptable happiness (if joy means multiplicity) within Soviet society. The film Veselye rebiata, discussed at various points throughout this book, was criticized as “overloaded with stunts, jokes and set pieces. It turned out to be an embarrassment of riches, a misfortune born of a young director’s riches, an excess of effort.” The emotions employed to run beside Soviet high culture can at times outrun it altogether. Utesov did not stop moving. In 1971 he was described as a man who for decades had been “confessing his optimistic religion … His stage creation is the companion of a nation, one that makes people happy.” I. Babel’, Konarmiia. Rasskazy. Dnevniki. Publitsistika (Moscow: Pravda 1990), 466. Letter from B. Kisilev (Omsk), “Redkaia zapis’,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 48 (15 June 1982): 6. It is precisely at this time that the Soviet music industry, under a flood of rediscovered gems and the pressure of newer fashions, started to worry about the disparity between quantity and quality in a nationalized entertainment industry. M. Grin, Publitsist na èstrade (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1981), 154. From the repertoire of, among others, Iurii Morfessi. Words and music by Ia. Fel’dman. Savchenko, Kumiry zabytoi èstrady, 68. On Morfessi’s early dramatic career in Odessa, see “Kuprin v polete, Kuprin na stsene,” Neva 9 (1995): 230–3. Buff 1 (1909), as recorded in Èstrada retro, 10–11. V. Bardadym, Iurii Morfessi: Baian russkoi pesni (Krasnodar: Sovetskaia Kuban’ 1999), 34. Savchenko, Èstrada retro, 30–1. These collective concerts, sadly, would go out of fashion during the 1970s, but have recently reappeared for post-Soviet financial reasons. More people attract more viewers. For the Soviet demise, see V.K. Iashkin, Teatral’nost’ i teatralizatsiia v iskusstve sovetskoi èstrady (Moscow 1986), 10. For exactly this viewpoint, see V. Dontsov, “Baian russkoi pesni,” Sovetskaia muzyka 2 (1982): 134–5. I. Timofeeva, “Svet dalekoi zvezdy,” Nedelia 6 (6–12 February 1989): 5.

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notes to pages 42–7 16 Iu. Vereshchagin, “Korol’ romansa,” Gudok, 14 October 1990: 4. 17 Bardadym, Iurii Morfessi, 66–7. 18 Ibid., 114, framed by Morfessi’s own Zhizn’, liubov’, stsena (Paris: Starina 1931). 19 Ibid., 48. Here the author cites Morfessi’s awareness that romances are not – nor ever have been – held in high regard. They are dismissed as “light” entertainment or even “second-rate” music (54). 20 Timofeeva, “Svet dalekoi zvezdy.” 21 It is hard not to subscribe these generic shifts to politics, a desperate desire to please a whimsical politic back home (in order to get home). After all, we are not talking of perestroika, of equally dramatic – but less bloody – changes, which allowed for freer and less suspicious generic shifts. The composer Andrei Petrov, for example, was able to say calmly in 1986, “I wouldn’t divorce serious and light genres. Nowadays they’re coming together, often merging and not distancing themselves from one another. It’s not a matter of estrangement or polarization.” L. Markhasev, V legkom zhanre (Leningrad: Sovetskii kompozitor 1986), 285–6. 22 Savchenko, Èstrada retro, 76–7. 23 N. Shirinskii, “Baian russkoi pesni,” Mir zhenshchiny 13 (March 1998): 13–15. 24 V. Dontsov, “Iurii Morfessi,” Molodezhnaia èstrada 1 (January–March 1996): 25–6. 25 Bardadym, Iurii Morfessi, 192. 26 Boris Grebenshchikov in “Ia ochen’ blagodaren nashei sisteme,” Komsomol’skoe znamia, 9 September 1990. 27 See Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 18 (1989); Literaturnaia Rossiia, 18 May 1990; or Ogonek 35 (1991). All are discussed in Savchenko, Èstrada retro, 221. Further research into the matter can be found in V. Gridin, “Syn Odessy i Kishineva,” Slovo 34, no. 301 (28 August 1998), . 28 Savchenko, Kumiry zabytoi èstrady, 83–4. 29 This sad tale has already acquired an air of romance, because modern performers like Garik Sukachev “dream” of playing in the Parisian restaurant “Maxim,” where “great singers” such as Leshchenko and Vertinskii worked. Medved’ 6 (1996). 30 On Leshchenko’s early performances in Riga as a singer, see V. Bardadym, Tot samyi Leshchenko (Solo: Krasnodar 1993), 43. 31 K.T. Sokol’skii, in ibid., 44–5. 32 Ibid., 131. 33 È. Krenkel’, Chetyre tovarishcha: Dnevnik (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura 1940), 200, as quoted in Bardadym, Tot samyi Leshchenko, 104.

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notes to p age s 47–50 34 Savchenko, Èstrada retro, 228. Even in 1999, the newspaper Trud would refer to this Soviet composer as “the King of Tango.” N. Dolgopolov, “Vival’di igraet dzhaz,” 3 February. 35 For more information on the restaurant and its success, see È. Iakovleva, “Pevitsa Alla Baianova: ’V Rumynii my snimali kvartiru s privideniiami,” Fakty i kommentarii (Kiev), 19 November 1998. Further memoirs are in “Alla Baianova: Moi korolevskii Novyi god,” Antenna v Stavropole 51 (30 December 1998). Baianova’s story is told more objectively in A. Verein, “Snova na Rodine,” . 36 Bardadym, Tot samyi Leshchenko,194. For a fine collection of songs that express sentiment beyond national borders (and several wonderful photographs), see E. Druts and A. Gessler, Narodnye pesni russkikh tsygan (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor 1988). For a connection between the gypsy song and the gypsy lifestyle, see V. Gridin, “Proshchai, moi tabor,” Slovo 25, no. 292 (19 June 1998). 37 The influence of exclusive politics on inclusive estrada is clear here. As an example of the reverse process, one conducted at least in the country of an artist’s birth, Utesov once said on an overly enthusiastic Soviet radio show: “You’ve got so many artists stuffed into your radio show, I’ll get stuck between them.” V.N. Tikhvinskii, Minuty na razmyshleniia (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1978), 172. 38 Komsomol’skaia pravda, 5 December 1941: 4. 39 A recent exhibition in Odessa of life during World War Two afforded Leshchenko a special place. “Voina i Rumyny,” Porto-Franko 343 (1997). 40 On the enduring importance of theatre and cuisine in Odessa, even during war, see G. Aleksandrov, “I budet gorod vozrozhden,” PortoFranko 16 (1997). The importance of Leshchenko himself is recalled in articles such as A. Maksiutenko, “Goden k nestroevoi,” Slovo 25, no. 240 (20 June 1997); and V. Gridin, “Temnoe piatno …,” Slovo 28, no. 243 (11 July 1997). 41 Savchenko, Kumiry rossiiskoi èstrady, 196. 42 For all of its multigeneric melanges, estrada is often loath to merge folk music and contemporary strains, as if aware of itself as an essentially twentieth-century phenomenon. Leshchenko’s concerns were certainly well founded if we consider the prejudices of folk singers decades later: “Estrada singers give folk songs [nothing but] fanciness, flashiness, and that swagger of theirs.” Liudmila Zykina, “O russkoi pesne,” in Mastera èstrady – samodeiatel’nosti (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1971), 15. 43 C. Borzenko, Zhizn’ na voine (Moscow: Voennoe izdatel’stvo 1965), 301. 44 Safoshkin, Gori, gori, moia zvezda, 218. 45 For the terrible (official) confusion caused by Leshchenko’s multinational status, see Bardadym, Tot samyi Leshchenko, 89, 195.

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notes to pages 50–1 46 This issue refuses to go away. The strange thing is that on all occasions when Utesov himself mentions the song, he does so in its political form, and even when talking of Lebedev-Kumach and their work together, he still does not employ the textual emphases prevalent in the movie. See, for example, “Obidno!” Literaturnaia gazeta 110 (13 September 1958): 3; “S pesnei po zhizni,” Sovetskii èkran 7 (1965): 21; “Tysiacha pesen,” Vechernii Leningrad 67 (21 March 1970): 3; “Dlia menia on vsegda molod,” Komsomol’skaia pravda, 5 August 1978; “Veselyi veter ego pesen,” Komsomol’skaia pravda, 5 August 1988; “Trudnye gody ‘Veselykh rebiat,’” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 12 (December 1991): 26–8; “Narod Utesova liubil, a vlast’ podozrevala,” Izvestiia 51 (21 March 1995): 7; “Moi Utesov,” Neva 6 (June 1995): 200–4; and “Chelovek iz dzhaza: 100 let nazad,” Rossiiskaia gazeta 56 (21 March 1995). 47 Savchenko, Èstrada retro, 243. Once again Marsh veselykh rebiat becomes the litmus test for ideological (non) commitment. An article of 1995 by Hans Gunter looks at the lyrical elements in the song, but sticks to later political textual emphases and subsumes the private in a series of ancient, matriarchal archetypes that he sees at the root of all Soviet mass songs. “Poiushchaia Rodina,” Voprosy literatury 4 (1997). He draws in part upon an article by Naum Korzhavin, “O tom, kak veselilis’ rebiata v 1934 godu …,” Voprosy literatury 6 (1995): 33–57. The changes to such songs in favour of politics were often made as war approached. On this subject, see A.R. Rothstein, “Homeland, Home Town and Battlefield: The Popular Song,” in R. Stites, Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1995), 77–108. In other Western studies, the political air over the film hangs thick: D. Youngblood, Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992), 174; R. Taylor, “Red Stars, Positive Heroes and Personality Cults,” M. Enzensberger, “We Were Born to Turn a Fairy Tale …,” and I. Christie, “Canons and Careers,” all in R. Taylor and D. Spring, Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (London and New York: Routledge 1993), 75, 103, 156; and R. Taylor and I. Christie, Inside the Film Factory (London and New York: Routledge 1991), 209. Taylor and Christie argue against the case for pure laughter in Veselye rebiata, an example also used for their other documentary publication of 1988 (Harvard University Press). In this regard, see B. Shumiatskii, Kinematografiia millionov (Moscow 1935), 148–76, 234–40. 48 Savchenko, Èstrada retro, 254. See also L. Lugom, “Sud’ba Petra Leshchenko,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 31 January 1990: 8. 49 Safoshkin, Gori, gori, moia zvezda, 221. This awful type of non-meeting was recently depicted in the powerful film Vor (The Thief), directed by Pavel Chukhrai (ntv/Le Pont, 1998).

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notes to pages 51–8 50 An article in #60 (1998) of the Odessa newspaper Porto-Franko asked for information regarding a wartime photograph of the singer and an unknown boy, adding to his reputation as a sentimental performer. A. Galias, “A kto byl mal’chik?” . 51 Bardadym, Tot samyi Leshchenko, 201. 52 From Morfessi’s romance “Kak mnogo schast’ia!” Words by D. Nikolaev and music by N. Starova. 53 Routine smothers gaiety elsewhere, too. As V. Poliakov has it, in discussing the stubborn use of humour by Aleksandr Vertinskii, despite the apparent grey sameness of tour after tour, concert after concert: “Over the years a sense of humour conquered the singer’s sadness.” Tovarishch smekh (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1976), 133. This vivacity was apparently in the singer from his youth but was suppressed by professional obligations and political affect. A. Kapler, Zagadka korolevy èkrana (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia 1979), 136. 54 The manner in which politically tainted realia and apolitical nostalgia interrelate is, of course, tricky: they represent the relationship of posturing to yearning. With regard to Vertinskii, for example, it has been said that “even he, the romantic ‘wanderer and artist,’ could sometimes not stand aimless travel around foreign lands and (happily) came back to his native country.” V. Filippov, Aktery bez grima (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia 1971), 233. 55 “Nowadays the ‘minor’ intonations in his songs are perceived as a mood [or feeling: nastroenie], born of his longing for the homeland.” Iu. Alianskii on Vertinskii in Teatral’nye legendy (Moscow: Vserossiiskoteatral’noe obshchestvo 1973), 250. 56 A pun based upon an interview with Mark Bernes: “What can I advise another artist on the [Soviet] estrada if everything has to be profoundly individual? Each artist emerges from his own personality! If you copy somebody else’s manner, it won’t become your own; all you do is lose the main thing – uniqueness [nepovtorimost’].” V. Ia. Petrova, ed., Mastera èstrady sovetuiut (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia 1967), 24. 57 Here we have the link between affect and the non-ideological, transformative significance of labour (trud) examined in Red Stars. Take, for example, Bernes: “He considered that the main thing in movies was hard work [trud]. It was the sense and goal of his life … Never satisfied, he built his fate anew upon the small stage. With all of his activity as an estrada actor, he brilliantly showed the vitality [or viability: zhiznesposobnost’] of the image that had grown from his work in cinema.” L. Rybak, “Mark Bernes,” in L. Pol’skaia and M. Khadzhimuradova, Aktery sovetskogo kino (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1975), 43.

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notes to p age s 59–63 58 This ability of “Soviet” estrada to live within and beside pathos is well expressed in K. Vanshenkin’s book Nabroski k romanu (Moscow: Sovremennik 1973). Even though he was the hero of many epic adventure movies, “Bernes was my singer. I mean he sang and expressed what I wanted to hear” (68). Desire moves freely between the epic and private, between stage and hall, as part of a supraideological process. Hence we come full circle, back to what I call the “stage/hall” dialogue of Red Stars. 59 Bernes is not such a surprising choice when we consider how he was perceived publicly. “He’s a singer and movie actor, a People’s Artist of the Russian Federation, winner of the State Prize, a simple man. He’s dear to millions of people, a beautiful Soviet person.” A. Romanov, Nemerknushchii èkran (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1973), 14. See also Nravstvennyi ideal v sovetskom kinoiskusstve (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1971), 82–4. 60 This is the Nietzschean “dance” or game between the most extreme affects that begs an equally broad affirmation. In Utesov’s work, for example, “this was the main thing. The joy that penetrated the artist, the joy from music, from contact with his public, the joy of the actor’s game [igra], of his worldview.” E. Gershuni, Rasskazyvaiu ob èstrade (Leningrad: Iskusstvo 1968), 213. On the same impression Vertinskii would make with close, joyful contact in the distant Harbin of 1935, see N. Il’ina, Dorogi i sud’by (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia 1988), 180. 61 Such excessive metaphors troubled the Soviets, but as Vertinskii wrote in Shanghai on 7 March 1943, “I used to be accused of decadent moods in my songs, but I was never anything more than a mirror and microphone for my epoch.” S. Nikolaev, “Ia ne plachu! Ty vidish’? Ia snova poiu,” Ogonek 12 (March 1993): 21. 62 Said of Vertinskii by N. Slonova, Zhizn’ na stsene (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1971), 272. 63 For a dramatization of the jealousy between Morfessi and Vertinskii, see volume two of A.I. Kuprin, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (Moscow: Pravda 1982), 38–46; and “Posleslovie,” Volga 2 (February 1993), 154–7. A brief overview of Vertinskii’s performance in the Odessa Opera Theatre, where Leshchenko performed, is in V. Gridin, “Nad rozovym morem,” Slovo 38, no. 253 (19 September 1997). 64 For a cruel juxtaposition of Petr and the later Lev Leshchenko, see V. Tuchkov, “Rozanovyi sad,” . Lev Leshchenko has spoken himself about the confusion in last names, between pre-Soviet and Soviet artists: “Starushka ‘poradovala’ L’va Leshchenko tem, chto eshche pomnit ego!” . The singer is elsewhere celebrated both in Vladivostok

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notes to page 63

65

66 67

68

69

70

71

on the hundredth anniversary of his birth and as the key performer in a series of retrospective concerts entitled “Melodies of the Russian Emigration”: Khot’ Nius, ; and “Vse o Leshchenko,” Vladivostok 88 (3 June 1998). The grander celebrations in Moscow were reported on 20 October in Moskovskaia pravda (1998). For one romantic tale of Leshchenko’s records smuggled into amorous Russia after wwii, see S. Artemov, “Leshchenko,” . When the singer’s tale is told today in small provincial newspapers, such as Penza Online, it is reduced to exactly this element of romance and patriotism: . Pozdniakov and Statsevich, Tango i romansy Petra Leshchenko, 22. This practice, as I note, is often associated with the more radical underground music of the Thaw, but even musicians who grew up during that time themselves speak highly of Leshchenko’s art. S. Kuznetsov, “Eshche ne khochu umirat’,” Gazeta.Ru . The rock musician Boris Grebenshchikov was easily able to record an album entitled Chubchik, including the songs of Leshchenko, Dunaevskii, and “other Soviet or anti-Soviet composers.” I. Smirnov, “My nikogda ne stanem star’she?” Nezavisimaia gazeta, 28 June 1997. Even today, that release is seen as a turning point in Leshchenko’s reputation at home, and it has given rise to several retrospective musings or biographical sketches, such as “Chto zhe kasaetsia nashei strany …” (Listovka. Ru) to mark the 101st birthday of the singer . The other two were bard Vladimir Vysotskii and rock star Viktor Tsoi. M. Blekhman, “V gostiakh u Orfeiia,” Vestnik, 23 June 1998, at . The notion of “bard” is sometimes flexible, being often applied to any wandering post-revolutionary warbler, such as Vertinskii himself. P. Kurtsman, Mark Fradkin (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor 1991), 124. M. Oseneva, “Russkii shanson vykhodit iz podpol’ia,” Shans, 16 April 1998. The St Petersburg radio station Melodiia also includes Leshchenko in its basic line-up, as a star without whom no selfrespecting retro-program could be established . On an oldies retro-show broadcast by Moscow’s Radio Rakurs, Leshchenko even faces the likes of Elvis Presley . Take, for example, this quote from E. Gershuni, Zametki o muzykal’noi èstrade (Leningrad: Sovetskii kompozitor 1963), 57–8. The popularity of songs defined, in the mid-sixties, their ideological status. Popularity

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notes to pages 64–6 was once again prior to politics. “We often reproach estrada for occasionally falling short of our listeners’ increasing demands, and so we should. Nevertheless, we often forget what a great, complicated, and difficult path our estrada has traversed. We forget how many masters estrada has fostered who enjoy the deserved love of millions of Soviet listeners and viewers, a popularity with Russians and others far beyond the borders of our homeland.”

chapter three 1 The words of Kozin’s mother to her young son in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg. 2 Kozin’s passport states 21 March 1906 as his birthday, but the singer always maintained that he was born three years earlier. B. Savchenko, Opal’nyi Orfei (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1993), 14. A slightly briefer version of this book was published by Znanie in Moscow, 1991. There exists also a third edition with the same title, published by Magadanskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo in the same year. It has the added attraction of a good introduction and a useful bibliography on the final pages. Reviews of this and the Iskusstvo edition can be found in Knizhnoe obozrenie 8 (21 February 1992): 8; and V. Shipunov, “Opal’nyi Orfei,” Kul’tura 19 (15 May 1993): 7. They act as a useful indicator of changing post-Soviet attitudes to the singer. All following references to this text imply the Iskusstvo text. 3 In several articles there are suggestions that Kozin’s father loved to hear his wife sing and jeopardized his social standing for that pleasure when he proposed to her. 4 A. Mazurenko, “Sud’ba Vadima Kozina,” Dal’nii Vostok 10 (1993): 12–66. 5 Savchenko, Opal’nyi Orfei, 17. 6 È. Polianovskii, “Pevets,” Nedelia 12 (19–25 March 1990): 14–15. 7 L. Nikolaev, “Pesni Vadima Kozina,” Sovetskaia Rossiia, 24 June 1989: 4. 8 È. Polianovskii, “Tragicheskii tenor èpokhi,” Izvestiia 244 (21 December 1994): 6. 9 Metlitskii archives, #218. 10 Savchenko, Èstrada retro, 263. 11 Kozin would even sing romances explicitly associated with those two women, such as Gazovaia kosynka. 12 Metlitskii archives, #218. 13 B. Savchenko, “Sud’ba v pesne,” Avrora 6 (1993): 117–30. 14 For example, Vadim Kozin: Neizdannoe (Tsentr Vozrozhdeniia i Propagandy Istoriko-Kul’turnogo Naslediia Otechestva 2000). These recordings come from the Safoshkin archives, employed in full for this study.

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notes to p age s 67–72 15 In 1993 Kozin said that modern stars such as Pugacheva and Leont’ev could never handle a pre-revolutionary workload without a microphone. Mazurenko, “Sud’ba V. Kozina,” 26. Five years before he had criticized modern estrada for “no feeling, no beauty, and no skill,” because it relied not only on microphones but fanera, too. B. Savchenko, “V gostiakh u Opal’nogo Orfeiia,” Literaturnaia Rossiia 14 (8 April 1988): 21. He would, nevertheless, towards the end of his life have kinder words for Pugacheva, saying that she “sings well, she sings the Soviet way.” Iosif Kobzon would also be praised for “singing, not shouting.” 16 Savchenko, Èstrada retro, 271. 17 Mazurenko, “Sud’ba V. Kozina,” 31. 18 The others were Utesov, Lidiia Ruslanova, and operatic folk singer Sergei Lemeshev. 19 Metlitskii archives, #218. 20 È. Polianovskii, “Odinokii golos,” Izvestiia 54 (27 March 1993): 12. 21 “Gde nasha pervaia vstrecha?” Leningradskaia pravda 300 (31 December 1989): 4. 22 A.D. “Vadim Kozin: Khochetsia vspomnit’…” Vechernii Peterburg 69 (20 April 1999): 4. 23 I. Dudinskii and Iu. Rebrov, “Osen’. Prozrachnoe utro,” Ogonek 10 (March 1987): 15. 24 Metlitskii archives, #176. 25 Savchenko, Opal’nyi Orfei, 70. 26 Savchenko, Èstrada retro, 279–80. 27 Savchenko, Opal’nyi Orfei, 97. 28 Savchenko, Èstrada retro, 300. The ability of jazz to hold on through the toughest years does not necessarily mean that in a few years’ time, with Stalin’s death, all would be well. Khrushchev would soon say, “I don’t like jazz. When I hear it, it’s as if I had gas on the stomach.” B. Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1983), 361–2. 29 M. Blekhman, “V gostiakh u Orfeia,” Vestnik, 23 June 1998. 30 Savchenko, Opal’nyi Orfei, 110. 31 His wages were raised again in July 1956, and he thus attained the level of pay that a major artist on the Soviet “mainland” might receive. In January 1957 he received yet another salary increase, marking a significant change in his well-being after Stalin’s death. For a brief history of the Magadan theatre and Kozin’s role, see S. Tarasov, “Osen’. Tumannoe utro,” Vechernii Peterburg 63 (20 March 1993): 3. 32 For a wonderful picture of the cramped apartment in which Kozin lived, see Televidenie i radioveshchanie, 11 (November 1990): 57. An

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notes to pages 72–3

33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46

47 48 49 50

announcement of his death can be found in “Otchuvstvoval, otpel …,” Rossiiskaia gazeta 247 (21 December 1994): 7. B. Savchenko, “Eshche ne speto stol’ko pesen…” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 1 (January 1982): 28–9. M. Il’ves, “Ne tol’ko dlia babushek,” Vozdushnyi transport, 17 February 1990: 4. Iu. Vereshchagin, “Master èstrady Vadim Kozin,” Gudok, 7 November 1989: 4. B. Savchenko, “Osen’” Muzykal’naia zhizn’, 8 (April 1987): 10. Polianovskii, “Pevets.” Kozin, like Iur’eva, also had trouble with overzealous fans stealing things from his archive during home visits. An article of 1998 tried to rectify the problem with a call to gather missing materials. A. Kostyrin, “Pamiati Vadima Kozina,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 2 (February 1998): 17. M. Drobysheva, “Legenda nashei èstrady,” Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, 21 April 1991: 2. B. Reznik, “Vadimu Kozinu – ot Ministerstva bezopasnosti,” Izvestiia 94 (21 March 1993): 8. N. Vainonen, “Vadim Kozin: Ne nado brat’ vysokie noty,” Rossiiskie vesti 54 (26 March 1994) (Vekhi): 3. “Na materik on ne vernulsia,” Krest’ianka 11 (1991): 27. An article of 1993 is testament to yet another attempt at instituting Kozin. “Pozhmem drug drugu ruki,” Kul’tura 13 (3 April 1993): 7. The witless story of this “crime” and its legal consequences is told in È. Polianovskii, “Lozh’ kak sredstvo obshcheniia vlasti s grazhdanami,” Izvestiia 238 (10 December 1994): 5. È. Polianovskii, “Pevtsy,” Izvestiia 8 (15 January 1994): 1, 10. For example, Iosif Kobzon in 1993. See V. Terskaia, “Svidan’ia chas i bol’ razluki,” Trud 61 (19 March 1993): 4. See, for example, M. Gorskaia, “Eshche ne speto stol’ko pesen …,” Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti 53 (21 March 1997): 2; or M. Drobysheva, “Vadim Kozin pel vezde – ot Peterburga do Magadana,” Smena 63 (21 March 1998): 2. “Tainyi krest Vadima Kozina,” Sovershenno sekretno 4 (April 1996): 8–9. V. Sudakov, “Staraia druzhba na novyi lad,” Delovoi mir, 11 July 1991: 8. B. Savchenko, “Pomnite Vadima Kozina? … Konechno, pomnite …” Literaturnaia gazeta 32 (5 August 1987): 8. V. Bashaev, “I proshloe kazhetsia snom …,” Smena 66–7 (20 March 1993): 2; and B. Savchenko, “Dolgozhdannaia plastinka,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 6 (June 1986): 29. On the initial unwillingness of Melodiia to press Kozin’s records, see I. Vainshtein, “O, Kozin!” Pravda, 6 February 1990: 8. Substantial re-releases were only to appear in 1991.

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notes to pages 73–6 51 Others have made claim to discovering Kozin, as we are reminded in M. Masharov, “… Lish’ tol’ko zvezdy blesnut v nebesakh,” Moskovskie novosti 13 (28 March 1993): 3b. One such claimant is G. Kotliarskii, quoted in this chapter’s conclusion. The author maintains that his article of 1988 in Sovetskaia kul’tura entitled “V zashchitu starykh pesen” started the snowballing rediscovery. 52 The archives of Boris Metlitskii contain a letter of 23 December 1988 in which Iur’eva complains that a television broadcast dedicated to both her and Kozin gave the latter considerably more attention. These same archives also contain some congratulatory postcards sent to St Petersburg from Magadan by Kozin, a concert program of 16 April 1973 (forty-five years of artistic activity), and an advertisement for the “Kismet” recording of Kozin’s songs, released in New York (#19 and #34). 53 David Ashkenazi, in Metlitskii archives, #218. 54 D.R. Kelley, Soviet Politics from Brezhnev to Gorbachev (New York: Praeger 1987), 15. 55 S. White, Gorbachev in Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990), 10–11. 56 D. Lane and C. Ross, The Transition from Communism to Capitalism: Ruling Elites from Gorbachev to Yeltsin (New York: St Martin’s Press 1999), 19. 57 Gorbachev, in M.K. Gorshkov and L.N. Dobrokhotov, Gorbachev – El’tsyn: 1500 dnei politicheskogo protivostoianiia (Moscow: Terra 1992), 434. 58 D. Lane, Soviet Society under Perestroika (London and New York: Routledge 1992), 330. 59 L. Velikodnyi, Èntsiklopediia gorbachevizma (Moscow: Paleia 1993), 13– 14. 60 Ibid., 20, 163. 61 M.S. Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy: Chast’ 2-ia (Moscow: Novosti 1995), 554. 62 M.S. Gorbachev, Nobelevskaia lektsiia (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury 1991), 15. The speech itself was given in Oslo on 5 June 1991. 63 M.S. Gorbachev, Po puti reshitel’nykh preobrazovanii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury 1991), 5. The speech itself was given on 27 March 1990. 64 M.S. Gorbachev, Razmyshleniia o proshlom i budushchem (Moscow: Terra 1998), 299–300. 65 Part of this “minorization” was caused by the official view that singers such as Utesov and Shul’zhenko had no voice and did not deserve the big stage. As Kozin himself said, however, they “had their own voice,

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notes to p age s 77–86

66

67 68

69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77 78 79

a special one.” M. Kagan, “Eshche ne speto stol’ko pesen,” Moskovskii komsomolets, 7 October 1986: 3. Savchenko, Kumiry zabytoi èstrady, 200–1. The author notes here other texts that show an ongoing commitment to civic matters: Liudi, ostanovite smert’! (L. Oshanin); Moia Rossiia (N. Braun); Ia nenavizhu v liudiakh lozh’ (A. Dement’ev); and Pochta 36–401 (N. Novosel’tseva). During the fifties or sixties we find Ostrova vospominanii (V. Shefner); Moi zhuravli (P. Brovki); Byloe and Rasproshchaemsia, razoidemsia plus Zakata luchi dogorali (N. Braun); Ne strashchai menia groznoi sud’boi (A. Akhmatova); Lish’ chernyi barkhat (N. Gumilev); Ne budi vospominanii (K. Bal’mont); Idut belye snegi, Na arkhangel’skom prichale, Vchera eshche kursanty (E. Evtushenko); Nichego ne vernesh’, Sumerki; and Grustnoe tango (A. Dement’ev). E. Chernosvistov, “V gostiakh u Vadima Kozina,” Literaturnaia Rossiia 14 (8 April 1988): 21. From a lone, oddly positive review of Kozin in 1967 found in the Pacific coast Tikhookeanskaia pravda and quoted in G. Skorokhodov, “Lirika dushi,” Molodezhnaia èstrada 1 (January–March 1996), 22–3. A. Sidorov, “Golos,” Teatral’naia zhizn’ 16 (August 1988): 15. V. Rezinovskii, Vadim Kozin: Fotokniga (Administratsiia goroda Magadana 1993). Savchenko, Sud’ba v pesne, 125. See, for example, the impressive article by V. Shakhidzhanian, “Gomuseksualizm,” , for a full introduction to the status of homosexuality legally, historically, and culturally in Russia. Kozin is indeed mentioned as a performer who survived the thirties “by some miracle.” The article is in part reproduced in the first edition of the wittily named web journal Gay, slaviane!, . See also, in the same publication, A. Bredei, “Russkie znamenitosti,” . For a radically different view on the matter, see chapter 11 of Grigorii Krasnov’s Krasnaia Kabbala, available on-line at . Mazurenko, “Sud’ba V. Kozina,” 36. A. Murai, “Tsvety zapozdalye,” Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti 203 (22 October 1994): 7. Deleuze on the workings of Baroque melody in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1999), 82. G. Liubarskii, “Pevets Vadim Kozin,” Vestnik, 22 June 1998. T. Kravtsova, “Koty i Kozin,” Versty (Perekrestok) 90 (1999). T. Batova, “Variatsii na muykal’nye temy,” Vladivostok-novosti, 17 July 1998. N. Kurnosov, “Popsa vseia Rusi,” Ogonek, 7 February 2000: 41.

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notes to p age s 87–90

chapter four 1 A common assertion, verified elsewhere by Stalin’s son. L. Markhasev, in V. Model’, ed., Pesni i romansy Aleksandra Vertinskogo (Leningrad: Sovetskii kompozitor 1991). A fuller collection of Vertinskii’s early work can be found in Aleksandr Vertinskii: Pesni i stikhi (1916–1937) (Washington: Knigoizdatel’stvo V. Kamkina 1962). 2 M. Brokhes in V. Svirin, “Vertinskii vblizi,” Trud, 23 March 1989: 3. 3 A. Vertinskii, Dorogoi dlinnoiu … (Moscow: Pravda 1990), 12, 402. 4 Vertinskii himself claimed his birthday was 9 March, but research in the registers of Kiev’s Troitskii Church has proved the singer mistaken. V. Bardadym, Aleksandr Vertinskii bez grima (Krasnodar: Sovetskaia Kuban’ 1996), 6. An interesting review of this book can be found in V. Rotov, “Kto vy, Vertinskii?” Literaturnaia Rossia 33 (15 August 1997): 4. 5 In 1912 he published a few of these stories in the newspaper Kievskaia nedelia: Portret (#1, 4–8); Moia nevesta (#2, 1–4); and Papirosy “Vesna” (#4, 7–8). He also published “Red Butterflies” in the weekly Lukomor’e (#1, 5–8). 6 Vertinskii, Dorogoi dlinnoiu, 50–1. 7 On Vertinskii’s early drug use, see G. Pin and R. Iangirov, “Iunost’ P’ero,” Nezavisimaia gazeta 131 (19 July 1996): 8. 8 Vertinskii, Dorogoi dlinnoiu, 74. 9 For more information of the relative success of Vertinskii’s movies and his performances, see N. Ravich, Portrety sovremennikov (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia 1977). 10 V.G. Babenko, Arlekin i P’ero: Nikolai Evreinov / Aleksandr Vertinskii. Materialy k biografiiam. Razmyshleniia (Ekaterinburg: Izdatel’stvo Ural’skogo Universiteta 1992), 188–9. The information here was also published in Artist Aleksandr Vertinskii: Materialy k biografii. Razmyshleniia (Sverdlovsk: Izdatel’stvo Ural’skogo Universiteta 1989). I quote the more recent and available publication below, given the negligible difference between them. With regard to films, Babenko draws particular attention to Kreuzer Sonata and The Defence of Sevastopol’, both of 1911. In the former movie Vertinskii played the violinist Trukhachevskii, and in the latter Admiral Kornilov. 11 A. Khrenov, “A. Vertinskii v pesniakh i fil’makh,” Sovetskii fil’m 12 (1989): 12–14. The article includes a wonderful collage of Vertinskii in several of his early big-screen roles. Snippets from his longforgotten efforts can be seen in the two-part documentary by Lentelefil’m, Odisseia Vertinskogo. 12 Bardadym, Aleksandr Vertinskii bez grima, 12. 13 A. Vertinskii, “Seroglazyi korol’,” Sovetskii èkran 18 (December 1989): 22–5.

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notes to pages 90–2 14 Vertinskii, Dorogoi dlinnoiu, 106. 15 S. Volkov, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press 1995), 181. 16 To some degree this novelty was in a reduction or minorization of romances’ wide sweep, as noted in the 1929 essay by P. Pil’skii, reprinted in “Kapriznik, fantast i romantik,” Literaturnaia Rossiia 12 (24 March 1989): 22–3. On Vertinskii’s related modesty on stage, despite the makeup, see T. Leshchenko-Sukhomlina, “Golosa moei zhizni,” Literaturnaia Rossiia 1 (2 January 1981): 17. On the minor, condensed narratives of his songs, see “Vstrechi neobkhodimy,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 6 (17 January 1975): 4. 17 È. Krasnianskii, Vstrechi v puti (Moscow: Vserossiiskoe teatral’noe obshchestvo 1967), 75–6. 18 Gershuni, in a bad mood. Iskusstvo èstrady 107. From 1960, this is as an indication of how, paradoxically, Vertinskii’s success may have been dependent upon Stalinist society. 19 K. Rudnitskii, “Aleksandr Vertinskii,” Teatr 2 (1988): 130–42. See also inside back cover of previous issue. 20 B. Rodkin, Vsia teatral’no-muzykal’naia Rossiia (1915), quoted in Babenko Arlekin, 192–3. 21 V. Gaevskii, “V leksikone Vertinskogo …,” Kommersant-DAILY 74 (22 May 1997): 13. 22 See Babenko, Arlekin, 215, for an overview of other contemporary Pierrots. Although Vertinskii is not under consideration in its pages, a most impressive overview of this figure and its significance for strictly theatrical Russia can be found in J.D. Clayton, Pierrot in Petrograd (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1993). One especially interesting quote is from Eisenstein, crediting the music-hall multigeneric commedia figures and repertoires with inspiring his editing style (215–16). 23 His daughter, Marianna, says he also loved Gumilev, Akhmatova, and Ivanov. “Vertinskaia o Vertinskom,” Rossiiskaia gazeta 16 (26 January 1996): 28. His other daughter, Anastasiia, even says Blok was her father’s “idol.” “Otkrytie dushi,” Sovetskaia zhenshchina 12 (1989): 26– 7, 29. Perhaps, though, his work was actually a parody of Blok, as suggested by “B.T.” in “P’ero, brat miloserdiia,” Vechernii Peterburg 14 (3 April 1998): 15 (Ètazherka). For more information on Vertinskii’s favourite poets, see “Blagodariu vas za liubov’,” Avrora 3 (March 1989): 88. 24 L. Borisov, “Vera Kholodnaia i Vertinskii v gostiakh u ranenykh voinov,” Rodina 4 (1992): 85. The same magazine in 1993 also included both actors in a photo-spread of early Russian film stars. “Kumiry publiki,” Rodina 8–9 (1993): 146–9.

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notes to pages 92–7 25 A. Makarov, Aleksandr Vertinskii: Portret na fone vremeni (Moscow and Smolensk: Olimp/Rusich 1998), 51. 26 Ibid., 72. 27 M. Zharov, Zhizn’. Teatr. Kino (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1967), 90. 28 Vertinskii, Dorogoi dlinnoiu, 95. 29 “M” Svobodnaia rech’ 165 (28 June [10 August] 1919): 2. The connection here with Futurism is moot, given that movement’s antipathy towards small lyric forms. In support of such an argument, see Babenko, Arlekin, 210. 30 A. Vertinskii, Chetvert’ veka bez rodiny: Stranitsy minuvshego (Kiev: Muzychna Ukraiina 1989), 33. For a review, see E. Bakhanov, “O zhizni, polnoi trevog,” Knizhnoe obozrenie 32 (11 August 1989): 16. The author makes the touching remark that Vertinskii’s concerts were so reverentially quiet that buzzing summer flies would drive the audience crazy. 31 Makarov, Aleksandr Vertinskii, 171, 173. 32 Vertinskii, Dorogoi dlinnoiu, 122. See also Vertinskii, Chetvert’ veka bez rodiny, 62, for a similar confession. 33 Vertinskii, Dorogoi dlinnoiu, 133. 34 Bardadym, Aleksandr Vertinskii bez grima, 32. 35 Vertinskii, Dorogoi dlinnoiu, 149–50. 36 Vertinskii, Chetvert’ veka bez rodiny, 40–1. 37 For an indicative positive review of a Berlin concert in 1923, see I. Khabarov, “Iskusnaia i vlastnaia ruka bol’shogo mastera,” Rossiiskaia muzykal’naia gazeta 4 (April 1992): 4. 38 E. Reis, “Chernaia roza Vertinskogo,” Nedelia 22 (27 May–2 June 1991): 20. 39 See Bessarabskoe slovo 15696 (9 June 1929): 4, and 1606 (19 June 1929). Both are quoted in Bardadym, Aleksandr Vertinskii bez grima, 50. 40 Babenko, Arlekin, 251. 41 Narodnaia mysl’ 24 (30 January 1925): 1. 42 N. Bukharin, “Zlye zametki,” reprinted in Voprosy literatury 8 (1988): 226–7. 43 N. Pogodin, “Gde vy teper’?” Ogonek 50–2/6 (1928); and L. Nikulin, “Malen’kii kreolchik,” Ogonek 6 (1929): 13. 44 For the story of this song and romance, see “Kto vy, printsessa Iren,” Mir zhenshchiny, August 1994: 22–3, 59. 45 Zaria, 27 November 1936, as noted in G. Melikhov, “Rodnaia svecha na chuzhikh dorogakh,” Problemy Dal’nego Vostoka 6 (1992): 89–97. 46 N. Grinkevich, “Pered likom Rodiny,” Prostor 4 (1989): 164–8. 47 Makarov, Aleksandr Vertinskii, 200–1. 48 I. Popova, “Fedor Ivanovich Shaliapin,” Muzykal’naia akademiia 3 (July– September 1993): 98–101.

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notes to pages 97–101 49 Babenko, Arlekin, 254, 258. 50 Bardadym, Aleksandr Vertinskii bez grima, 78. I should mention that such rumours endure with impressive persistence even today. 51 Vertinskii, Dorogoi dlinnoiu, 249, 252, 492. 52 V. Shakhnazarian, “Postav’te im skameiku,” Trud 122 (5 July 1997): 5. 53 Vertinskii, Dorogoi dlinnoiu, 249. 54 Vertinskii, Chetvert’ veka bez rodiny, 129. 55 This irony may in fact be deliberate, given Vertinskii’s frequent recourse to it. See, for example, “Mezh pesnei i sud’boiu,” Iskusstvo Leningrada 1 (1990): 79–80. 56 Vertinskii, Chetvert’ veka bez rodiny, 132. 57 I. Baranovskii in an interview with Vertinskii’s long-time accompanist, M. Brokhes. “Vertinskii: sud’ba i pesni,” Sotsialisticheskaia industriia, 17 November 1988: 4. For additional and telling conversation with Brokhes, see “Pesni Vertinskogo,” Sovetskaia Rossiia, 21 March 1989. 58 Makarov, Aleksandr Vertinskii, 258. 59 E. Andrikanis, O Presne, o Parizhe, o kino (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1980), 138. 60 See the discographical discussions in Bardadym, Aleksandr Vertinskii bez grima, 107–8. “In the Moldovan Steppe,” for example, a very nostalgic song, is usually dated as some time between 1923 and 1925, when in fact it might possibly not have been written earlier than 1929. 61 “O Iu. Morfessi,” in Vertinskii, Dorogoi dlinnoiu, 368–71. Similar comments about Leonid Utesov and Mark Bernes can be found on pages 412 and 454. An interesting letter of 4 December 1950 to his wife complains of dual standards, that he is taking critical flak for a song (Belogvardeiskie limonchiki) that Utesov had already sung for years (467). 62 V. Raevskii, “Vertinskii i russkie v Shankhae,” Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti 268 (17 December 1993): 7. 63 Rudnitskii, “Aleksandr Vertinskii,” 139. 64 I. Shneider, Zapiski starogo moskvicha (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia 1970), 102. 65 V. Drozdov, “Minuvshee prokhodit predo mnoiu,” Niva 3 (1991): 70–2. 66 Given the risk that Vertinskii took in bringing his family home, it is interesting to note a court case of 1996–97 in which an editor of the newspaper Megapolis-Èkspress tried to sue them. He attacked the family with a series of stunning claims: Vertinskii’s wife had been unfaithful; she had tried to kill her daughter; one of the current daughters was not born of her mother; and the housemaid had in fact murdered the mother, taken her papers, and starred in her films! Vertinskii’s postwar films star, the editor also claimed, a series of identical stand-ins. The daughters won the case and a great deal of money. B.

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notes to p age s 101–3

67 68

69 70

71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81

Voitsekhovskii, “Vertinskie otstoiali svoiu chest’!” Komsomol’skaia pravda 47 (14–21 March 1997): 6; and the briefer, preliminary “Imia Vertinskogo slishkom uzh dorogo,” Komsomol’skaia pravda 26 (12 February 1997): 1. Extra information is in A. Gerasimov, “Sud podderzhal sem’iu Vertinskikh,” Kommersant-DAILY 54 (17 April 1997): 7; and “Chest’ i dostoinstvo sester Vertinskikh …,” Kommersant-DAILY 60 (25 April 1997): 13. A story of moot provenance. S.A. Kovalenko, “Fenomen Aleksandra Vertinskogo,” Ros. Literaturoved. Zhurnal 2 (1993): 126–51. On Vertinskii’s diligence at this time, showing his return to a country he genuinely loved, irrespective of ideology, see his wife’s article “Aleksandr Vertinskii: Biografiia,” Molodezhnaia èstrada 2–4 (March– August 1992): 54–6. N. Kalmykov, “Vertinskii,” Trud, 6 October 1988: 4. B. Filippov, Zapiski domovogo (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia 1989), 248. Nevertheless, at one of his 1944 concerts in Moscow, an erstwhile Count Ignat’ev, dressed now as a Soviet officer, came out on the stage prior to Vertinskii. He introduced the singer, mentioning that he had met Vertinskii in Paris and that he hoped the Soviet future would be a happy one for all concerned. M. Grin, “Odin den’ s Vertinskim,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 8 (1991): 12–13. On the overcoming of curiosity at these concerts of the fifties, see G. Skorokhodov, “Aleksandr Vertinskii,” Molodezhnaia èstrada 1 (January–March 1996): 4–7. N. Slonova, Zhizn’ na stsene (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1971), 271. Vertinskii, Chetvert’ veka bez rodiny, 69. R. Ivnev, “Vospominaniia o Mariengofe” and “Dva Vertinskikh,” Moskovskii zhurnal 6 (1991): 12–18. “On pel tikho, no ego bylo slyshno,” Sovetskii ekran 5 (March 1988): 22. Gershuni archives, #106: Nezabyvaemye dni. Iz zapisok nachal’nika frontovoi agit-brigady. “O prisuzhdenii Stalinskikh premii …,” Pravda, 17 March 1951: front page. The films mentioned here are Anna na shee (1954), dir. Isidor Annenskii; Sadko (1952), dir. Aleksandr Ptushko; Don Kikhot (1957), dir. Grigorii Kozintsev; Novye pokhozhdeniia Kota v sapogakh (1957), dir. Aleksandr Rou; and Korolevstvo krivykh zerkal (1963), dir. Aleksandr Rou. “Dorozhnaia pyl’,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 2 (February 1991): 2–5, 43. B. Bazhanov, “Genii moei mechty,” Literaturnyi Kirgystan 11 (1991): 156–8. Television documentary, Ia vernulsia domoi, broadcast on ort in the summer of 1996.

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notes to pages 103–10 82 Babenko, Arlekin, 298. 83 Acts such as this led to rumours that Vertinskii had been a double agent while abroad and even that his bust stood in the corridors of the kgb headquarters. O. Goriachev, “Kochuiushchii P’ero,” Argumenty i fakty 26 (June 1993): 8. 84 Makarov, Aleksandr Vertinskii, 196. 85 This new sombre persona was a little boring for some members of the audience. One said he looked like an accountant on stage. I. Rakhillo, “Vertinskii,” Literaturnaia Rossiia 27 (7 July 1978): 20. 86 Makarov, Aleksandr Vertinskii, 304–5, 329. 87 I. Nikolaeva, “Otzvuk ego pesen,” Sotsialisticheskaia industriia, 19 March 1989: 4. Perestroika also worked in Vertinskii’s favour, as explained by K. Kurnosenkov, in “Dorogaia pamiat’,” Pravda Vostoka, 28 July 1990: 4; and an article of later samizdat: L. Kozlov, “Pomogaet zhurnal samizdatu,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 28 (13 July 1991): 9. 88 “V bananovo-limonnom Sinagapure i zasnezhennoi Moskve,” Izvestiia, 18 March 1989: 3. 89 E. Èpshtein, “Riadom s Vertinskim,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk, September 1989: 40–2. For a picture of the artist at this time, see “Khleb èstrady,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 1 (January 1990): 23. 90 Vertinskii, Dorogoi dlinnoiu, 410. For a touching story of how an old school friend tried not to forget – and then find – his grave, see “Nechaiannye vstrechi,” Teatral’naia zhizn’ 7 (April 1992): 20–1. 91 Vertinskii, Dorogoi dlinnoiu, 462. 92 Vertinskii, Chetvert’ veka bez rodiny, 140. 93 For example, B. Filippov, “Dve sud’by,” Literaturnaia Rossiia, 29 October 1965: 20. 94 Anastasiia Vertinskaia (Moscow: Kinotsentr 1988), 6. 95 An enthusiastic assessment of Vertinskii by Alla Larionova, his co-star in Anna na shee. “Odinokaia boginia,” Speed-Info 6 (June 2000): 34–5. 96 A letter from Vertinskii to his wife and daughters from Izhevsk, 13 February 1952. Vertinskii, Dorogoi dlinnoiu, 481. 97 R. Iangirov, “Ego est’ za chto tsenit’, pomnit’ i liubit’…” Nezavisimaia gazeta 85 (15 May 1998): 16. 98 See Kovalenko, “Fenomen,” 148–9, on how Vertinskii uses the “high style” for purely emotional purposes. 99 Even Vertinskii’s wife after his death remarked that the basic theme of his songs was a “paradise lost,” a fall and its consequences. “Ia liubliu tebia odnu na vsem bozh’em svete,” Ogonek 12 (March 1993): 23–5. 100 This notion of heartfelt memories as always constituting a type of universal Russian “home” is developed at the end of “Dorogoi dlinnoiu …,” Avrora 1 (1993): 112–13. 101 Iu. Alianskii, “Kontsert,” Nedelia 41 (5–11 October 1970): 16–17.

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notes to pages 110–13 102 T. Piletskaia, “Takim ego zapomnila,” Smena 66 (21 March 1989): 3. 103 On this generational shift, see A. Galich, “Proshchal’nyi uzhin,” Nedelia 43 (23–29 October 1989): 19; and T. Piletskaia, “Vertinskii,” Natali 15 (1993): 3. Galich himself becomes such a generation’s representative in “Nostal’gicheskie posidelki,” TV -rev’iu 12 (18–24 September 1992): 32. 104 An article by Boris Tulintsev in the magazine Moskovskii nabliudatel’ stresses in an interesting way that Vertinskii’s nostalgia (and sexual ambivalence) are forms of absence or exclusion from the real world, but the author does not suggest how nostalgia might positively fold time (“Stradaiushchie nostal’giei,” 3 [1992]: 15–18). See also his related article in Nezavisimaia gazeta 60 (27 March 1992), 7. 105 S. Borovikov, “Skazitel’ russkoi èstrady,” Volga 3 (1975): 186–90. 106 O. Khmel’nitskaia and N. Andronov, “Tele-kino-anons,” Teleradio-Èfir 5 (May 1991): 48. 107 These issues are concisely expressed in an article on memory and nostalgia of 1989. A play about Vertinskii is praised as “an attempt to return the delicate fragility which bore the Petersburg moderne and which, returning in post-traditional forms, becomes live and essential. A yearning for departed times. Has it really all passed away irrevocably?” D. Krizhanskaia, “Zhamè?” Smena 261 (14 November 1989): 4. On staging Vertinskii’s biography, see also “V roli Vertinskogo … zhenshchina,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 97 (13 August 1988): 7; A. Grinevich, “Dorogi P’ero,” Sovetskaia Kul’tura 34 (21 March 1989): 6; V. Vernik, “Doroga russkogo P’ero,” Nedelia 12 (20–26 March 1989): 4–5; A. Svobodin, “Ocharovanie mirazha,” Moskovskie novosti 44 (29 October 1989): 11; N. Onchurova, “Ia ustal ot belil i rumian,” Literaturnaia Rossiia 41 (13 October 1989): 21; E. Davydova, “Obraz i podobie,” Sovetskii teatr 1 (January–March 1990): 8–9; B. Metlitskii, “Kak sygrat’ vospominaniia,” Vechernii Peterburg 264 (18 November 1991): 3; T. Posysaeva, “Dochen’ki my …,” Uchitel’skaia gazeta, 25 March 1989: 3; S. Il’chenko, “Kak svezhi byli rozy,” Vechernii Peterburg 31 (7 February 1992): 3; and I. Kosminskaia, “Kto vam tseluet pal’tsy?” Kul’tura 6 (18 February 1995): 9. 108 “Profili èstrady,” Teatr 1 (1971): 108–10. 109 Vertinskii liked to equate the two by repeating a comment made about him: “The public is always thoughtful. Vertinskii is always with the public; therefore he, too, is thoughtful.” A. Chernigovskaia, “To byl P’ero,” Vechernii Leningrad 67 (21 March 1989): 3. 110 Iu. Vereshchagin, “Patriarkh èstrady,” Gudok, 18 March 1995: 4. 111 Makarov, Aleksandr Vertinskii, 411. 112 On this problem, see the introduction to “Sila pesni,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 3 (1964): 25–7. His wife later said that had they known more

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notes to pages 113–15 about the purges, they probably would have thought twice about returning. Vertinskii in exile said that fate kept him there; others thought it was fear. See G. Spitsyn, “Zaveshchanie mastera,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 18 (February 1972): 4; and G. Tsitriniak, “Aleksandr Vertinskii: Sud’ba i pesni,” Literaturnaia gazeta 25 (21 June 1989): 8. 113 For a brief announcement of his death, see “Izveshchenie o smerti,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 70 (25 May 1957): 4.

chapter five 1 Starr, Red and Hot, 79. 2 See, for example, È.B. Shapirovskii, Obrazy i maski èstrady (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia 1976), 82–3; L. Sidorovskii, “Spasibo, serdtse!” Antrakt October 7 (1991): 6; and E. Maleva, “Utesov rasskazyval,” Argumenty i fakty 30 (July 1994): 8. 3 L. Utesov, “Moia Odessa,” Moskva 9 (1964): 120–42. On one page he mocks the bourgeois myth that the city would be the Whites’ “salvation” after the Revolution; it is the variegated aspect of Soviet Odessa that offers so much hope for a philosophy of Soviet Russia. 4 9 (21) March. 5 As noted in Iu. Dmitriev, Leonid Utesov (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1982), 8. The sailor mythology was often celebrated in talk of Utesov, for example in a brief poem accompanying a cartoon in Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 9 (September 1977): 9. (For a kindred cartoon, see July 1978: 17.) Негромкой песнею своей Немало внес душевных взносов В октрытые сердца людей Московский одессит Утесов! [With his quiet song, Utesov – that Muscovite from Odessa – has invested much in people’s open hearts.] 6 L. Utesov, Spasibo, serdtse! (Moscow: Vagrius 1999), 23. The theme of children and childishness would be fondly recalled in other writings by him, such as “Samyi dobryi volshebnik,” Sovetskaia Rossiia, 6 June 1965: 3; and, with regard to circus, “Ob”iasnenie v liubvi,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 8 (August 1979): 11–12. As a result, he soon became the voice that symbolized the childhood of others. V. Vinogradov, “Spasibo, serdtse!” Avrora 3 (1985): 123–5. 7 L. Utesov, Zapiski aktera (Moscow / Leningrad 1939), 12. 8 F. Lipskerov, “Sluchai v treugol’nom pereulke,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 3 (March 1975): 15.

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notes to pages 115–17 9 L. Utesov, S pesnei po zhizni (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1961), 30. This was according to the second version of Utesov’s autobiography. He joked that should he live to be 100, he would pen a fourth version. D. Savchenko, “Liudiam nuzhna liubov’,” Gudok, 21 March 1995: 4. 10 V. Ponomarev, “Spasibo, serdtse!” Stroitel’naia gazeta, 9 January 1981: 4. 11 “Teatr minatiur,” Pridneprovskii golos, 30 November 1912, and Novosti Aleksandrovska, 24 February 1914, both quoted in Dmitriev, Leonid Utesov, 28, 38. 12 For a review of Utesov reading Zoshchenko, see “Kusochek novogo,” Novyi zritel’ 26 (8 July 1924): 9. Utesov remained close friends with Zoshchenko, even when the latter fell swiftly out of official favour. For the story of their friendship, see M. Geizer, “Liubov’ nagrianula i ne prokhodit,” Obshchaia gazeta 11 (16–22 March 1995): 16. As for Babel’, it was often said that Utesov on stage absorbed the daring and swagger of Babel’s characters. N. Smirnova, “Slovo o Leonide Utesove,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk, December 1969: 8–10. Utesov praised the writer in “My rodilis’ po sosedstvu,” Nedelia 40 (29 September–5 October 1969): 11. His own personal tastes were often more typically “Soviet,” however, such as his great enthusiasm for Jules Verne. “Akh, vesna moskovskaia,” Izvestiia, 10 October 1972: 4. 13 L. Utesov, “Slovo ob èstrade,” Pravda, 31 October 1970: 3. Elsewhere he would call that audience contact the dearest thing in life. “Volshebniki zhivut riadom,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 24 (21 March 1980): 6. Some of his poetry is dedicated to the wonders of friendship. “Stikhi Leonida Utesova,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 142 (28 November 1987): 8; and “Belyi lebed’,” Neva 3 (1993): 281–5. 14 Utesov, Spasibo, serdtse! 93. 15 Ibid., 61. 16 Iu. Dmitriev, “Kak rotnyi prostoi zapevala,” Sovetskaia muzyka 5 (1965): 64–8. On Utesov and “change” in a broader sense, see him on the Pygmalion myth in Televidenie i radioveshchanie, 10 (October 1980): 35. These changes were often extreme. The musician, for example, enjoyed playing objectionable criminals. “Respublika na kolesakh,” Teatr 12 (1980): 93. 17 Iosif Kobzon, in “On pesne otdal vse spolna,” Ogonek 13 (March 1985): 19. Utesov himself would make those changes just as much a “seeking” for his art, life, and the nation’s happiness. “Moda – mgnovenie, sovremennost’ – èpokha,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 2 (1980): 4–5. 18 “Sekrety zhanra,” Sovetskia èstrada i tsirk 9 (September 1983): 20–2. 19 Utesov, Zapiski aktera, 39. 20 Dmitriev, Leonid Utesov, 43.

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notes to pages 117–20 21 For more details, see I. Nezhnyi, “Pervyi kommunisticheskii agitpoezd,” Teatral’naia zhizn’ 3 (1961): 28–9. 22 I. Nezhnyi, Byloe pered glazami (Moscow: vto 1963), 99. Quoted in Dmitriev, Leonid Utesov, 50. 23 Utesov, Spasibo, serdtse! 131. 24 Utesov, S pesnei po zhizni, 79–81. For a posthumous remark on the same theme, see A. Aronov, “Chto takoe prodolzhenie,” Moskovskii komsomolets, 30 October 1974: 3. Changes such as these, reflective of social changes on a grander scale, have led some journalists to equate the jazzman’s life with that of the entire Soviet Union. “Odin v trekh litsakh,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 142 (27 November 1971): 3. 25 Utesov, Spasibo, serdtse! 56. 26 Utesov, S pesnei po zhizni, 56. Even decades later Utesov would stress the importance of respect for one’s audience over all. “Ob uvazhenii, limite i drugikh nemalovazhnykh veshchakh …,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 4 (March 1964): 10–12. 27 L. Utesov, “Schastlivye vstrechi,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 6 (June 1967): 18. 28 “Petrovskii teatr,” Teatr i muzyka 1–7 (14 November 1922): 19. 29 L. Fradkin, “Slovo o Leonide Utesove,” Sovetskaia muzyka 9 (1975): 148–9. 30 G. Skorokhodov, “Kto mnogo zhil,” Televidenie i radioveshchanie 12 (December 1981): 18–23. 31 L. Besprozvannyi, Zapiski teatral’nogo administratora (Novosibirsk: Zapadno-sibirskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo 1969), 133–4. 32 Utesov, Zapiski aktera, 54. 33 Clips from this early work can be seen in the Soviet television documentary Ia vozvrashchaiu vash portret (Lentelefil’m1983), which should be watched together with the related film Tol’ko dlia druzei (Forum 1989) or read with the relevant articles: “O Leonide Utesove,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 129 (30 October 1965): 1; “Posviashchaetsia Utesovu,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 82 (12 October 1982): 1; and I. Abel’, “Novaia staraia plastinka,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 10 (October 1985): 28. 34 For Utesov on the advantages of humour, see the following: I. Iaroslavets, “S pesnei i ulybkoi,” Nedelia 5 (30 January–5 February 1978): 22; “Smekh na voine,” Literaturnaia gazeta 19 (6 May 1981): 16; “V nastupaiushchem 86-om godu,” Literaturnaia gazeta 1 (1981): 8; and “Kak nezametno podrastaiut mal’chishki …,” Komsomol’skaia pravda, 3 January 1981: 109. 35 There were slightly earlier jazz ensembles, such as the smooth Aleksandr Tsfasman in Moscow, Leopol’d Teplitskii in Leningrad, or others like Valentin Parnakh and Eddie (Adi/Adolph) Rozner. None,

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notes to p age s 120–1

36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

44

45 46

47 48 49 50

though, would go on to influence Soviet jazz on the same scale as Utesov (Gershuni archives, #81). Utesov, Zapiski aktera, 86–7. S. Tanina, “Serdtse, ne znaiushchee pokoia,” Vechernii Leningrad 54 (5 March 1981): 3. A. Platitsin, “Leonid Utesov,” Klub i khudozhestvennaia samodeiatel’nost’ 22 (November 1987): 28–9. A. Volyntsev, “Zolotoi iubilei,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 3 (March 1970): 18–19. For a stinging critique of Utesov as a manifestation of nep, see “Teatral’nye profili,” Teatral’naia Moskva 42 (1922): 6–7. Utesov himself says he fought against the profiteering principles of nep in “Vospominaniia dalekogo bylogo,” Teatral’naia zhizn’ 24 (1966): 25–8. Utesov, S pesnei po zhizni, 135. V. Feiertag, Dzhaz ot Leningrada do Peterburga (St Petersburg: Kul’tInform Press 1999), 38. Utesov himself would praise irony much later. “V.A. Glebova,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 4 (1971): 29; or “Predannost’ iskusstvu,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 11 (1973): 29. Sometimes this same irony could be turned against him. For a joking critique of the man’s poetry, see Ia. Ziskind, “Uzkii spetsialist,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 9 (September 1986): 30. A. Revel’s, Riadom s Utesovym (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1995), 124–5; and the related “Pesnia slyshitsia i ne slyshitsia,” Sovetskaia Rossiia, 31 August 1966: 3. E. Malev, “On nikogda ne opazdyval k shutke,” Vechernii Peterburg 50 (20 March 1995): 7. D. Mechik, “Individual’nost’ na èstrade,” in R. Mervol’f, ed., Mastera èstrady (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1964), 150–76. In 1972 Utesov himself would claim the importance of such conductors as guarantors of taste. “Glavnoe – vospitanie vkusa,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 4 (1972): 8. In the same journal of June 1964 he had already said the same of circus ringmasters, that they – paradoxically – unify the big top’s variety (“Za khoroshuiu muzyku,” 2–4). On Lewis, see N. Zavadskaia, “Zolotoi iubilei,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 6 (1979): 20–1. Utesov, S pesnei po zhizni, 116–17. V. Parnakh, “Dzhaz-bend,” Veshch’ 1–2 (1922): 25, quoted in Dmitriev, Leonid Utesov, 87. Articles even decades later would call these aesthetic principles – not the political content – the “main thing” in Utesov’s Soviet jazz. Iu. Dmitriev, “S pesnei po zhizni,” Moskovskaia pravda, 22 March 1970: 4. An article of 1965 also called “soul” the highest praise for a song. If

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51 52

53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64

we allow ourselves the ongoing synonymy between soul and emotion, then jazzy improvisations take on a very important philosophical role. D. Pokrass, “S pesnei po zhizni,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 6 (1965): 10. Utesov, however, quipped on at least one occasion that improvisation grew from the illiteracy of Soviet musicians! K. Liasko, “Leonid Utesov,” Komsomol’skaia pravda, 28 November 1971: 4. He also said it travelled from Odessa to New Orleans: “Mysli o dzhaze,” Sovetskaia kul’tura, 25 February 1961: 3. Metlitskii archives, #214. Utesov, Spasibo, serdtse! 187, 195–8, 202–3, 210 (emphasis added). The bandleader also advocated generic jumbles in “O sviatotatstve …,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 5 (May 1964): 7. See also Gershuni archives, #86, on Utesov’s wide range of genres and styles. Actually getting shy musicians to be this active and irreverent was hard even in the seventies. L. Bulgak, “Vmeste s Utesovym,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 8 (August 1976): 4–5. M. Dolinskii and S. Chertok, “Leonid Utesov,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 10 (1967): 16–17. Utesov, Spasibo, serdtse! 332–3. I have taken a little liberty with the translation for the sake of rhyming a key pun. I should offer another of his jokes, this one intended to relieve the pain of incarceration. A prisoner is being led in chains through town to prison. En route he asks the prison guard to buy him a bread roll. “Oh, I see!” says the guard. “I should go and buy the bread for you, so you’ll run off? No way! Run along and buy it yourself!” Revel’s, Riadom s Utesovym, 63–4. A. Kotliarskii, Spasibo dzhazu (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura 1990), 5. I. Matsa, Iskusstvo sovremennoi Evropy (Moscow/Leningrad: Gosizdat 1926), 120. S. Dreiden, “Teadzhaz,” Zhizn’ iskusstva 26 (1929): 12. Iu. Khomenko, “Utesovshchina,” Za proletarskuiu muzyku 8 (1930): 14. For Utesov’s attitude towards and mockery of rapm, see A. Kotliarskii, “Nezabyvaemoe,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 2 (February 1987): 20–2. Metlitskii archives, #214. S. Khentova, “Strannye sblizheniia,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 3 (1995): 12– 14. Utesov would congratulate some composers more publicly, such as in “Oskaru Stroku – 80 let,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 12 (1973): 27. Others would also benefit from the attention of Utesov’s significant blessings. “Drug i nastavnik,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 7 (July 1976): 18– 19; and “M.I. Blanter,” Sovetskaia muzyka 2 (1963): 144. L. Utesov, “Veselym rebiatam – 30 let!” Sovetskaia muzyka 12 (1964): 152. Some of the political fallout following the film’s release is

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notes to p age s 123–4

65

66

67 68 69

70

71 72

73

74

75

recorded (and conjectured) in M. Mangushev and B. Kotliarchuk, “Trudnye gody Veselykh rebiat,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 12 (1991): 26– 8. Other criticism of the early 1930s is collected in M. Gol’denberg, “Vopros o klassovoi prirode muzykal’nogo iskusstva,” Èkran i stsena 30 (2 August 1990): 15. Utesov would subsequently call this play the best work ever done by his orchestra. A. Krupnov, “Pesnia zhit’ pomogaet,” Smena 202 (4 September 1979): 4; and Moskovskii komsomolets, 4 September 1979: 4. In all fairness, I should add that Utesov himself spoke out on occasion against amplifiers, microphones, and telephones as excessively noisy, chaotic forms of communication. He also saw a limit to disarray (Metlitskii archives, #254). L. Utesov, “Pesnia – dusha vremeni,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 7 (July 1973): 4–6, and 8 (August 1973): 18–21. Metlitskii archives, #214. It can even get a little too grand. One article not long after the film’s release criticized it for excessive effort in manipulating idiosyncratic goofiness, for being (therefore!) an essentially “second-rate bourgeois” movie. See Rabochii i teatr 1 (January 1935): 14–15. Aleksandrov gives a different, less conspiratorial, and less convincing version of how the words were changed in Iskusstvo kino 10 (1961): 107–8, 111–12. M. Kanevskii, “S pesnei po zhizni,” Sovetskii èkran 13 (July 1981): 12– 13; and “Obidno!” Literaturnaia gazeta 110 (13 September 1958): 3. A. Bernshtein, “Madam s”ela vsiu moiu plenku,” Nedelia 52 (December 1994): 13; and M. Geizer, “Narod Utesova liubili, vlast’ podozrevala,” Izvestiia 51 (21 March 1995): 7. For Utesov’s memories of Lebedev-Kumach and the writing of this song (with another different version of the original “bovine” text), see Iu. Biriukov, “Veselyi veter ego pesen,” Komsomol’skaia pravda, 5 August 1988: 4; and “Dlia menia on vsegda molod,” in the same paper, 5 August 1978: 4. It is used in television advertisements even today for the beer Staryi mel’nik, broadcast nationally over the summer of 2000. The song’s melody accompanies footage of a dacha garden well weeded and a living room well decorated. In the same period the lyrics from the film also advertised a St Petersburg construction company and a major northern dairy. For a review of Utesov’s shows as both popular and willingly “Soviet” at this time, see “Muzykal’noe predstavlenie na korable,” Iskusstvo i zhizn’ 6 (1938): 48. For the sake of balance, i.e., a contemporary review of an Utesov concert as boring, see “Vovse ne ‘Aga!’” Teatr 19 (1940): 170.

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notes to p age s 124–6 76 “Tea-dzhaz vyzyvaet,” Rabochii i teatr 16 (21 March 1930): 9. 77 For Utesov joking about the horrors of not being recognized, see A. Raikin, “Ping-pong,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 92 (2 August 1986): 6; and “Raikin i Utesov,” Antrakt 31 (November 1991): 4. 78 N. Panferov, “S pesnei po zhizni,” Vodnyi transport, 26 June 1965: 3. Chkalov’s greatest flight was from Moscow to Vancouver via the North Pole, over three summer days in 1937. 79 See also “Shagaia s pesnei,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 21 (31 March 1979): 4. On average, the composition of the orchestra would change every four years owing to the great workload. Ia. Agekian, “Patriarkh sovetskoi pesni,” Molodezhnaia èstrada 1 (January–March 1996): 37–40. 80 Metlitskii archives, #214. The best discographies to appear in many years are included, together with some key Soviet articles marking Utesov’s reception by the press, in V. Safoshkin, Liubov’ nechaianno nagrianet (Moscow: Lamand 1999), 333–55; and G. Skorokhodov, ed., Neizvestnyi Utesov (Moscow: Terra 1995), 178–202. 81 For an examination of how this floating took place simultaneously between Soviet and Western influences, see V. Blok, “Utesov i ego dzhaz,” Teatral’naia nedelia 4 (1940): 14. 82 F. Razzakov, Dos’e na zvezd:1934–1961 (Moscow: Èksmo-Press 1998), 11–12. On the issue of Utesov and criminal songs such as S odesskogo kichmana, see “Legkomyslenno o legkom zhanre,” Komsomol’skaia pravda 158 (4 July 1958): 3. The song troubles a critic in M. Ignat’eva and N. Krivenko, “Dosadnaia neudacha talantlivogo kollektiva,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 68 (7 June 1958): 2. 83 L. Arkad’ev, “Chelovek uspekha,” Trud, 21 March 1995: 7. 84 A. Simonov, “Aktsent Utesova, ili o pol’ze chernovikov,” Moskovskie novosti 30 (28 July 1991): 16. Stalin’s like for Utesov’s work is also noted in “Serdtse, tebe ne khochetsia pokoia!” Moskovskaia pravda, 6 April 1995: 3. For a deflation of the potential political drama that might have come from the anti-official, anti-rapm stance of Veselye rebiata, see M. Zakharchuk, “Ia pesne otdal vse spolna,” Krasnaia zvezda, 21 March 1995: 4. 85 “Khronika,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 9 (May 1980): 12. 86 M. Dmitrieva, “Sidiat i slushaiut boitsy …,” Teatral’naia zhizn’ 10 (10 May 1975): 14–15. 87 L. Utesov, “V odnom stroiu,” in I. Dupalo, ed., Svoim oruzhiem (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury 1961), 223–5. On the overall dimensions of the estrada call-up, see B. Filippov, Muzy na fronte: Ocherki. Dnevniki. Pis’ma (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia 1975), 35. Even after Utesov’s death he would be remembered by those like Aleksandra Pakhmutova as a musician appealing to both soldiers and peacemakers. See N. Krivenko, “Ego znali i liubili milliony,” Sovetskaia

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88

89

90 91

92 93 94 95

96

97 98

èstrada i tsirk 3 (March 1986): 30–1; and “Storonka rodnaia,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 4 (April 1981): 14–15, for the synonymy of soldiers and friends in an estrada audience. M. Zakharchuk, “Pesnia, propetaia serdtsem,” Krasnaia zvezda, 21 March 1985: 4. Utesov wondered initially about the applicability of lyric songs during wartime. “Vstavai, strana ogromnaia!” Sovetskaia kul’tura 26 (23 March 1983): 8. That personal touch could bring Utesov very close to the private lives of some soldiers. V. Kotovskov, “Pis’mo Utesovu,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 92 (1 August 1985): 8. N. Aranovich, “Sovremennyi – navsegda,” Moskovskaia pravda, 21 March 1995: 8. The thought is repeated with specific reference to estrada in “O pesne, o dzhaze, o vkusakh i pristrastiakh,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 142 (2 December 1967): 4. It appears again in Z. Papernyi, “Poslednee interv’iu L. Utesova,” Teatral’naia zhizn’ 14 (July 1987): 32, inside back cover. “Sovetskaia èstrada i sovremennost’,” Trud, 15 December 1959: 4. L. Utesov, “Vspominaia byloe,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 7 (April 1975): 20– 1; and “Iz dnevnikov, pisem, vospominanii voennoi pory,” Teatral’naia zhizn’ 9 (May 1985): 20–1. For good pictures of Utesov’s band and other artistes at the front, see “Oruzhiem iskusstva,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 5 (May 1975): 14–15. Utesov, S pesnei po zhizni, 173. For a more detailed discussion of repertoires during the war, see G. Kholostiakov, “35 let Velikoi Pobedy,” Teatr 3 (1980): 13–23. Èstradnyi antifashistskii sbornik (Voroshilovgrad: Oblastnoi dom iskusstv 1941), 64. For a story of those airplanes’ active service, see D. Zemlianskii, “Na kryl’iakh veselykh rebiat,” Nedelia 45 (4–10 November 1974): 10. Some sources claim there were two aircraft, others maintain three. The numerous semi-documentary films with starring performances by Utesov and his band are best recorded in L.O. Utesov: K 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia (Moscow: Ostankino 1994). For an announcement of the Red Banner, see “Vysokie nagrady, pochetnye zvaniia,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 13 (July 1980): 5; and “Ukaz Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta …,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 25 (25 March 1980): 2; or, for the Order of the October Revolution, D. Pokrass, “Prisiagnuvshii na vernost’ pesne,” Moskovskii komsomolets, 22 March 1975: 4; and “Ukaz Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta sssr …,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 25 (25 March 1975): 1. “Khoroshie pesni ne umiraiut,” Iskusstvo kino 1 (1980): 98–106. Revel’s, Riadom s Utesovym, 123–4. See also pages 169–70 for additional problems with bureaucrats. The delays in getting the award led to articles on occasion calling Utesov a “people’s artist” in the literal,

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99 100

101

102 103

104

105 106

107

108

109

not bureaucratic, sense. K. Lapin, “S pesnei po zhizni,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 27 April 1965: 3. Starr, Red and Hot, 186. Utesov, Spasibo, serdtse! 270. In talking of war songs in the seventies, Utesov noted that they were now sung with happier, braver voices. Joy lives longer than rant. “Spoemte, druz’ia!” Nedelia 27 (1–7 July 1974): 18. For a review showing Utesov’s immediate postwar shift towards a more overtly political repertoire, see P. Alov, “Vsegda s vami,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo 52 (12 August 1950): 4. Utesov, S pesnei po zhizni, 133. R. Simonov, “Utesov,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo 13 (1945): 4. In the same newspaper of the following year, lone voices could still be heard praising Utesov, such as the critic Shklovskii, drawing a parallel with the poetry of Derzhavin as a model of generic confusion (6 September: 3). Not only was his work a reflection of changing emotion, though: emotional temperament drove those changes. V. Ardov, “Ne ustaiu voskhishchat’sia,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 3 (March 1975): 13. “Volshebniki zhivut riadom,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 24 (21 March 1980): 6. That openness would be celebrated with a series of re-releases by Melodiia. “Pamiati Leonida Utesova,” Klub i khudozhestvennaia samodeiatel’nost’ 1 (1984): inside back cover. V. Rusanov and A. Pashkevich, “Novaia programma i starye oshibki,” Vechernii Leningrad 157 (4 July 1952): 3. N. Kaniuka, “Zakonnye pretenzii,” Literaturnaia gazeta 120 (9 October 1951): 2. Here Utesov is criticized for playing too many old songs at a concert, whereas by 1958 he is praised for doing exactly the same. V. Sukharevich, “Odin na odin …,” Literaturnaia gazeta 83 (12 July 1958): 2. Here, too, he is criticized for his jokes on stage, whereas in 1995 he is praised for them. V. Èrmans, “L. Utesov v komediinom spektakle,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 142 (19 November 1955): 4. There was, however, a limit to his wisecracks, as warned in Iu. Dmitriev, “Tol’ko dlia druzei,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 73 (23 June 1956): 3. K. Khachaturian, “O novoi programme èstradnogo orkestra,” Sovetskaia muyzka 10 (1952): 80–1. For a similar critique of his lyrics, see V. Muradeli, “Èstradnyi orkestr i ego repertuar,” Vecherniaia Moskva 194 (16 August 1952): 3. “Pechali masterov smeshnogo,” Literaturnaia gazeta 111 (13 September 1952): 3. The article, in its defence of estrada artists like Shul’zhenko, marks an impending change in the critical stance towards popular songs. For example, L. Utesov, “Bol’she muzyki – veseloi i raznoobraznoi,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo 29 (9 April 1952): 4.

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notes to pages 128–30 110 S. Aleshin, “Portrety,” Teatr 6 (1993): 107–22; and “21 marta – sto let, kak rodilsia L.O. Utesov,” Argumenty i fakty 11 (March 1995): 10 (St Petersburg edition). 111 Metlitskii archives, #214. 112 Introduction to Utesov, Zapiski aktera. See also a related text in S pesnei po zhizni, 135, and Nikita Bogoslovskii in Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk, April 1965: 12–13, where “N.B.” refuses to wish Utesov a long life, since the bandleader is life itself. See also Kommunist Tadzhikistana, 21 March 1965, and Moskovskii komsomolets, 18 March 1965. 113 These oppositions would increase in later interviews, as Utesov made calls for studios and schools to train young musicians to the standards of the old. 114 Utesov praised Dunaevskii for his multigeneric, happy, audacious, optimistic, and interesting work in “Belaia akatsiia,” Sovetskaia muzyka 2 (1956): 92–5. 115 “Pevets nashei zhizni,” Izvestiia, 29 January 1980: 6 (Moscow evening edition). 116 Utesov, S pesnei po zhizni, 127. 117 A. Makarov, “Vse starinnye novinki,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 15 (August 1973): 20. See also G. Grakov, “Patrioticheskaia lirika,” Literatura i iskusstvo 48 (1943): 4. 118 “Tol’ko odin vopros …,” Kul’tura i zhizn’ 8 (1980), 32. 119 L. Utesov, “Vysshaia radost’ artista,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk, October 1967: 8–9. 120 A. Tamaev, “S pesnei po zhizni,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 6 (1965): 10. 121 See, for example, a Latvian review of 1957: A. Isaeva, “Tol’ko dlia druzei,” Sovetskaia Latviia, 26 January: 4; or a Lithuanian paper of 1979: “Pesnia stroit’ i zhit’,” Sovetskaia Litva, 8 August: 4. Utesov also recommends Russian performers – who travel to those Baltic stages – to local readers for their “heart.” “O druziakh-tovarishchakh,” Sovetskaia Litva, 6 March 1968: 4. For the same logic extended to Bulgaria, see “Piatdesiat’ sem’ let spustia,” Teatral’naia zhizn’ 27 (1971): 31. This amiable atmosphere was supposed to extend to critics as well, the artist’s “friends” who should then help him develop his art. “Otvetnoe priznanie,” Teatr 1 (1982): 109. 122 E. Gershuni, “Pesnia – nash sputnik,” Vechernii Leningrad 62 (14 March 1959): 3. 123 I. Papanin, “Tak derzhat’!” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 3 (March 1975): front cover, 12. An article of 1984 claimed that his songs overcame broad expanses of space like a fairy tale’s hero. N. Bogoslovskii, “On pesne otdal vse spolna,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 68 (7 June 1984): 8. 124 “Zhelaiu radostei,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk, December 1966: 2, 18–19. 125 Revel’s, Riadom s Utesovym, 130, 134–5.

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notes to p age s 130–2 126 Utesov, S pesnei po zhizni, 203. By the late fifties a “considerable part” of Utesov’s repertoire was also made up of foreign material. Dmitriev, Leonid Utesov, 179, and “Kogda perepolnen zal,” Literaturnaia gazeta 86 (21 June 1956): 3. Perhaps this was a reason for Sovetskaia muzyka’s ongoing gripes: “I stroit’ i deistvovat’,” Sovetskaia muzyka 2 (1963): 17–25. 127 V. Aleksandrov, “Moi Utesov,” Neva 6 (June 1995): 200–4. 128 “Pozdravliaem!” Sovetskaia kul’tura 50 (27 April 1965): 1. Here, interestingly, Utesov is praised for his wide number of shifting forms and genres, which are elsewhere called a result of “constant dissatisfaction with oneself.” “Talant – èto otvetstvennost’,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 9 (28 January 1975): 4–5. For Artist of the Russian Federation, see “Narodnye artisty Respubliki,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 6 (14 January 1958): 1. 129 “Buba Kastorskii vozvrashchaetsia?” Sozvezdie 1 (January 1992): 15. 130 L. Utesov, “Pust’ stanut devizom,” Teatral’naia zhizn’ 15 (1981): 18–19; and “Po zhizni s pesnei,” Trud, 21 March 1970: 4. 131 B. Novikov, “Leonid Utesov,” Gudok, 22 March 1970: 4. 132 A. Zhitinskii, “Tri chasa s Leonidom Utesovym,” Avrora 3 (1981): 98– 107. 133 Starr, Red and Hot, 290, 337. 134 B. Filippov, Aktery bez grima (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia 1971), 287. 135 T. Kareva, “Vse my ego poklonniki,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 8 (August 1981): 16–17. Perhaps a bigger jubilee still, the hundredth since his birth, was marked in 1995 and filmed for the Soviet television documentary Ètot raznyi Utesov (lad: 1995). The documenary also contains some witty stories, such as one about a guest leaving from Utesov’s apartment after a party who was so drunk that he began to undress in Utesov’s lift, believing that he was already home. 136 N. Krivenko, “Dobroe serdtse Utesova,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 6 (June 1982): 10–11. 137 “Uspekhi Leningradtsev …,” Vechernii Leningrad 185 (7 August 1957): 3; V. Itsomin, “Nelegkii ‘legkii zhanr,’” Moskovskii komsomolets. 30 October 1974: 4; A. Kirichenko, “Serdtsu ne khochetsia pokoia,” Smena 284 (3 December 1966): 4; and – earlier still – “O chem poet molodost’,” Komsomol’skaia pravda 181 (1 August 1957): 98. 138 As recorded in Ia. Volkov, “Ia pel ee serdtsem svoim,” Gor. Khoz-vo Moskvy 11 (1989): 36–7. An article of 1987 maintained, with justification, that it took Utesov fifty years to reach the point where his art was “never wilting,” where he had enough time to start folding it. “Chto tam, za gorizontom?” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 12 (December 1987): 4–5. Another journalist noted that those 50 years included what a normal person could do only in 200! N. Bogoslovksii, “Talant, nesushchii radost’,” Kommunist Tadzhikistana, 21 March 1965: 4. Even in that

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notes to pages 132–40

139 140 141 142 143 144

145

146 147

148

149 150 151

152

final performance he showed his eternally relevant estrada “genes.” T. Kareva, “O Rèro, Rèro!” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 7 (July 1984): 11. As a result, “retro” for Utesov means not retrospection, but bringing the past into the present. “Novogodnee interv’iu,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 12 (1973): 1. I. Osipov, “Pesnia – dusha naroda,” Gudok, 22 March 1970: 3. “Druz’ia i nedrugi pesni,” Zhurnalist 12 (1979): 60–1. A. Krupnov, “Zhizn’, otdannaia pesne,” Vodnyi transport, 14 April 1979: 3. “Akterskie posidelki,” Izvestiia, 28 December 1974: 6 (Moscow evening edition). On Utesov’s fear of loneliness, by his own admission, see “I, kak pesnia, molodoi,” Komsomol’skaia pravda, 20 May 1973: 4. “Leonid Osipovich Utesov,” Pravda 70 (11 March 1982): 2. See also “Nekrolog,” Sovetskaia muzyka 6 (1982): 143; and “Nekrolog,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 21 (12 March 1982): 2. Retrospective overviews of his career appeared everywhere, such as in G. Soboleva, “Spasibo, serdtse!” Vek 11 (17–23 March 1995): 11; B. Metlitskii, “Pochemu Utesov poliubil Arabellu,” Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti 51 (18 March 1995): 5; S. Goriacheva, “Vsemi liubimyi shanson’e,” Lesnaia gazeta, 25 March 1995: 4; and A. Bernshtein, “Chelovek iz dzhaza,” Rossiiskaia gazeta 56 (21 March 1995): 7. On celebrations in both Moscow and Odessa, see “Ikh Velichestva Artisty,” Kul’tura, 13 May 1995: 8. “Tri vstrechi,” Teatr 5 (1989): 105–6. M. Koldobskaia, “Godovshchiny i shou,” Smena 66–7 (24 March 1995): 5. The troubles in gathering old, decaying stock are listed in E. Bokshitskaia, “Ia pesne vse otdal spolna …,” Sovetskii èkran 22 (1971): 7. The final image of Utesov during his life is published in “Dzhazovyi pevets pisal stikhi,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 20 (18 May 1991): 16. L. Sidorovoskii, “Ia pesne otdal vse spolna …,” Smena 67 (21 March 1980): 4. On the quiet voice, see V. Turovskii, “Zvezdnye minuty,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 52 (29 June 1982): 2; and “Chtoby ty zapel so mnoiu,” Vechernii Leningrad 127 (2 June 1975): 3. In many ways this is a late expression of the “gentle and lyric” Utesov who charmed listeners during the Thaw. “So spetsial’noi afishei,” Teatr 5 (1956): 131. L. Utesov, “Dobryi satirik,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 1 (January 1964): 24. Revel’s, Riadom s Utesovym, 172–3. An alternative, apparently earlier version switches the words “rifle” and “broom” (metelka), hinting at the dying man’s confusion of heroic dreams and mundane prison chores. This song also has a long history, going back to Heine. A. Mar’iamov, “Chelovek i orkestr,” Nedelia 11 (10–16 March 1975): 14–16.

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notes to page 140 153 “Pesnia vsegda so mnoi,” Komsomol’skaia pravda, 22 March 1975: 4; and “O molodezhnoi pesne,” Komsomolets (Erevan), 4 September 1976. In 1975 the claim is made that only by “understanding the needs of an age” can one become a personality. “Pevets zhizneutverzhdeniia,” Teatr 4 (1975): 92–3. 154 L. Utesov, “M.L. Blanter,” Sovetskaia muzyka 2 (1963): 144. 155 For example, “Ulitsa Utesova,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 45 (4 June 1982): 8; D. Zemlianskii, “Posviashchaetsia Utesovu,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 26 (23 March 1983): 8; “Pamiati artista,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 155 (26 December 1985): 4; E. Golubovskii, “Ta samaia kvartira …,” Nedelia 12 (18–24 March 1985): 13; “Tol’ko fakty,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 16 (August 1986), and 11 (June 1983): 7. See also “Est’ gorod, kotoryi ia vizhu vo sne …,” Knizhnoe obozrenie 29 (July 1988): 16; “Nam pishut: Odessa,” Sovetskaia muzyka 8 (1990): 141; “Imeni Utesova,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 12 (December 1990): 9–11; “V Odessu, k Utesovu,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 14 (7 April 1990): 9; “Vozvrashchenie v Odessu,” Èkran i stsena 25 (18–25 June 1992): 3; M. Barabanova, “Nas sogreet ulybka Utesova,” Nevskoe vremia 242 (December 1996): 2; “Utesovu, kotorogo vse liubiat,” Smena 286 (25 December 1996): 1; “Spustia sto odin god Utesovu sozdali pamiatnik,” Chas pik 221 (25 December 1996): 2; and “Pamiatnaia doska na dome Utesova,” Smena 163 (23 July 1996): 4. 156 N. Borisov, “Èstrada – liubov’ moia,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 6 (March 1983): 16–17. 157 E. Ryk, “O molodezhnoi pesne,” Smena 172 (24 July 1976): 4. In an interesting collocation of linearity and the diffuse nature of emotion or affect, an article by Utesov of 1982 talks of his career as a road, but one that needs “fellow travellers.” “Dobryi sputnik,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 3 (March 1982): 25. 158 V. Ustinov, “Sertdtse ostalos’ molodym,” Smena 16 (21 January 1965): 4. Loving memory does the same, “Golos serdtsa,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 8 (August 1983): 24–5. On “defending” love against all, see Utesov in relation to a play about Tsvetaeva. “Liubliu i bol’she nichego,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 86 (27 October 1981): 4. The singer Klavdiia Shul’zhenko also saw in Utesov love, humour, kindness, and effort. Love and labour go hand in hand. “Master veselogo tsekha,” Izvestiia, 21 March 1975: 6. 159 L. Utesov, “Esche ob èstradnom teatre,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo 11 (15 March 1945): 4; and “Veteran èstrady,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 3 (1972): 22. Utesov praises the notion of love and creativity among amateurs as preferable perhaps to the work of professional actors. “Deistvuiushchie litsa,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 40 (16 May 1975): 3. 160 L. Utesov, “Davaite razberemsia,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 9 (1972): 15.

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notes to p age s 140–5 161 A. Vartanov, “Ob artisticheskoi kul’ture,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 1 (1972): 2–3. 162 A. Krupnov, “Tol’ko s pesnei!” Nedelia 13 (24–30 March 1980): 9. A similar critique is in “Starye druz’ia,” Literaturnaia gazeta 35 (27 August 1980): 8. 163 As we can see from the first few chapters of this book, Utesov’s third claim is moot, to say the least. His notion of “Soviet” here, in fact, is once again very Stalinist. “Kak rotnyi zapevala,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 22 (14 March 1975): 5. 164 V. Poliakov, “S pesnei po zhizni,” Trud, 21 March 1975: 3. 165 B. Minaev, “Odesskii Armstrong èpokhi bol’shogo stilia,” Ogonek 11 (March 1995): 62–3. 166 “Slushai siuda! Èto zhivoi Utesov!” Argumenty i fakty 13 (March 1995): 12. 167 L. Mariagin, “Neizvestnyi Utesov,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 6 (June 1990): 36–8.

chapter six 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10

11 12 13 14 15

S. Agoniats, “Master filigrannoi otdelki,” Teatral’naia zhizn’ 15 (1966): 25. Metlitskii archives, #209. V. Berlin, “Rodom iz detstva,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 5 (March 1988): 8–9. K. Shul’zhenko, Kogda vy sprosite menia … (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia 1985), 12. Televidenie i radioveshchanie 2 (1984). “Sinii platochek sberech’,” Televidenie i radioveshchanie 4 (April 1985): 29. I. Vasilinina, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1979), 13–14. Statisticheskii ezhegodnik 1918–1920, vol. 8, 2nd ed. (Moscow 1921), 164. “Kazhdaia pesnia …,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 5 (11 January 1966): 1; or “Tvorcheskii vecher Klavdii Shul’zhenko,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 30 (13 April 1976): 8. Gershuni archives, #103. Shul’zhenko helped celebrate 100 years of the Leningrad circus in 1978. See Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 6 (June 1978): 5. V.V. Khotulev, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko: Zhizn’, liubov’, pesnia (Moscow and Smolensk: Olimp/Rusich 1998), 21. “Klavdiia Shul’zhenko v gostiakh u zhurnalistov,” Vechernii Leningrad 84 (April 1960): 3. K. Shul’zhenko, “Pochemu ne stareet pesnia,” Sovetskaia Rossiia, 3 November 1965: 4 (Moscow edition). Vasilinina, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko, 39. Shul’zhenko, Kogda vy sprosite menia, 60–1. For the expression of a similar thought (pathos and sentiment), see K. Shul’zhenko, “Moskva – pesnia moia!” Vecherniaia Moskva, 24 April 1975: 3. Here she speaks

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notes to p age s 145–9

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27

28

29 30 31

32 33

of Moscow with loud civic pride, but in other articles she sees the cityscape in terms of parks, of small sentimental spaces. K. Shul’zhenko, “Skol’ko sviazano s toboiu,” Sovetskaia Rossiia, 7 August 1981: 4. G. Skorokhodov, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko: Sud’ba aktrisy, sud’ba pesni (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor 1974), 19. Shul’zhenko, Kogda vy sprosite menia, 15. Khotulev, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko, 88–9. V. Koralli, “Nash dzhaz-ansambl’,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 1 (January 1979): 20–1. Khotulev, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko, 96. Shul’zhenko, Kogda vy sprosite menia, 63. Khotulev, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko, 61. E. Ogon’kova, “Zhizn’ v pesne,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 51 (27 June 1978): 5. Shul’zhenko, Kogda vy sprosite menia, 27. Khotulev, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko,120. V. Koralli, “Ee golos i segodnia zvuchit,” Vecherniaia Moskva, 13 February 1992: 6; and “V vagone poezda my vstretilis’ sluchaino …,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 6 (9 February 1991): 11. The blonde heroine of both Volga-Volga and Veselye rebiata – Liubov’ Orlova – was a formative influence on Shul’zhenko. I. Vasilinina, “Tovarishch artistka,” Pravda 279 (6 October 1975): 4. For a full listing of all Shul’zhenko’s endeavours in film, see K.I. Shul’zhenko: K 90letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia (Moscow: Gostelradiofond 1995). See also A. Pavlov, “Pervaia plastinka Klavdii Shul’zhenko,” Vechernii Leningrad 184 (8 August 1972): 3. Despite the article’s title, it refers to the first record Shul’zhenko made knowingly, a 1937 version of Druzhba and Siluèt. Skorokhodov, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko, 39–40. Khotulev, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko, 202. Ibid., 165. Kinder critics would try to make a virtue of her quiet voice. B. Petker, Èto moi mir (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1968), 152. Evgenii Gershuni called her a diseuse, drawing upon the positive connotations of French variety (#87 and T. Osipova, “Kazhdaia pesnia – novella,” Teatral’naia zhizn’ 4 [1961]: 21–2). That lack of volume and abundance of tenderness are praised with a kind caricature in “Pesnia ne proshchaetsia s toboi,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 9 (September 1977): 9. Shul’zhenko in fact encountered volume and other excessive forms of modern estrada in her old age. “Nas priglasila Shul’zhenko,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 153 (24 December 1983): 5. V. Bunchikov, “Mikrofon – durnaia moda,” Literaturnaia gazeta 44 (30 October 1974): 8. L. Alimamedova and L. Arkad’ev, “Kumir,” Trud 51 (22–28 March 1996): 5. Her restraint is married even to dynamism in “Klavdiia

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notes to pages 149–53

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58

Shul’zhenko,” Klub i khudozhestvennaia samodeiatel’nost’ 5 (March 1988): 28–9. Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 9 July 1939. Vasilinina, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko, 55–6. Metlitskii archives, #221. This is at odds with several Soviet monographs of Shul’zhenko’s career, which place her higher in the rankings. Metlitskii archives, #221. Skorokhodov, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko, 51–2. Gershuni archives, #99. “Skol’ko pesen propeto!” Krest’ianka 3 (1976): 21. See also L.Verin, “I pesnia borolas’ s vragom,” Krest’ianka 5 (1975): inside back cover. Vasilinina, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko, 60. S. Chertok, “Muzyka zvala na podvig,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 3 (February 1978): 2–4. For tales of Shul’zhenko’s front-line concerts, see T. Bulkina, “Tsvety s peredovoi,” Rossiiskaia gazeta 73 (13 April 1995): 7. G. Skorokhodov, “Tri èkzamena Klavdii Shul’zhenko,” Molodezhnaia èstrada 1 (January–March 1996): 43–7. K. Shul’zhenko and V. Koralli, “Vystuplenie na bronepoezde,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 9 (May 1980): 20. Shul’zhenko, Kogda vy sprosite menia, 85. V. Tikhvinskii, Minuty na razmyshleniia (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1978), 156. Metlitskii archives, #254. G. Skorokhodov, “Dzhaz v gimnasterkakh,” Sem’ dnei 19 (8–14 May 1995): 39. On the need to look good, even under fire, see A. Amasovich, “Schast’e pet’ dlia Rossii,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 1 (January 1975): 1–3. V. Nikitin, “Vernost’ frontovoi pesne,” Krasnaia zvezda, 15 August 1971: 4. Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 5 (1981). V. Viren, “Pesni Klavdii Shul’zhenko,” Ogonek 12 (1981): 20. A. Tamaev, “Sinen’kii skromnyi platochek,” Nedelia, 17–23 May 1971: 15. V. Nikitin, “Aktrisoi-voinom s liubov’iu nazyvaem,” Teatral’naia zhizn’ 9 (1970): 10. V. Koralli, Serdtse, otdannoe èstrade (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1988), 93. Shul’zhenko had spoken of “growing into” a repertoire, of liking what she once rejected and vice versa. “Volshebnoe ‘chut’-chut’,’” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 5 (1966): 8–10. A. Gerber, “Sinii platochek,” Sovetskii èkran 9 (May 1975): 17. K. Shul’zhenko, “Po putiam-dorogam frontovym …,” Literaturnaia Rossiia 19 (9 May 1975): 21. M. Linetskaia, “Liubit’, mechtat’, goret!” Literaturnaia Rossiia, 1 January 1967: 7.

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notes to p age s 153–7 59 Vasilinina, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko, 70; and B. Metlitskii, “V ee pesniakh – blizkoe i dorogoe,” Vechernii Leningrad 30 (February 1972): 3. 60 On the success of the song for Soviet troops, see G. Skorokhodov, “Pesnia – oruzhie,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 2 (January 1974): 5–6. 61 As is often reaffirmed, for example in Moskovskaia pravda, 10 April 1976. 62 V. Varzhapetian, “Vysshaia ee nagrada,” Ogonek 15 (April 1970): 27. 63 That tango is called “The Exhausted Sun” or Utomlennoe solntse. Mikhalkov’s film, by changing the case of the noun and the number of the participle becomes Utomlennye solntsem, or “Those Exhausted by the Sun.” The reference here to weariness and exhaustion caused by Stalinist persecution was translated rather dramatically into English as “Burned by the Sun,” no doubt because the image of heat fatigue in the film later becomes that of fire. For an interview with the composer, see “Strochit pulemetchik – za sinii platochek!” Smena 64 (18 March 1975): 4. 64 Khotulev, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko, 233. 65 V. Nikitin, “V chas surovyi s druz’iami riadom,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 3 (1969): 9. 66 M. L’vov, “Sinii platochek,” Ogonek 19 (May 1972): 24. 67 “Po putiam-dorogam frontovym,” Literaturnaia Rossiia, 9 May 1975: 21. 68 M. Linetskaia, “Sinii platochek,” Krest’ianka 3 (1967), 26–7. 69 Khotulev, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko, 236. 70 For a more radical example of the way in which texts are claimed, reworked, or even rewritten during tough times, see the wonderful article by I.N. Rozanov, “Pesni o Katiushe kak novyi tip narodnogo tvorchestva,” in V.E. Gusev, Russkii fol’klor Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny (Leningrad and Moscow: Nauka 1964), 310–25. 71 T. Bulkina, “Tsvety s peredovoi – Klavdii Shul’zhenko,” Rossiiskaia gazeta 73 (13 April 1995): 7. A similar contradiction of the military and maudlin is documented in A. Pronin, “Sila iskusstva,” Teatral’naia zhizn’ 15 (1971): 31. Here we have the story of Soviet soldiers’ awkwardness requesting love songs while at war. 72 V. Koralli, “Vpered, boevaia èstrada,” Pravda 112 (22 April 1985), 7. 73 R. Pospelov, “Èti dni kogda-nibud’ my budem vspominat’,” Literaturnaia gazeta 14 (2 April 1975): 8. 74 V. Koralli, “Pesnia zvuchala na frontakh …,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 148 (10 December 1985): 6. 75 Shul’zhenko, Kogda vy sprosite menia, 174. 76 Ibid., 193. 77 R. Voropaev and A. Voropaev in “Pochta aktrisy,” Literaturnaia Rossiia, 5 May 1967: 7. 78 G. Troitskaia, “Pesni o voine,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 9 (May 1984): 4–5. 79 V. Koralli, “Kogda nas slushaiut boitsy,” Krasnoarmeets 9–10 (1943): 24.

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notes to pages 157–60 80 I. Rummel’, “Na Leningradskom fronte,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 2 (1964): 6–7. See also “Pesnia o Verochke,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 3 (1965): 15; and “Oni byli na legendarnoi ‘doroge zhizni,’” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 11 (November 1980): 16. 81 I. Nadezhdin, “Slovo …,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 56 (12 May 1965): 2; and V. Frolov, “Ty pela na voine,” Teatral’naia zhizn’ 4 (1968): 8. 82 V. Koralli, “Stakan moloka dlia Shul’zhenko!” Kul’tura 13 (8 April 1995): 5. 83 V. Koralli, “Pesnia na doroge zhizni,” Literaturnaia gazeta 33 (15 August 1984): 8. 84 In later years that emotional intensity would be transferred to somewhat trivial yet charming equivalents, as admirers would be afraid to sit too close to such an awe-inspiring personality. “Ty vdokhnul v menia zhizn’,” Trud 83 (12 May 1995): 6. 85 V. Koralli, “Riadom s soldatom,” Literaturnaia gazeta 4 (24 January 1979): 8. 86 Shul’zhenko, Kogda vy sprosite menia, 109. 87 Quoted from the Gershuni archives, #328, taken in turn from the 1967 television broadcast Legko na serdtse ot pesni veseloi: 50 let sovetskoi èstrady. 88 V. Koralli, “Blokadnoe pirshestvo,” Vecherniaia Moskva, 29 December 1989: 3; and “Novyi god, god Pobedy,” Literaturnaia Rossiia, 3 January 1975: 12–13. 89 V. Koralli, “V blokadnom Leningrade,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 1 (1 January 1978): 6. 90 K. Shul’zhenko, “V pesniakh ostanemsia my,” Vecherniaia Moskva, 24 June 1982: 3. 91 She in fact would record several other “male” songs: Goroda-geroi, Pesnia o Leningrade, Vecher na reide, Rodnaia storona, and My iz Odessy moriaki. 92 Shul’zhenko, Kogda vy sprosite menia, 101. 93 Metlitskii archives, #257. 94 B. Ermolaev, “Davai zakurim, tovarishch, po odnoi,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 10 (1973): 21. 95 Quotes from articles of the period. Vasilinina, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko, 94. 96 O. Amus’eva, “Master èstrady Klavdii Shul’zhenko,” Sovetskaia muzyka 11 (1951): 71–3. Similar criticism is in E. Dobrynina, “Vechera pesni,” Sovetskaia muzyka 10 (1952): 79–80. 97 Shul’zhenko, Kogda vy sprosite menia, 38. 98 Ibid., 144–5. 99 V. Sechin, “Klavdiia Shul’zhenko i sud’ba zhanra,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 6 (1961): 14–15. 100 Interview with G. Skorokhodov, quoted in Skorokhodov, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko, 99; and K. Shul’zhenko, “Sud’ba pesni,” Sovetskaia Rossiia, 15 June 1980: 4. 318

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notes to p age s 160–2 101 Shul’zhenko, Kogda vy sprosite menia, 218. 102 For the bureaucratic hassles of getting proper and fitting accommodation, see Khotulev, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko, 323. 103 See Koralli, Serdtse, otdannoe èstrade, 176–7. 104 A. Iaroslavskii, “Pesnia, kotoroi tysiachi let,” Sovetskaia Moldaviia, 6 August 1967: 3. 105 The story of that marriage is told in L. Arkad’ev, “Zhizn’ – èto ty!” Mir zhenshchiny, March 1996: 2–5. 106 V. Dontsov, “Moia liubimaia pevitsa,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 78 (4 July 1968): 3. 107 “Sovetskaia kul’tura pozdravliaet,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 58 (15 May 1971): 3. 108 Razzakov, Dos’e na zvezd, 226. 109 Khotulev, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko, 374–5. That degree of official renown can be felt in reviews of her jubilee concerts at this time, for example in one marking her seventieth birthday. M. Leonidova, “Tvorcheskii vecher Klavdii Shul’zhenko,” Sovetskaia kul’tura, 13 April 1976: 8. Perhaps, though, jubilees run counter to the notion of a changing artist, as suggested in “Sekret neuviadaemoi molodosti,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 2 (February 1979): 18. 110 N. Zakharovich, “Prazdnik pesni,” Sovetskaia muzyka 7 (1976): 134–5. 111 Shul’zhenko, Kogda vy sprosite menia, 211–12, 221. 112 T. Markova, “Ona pela serdtsem,” Nedelia 11 (10–16 March 1986): 18– 19. Television was certainly interested in Shul’zhenko, to the degree of making some day-in-the-life documentaries. “Vas priglashaet Klavdiia Shul’zhenko,” Televidenie i radioveshchanie 2 (February 1984): 45. 113 “Moskva proshchaetsia s Klavdiei Shul’zhenko,” Komsomol’skaia pravda, 21 June 1984: 4. The official announcement of her death is in Pravda 172 (20 June 1984): 3. See also “Pamiati ushedshikh,” Sovetskaia muzyka 9 (1984): 128; Sovetskaia kul’tura 74 (21 June 1984): 2; “V poslednii put’,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 74 (21 June 1984): 2. 114 Shul’zhenko, Kogda vy sprosite menia, 35. On her contact with the audience as vocally produced but maintained with other senses (such as vision) or emotion, see V. Bokov, “Tri vstrechi,” Sovetskaia zhenshchina 3 (1991): 16–17. 115 “Kogda poet Klavdiia Shul’zhenko,” Literaturnaia gazeta 3 (18 January 1984): 8. For Shul’zhenko herself on the use of humour as ideology, see “Satirist-publitsist,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 60 (26 July 1977): 4. 116 Khotulev, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko, 403. 117 A quotation remembered by Alla Pugacheva in Komsomol’skaia pravda, 21 June 1984. For similar praise from the singer Lev Leshchenko, see Televidenie i radioveshchanie 9 (1983). 118 Kobzon in an article of Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 8 (1996), as quoted in A.L. Vartanian, Vspominaia K. Shul’zhenko: K 90-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia (Moscow 1996), 16. 319

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notes to pages 162–71 119 M. Maksakova, “Obaianie nepovtorimosti,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 8 (1971): 10–11. On remembering Shul’zhenko, see also A. Papanova, “Kogda vy sprosite menia …,” Moskovskaia pravda, 23 March 1986: 3. 120 “Sinii platochek,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 36 (22 March 1986), 4. 121 A. Vartanian, “Ty pomnish’ nashi vstrechi,” Vechernii klub, 20 February 1996: 8. 122 L. Utesov, “I v ètom ves’ sekret …,” Moskovskaia pravda, 10 April 1976: 3. 123 G. Poliachek, “Sinii platochek,” Vechernii Leningrad 70 (24 March 1986): 4. 124 B. Poiurovskii, “Svet dalekikh zvezd,” Kul’tura 13 (13 April 1993): 7. 125 O. Musafirova, “Ia vernulas’ v svoi gorod, znakomyi do slez …,” Komsomol’skaia pravda 40 (4 March 1997), 4; and “U samovara my i nasha Klava,” Trud 221 (5 December 1996): 6. Problems organizing a Shul’zhenko festival in Kharkov just prior to this are documented in “Sinen’kii skromnyi platochek,” Trud 157 (25 August 1995): 1; and “Klavdiia,” Chas pik 145 (15 August 1995): 1. 126 A. Zhitnitskii, “S ulybkoi,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 12 (December 1980): 30.

chapter seven 1 Metlitskii archives, #215. 2 A. Kapler, Zagadka korolevy èkrana (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia 1979), 136–44. In later years he would himself be part of a similarly awkward transmission of traditions, between old and young artists. See K. Vanshenkin, Povesti i rasskazy (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia 1979), 136–44. 3 L. Rybak, Mark Bernes (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1976), 12. 4 V. Petrova, Mastera èstrady sovetuiut (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia 1967), 24–8. 5 E. Khandros, Mastera sovetskogo kino: M.N. Bernes (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1955), 7, 16. 6 M. Bernes, “Kadr za kadrom,” in L. Bernes-Bodrova, ed., Mark Bernes: Stat’i. Vospominaniia o M.N. Bernese (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1980), 55. There are, not surprisingly, those who disagree and see Bernes’s early films as ideologically “squeaky clean” (golubye). Rybak, Mark Bernes, 44. 7 Metlitskii archives, #215. 8 Ia. Khelemskii, “Kogda poet khoroshii drug,” in Bernes-Bodrova, Mark Bernes, 124. 9 Rybak, Mark Bernes, 56, 106. 10 E. Shatrova, Zhizn’ moia – teatr (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1975), 359. 11 M. Bernes, “Èpizodicheskaia rol’,” in Bernes-Bodrova, Mark Bernes, 35.

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notes to p age s 171–6 12 Rybak, Mark Bernes, 22. 13 M. Bernes, “Oni byli pervymi,” Sovetskii èkran 20 (1968): 6. The song certainly enjoyed great popularity and was changed into several different versions by those people who sang it. For an account of that process, see V. Krupianskaia and S. Mints, Materialy po istorii pesni Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk 1953), 81–4. 14 G. Skorokhodov, “Rozhdenie odnoi pesni,” Sem’ dnei 29 (17–23 July 1995): 2, 30. 15 È. Kotliar, “On byl zapevaloi naroda,” Moskovskaia pravda, 9 May 1989: 3. 16 S. Iutkevich, “Kostia Zhigulev – god rozhdeniia 1937-oi,” in BernesBodrova, Mark Bernes, 100. 17 N. Sosina, “V druzhbe s letchikami,” Sovetskii èkran 18 (1972): 19. 18 Khandros, Mastera, 15. 19 He even praised this attention to quotidian detail in others’ films. “V ital’ianskom gorode,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 102 (3 August 1957): 3. 20 E. Dolmatovskii, “Proidet tovarisch vse fronty i voiny,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 39 (18 April 1975): 8. 21 Ia. Frenkel’, “Dobryi volshebnik,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 10 (1981): 20–1. 22 Metlitskii archives, #215. 23 When Bernes’s most famous songs are set to more lush arrangements (strings and choir), the result is not impressive. See, for example, Pesnia Roshchina on Kogda vesna pridet (Melodiia 1996). 24 Khandros, Mastera, 28–9, 47. 25 E. Evtushenko, “On liubil tebia, zhizn’ …,” Sovetskii èkran 24 (1969): 5. For a very similar view on the same song, see N. Krymova, “Kuda zh teper’ idti soldatu?” Iskusstvo kino 5 (1995): 119–28. 26 “O fil’me ‘Dva boitsa,’” Pravda, 6 October 1943. For a good example of Bernes’s humour, see “Fonogrammy pamiati,” Sovetskii èkran 24 (December 1985): 21; and I. Prut, “Rozygrysh,” Stolitsa 29 (August 1992): 50. 27 Metlitskii archives, #215. 28 Khandros, Mastera, 62, 70. 29 Ibid., 71. 30 M. Bernes, “Obraz prostogo cheloveka,” Sovetskaia kul’tura, 14 May 1957; and “Luchshii rezhisser – narod,” Sovetskoe kino, 30 March 1969, in Bernes-Bodrova, Mark Bernes, 44, 62–3. 31 N. Smirnova, “On ushel iz zhizni molodym,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 11 (1969): 25. 32 I. Mukhina, “Golos Marka Bernesa,” Smena, 23 July 1966: 4. 33 Bernes, “Èpizodicheskaia rol’,” 38–9. 34 Ibid., 39–40. 35 Ibid., 40–1.

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notes to pages 176–81 36 As noted by his wife. “Vspominaetsia pesnei,” in Bernes-Bodrova, Mark Bernes, 206. 37 M. Bernes, “Sila pesni,” Izvestiia, 29 September 1966. 38 M. Ignat’eva, Èduard Kolmanovskii (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor 1983), 128. 39 Metlitskii archives, #215. 40 L. Shagalova, “Ostalsia s nami,” Trud, 21 September 1986: 4. 41 See the critique in “Zritelei nado uvazhat’!” Sovetskaia kul’tura 31 (13 March 1958): 2. 42 “Derzhat’ v chistote zvanie artista,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 137 (18 November 1958): 4. 43 Z. Gerdt, “Nu chto skazat’, moi staryi drug,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 79 (2 October 1981): 5. 44 The story of this marriage is told in N. Fokina, “Ni s kem ia ne sravniu …,” Trud 134 (9 June 1993): 7. 45 K. Vanshenkin, “Mne slyshitsia pesnia Bernesa,” Literaturnaia gazeta 33 (17 August 1994): 8. 46 “Luchshii rezhisser – narod,” 64. 47 “Bud’te vyrazitel’ny!” Kul’turno-prosvetitel’naia rabota 11 (1956). See also “Glavnoe – nepovtorimost’” (86) and the essay by his wife (207) in Bernes-Bodrova, Mark Bernes. 48 S. Il’chenko, “On liubil tebia, zhizn’!” Nevskoe vremia 180 (21 September 1996): 5; and È. Kolmanovskii, “Sud’ba mne podarila druzhbu s Bernesom,” Kul’tura 4 (5 October 1991): 9. 49 Bernes reviewed a concert by the Frenchman very positively in “Zhelannyi gost’,” Trud 294 (20 December 1956): 4. 50 Metlitskii archives, #215. 51 “Neskol’ko slov o Marke Bernese,” Avrora 3 (1975): 71–3. 52 Ia. Khelemskii in the article by K. Vanshenkin, “Ego zakazy – èto pochti zagotovki,” in Bernes-Bodrova, Mark Bernes, 138–9. 53 The last picture ever taken of Bernes performing is in N. Bogoslovskii, “Pamiati nashego druga,” Komsomol’skaia pravda, 20 August 1969: 4. Compare with Teatr 1 (1988): inside back cover. 54 “M.N. Bernes.” Sovetskaia kul’tura 99 (21 August 1969): 4. 55 Rybak, Mark Bernes, 7. 56 V. Shalunovskii, “Èto byl truzhennik v iskusstve,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 107 (7 September 1971): 3. 57 “Novosti kino,” Sovetskii èkran 22 (1971): 19. Memorial evenings would serve the same purpose, such as “Ego pesni – s nami,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 95 (27 November 1981): 8. In 1991 the suggestion was first made to place a memorial plaque on his old Moscow house. “Ob uvekovechenii pamiati Marka Bernesa,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 54 (5 May 1988): 1.

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notes to pages 182–91 58 O. Korotsev, “Planeta Bernes,” Vechernii Peterburg, 11 May 1994: 5. 59 N. Fokina, “Po vesne v tishine zagoraiutsia novye zvezdy,” Trud 102 (8 June 1995): 5. 60 Metlitskii archives, #215. 61 B. Alibasov, Osnovy na-naiskoi filosofii v dialogakh i razmyshleniiakh (Moscow: Tsentropoligraf 1999), 405. 62 Chelovek s ruzhem (1936), dir. S. Iutkevich. The film was restored in 1965, which is perhaps testament to its romanticism staying attractive to an audience of the Thaw, despite being a product of the Purges. 63 The importance of joy in Bernes’s repertoire is touchingly described in “Ia liubliu tebia, zhizn’,” Klub 5 (May 1997): 16. 64 Istrebiteli (1939), dir. È. Pentslin. In 1940 it was the most popular film of the year, with 27.1 million viewers. Audience figures in this chapter are taken from S. Zemlianukhin and M. Segida, Domashniaia sinematika (Moscow: Dubl’-D 1996). 65 For a picture of the “real” Bernes and other artists in this book during the war, see Televidenie i radioveshchanie 5 (May 1985): 27. 66 On the importance of friendship in Bernes’s own life, see “Bernes i Andreev/Druz’ia i znakomye,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 78 (1 July 1989): 5. 67 B. Andreev, “Slovo o druge,” Iskusstvo kino 10 (1969): 140. 68 Bol’shaia zhizn’ (1939), dir. L. Lukov. The film was the sixth most popular of the year, with 18.6 million viewers. It was restored in 1973. 69 Dva boitsa (1943), dir. L. Lukov. The print was restored in 1963. 70 On general working conditions in Tashkent at this time, see Bernes’s article “Odin iz ‘Dvukh boitsov,’” Literaturnaia gazeta, 18 October 1967: 7. Bogoslovskii is praised by Bernes in “Ego pesni – dlia vsekh,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 67 (4 June 1963): 2; and the compliment is repaid with tales of family and friendship in N. Bogoslovskii, “Nu chto skazat’, moi staryi drug,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 73 (2 October 1973): 5. Bernes’s relationships in similar creative teams are discussed in “Roman s pesnei,” Mir zhenshchiny 10 (1996): 73. 71 That lyricism, as the strongest element of his work, civic or not, is discussed in N. Kravtsova, “Pesni Marka Bernesa,” Komsomol’skaia pravda, 7 March 1967: 3. 72 On the unique aspect of his voice, see K. Shcherbakov, “Golos druga,” Komsomol’skaia pravda, 8 October 1971: 2. 73 L. Sidorovskii, “Veriu v tebia …,” Smena 30 (5 February 1975): 3. 74 Iu. Krasnov, “Vse eshche vperedi,” Vechernii Leningrad 239 (9 October 1971): 3. 75 L. Sidorovskii, “Dva boitsa i pesnia,” Smena 62 (14 March 1985): 4. It is sometimes said that the film was based upon a novella by the Odessa writer Lev Slavin. 76 “S pesnei po Pol’she,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 142 (28 November 1964): 1.

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notes to p age s 192–9 77 Velikii perelom (1945), dir. F. Èrmler. The print was restored in 1967 and won awards at Cannes in 1946. 78 Taras Shevchenko (1951), dir. I. Savchenko. The film was restored in 1964. It enjoyed 18.4 million viewers, making it the eighth most popular film of the year. 79 M. Bernes, “Truzhennik iskusstva,” Pravda Ukrainy, 12 October 1976: 4; and M. Gallai, “Tsel’ ego zhizni,” Iskusstvo kino 10 (1971): 118–23. 80 A. Krichevskii, “O Marke Bernese,” Sovetskii èkran 7 (April 1974): inside back cover. See a fine picture of Bernes from this period in the same journal, 5 (1972): 17. 81 Maksimka (1952), dir. V. Braun. This reached fifth place in the year’s distribution figures, with an audience of 32.9 million viewers. 82 More studenoe (1954), dir. Iu. Egorov. 83 Shkola muzhestva (1954), dir. V. Basov and M. Korchagin. This was the tenth most popular film of the year – 27.2 million viewers. 84 Zapasnoi igrok (1954), dir. S. Timoshenko. 85 M. Ziangirova and N. Fokina, “Razminuvshiesia vo vremeni,” Rossiiskaia gazeta 280 (31 December 1992): 11. 86 Oni byli pervymi (1956), dir. Iu. Egorov. 87 The same has been said of his voice as a vehicle of non-pathetic emotions. “Nostal’gicheskie posidelki v studii Retro,” TV -rev’iu 3 (18– 24 January 1993): 32–3. 88 Delo #306 (1956), dir. A. Rybakov. The film was the second most popular of the year, with 33.5 million viewers. 89 Nochnoi patrul’ (1957), dir. V. Sukhobokov. This movie was third in popularity among viewers, with 36.4 million tickets sold. 90 Given the popularity of this metaphor and Bernes’s song Zhuravli, it appears elsewhere, even in a posthumous or metaphysical context, for example “Zhuravli i Mark Bernes,” Ogonek 25 (June 1971): 23. 91 “Komissar militsii,” Izvestiia 7 (9 January 1958): 3. 92 K. Vanshenkin, “Iz vospominanii,” Druzhba narodov 4 (1991): 157–69. 93 Èto sluchilos’ v militsii (1963), dir. V. Azarov; 22.6 million viewers. 94 Zhenia, Zhenechka i Katiusha (1967), dir. V. Motyl’; 24.6 million viewers. 95 E. Zorokhovich, “Ia liubliu tebia, zhizn’!” Moskovskaia pravda, 29 November 1981: 3. In later years, his singing would also be swapped for other valuable things. He would be challenged to billiard games, not for financial stakes but for a quick live performance. V. Kagarlistskii, “Cherez zelenoe sukno,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 37 (28 March 1989): 5. 96 V. Galanter, “Novodevich’e Marku ‘ne polagalos’,” 24 chasa 15 (11 April 1996): 10. The story is from a long interview with Bernes’s wife, whose words act as a very useful antidote to many of the rumours surrounding the man, his politics, and his behaviour.

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notes to p age s 200–4

chapter eight 1 L. Zykina, Na perekrestkakh vstrech (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia 1988), 16. For exactly the same thought on Ruslanova, see “Dusha moia – russkaia pesnia,” Izvestiia, 31 October 1970. The same is said of Zykina’s voice in “Kontserty L. Zykinoi,” Vechernii Leningrad 62 (15 March 1974): 1. 2 Zabytaia melodiia dlia fleity (1987). For the screenplay, which in its final pages leaves the folk singers even worse off than the film, see Vokzal dlia dvoikh (Moscow: Drofa 1993), 75–148. The movie grew from a play, entitled Amoral’naia istoriia, which hints at another ethically positive aspect to the folk singers. While the bureaucracy grows sad and immoral, the singers’ happiness is a “commendable” form of social cohesion. 3 L. Ruslanova, “Pet’ serdtsem i ot serdtsa,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 4 (1972): 8–9. 4 Nadehzda Babkina in “Dusha – pesnia,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 43 (27 October 1990): 9. 5 V. Ardov, “Zvuchit russkaia pesnia,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 1 (1964): 6–7. 6 Metlitskii archives, #213; and “Russkaia pevitsa,” Ogonek 40 (1976): 26–8. 7 G. Andriukhina-Iukhtina, “Zachinai syznova!” Teatral’naia zhizn’ 4 (1973): 10. 8 N. Smirnova, “Ruslanova – èto russkaia pesnia,” in L. Bulgak and F. Mishin, Lidiia Ruslanova: Stat’i i vospominaniia o nei (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1981), 67. 9 L. Utesov, “Liubimaia pevitsa,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 1 (1971): 15. 10 G. Serebriakova, “… Pesnia vsegda golos èpokhi,” Literaturnaia Rossiia 151 (20 December 1985): 24. 11 Iu. Pesikov, Lidiia Ruslanova: Izvestnaia i neizvestnaia (Saratov: Slovo 1998), 10–12. 12 V. Shchurov, “Ispolnitel’skii fenomen Lidii Ruslanovoi,” in Bulgak and Mishin, Lidiia Ruslanova, 36. 13 Ibid., 42–3; and L. Zykina, “Ona davala pesne novuiu zhizn’,” Televidenie i radioveshchanie 10 (1990): 44–5. 14 L. Zykina, “Ruslanova,” Nedelia, 14 October 1973: 15. 15 Iu. Bespalov, “Pesnia – èto zhizn’,” Komsomol’skaia pravda, 19 June 1979: 2. 16 F. Mishin, “Nepovtorimoe iskusstvo,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 9 (May 1975): 18–19. This includes a good picture of the Reichstag concert. 17 V. Ardov, “Russkaia pesnia Lidii Ruslanovoi,” and M. Rozhkov, “Samobytnost’,” in Bulgak and Mishin, Lidiia Ruslanova, 189, 236 respectively.

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notes to p age s 204–8 18 A. Novikov, “Vsia zhizn’ ee byla sviazana s pesnei,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 1 (1974): 29. 19 Ardov, “Russkaia pesnia,” 191. 20 Metlitskii archives, #213. 21 For several tales of this period in her life, see L. Ruslanova, “Ot El’ni do Berlina,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 35 (24 March 1970): 4. 22 V. Kataev, “Kontsert pered boem,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 9 (May 1980): 19–20. 23 V. Ardov, “Tak pela Lidiia Ruslanova,” Literaturnaia Rossiia, 22 August 1975: 11. 24 Razzakov, Dos’e na zvezd (1934–61), 129. 25 V. Zaitseva, “Gvardii pevitsa,” Meditsinskaia gazeta, 9 May 1990: 4; and “Kontsert pered boem,” Ogonek 30 (1942): 11. 26 F. Mishin, “Vechno zhivoi golos,” in Bulgak and Mishin, Lidiia Ruslanova, 176. 27 V. Kisliakov, “Boevye sputniki moi …,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 115 (23 September 1972): 4. 28 See photograph in Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 9 (1979), inside back cover; or L. Ruslanova, “Pela pobediteliam,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 37 (9 May 1973): 2. 29 L. Ruslanova, “Ètogo ne zabyt’,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 5 (1968): 6. 30 Pesikov, Lidiia Ruslanova, 30. 31 M. Dolgopolov, Minuvshikh dnei vospominaniia (Moscow: Izvestiia 1977), 75–6. 32 Novikov, “Vsia zhizn’ ee byla sviazana s pesnei.” 33 K. Samsonov, “Nepovtorimyi kontsert,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 5 (May 1975): 33. 34 Metlitskii archives, #213. 35 L. Kolobova, “Russkaia pesnia Lidii Ruslanovoi,” Literaturnaia Rossiia, 5 May 1972: 11. 36 L. Ruslanova, “Vsled za minerami,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 49 (19 June 1981): 4. 37 The collection is reviewed and discussed in K. Frolova, “V gostiakh u kollektsionera,” Khudozhnik 7 (1972): 42–50. The article contains many photographs of her paintings. 38 On these rumours, see I. Liubeznov, “Talant, otdannyi narodu,” in Bulgak and Mishin, Lidiia Ruslanova, 135–9. 39 Pesikov, Lidiia Ruslanova, 31. 40 G. Skipenko, “Lilas’ pesnia na peredovoi,” Sovetskii patriot, 22 February 1970: 4. 41 In subsequent decades after perestroika, the dangerous and ridiculous problems with official status would be dismissed as meaningless because Ruslanova had (and has) a “name” (imia), which will outlast whatever political system bestows honours upon her. L. Shugalo, “Lidiia Ruslanova,” Televidenie i radioveshchanie 5 (May 1985): 29. 326

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notes to pages 208–11 42 B. Spoel’niak, “Gosudarstvennaia prestupnitsa,” Sovershenno sekretno 5 (May 1995): 16–17. 43 A. Vaksberg, “Delo marshala Zhukova: Nerazorvavshaiasia bomba,” Literaturnaia gazeta 32 (5 August 1992): 12. 44 N. Zaitsev, “Solovei frontovykh dorog,” Kul’tura 18 (13 May 1995): 5. 45 Pesikov, Lidiia Ruslanova, 36–7. 46 N. Zaitsev, “Narodnaia pevitsa,” Gudok, 1 March 1995: 4. 47 L. Kolobova, “Pesnia, spetaia serdtsem,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 127 (29 October 1971): 3. 48 I. Prut, “My byli bol’shimi druz’iami,” in Bulgak and Mishin, Lidiia Ruslanova, 128–9. 49 M. Grin, “Dusha-pevitsa,” Narodnoe tvorchestvo 10 (1990): 31–3. See also Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 5 (May 1990): 38–41. 50 L. Ruslanova, “Zhizn’, moia pesnia,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 7 (1968): 6–7. For a slightly different opinion, in which Zykina says she would like to sing “wide and open” like Ruslanova, see E. Belostotskaia, “Liudmila Zykina,” Trud, 14 Janaury 1979: 4; or “Iz rodnika narodnogo,” Televidenie i radioveshchanie 4 (1981): 43. 51 This remembrance is very much in evidence at modern memorial evenings, sometimes staged by Zykina herself, interrupted on occasion by taped reminiscences from Ruslanova. The people recalling and those recalled move back and forth on one stage, keeping the historical process firmly in the present. See an early example in E. Kudriavtseva, “Pamiat’iu sberezhennoe,” Teatral’naia zhizn’ 18 (September 1980): 15. The same philosophy is proffered by Zykina in “Korol’ balalaiki,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 60 (19 May 1987), 4. The evenings serve the purpose of documentary films, such as the efforts recorded in “Dva chasa s L. Ruslanovoi,” Izvestiia 36 (25 February 1993): 7. 52 B. Petrov, “Pesnia Rodiny,” Sovetskaia Rossiia, 19 January 1980: 4. For a description of the village life that allows or prompts such metaphors, see “Kak pakhnet len …,” Ogonek 35 (1969): 18–19. 53 “Sversheniia i liudi,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 10 (22 January 1966): 1; and “Ee pesni – russkie pesni,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 63 (29 May 1969): 2. 54 V. Ardov, “Russkaia pesnia Lidii Ruslanovoi,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 9 (1975): 12–13. Ruslanova had been praised for this refashioning of lyricism even in the forties. See “Kontserty L. Ruslanovoi,” Kirovskaia pravda, 13 February 1945: 4. 55 An elegiac tone in talking of these erstwhile fields is very common in writings about Zykina, for example in N. Zavadskaia, Liudmila Zykina (Moscow: Muzyka 1978), 13–14; or L. Ocheret, “Poiu Rossiiu,” V mire knig 4 (1987): 12–13. 56 A. Timofeevskii, “Smutnyi ob”ekt nostal’gii,” Moskovskie novosti 17 (26 April 1992): 22–3. 327

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notes to pages 211–14 57 L. Zykina, “Pesnia – zhivaia istoriia,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 73 (11 September 1979): 5. In another article she raises these family traditions to the level of a “sacred object.” “Zavetnye kladovye pesni,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 16 (6 February 1988): 6. 58 È. Tipaine, “Poet Liudmila Zykina,” Sovetskaia Latviia, 4 July 1970: 4. 59 L. Zykina, “Dostoinstvo pesni,” Pravda, 2 November 1973: 3. For a dramatization of these first singing sessions, see E. Prilutskaia, “Slovno reka l’etsia,” Teatral’naia zhizn’ 4 (1968): 11–12. 60 L. Zykina, Pesnia (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia 1975), 7. Zykina praises her mother in no greater terms than in “Den’ materi,” Mir zhenshchiny 1 (January 1993): 10. 61 L. Zykina, “Nachalo,” Literaturnaia Rossiia, 8 March 1974: 12–13. 62 Zykina, Na perekrestkakh vstrech, 20. 63 A. Pistunova, Iz serdtsa (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia 1974), 22. 64 Zykina, Pesnia, 63. 65 V. Vladimirov, “Istinno narodnaia,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 35 (2 May 1973): 4. 66 L. Zykina, Techet moia Volga (Moscow: Novosti 1998), 19. 67 “V pesne – dusha naroda,” Krasnaia zvezda, 7 January 1983: 4. 68 L. Pavlova, “Liudmila Zykina,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 7 (1963): 12–13. 69 Zykina, Techet moia Volga, 24. 70 Zykina, Pesnia, 10. Romances also get short shrift in an article of 1970. “Iarkii talant,” Sel’skaia zhizn’, 10 April: 4; and V. Bokov, “Slushaia Zykinu,” Literaturnaia Rossiia, 1 January 1970: 9. Zykina by no means abandoned or scorned nineteenth-century traditions in shaping a Soviet repertoire. She was, for example, most approving of how the Soviet composer Rodion Shchedrin used nineteenth-century sources in forging an original “folk” sound. “Obrashcheno k serdtsu,” Pravda 80 (20 March 1984): 6. 71 N. Velkhova, “Zagadka russkogo romansa,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 5 (1969): 11–12. The article is very useful in tracing the transition from romances’ sentiment to that of modern folk songs. 72 “Dorogami pesni,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 18 (9 February 1985): 5. 73 L. Zykina, “Pesnia – dusha naroda,” Sovetskaia Rossiia, 22 January 1971: 3. 74 Zykina, Techet moia Volga, 29. 75 Pistunova, Iz serdtsa, 44–5. 76 L. Zykina, “Vysokoe iskusstvo tantsa,” Pravda 324 (20 November 1985): 6. 77 Zykina, Techet moia Volga, 53. 78 Zavadskaia, Liudmila Zykina, 17. The need to actually like such heroes or heroines arises in “Liudi, kotorykh ia znaiu,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 9 (28 January 1975): 5. 79 I. Veksler, “Miss Volga iz Moskvy,” Sovetskaia Èstoniia, 8 July 1977: 3.

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notes to pages 214–15 80 I. Mikita, “Pesni Rossii,” Vechernii Leningrad 23 (28 January 1971): 3. Another article of 1968 adds war to that list: “Koroleva russkoi pesni,” Kul’tura i zhizn’ 9 (1968): 28–30. On songs as “fate and the human heart,” see also Sovetskoe radio i televidenie 10 (1970): 22–3. 81 G. Pavlova, “Poet Liudmila Zykina,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 19 (1969): 19– 20; or “Laureaty premii imeni Glinki 1983 goda,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 3 (February 1984): front cover, 2. 82 L. Zykina, “Poiu tebe, moia strana,” Kul’tura i zhizn’ 3 (1983): 36. 83 G. Pavlova, “Liudmila Zykina,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 5 (1965): 5–6. 84 L. Zykina, “Zemlia – moia radost’,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 58 (18 July 1980): 1. 85 Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 4 (April 1981): 3. For a good picture of Zykina at this time, see Televidenie i radioveshchanie 4 (April 1981): back cover. This distinction of politics versus civic spirit is equally evident in the career of Iosif Kobzon, discussed in Red Stars. 86 L. Zykina, “Solistka,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 9 (1974): 9–11. 87 E. Khodyreva, “Moia politika – moi pesni,” Kul’tura 15 (17 April 1997): 3. 88 S. Karin, “Aplodismenty – koroleve,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 62 (27 May 1967): 4. 89 “Pevitsa russkogo ocharovan’ia,” Pravda Vostoka, 30 December 1971: 4. 90 “Pozdravliaem!” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 11 (1968): 21. The article also congratulates Zykina on becoming a People’s Artist. Such visual metaphors are to some degree possible or appropriate because Zykina moved and moves very little on stage. She was, despite the phrases quoted here, herself not at all a proponent of the increasing visualization or theatricalization of estrada that began after the Thaw. See B. Petrov, “Razve pet’ razuchilis’?” Sovetskaia Rossiia, 10 June 1979: 6. 91 N. Kutuzov, “Talant istinnyi, nepovtorimyi,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 70 (13 June 1989): 8. For a similar technique applied to Ruslanova, see F. Mishin, “V ee golose – zapakh lugov,” Sovetskaia Rossiia, 27 October 1985: 4. 92 L. Zykina, “Rossiia pomogaet,” Literaturnaia Rossiia, 24 August 1973: 12. 93 I. Romaneeva, “Poet Liumila Zykina …,” Literaturnaia Rossiia, 7 March 1969: 20. 94 L. Zykina, “Ne oskudela zemlia pesniami,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 36 (5 May 1981): 4. 95 L. Zykina, “Bez chego na svete zhit’ nel’zia,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 134 (8 November 1984): 5. She, for example, will also draw upon the wise words of famous writers in order to show the status of folk song. She uses “the great Gogol’” in “Liubov’ moia – pesnia,” Izvestiia, 23 March 1979: 3. 96 O. Lobanova, “Gost’ 13-i stranitsy,” Nedelia 20 (11–17 May 1981): 13.

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notes to pages 215–17 97 L. Zykina, “Luchshie minuty schastlivogo dnia,” Literaturnaia Rossiia, 4 January 1974: 12–13. 98 L. Zykina, “Pesnia zvuchit kak priznanie,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 9 (1964): 16–18. 99 V. Bokov, “Poet Liudmila Zykina,” Literaturnaia Rossiia, 28 April 1970: 3; or M. Chudnovskii, “Pesnia,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 28 (7 March 1970): 3. Other Soviet composers would refer to her merging of singer and heroine as an ideal they would like to achieve in their own work. See N. Saakian, “Poet Liudmila Zykina,” Kommunist, 19 September 1972: 4. 100 E. Prilutskaia, “Krasota i sila narodnoi pesni,” Moskovskaia pravda, 10 February 1979: 3; and O. Fel’tsman, “Pesni Liudmily Zykinoi,” Sovetskaia Rossiia, 20 March 1970: 4. 101 T. Moiseeva, “Kakoe serdtse ne zamret,” Pravda Vostoka, 10 October 1976: 2. 102 N. Zavadskaia, “Okrylennost’,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 5 (1979): 6–7. 103 E. Tkach, “Khoziaika russkoi pesni,” Sovetskaia Moldaviia, 5 August 1967: 3. Zykina praises Pakhmutova’s songs as “folk” in “Melodii muzhestva i otvagi,” Izvestiia, 15 August 1975: 5. For a good photograph of the two women working together, see Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 9 (September 1990): 46. 104 A. Pakhmutova, “Pesnia Rossii,” Komsomol’skaia pravda, 18 March 1970: 2. 105 B. Kotelkin, “Serdtse, izlitoe v pesne,” Krasnaia zvezda, 6 May 1975: 4. 106 A. Kharitonova, “Priznanie v liubvi,” Sel’skaia zhizn’, 12 July 1973: 4. 107 R. Shchedrin, “Svet talanta,” Pravda, 8 March 1970: 3. 108 See V. Levashov, “Poet Liudmila Zykina,” Pravda, 17 October 1965: 3. 109 L. Zykina, “Ia vsiu zhizn’ igrala v dogonialki,” Rossiiskie vesti 5 (12 January 1995): 8. This happiness is by no means a post-Soviet state of delirium. See S. Oganian, “Prazdnik, kotoryi ne konchaetsia,” Kommunist, 19 September 1972: 4. 110 O. Karasev, “Nagrada sovetskoi pevitse,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 52 (28 June 1974): 7. Such notions of vospitanie are obviously based upon a philosophy of process, and Zykina does indeed stress ethical issues in a longterm pedagogical context on many occasions: for example (from the same decade), “Zapoiut li nashi vnuki Kalinku,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 15 (20 February 1979): 4. For more on her concerts in the Olympia, see S. Agaiants, “S pesnei po zhizni,” Trud, 21 March 1975: 3. 111 Zykina, Na perekrestkakh vstrech, 160. 112 Zykina talks about Pugacheva specifically as a cultivator of traditions in “Bogatstva pesni,” Pravda 159 (8 June 1979): 3. 113 O. Shirokov, “Poet Liudmila Zykina,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 144 (2 December 1971): 4. 114 V. Sechin, “Russkie pesni Liudmily Zykinoi,” Sovetskaia Litva, 10 December 1966: 4.

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notes to pages 217–18 115 L. Zykina, “Put’ k pesne,” Moskva 1 and 2 (1975): 3–41, 105–58, respectively. 116 A suitably lofty tone is struck in an examination of Zykina’s fame by A. Pistunova, “So zvezdy,” Moskva 3 (1973): 182–6. 117 See Zykina, Techet moia Volga, 60–1; and “Dlia vas poet Liudmila Zykina!” Sovetskaia Moldaviia, 6 June 1972, on the emotional contact of audience and artist. For the story of how that song was written, see M. Fradkin, “Techet reka Volga …,” Krasnaia zvezda, 4 October 1969: 4. 118 Iu. Bespalov, “Rabochie budni pesni,” Pravda 325 (21 November 1982): 6. 119 See the movie Kogda pesnia ne konchaetsia (1964), dir. R. Tikhomirov. Here a staging of a Zykina song is so emotionally rich that she need simply wander aimlessly around the edge of a small lake, fingering a red handkerchief. Affect grows strong enough to create even aimless behaviour! 120 Official recognition also came at this time. “Pochetnye zvaniia,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 105 (5 September 1968): 1. For a description of later Australian dates that includes talk of high ticket prices and Zykina’s culinary skills on tour, see “Avstraliiskie vstrechi,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 89 (5 November 1974): 7. For Japanese, British, and American touring (again, later), see “Teplye vstrechi,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 99 (10 December 1974): 7; “S pesnei po Anglii,” Sovetskaia ulk’tura 98 (5 December 1975): 7; and “Ona plenila nashi serdtsa,” 17 (25 February 1975): 7. A concert in West Berlin is covered in “Bol’shoi uspekh,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 76 (21 September 1976): 7. Yet another Japanese visit is announced in “Russkie pesni v Iaponii,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 90 (10 November 1981): 8, and then reviewed in “Rossiia v Iaponii,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 96 (1 December 1981): 7. 121 “Koroleva russkoi pesni,” Sovetskaia Rossiia, 11 January 1968: 3. For something similar in Canada, see L. Oshanin, “Poet Liudmila Zykina,” Sovetskaia Rossiia, 20 March 1970: 2. 122 G. Spitsyn, “Pesn’ o Rossii,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 133 (7 November 1970): 4. Her role was to some degree fostered by substantial record sales, which by this time had already topped 6 million within the Soviet Union. M. Dolgopolov, “Russkoe razdol’e,” Izvestiia, 6 June 1969: 4. 123 Zykina, Na perekrestkakh vstrech, 186. 124 Ibid, 247. In the early seventies, by comparison, her Eastern Bloc concerts were trouble free, such as in Belgrade, where people were turned away from the venue due to a lack of tickets. “Mir v neskol’kikh strokakh,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 22 (16 November 1973): 7. For similar Soviet successes, see “Trud i pesnia,” Izvestiia, 21 March 1980: 3; “Stroka v ankete,” Teatral’naia zhizn’ 7 (April 1974): 19–20; and the earlier “Shirokaia, kak reka,” Kommunist, 6 June 1965: 3.

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notes to pages 218–20 125 N. Lagina, “Zvezdam navstrechu,” Krasnaia zvezda, 28 April 1971: 4. 126 Pistunova, Iz serdtsa, 109. For the announcement, see “Ukaz Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta sssr,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 27 (3 April 1973): 1. 127 Zykina, Techet moia Volga, 112. 128 F. Razzakov, Dos’e na zvezd: Ikh liubiat, o nikh govoriat (Moscow: Èksmo Press 1999), 339–40. This suicide came sadly in a decade when Zykina was taking serious stock of her career and the loss of such a support must have been felt deeply. E. Sorokin, “Serdtse – liudiam,” Sovetskaia Rossiia, 16 August 1977: 4. 129 “Ukaz Prezidiuma …,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 47 (12 June 1979): 1; and “Vysokie nagrady, pochetnye zvaniia,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 18 (September 1979): 10. See also G. Gogoberidze, “Medal’ fonda mira,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 19 (6 March 1976): 8. 130 L. Zykina, “Teplo vstrech,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 103 (23 December 1980): 1. During the time of the Moscow Olympics, she also talked of song as something more than its audible self in terms of pride (sporting or otherwise). “Nasha gordost’,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 58 (18 July 1980): 1. 131 L. Zykina, “Pet’ dlia vas bol’shaia radost’,” Krasnaia zvezda, 23 November 1983: 4. For reverse gift-giving – soldiers bringing something to Zykina – see “Priznanie v liubvi,” Kazakhstanskaia pravda, 19 February 1975: 4. 132 “Postanovlenie Soveta Ministrov rsfsr …,” Literaturnaia Rossiia 52 (23 December 1983): 6. 133 “Ukaz Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta sssr,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 108 (8 September 1987): 1. 134 For one of the last truly Soviet photo-shoots, in which Zykina sings to collective farm workers, see “Kontsertnym zalom stalo pole,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 65 (13 August 1982): 4. 135 See “Liudmila Zykina: Pesnia vo imia zhizni,” Smena 5 (6 January 1984): 4. 136 “Svoi i chuzhie” (“One’s Own and Outsiders”), Sovetskaia kul’tura 70 (11 June 1985): 6. The title of the article says it all. 137 L. Zykina, “Glubokie korni,” Pravda 139 (19 May 1986): 7. 138 “Puti-dorogi pesni,” Trud, 3 April 1988: 4. 139 E. Prilutskaia, “Golosom serdtsa,” Sovetskaia èstrada i tsirk 7 (July 1973): 11. 140 Iu. Bespalov, “V pesne – dusha naroda,” Pravda 358 (23 December 1988): 4. 141 R. Volodina, “Slovo o iazyke,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 96 (28 November 1980): 4. 142 A. Pistunova, “Iz serdtsa,” Literaturnaia Rossiia, 13 March 1970: 3. 143 “God kak zhizn’,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 133 (7 November 1987): 2; A. Miasnikov, “Poiu tebia, moia Rossiia!” Vechernii Leningrad 39

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144

145 146

147 148 149 150

151

152 153 154

155

156 157 158 159

(16 February 1980): 4; and “Pesni Rossii,” Izvestiia, 5 March 1981: 3. In an article of 1968, her generic mixing is even compared to the synaesthesia in Scriabin’s work. “Russkie pesni L. Zykinoi,” Teatr 4 (1968): 120–1. “Lidiia Ruslanova i teatr pesni,” Teatr 5 (1974): 104–12. Elsewhere Zykina has said that she feels awe before Ruslanova’s presence and a sense of mission in continuing her work. V. Demin, “Dolg pered pesnei,” Televidenie i radioveshchanie 5 (May 1983): 11–13. Pistunova, Iz serdtsa, 56–7. M. Fradkin, “Pesni, adresovannye serdtsu,” Vechernii Leningrad 129 (4 June 1970): 3. This description is akin to a description of Ruslanova’s songs in “Lidiia Ruslanova,” Ogonek 9 (1941): 18. V. Muradeli, “Pesnia – dusha naroda,” Izvestiia, 3 March 1970: 3. Iu. Bespalov, “Pustye akkordy nikomu ne nuzhny,” Pravda 135 (6 June 1991): 3. “Tvorcheskaia intelligentsia v trevoge,” Nezavisimaia gazeta 31 (18 February 1993): 2. L. Zykina, “Slovo o pesne,” Smena 6 (8 January 1980): 4. For a picture of Zykina at this time, see Televidenie i radioveshchanie 6 (June 1980): 47. L. Zykina, “Staraia plastinka,” Nedelia 4 (22–27 January 1974): 7; or (also on Ruslanova’s records) F. Lipskerov, “Na vsiu zhizn’,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 129 (29 October 1970): 3. This problem was to some degree caused by the fact that Ruslanova started using magnetic tape and the radio fairly late in her career. V. Demin, “Kakaia charuiushchaia sila!” Televidenie i radioveshchanie 5 (1986): 19–21. The same magazine published a fine picture of Ruslanova (5 [1971]: back cover). L. Zykina, “Poiu o zhenshchine,” Smena 55 (6 March 1973): 3. L. Kafanova, “Poet Liudmila Zykina,” Sel’skaia zhizn’, 25 January 1964: 6. On the process of obtaining real estate for such endeavours, see “Muzy, prem’er i nedvizhimost’ v Germanii,” Delovye liudi 8 (August 1993): 92. Zykina, Techet moia Volga, 413. On a less spiritual but purely ethical level, see the perestroika-style article on her tour of America: “Naperekor okeanu,” Sovetskaia kul’tura 10 (23 January 1988): 11. M. Kotel’nikova and I. Svianrenko, “Bog dal vse, chego prosila,” Domovoi 1 (January 1997): 52–64. “Zhivaia dusha Rossii,” Sovetskaia Moldaviia, 31 May 1972: 4. See also “Serdechnaia nit’,” Izvestiia, 7 July 1972: 5. L. Perkina, “Zvonkii golos Rossii,” Sovetskaia Rossiia, 9 June 1989: 4. See, for example, S. Dantsig, “Poka ne pozdno,” Muzykal’naia zhizn’ 22 (November 1987): 1; and L. Zykina, “Iz rodnikov nardonykh,” Pravda 117 (26 April 1984): 3. There is more criticism of capitalism’s

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notes to pages 221–38

160 161

162

163 164 165

influence upon folk songs in Iu. Bespalov, “Vot otkuda nashi bedy,” Trud 29 (February 1992): 4. N. Shadrina, “Liudmila – ledi Borisa,” Kul’tura 7 (February 1993): 7. For example, “Liudmila Zykina obkhoditsa bez povarov, modistok i prislugi” (“Liudmila Zykina Gets By without Cooks, Stylists, or Servants”), Stas 2 (1996): 162. The title is ironic. O. Lobanova, “S muzhchinami nuzhno rasstavat’sia krasivo,” Sem’ia 2 (9–15 January 1995): 24; or Ia. Iuferova, “Kapitalistka Zykina: russkaia dusha,” Izvestiia 62 (3 April 1997): 6. In another article she says that even if the money were available, she would never grace a “vulgar” broadcast. “Glavnoe – sokhranit’ svoe dostoinstvo,” Profsoiuzy 8 (1993): 54–5. “Nash dom – Rossiia,” Rossiiskaia gazeta 237 (7 November 1995): 3; and “Tsaritsa pesni,” Kul’tura 17 (1 May, 1995): 1. This concert is set in an interesting political framework, with much official praise on stage from both Chernomyrdin and Luzhkov. Zykina, Techet moia Volga, 80.

chapter nine 1 The contemporary singer Boris Grebenshchikov, celebrating in 1993 a fellow (albeit pre-revolutionary) artist, Aleksandr Vertinskii. “I net nikakoi propasti …,” Ogonek 12 (March 1993): 26. 2 Liubimye melodii XX veka, ntv, 1 January 2000. As an example of the pre-broadcast brouhaha, see “Evgenii Kiselev ezdit po gorodu na Zhuk,” . 3 “Staraia kvartira,” rtr, 30 December 1999. He also starred on the estrada quiz show Dva roialia on the same station. 4 Zvezdnaia noch’ na Kamergerskom, rtr, 8 January 2000. 5 A national newspaper ran a story in which it and Alla Pugacheva joined in mutual admiration of their ability to ride out political storms. “AiF pod schastlivoi zvezdoi,” Argumenty i Fakty 51 (December 1999): 3. 6 ProNovosti on Alla Pugacheva, Muztv, 31 December 1999. 7 Alla Pugacheva in Novogodnii attraktsion, ort, 31 December, 1999. An entire retrospective series of the quintessential Soviet holiday variety show, Goluboi ogonek (Little Blue Light), was also rerun on ort from 29 December to 8 January. 8 The same idea was recently played upon in advertisements by the artiste Larisa Dolina for dietary pills, who claimed that “miracles don’t just happen” in the world of appetite suppression, which – as noted in Estrada?! – has led to waggish parallels between Dolina’s changing aesthetics and waistline.

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notes to pages 239–40 9 Natasha Koroleva, praising Soviet superstars Sofiia Rotaru and Valerii Leont’ev in Vstrecha s Natashei Korolevoi, Piatyi kanal, 31 December 1999. 10 Muzykal’nye istorii, rtr, 31 December 1999. 11 Ulitsa razbytykh fonarei: Delo No. 1999, ntv, December 1999. The show ended with the entire cast performing a version of the post-Stalinist song “Five Minutes” from the 1956 comedy Carnival Night (Karnaval’naia noch’). 12 The Soviet estrada composer Aleksandra Pakhmutova was often shown, as was the actor from many musical comedies Mikhail Boairskii: “I wish only that you and your dearest be happy and healthy. Nothing more.” 13 Èdita P’ekha’s song of the Thaw, Khorosho!, as quoted at the end of the comedy broadcast Anshlag. 14 Igor’ Nikolaev’s Isaak Dunaevskii Prize was instituted in 1999–2000. 15 Liudmila Gurchenko – the heroine of Karnaval’naia noch’ – on the broadcast Pesnia 99, ort, 1 January 2000. The celebration of Robert Rozhdestvenskii’s songs during these broadcasts, for example, prompted the thought that “we could make an entire festival out of these!” P’ekha herself, on the same show, expressed her desire that “faith, hope, and love stay alive in every household.” 16 The quotes are from Igor’ Nikolaev, Natasha Koroleva, Dmitrii Malikov, Iosif Kobzon (on his old song “In Our Courtyard” [A u nas vo dvore]), Igor’ Nikolaev once again (appearing as both performer and composer), Tat’iana Ovsienko, and Vladimir Troshin, singing Podmoskovnie vechera. The “cabaret duet” Akademiia during the staged version of Starye pesni o glavnom on rtr, 8 January 2000, made very similar comments: “Today, [sadly,] one’s material position is of prime concern and importance.” 17 Filipp Kikorov in “Zaika – maksimalist,” Kul’t lichnostei, November/ December 1999: 58–63. For another view of how musical estrada is in fact a vehicle for bigger ideas, see Laima Vaikule in the same magazine a month later: “Russkii agent,” Kul’t lichnostei, January/February 2000: 54–9. 18 Chapter 3 of Vera Dunham’s study of Soviet literature (In Stalin’s Time [Durham: Duke University Press 1990]) gives some credit to sentiment but frames it in the context of material gain, stressing the objects in a postwar “happy home” rather than the fact that it managed to remain happy. Svetlana Boym’s work on memory (Common Places [Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1994]) has emphasized aspects of private experience in the Soviet Union but does so with severe reference to kitsch, poshlost’, and nostalgia. On Soviet sentimentalism as a recurrent element in literature, see Mikhail Epstein, After the Future (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1995), 79–82.

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19

20

21

22

23

The first two of these works are perhaps inclined towards some schematization of private experience, all in order to organize untidy or complex multiplicity. The other matter is that sentiment or emotion runs throughout all the periods discussed in these texts; it is one phenomenon hidden under (or by) several names. It is also neither “nostalgic” nor retrospective, but both productive and able to look in all directions at all times. Kristina Orbakaite about her film Limita in “Zhizn’ po limitu,” Kino Park 12, no. 31 (December 1999): 54–8. Her more recent project, the movie Fara, concerns a crippled boy who grows up to be so painfully honest and kind that the opposing intensity of Russia’s criminal society tries constantly to eradicate him. Here, too, friendship and love triumph with such emotional force that the film was attacked on occasion for being excessively maudlin. For an unkind critique of its presentation at the Moscow Film Festival, for example, see . For Pugacheva on homophobia, see “Alla pod Novyi god vpustila v svoi dom telekameru,” Kaleidsokop 52 (27 December 1999): back cover. The article notes correctly that Pugacheva was such an important part of the New Year’s celebrations that she appeared on several channels almost simultaneously: ort, rtr, ntv, and tv6. It also makes brief mention of the upcoming traditional “Christmas Rendezvous” (Rozhdestvenskie vstrechi), a show hosted regularly by Pugacheva, which in 2000 was filmed both in her house (to stress the sentimental or domestic) and with an air of (contrived) spontaneity or change. The program was replete with shaky shoulder-mounted shots, apparent outtakes, and countdown frames. It was broadcast on rtr on 7 January 2000. A slightly critical view of Pugacheva’s benevolent stance on homosexuality can be found in “Bezumnyi mir: Oni plokho sebia vedut,” OM , December 1999: 38. “Èstrada: istoriia boleznei za 20 let,” Argumenty i fakty 51 (1999): 14. The reference here is to Pugacheva again, in particular her classic Soviet double album Kak trevozhen ètot put’. Alla Pugacheva in “Mne strana ne dala zarabotat’ kak sleduet,” Teleman, 3–9 January 2000: 3. Interestingly enough, Èdita P’ekha, who always gives concerts on New Year’s Eve in St Petersburg, has also dedicated recent repertoires to the theme of “starting anew.” “Kak vstretiat Novyi god piterskie zvezdy,” AiF – Peterburg 52 (1999): 15. See, for example, the observations by Valerii Leont’ev, Larisa Dolina, and Alena Apina in “Valerii Leont’ev rabotal Dedom Morozom,” Dochki – materi 24, no. 118 (December 1999): 2. See also some interesting observations on the millennium and tradition by Kobzon’s remarkably gifted pianist, Levon Oganezov, in “Luchshii taper,” Medved’, December 1999–January 2000: 32–6. 336

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notes to p age s 241–5 24 “S Novym godom, dorogie chitateli!” Voiazh, December 1999–January 2000: 3. 25 G. Epifanov, “Govorite mne o liubvi,” Ogonek 18 (1993), a special issue dedicated to Klavdiia Shul’zhenko, who forged her career with wwii front-line concerts for the Red Army: Te, kogo my liubili. 26 L. Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (London and New York: Routledge 1992), 79 (emphasis added). 27 G. Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1998), 75. For affect in a broader context, see B. Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” in P. Patton, ed., Deleuze: A Critical Reader (London: Blackwell 1996), 217–39. 28 G. Deleuze, Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press 1995), 137. 29 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1998), 400. 30 M. de Cervantes, Don Quixote (New York: W.W. Norton 1981), 601 (emphasis added). Interestingly enough, this and other related episodes received particular attention in the Soviet film of Cervantes’s tale, starring the wife of Aleksandr Vertinskii and discussed earlier. 31 P. Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire (London and Thousand Oaks: Sage 1996), 217. 32 Cervantes, Don Quixote, 605. On this transformational reciprocity of Don Quixote and Dulcinea, together with the heart’s avoidance of hierarchies, see E. Auerbach, “The Enchanted Dulcinea,” in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1981). 33 Viazemskii as quoted in Olga Peters Hasty, Pushkin’s Tatiana (Madison: University of Wisconsin 1999), 80. 34 Ibid., 7, 17, 87 (my emphasis). 35 Praise for the bandleader Leonid Utesov by M. Shaginian, Sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh, vol. 7 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura 1988), 496. 36 Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari, 56. 37 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1983), 1–2. 38 Deleuze, Foucault, 70. 39 G. Deleuze “Seminar Session [1974] on Scholasticism and Spinoza (Vincennes).” Published only at . 40 On joy and becoming or returning, see G. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press 1983), 190. 41 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 263. 337

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notes to pages 245–53 42 G. Deleuze, “D as in Desire,” L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, avec Claire Parnet (1988–89), . 43 G. Deleuze, Dialogues (London: Athlone 1987), 96. 44 G. Deleuze, “Ethics without Morality,” in G. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights Books 1988), and included among selected essays in C.V. Boundas, ed., The Deleuze Reader (New York: Columbia University Press 1993), 69–78. 45 D. Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press 1999), 213. 46 Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari, 189. 47 A. Vartanian on Klavdiia Shul’zhenko in “Ty pomnish’ nashi vstrechi,” Vechernii klub, 20 February 1996: 8. 48 G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press 1994), 24. 49 Ibid., 21–2. 50 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 186. 51 R.J. Ackerman, Nietzsche: A Frenzied Look (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1990), 163–4. 52 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 57. On the opposite state of affairs, the representation of enduring fixed states, see Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press 1990), 12. 53 Delueze, Difference and Repetition, 300. 54 Deleuze, Foucault, 107. 55 G. Deleuze, “The Shame and the Glory: T.E. Lawrence,” in G. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical (New York: Columbia University Press 1998), 124. 56 Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of this Place, 86. 57 G. Deleuze, “An Unrecognized Precursor to Heidegger,” in Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 98. 58 Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, 300. 59 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press 1994), 179. 60 Ibid., 183. 61 Ibid., 175–6. 62 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 56.

chapter ten 1 From two somewhat gruesome “show-business” stories of 1912 by Aleksandr Vertinskii: “Moia nevesta” and “Papirosy Vesna,” published in Kievskaia nedelia 2:1–4 and 4:7–8 respectively. 2 A. Ferenc, “Music in the Socialist State,” in C. Kelly and D. Shepherd, eds., Russian Cultural Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998), 338

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3

4

5

6

7 8

9

10

11

12 13 14

109–20. Katerina Clark touches very briefly upon this difference as the product of Stalinism’s great “ambiguity.” She begins to explain such ambiguities as political; my point in this book has been to reverse our perspective and see the continuity in affect rather than the break in policy. K. Clark, “Aural Hieroglyphics?” in N. Condee, Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late Twentieth-Century Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1995), 1–21. Richard Stites takes a similar approach with his “dichotomy between the values of the regime and the tastes if the people.” R. Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1992), 45. S. Smith, C. Kelly, and L. McReynolds, “Commercial Culture and Consumerism,” in C. Kelly and D. Shepherd, Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998), 107. L. Volkov-Lannit, Iskusstvo zapechatlennogo zvuka (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1964), 90–3. The author says on page 58 that the Riga factory opened before Rebikov’s but identifies the date of the Latvian opening as 1901, not 1902. I take this to be a typo, corrected on page 93. Otherwise the author’s chronology makes no sense. For a very valuable description of rapm’s troubled existence, see A. Nelson, “The Struggle for Proletarian Music: rapm and the Cultural Revolution,” Slavic Review 59, no. 1 (2000): 101–32. R.A. Rothstein, “Popular Song in the nep Era,” in S. Fitzpatrick, A. Rabinowitch, and R. Stites, Russia in the Era of NEP (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1991), 268–94. Ibid., 269. C. Gilman, “The Fox-Trot and the New Economic Policy: A Case Study in Thingification and Cultural Imports,” Experiment/Èksperiment 2 (1996): 443–75. For the enormous influence of the tango on early twentieth-century mores in Russia, see Iurii Tsivian, “The Tango in Russia,” Experiment/ Èksperiment 2 (1996): 307–35. The Freudian quote is from M. BonchTomashevskii, Kniga o tango: Iskusstvo i seksual’nost’ (Moscow: Portugalov 1914), 27, 33. For a detailed discussion of this meeting and many other related matters, see A. Nelson, “Music and the Politics of Culture in Revolutionary Russia: 1921–1930” (unpublished phd thesis, University of Michigan 1993), 121–5. S. Ament, “Sing to Victory: The Role of Popular Song in the Soviet Union during World War ii” (unpublished phd dissertation, Indiana University 1996), 94–5. Ibid., 157–62. M. Magomaev, Liubov’ moia – melodiia (Moscow: Vagrius 1999), 81. Ibid., 85. 339

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notes to pages 258–69 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Ibid., 151. Ibid., 182. Ibid., 249. Ibid., 285. A. Gimmervert, Maiia Kristalinskaia (Moscow/Smolensk: Olimp/Rusich 1999), 370. Slavoj Žižek with regard to Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in the Slovenian’s study The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso 1999), 20 (my emphasis). S. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso 1997), 7. S. Žižek, “The Spectre of Ideology,” in S. Žižek, Mapping Ideology (London: Verso 1994), and E. Wright, ed., The Žižek Reader (Oxford: Blackwell 1999), 72 (emphasis added). Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 8–9 (emphasis added). Ibid., 30–1. S. Žižek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (London: Verso 1999), 228–9. S. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press 1993), 196–7. J.P. Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press 1987), 216–17. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 142. Ibid., 194, 196. See Joseph Brodsky and the Baroque and Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse, both published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. S. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge 1992), 176–7. Since I am talking of the big ideas held in little emotions, the reader might wish to explore a discussion of how Lacan approaches Kierkegaard’s use of his own private romance as a test for universal philosophy. See S. Melville, “Psychoanalysis and the Place of Jouissance,” Critical Inquiry 13 (Winter 1987), in particular 357–8. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 144–5. S. Žižek, “Kant with (or against) Sade,” published for the first time in Wright, The Žižek Reader, 283–301. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 218 (emphasis added). Žižek, Enjoy your Symptom! 48. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 40. J. Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press 1989), 11. J. Feher-Guervich, “The Jouissance of the Other and the Prohibition of Incest,” Other Voices 3, no. 1 (January 1999).

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notes to pages 269–71 39 S. Žižek, Looking Awry (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1998), 24; and Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 72 (emphasis added). 40 S. Žižek For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso 1991), 30–1 (emphasis added). 41 M. Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1991), 40–1. 42 Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 33–4. 43 Žižek, Everything You Wanted to Know, 225. 44 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 150. 45 Ibid., 180 (emphasis added). 46 Ibid., 322 (emphasis added). 47 Žižek, Looking Awry, 64–6. 48 Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! 186. 49 M. Dolar, “The Object Voice,” in R. Salecl and S. Žižek, eds., Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Durham: Duke University Press 1996), 22. 50 Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! 123 51 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 157; and J.F. MacCannell, Figuring Lacan: Criticism and the Cultural Unconsciousness (London: Croom Helm 1986), 17 n 17.

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AUDIO-VISUAL SOURCES

principal films Anna na shee (I. Annenskii: 1954) Bol’shaia zhizn’ (L. Lukov: 1939) Chelovek s ruzh’em (S. Iutkevich: 1936) Delo No. 306 (A. Rybakov: 1956) Don Kikhot (G. Kozintsev: 1957) Dva boitsa (L. Lukov: 1943) Ètot raznyi Utesov (lad: 1995) Èto sluchilos’ v militsii (V. Azarov: 1963) Ia vernulsia domoi (ort: 1996) Ia vozvrashchaiu vash portret (Lentelefil’m: 1983) Istrebiteli (È. Pentslin: 1939) Iubilei (Zykina’s Kremlin concert of 27 April 1997) Kogda pesnia ne konchaetsia (M. Tikhomirov: 1964) Korolevstvo krivykh zerkal (A. Rou: 1963) Maksimka (V. Braun: 1952) More studenoe (Iu. Egorov: 1954) Nochnoi patrul’ (V. Sukhobokov: 1957) Novye pokhozhdeniia Kota v sapogakh (A. Rou: 1957) Odisseia Vertinskogo (Lentelefil’m: 1990/1991 [two parts]) Oni byli pervymi (Iu. Egorov: 1956) Sadko (A. Ptushko: 1952) Shkola muzhestva (V. Basov: 1954) Taras Shevchenko (I. Savchenko: 1951) Tsirk (G. Aleksandrov: 1936)

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audio-visual sources Vecher pamiati Lidii Ruslanovoi Velikii perelom (F. Èrmler: 1945) Veselye rebiata (G. Aleksandrov: 1934) Volga-Volga (G. Aleksandrov: 1938) Zapasnoi igrok (S. Timoshenko: 1954) Zhenia, Zhenechka i Katiusha (V. Motyl’: 1967)

discography All the recordings are long-playing records or taped archival collections of an equivalent length. The number of songs on each listed recording concludes these entries. The letter “B” designates a bootleg, undated copy; the letter “S” designates the Safoshkin archives. Archival recordings aside, the best place to find these songs outside Russia is through émigré music stores in cities with large Russian populations, such as New York or Los Angeles. All such establishments advertise vigorously on the Internet, where downloadable sound files can also be discovered through the major search engines. Bernes Ia liubliu tebia, zhizn’ (Murzik: 1995), 24 Ia rabotaiu volshebnikom (Murzik: 1997), 19 Ia ulybaius’ tebe (Moroz: 2001), 22 Luchshie (Alma [B]), 19 Mikhail Isakovskii: Plastinka poèta (Melodiia), 1 Muzhskoi razgovor (Murzik: 1997), 20 Na ploshchadi Krasnoi (S), 31 Ogromnoe nebo (Moroz: 2001), 20 Pesnia posviashchaetsia moia … (Melodiia: 1995), 23 Poet Mark Bernes (Melodiia), 14 S dobrym utrom! (S), 31 Sluzhi, soldat! (S), 31 Temnaia noch’ (Moroz: 2001), 21 Volshebnik (B), 14 Zavetnyi moi perekrestok (Melodiia: 1986), 13 Iur’eva Esli mozhesh’, prosti (S), 32 Izabella Iur’eva (Kominform: 1999), 24 Na krylechke tvoem (S), 30 Zapisi 30kh–40kh godov (Melodiia), 16 Zolotye rossypi romansa (Vostok: 2000), 24

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audio-visual sources Kozin Dni za dniami katiatsia (S), 36 Ia liubliu Vas tak bezumno (Melodiia: 1994), 18 Lokon materi (S), 32 Mat’ (S), 34 Neizdannoe (tsvipikn: 2000), 13 Pis’mo Esenina (S), 32 Pis’mo iz Magadana (mo: 1997), 24 Pis’mo v Moskvu (S), 35 Proch’ pechal’ (S), 33 Rusaia golovka (S), 32 Vadim Kozin: Luchshie pesni 1 (Russkii disk: 1994), 19 Vadim Kozin: Luchshie pesni 2 (Russkii disk: 1994), 20 Vstuplenie … (S), 33 Zachem ia vliubilsia? (S), 30 Leshchenko Chernye glaza (SoLyd: 1994), 23 Leshchenko #1/2 (B), 28 Luchshee: Ne ukhodi (Proekt Z: 1996), 24 Petr Leshchenko (B), 14 Segodnia budu den’ poslednii zhdat’ (S), 29 Siniaia rapsodiia (S), 30 Skuchno (S), 30 Tsyganochka moia (S), 30 U samovara (SoLyd: 1994), 23 Vse, chto bylo (Melodiia: 1994), 22 Zolotye rossypi romansa (Kvadro: 2000), 21 Morfessi Pomniu, pomniu ia (S), 29 Rasstat’sia suzhdeno (S), 30 Russkii romans: Zolotaia seriia (Bomba: 2000), 24 Starinnyi val’s (S), 24 Vy prosite pesen (S), 31 Zolotye rossypi romansa (Kvadro: 2000), 19 Ruslanova Govorit i poet Lidiia Ruslanova (Melodiia: 1980), 10

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audio-visual sources Kontsert (Leningradskii zavod), 2 Lidiia Ruslanova (B), 12 Lidiia Ruslanova (B), 20 Lidiia Ruslanova (Melodiia: 1984), 9 Muzyka russkoi dushi (cd media: 1996), 17 Poet Lidiia Ruslanova (Melodiia: 1996), 19 Poet Lidiia Ruslanova (Melodiia), 12 Po ulitse mostovoi (Bomba: 2000), 23 Rasskaz o zhizni i o pesni (S), 21 Russkie narodnye pesni (Akkord), 10 Valenki (S), 31 Vniz po Volge-reke (S), 32 Shul’zhenko Golubka (S), 29 Klavdiia Shul’zhenko (B), 12 Klavdiia Shul’zhenko (B), 16 Klavdiia Shul’zhenko (B), 17 Klavdiia Shul’zhenko (B), 20 Klavdiia Shul’zhenko (B), 16 Klavdiia Shul’zhenko (B), 18 Klavdiia Shul’zhenko (B), 19 Klavdiia Shul’zhenko (Melodiia), 15 Nemnozhko o sebe (Melodiia: 1994), 20 O liubvi ne govori (Melodiia: 1986), 16 Pesni proshlykh let (Melodiia), 45 Pesni, rozhdennye voinoi (rcd: 1995), 25 Pod”ezd (S), 25 Poet Klavdiia Shul’zhenko (Melodiia), 14 Poet Klavdiia Shul’zhenko (Melodiia), 25 Portret (S), 28 Shul’zhenko #1 (Alma [B]), 21 Sinii platochek (Bomba: 2001), 20 Starinnyi val’s (Bomba: 2000), 24 Tol’ko odin den’ (Melodiia: 1986), 12 Ty pomnish’ nashi vstrechi? (rcd: 1995), 23 Vernost’ (Melodiia: 1986), 16 Vstrechi (S), 28 Zapisi 40-kh godov (Melodiia), 14 Tsereteli Ne govorite mne o nem (S), 36 346

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audio-visual sources Utesov Akh, Odessa moia (Kominform: 1996), 21 Boroda (S), 30 Dorogie Moskvichi (Kominform: 1996), 22 Dorogie Moskvichi (S), 32 Doroga na Berlin (Russkii disk: 1995), 24 Gop so smykom (Kominform: 1995), 14 Gop so smykom (S), 24 Gosudarstvennyi èstradnyi orkestr (Melodiia; 1965?), 8 Leningradskie mosty (S), 21 Limonchiki (S), 21 Lunnaia rapsodiia (Kominform: 1996), 15 Marsh (S), 21 Na kontserte Leonida Utesova (Melodiia; 1980), 11 Neizvestnyi Utesov (Gramzapis Company: 1990), 24 Odessit Mishka (S), 27 Odesskii port (Kominform: 1997), 23 Odnazhdy v sadu otdykha (Melodiia: 1985), 1, plus comic sketches Ot vsego serdtsa (Melodiia), 11 Para gnedykh (Kominform: 1995), 16 Parokhod (S), 29 Poet Leonid Utesov (Melodiia), 13 Poliushko pole (Kominform: 1995), 18 Rasstalis’ my (S), 30 U Chernogo moria (Kominform: 1996), 24 Utesov (Akkord: 1962?), 6 Veselye rebiata (S), 14 Zapisi 30kh–40kh godov (Melodiia: 1971?), 29 Zapisi 40kh godov (Melodiia), 15 Zhdi menia (Kominform: 1996), 17 Vertinskii Aleksandr Vertinskii 1927–1957 (Melodiia: 1970?), 15 Aleksandr Vertinskii (Melodiia), 15 Aleksandr Vertinskii #1/2 (B), 24 Aleksandr Vertinskii: Neizdannoe (tsvpikno: 1997), 18 Belyi parokhodik (S), 25 Chuzhie goroda (S), 23 Luchshee (i &s International), 15 Pesni liubvi (rdm: 1995), 19 Seroglazochka (S), 29 To, chto ia dolzhen skazat’ (Melodiia: 1994), 19 347

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audio-visual sources Vertinskii (B), 14 Vertinskii (B), 22 Zapisi 20kh godov (Melodiia), 14 Zheltyi angel (cd media: 1996), 25 Zheltyi angel (S), 31 Zykina A liubov’ vse zhiva (Melodiia: 1996), 16 Lish’ ty smogla, moia Rossiia (Melodiia), 15 Liudmila Zykina (Melodiia), 13 Liudmila Zykina (B), 13 Liudmila Zykina (S), 26 Liudmila Zykina (S), 28 Pesni liubvi: Pesni na stikhi L’va Oshanina (Melodiia: 1995), 21 Poet Liudmila Zykina (Melodiia), 12 Poet Liudmila Zykina (Melodiia), 10 Poet Liudmila Zykina (Melodiia), 14 Russkie narodnye pesni (Akkord), 12 Techet reka Volga (Soiuz: 1996), 16 Techet reka Volga (S), 25 Vospominanie: Russkie romansy (Melodiia), 11 Miscellaneous Abramov, G. (S), 33 Aleksandrovich, M. (S), 29 Aleksandrovich, M. (Zolotye rossypi romansa/Kvadro: 2000), 15 Antologiia dzhaza: Èddi Rozner (Kvadro: 2000), 18 Antologiia dzhaza: Nikolai Minkh (Kvadro: 2000), 16 Antologiia dzhaza: Viktor Knushevitskii (Kvadro: 2000), 18 Beibutov, R. (S), 28 Bunchikov, V.: Letiat pereletnye ptitsy (S), 28 Bunchikov, V.: Soldatskaia podruga (S), 30 Bunchikov, V. and V. Nechaev: Grustnye ivy (S), 31 Bunchikov, V. and V. Nechaev: Liricheskii val’s (S), 27 Chernaia, L.: Ia tsygankoi rodilas’ (S), 30 Dul’kevich, N. (Bomba: 2000), 23 Dzhaparidze, K: Ia vam ne govoriu (S), 32 Dzhaparidze, K. (Zolotye rossypi romansa/Kvadro: 2000), 17 Dzhaz Armenii (S), 28 Dzhaz A. Tsfasmana: Utomlennoe solntse (S), 31 Dzhaz A. Tsfasmana: Zvuki dzhaza (S), 27

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audio-visual sources Dzhaz A. Varlamova (S), 27 Dzhaz Èddi Roznera (S), 24 Dzhaz Èddi Roznera: Mandolina, gitara i bas (S), 28 Dzhaz Ia. Skomorovskogo (S), 32 Dzhaz-orkester N. Minkha (S) Dzhaz-orkester N. Minkha: Vesna (S), 20 Èizen, A. (S), 26 Èkh raz, eshche raz! (Kvadro: 2000), 15 Èroticheskaia sovetskaia pesnia (aanb: 1996), 12 Flaks, E. (S), 29 Gori, gori, moia zvezda (Zolotoi fond: 2000), 17 Grebenshchikov, B.: Pesni Aleksandra Vertinskogo (Fili: 1995), 13 Grezy liubvi (Kvadro: 2000), 15 Iarostnyi stroiotriad (Melodiia: 1999), 19 Ia vstretil Vas (Zolotoi fond: 2000), 15 Iza Kremer/Alla Baianova (Kvadro-Disk: 2000), 23 Kamionskii, O. (Bomba: 2000), 23 Kandelaki, V.: Kuplety Sako (S), 32 Karinskaia, M. (Bomba: 2000), 23 Khor im. M. Piatnitskogo (S), 28 Kirichek, P. (S), 32 Klassicheskie russkie romansy (Bomba Piter: 1998), 22 Kogda vesna pridet (Melodiia: 1996), 20 Kostritsa, L.: Sibirskii vecher (S), 35 Kozlovskii, I. (S), 23 Lemeshev, S. (Zolotye rossypi romansa/Kvadro: 2000), 22 Lemeshev, S.: O, Mari (S), 31 Lemeshev, S.: Pesnia o pesne (S), 29 Lemeshev, S.: U vorot, vorot (S), 31 Luchshie tsyganskie pesni i romansy (4 volumes; Familiia: 2000), total 72 Luchshie vokalisty Rossii (S), 29 L’vovskii dzhaz (S) Moe poslednee tango (Zolotoi fond: 2000), 14 Moia Marusechka (Zolotoi fond: 2000), 16 Morskie pesni: More shumit (S), 29 Morskie pesni: Skalistye gory (S), 33 Narovskaia, M. (Zolotye rossypi romansa/Kvadro: 2000), 17 Nechaev, V.: Kostry goriat dalekie (S), 28 Nechaev, V.: Segodnia mne ne veselo (S), 29 Nechaev, V.: Vasilechki-vasil’ki (S), 32 Nesterenko, E.: Moia Moskva (S), 24 Obukhova, N.: Klassicheskie pesni i romansy (Melodiia), 13 Obukhova, N.: Pesni sovetskikh kompozitorov (Melodiia), 11

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audio-visual sources Obukhova, N.: Somnenie (S), 27 Obukhova, N.: Za dal’neiu okolitsei (S), 22 Orkestr V. Meshcherina (S), 27 Ots, G. (Zolotye rossypi romansa/Kvadro: 2000), 21 Panina, V. (Bomba: 2000), 26 Pesni Aleksandry Pakhmutovoi (S), 26 Pesni Beloi Gvardii (S), 28 Pesni B. Mokrousova (S), 26 Pesni grazhdanskoi voiny (Bomba: 2000), 17 Pesni iz kinofil’mov (S), 22 Pesni iz kinofil’mov: “Tachanka” (S), 31 Pesni katorzhan (S), 26 Pesni ob otechestvennoi voine (Melodiia), 13 Pesni o letchikakh (S), 29 Pesni o Moskve (S), 25 Pesni o shkole (S), 30 Pesni partizanskie (Bomba: 2000), 15 Pesni pervoi mirovoi voiny (Bomba: 2000), 21 Pesni russkikh revoliutsii (Bomba: 2000), 26 Pesni sovetskikh kompozitorov: Russkaia narodnaia pesnia (Melodiia), 13 Pesni Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny (B), 33 Pesni Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny (B), 9 Pesni Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny (B), 18 Pesni Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny (B), 19 Pesni voennykh let (S), 25 Pesni voennykh let (S), 29 Pionerskie i shkol’nye pesni (S), 30 Plevitskaia, N. (Bomba: 2000), 20 Podmoskovnie vechera (Zolotoi fond: 2000), 15 Pogodin, A., and R. Rozhdestvenskaia (S), 31 Revoliutsionnye i voennye pesni (S), 29 Russkie val’sy (tsvpikno: 1997), 19 Russkoe tango (aanb: 1995), 14 Serebrianyi vek (cd media: 1996), 25 [Tsfasman’s orchestra] Sergei Lemeshev Sings (Melodiia), 16 Severskii, N. (Bomba: 2000), 24 Shaliapin, F. (Zolotye rosspyi romansa/Kvadro: 2000), 19 Shiroka strana moia rodnaia (Zolotoi fond/Kvadro: 2000), 15 Shmelev, I. (S), 28 Sikora, R. (S), 30 Sikora, R.: Mal’chishka (S), 29 Skobtsov, I. (S), 26 Sokol’skii, K.: Razveselye chastushki (S), 32

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audio-visual sources Sovetskie pesni (Melodiia), 14 Starinnye romansy (S), 35 Sto let rossiiskoi èstrady (six volumes; Music Express: 2000), total 152 Sviashchennaia voina (Russkii disk: 1995), 20 Tamara, N. (Bomba: 2000), 25 Tam vdali, za rekoi (Zolotoi fond: 2000), 15 Tebe, liubimaia! (Zolotoi fond: 2000), 14 Utomlennoe solntse (Zolotoi fond: 1999), 17 Velikie i nepovtorimye zvezdy sovetskogo kino (2 volumes; Russian disc: 1996), total 48 Vinogradov, G. (S), 31 Vinogradov, G. (Bomba: 2000), 24 Vinogradov, G.: Moriaki (S), 31 V parke Chair (Melodiia: 1995), 22 V parke Chair 2 (Melodiia: 1996), 19 V parke Chair 3 (Melodiia: 1997), 18 Voennye marshy (S), 34 Znamenitye èmigranty 20kh–30kh godov: Blatnoe popurri (S), 30 Znamenitye èmigranty 20kh–30kh godov: Èi, Vy, zaletnye (S), 31 Znamenitye èmigranty 20kh–30kh godov: Pesennoe popurri (S), 29 Znamenitye èmigranty 20kh–30kh godov: Pesnia arestanta (S), 29 Znamenitye èmigranty 20kh–30kh godov: Poteriannaia liubov’ (S), 30 Znamenitye èmigranty 20kh–30kh godov: Pozhar moskovskii (S), 29 Znamenitye èmigranty 20kh–30kh godov: Priznaisia mne (S), 31 Znamenitye èmigranty 20kh–30kh godov: Proletaia streloi (S), 31 Znamenitye èmigranty 20kh–30kh godov: Solovei-ptashechka (S), 30 Znamenitye èmigranty 20kh–30kh godov: Tol’ko raz (S), 31 Znamenitye èmigranty 20kh–30kh godov: Tsyganskaia stoianka (S), 28 Zvezdy sovetskogo dzhaza: Veselye rebiata (Zolotoi fond/Kvadro: 2000), 16

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INDEX

Aleksandrov, G., 124 Andropov, Iu., 74 Babel’, I., 114, 116, 128–9 Bal’mont, K., 92 Beriia, L., 78 Bernes, M., 48, 60, 63, 168, 238; biography, 169–82; films, 188–98; texts, 182–8 Blok, A., 27, 92 Brecht, B., 266–7 Bregvadze, N., 32 Brezhnev, L., 73–4, 113, 161, 211, 215, 217, 258

123, 129, 144, 146, 149–50, 182, 239, 259 Dzhaparidze, K., 30 Evtushenko, E., 166, 174, 200 Freud, S., 261–2, 268–9, 272 Gorbachev, M., 73–5, 112, 219 Gor’ki, M., 1, 121, 123 Hammer, A., 25 Hegel, G., 263–4

Chaliapin, F., 41, 97 Chaplin, C., 65 Chernenko, K., 215 Chevalier, M., 78, 97 Churchill, W., 78–9

Iur’eva, I., 30, 38, 63, 66–8, 121, 150, 163; biography, 21–9; texts, 32–6

Deleuze, G. (with F. Guattari), 28, 36–7, 234, 244–7, 249–53, 261–5, 269, 271–2 Dietrich, M., 78, 92 Dostoevskii, F., 71, 144 Dunaevskii, I., 14–19, 21, 24, 27, 47, 50, 60, 85,

Kant, I., 267–8 Kholodnaia, V., 65, 92 Khrushchev, N., 27, 131, 178, 217, 257–8 Kierkegaard, S., 247–9, 266–8 Kobzon, I., 29, 162, 238, 257, 259–60

Kozin, V., 63, 92, 112–13, 208, 256; biography, 64–79; texts, 79–85 Kremer, I., 78–9, 117 Kristalinskaia, M., 160, 259–60 Lacan, J., 261–4, 268–9, 271–2 Lebedev-Kumach, V., 14, 18, 129, 167, 182, 256 Lenin, V., 11, 43, 143, 189 Lermontov, M., 142, 192 Leshchenko, P., 37–9, 62–3, 75, 101, 130, 256; biography, 44–52; texts, 52–62 Lipkovskaia, L., 117, 145 Magomaev, M., 257–9 Maiakovskii, V., 103, 144 Marshak, S., 25 Marx, K., 270–2 Mikhalkov, N., 43, 154, 222 Montand, Y., 180 Morfessi, I., 23, 37–9, 45, 62–4, 72, 99, 117; biography, 39–44; texts, 52–62

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index nep (New Economic Policy), 12–13, 52, 65, 94, 139 Nicholas II, 12, 41–2, 44, 195 Nietzsche, F., 246–7, 249, 268, 270

Ruslanova, L., 63, 68, 200–1, 256; biography, 201–10; texts, 222–6

Panina, V., 65, 72 P’ekha, È., 167, 199, 257–8 Prozorovskii, B., 30 Pugacheva, A., 166, 217, 238, 241 Pushkin, A., 11, 27, 142, 213, 243

Shostakovich, D., 17, 21, 24, 26, 123, 172 Shul’zhenko, K., 19–21, 48, 68, 73, 101, 141, 216, 256; biography, 142–63; texts, 163–7 Stalin, I., 13, 15–16, 21, 24–5, 27, 30, 50, 67, 70, 72–3, 102, 113, 124–5, 127–8, 131, 140, 170, 175, 257 Stanislavskii, K., 89

Raikin, A., 162 rapm (Russian Association for Proletarian Musicians), 16–17, 21, 24, 66, 122–3, 139, 146–7, 149, 254–5

Tarkovskii, A., 19 Tolstoi, L., 27, 65, 220 Tsereteli, T., 66–7, 72, 121, 138, 144, 150, 163; biography, 29–32; texts, 32–6

354

Utesov, L., 15, 17–19, 21, 113, 173–4, 204, 238, 256; biography 114–32; texts, 133–40 Vertinskii, A., 23, 62, 69–70, 77, 80, 86, 117, 142, 148, 238; biography, 87–104; texts, 105–12 Yeltsin, B., 27–8, 73 Zhdanov, A., 20, 26 Zhukov, G., 48, 207–8 Žižek, S., 234, 260–7, 269–72 Zoshchenko, M., 15, 25, 116, 149 Zykina, L., 200–1, 203, 209, 257; biography, 210–22; texts, 226–32