Balalaika and Co – Weekend

“Matryoshka, balalaika, Volga, hut” – these words begin the song of the Center group “Forever”. The lyrics of the song are a set of popular clichés of “Russianness”; this is a table of the most elementary symbols of Russia. Reflects on how to deal with common images Yuri Saprykin.

The Center album was recorded and released in France in 1989, and later released by Melodiya under the name Made in Paris. On the cover of the French record there is a typical painting of the Stalin era: a smiling accordion player stretching out his furs, and a beautiful collective farmer with a bouquet of wild flowers came out onto a hill above a river that stretched widely in the distance. That is, a set of patterns that are recognizable in the West and labeled as Soviet or Russian. But even in Russia, this collection of signs is fully recognized as Russian art: in the 1990s, for the project of conceptual artists Komar and Melamid “The People’s Choice,” sociologists conducted a survey on what an ideal Russian painting should look like—the result was something like this , with a spreading river.

“Borscht, samovar, satellite, pancakes”

In the late 1980s, it seemed that Russian rock itself was becoming one of such symbols of Russia for the West: after the fall of the Iron Curtain, interest in musicians from the USSR was enormous, everyone was being taken somewhere and offered contracts, perestroika was bringing yesterday’s Soviet underground to the peak of world fashion. For the musicians themselves, this turn is as unexpected as it is natural: you spent your whole life listening to Dylan and Donovan or The Cure and New Order, tried to play like them – and now you find yourself in the same cultural space with them. Moscow mods from “Center” in the video for the song “Forever” (filmed in Brussels) look the same as current bands from Glasgow or Lyon, French producers gave them a “signature” new wave sound, the guitar riff on which the track rests is clearly a reference to the sitar part from “Paint It Black” by The Rolling Stones. All identification marks clearly communicate: we are ours.

Meanwhile, for Europe, music from Russia is still exotic, no one needs the new The Cure with a Russian accent, it’s just Sputnik and pancakes that are interesting. And Gorby rock musicians have to adjust the navigation system: this is how guitars in the shape of a balalaika, photographs with St. Basil in the background, and T-shirts with a hammer and sickle appear. The most elegant of all, as always, is the Kino group, which stylizes the cover of their French record as a Malevich poster for the film Doctor Mabuse. Not a nesting doll or a samovar, but still something distinctly Russian – and at the same time futuristic, like the most fashionable European sound.

“Pushkin, E. Yevtushenko, Ivanov, Petrova”

The leader of the Center, Vasily Shumov, has a characteristic vocal style: he sings monotonously and deliberately aloof. In combination with the text, which in itself is a list, a protocol enumeration, this gives an additional degree of detachment: everything that Shumov lists is certainly his own for him – and at the same time he has nothing to do with it. Pushkin and Sputnik – does he speak about them with pride or with irony? Is this an export cranberry for him or integral elements of the cultural code? The cold, emotionless voice allows for any interpretation; today this would be called post-irony. On the French album there is a song “Man”, where such authorial splitting is presented openly: Shumov’s lyrical hero observes from the side the actions of a certain person and in the end discovers that this person is himself.

Such sliding on the edge between acceptance and rejection is a technique from the arsenal of Moscow conceptual art, allowing one to get out of the vicious circle of confrontation between “Soviet” and “anti-Soviet”: even the most callous cliché can become an object of reflection, and in some cases even detached admiration, if lined up according to an ironic distance towards him. To fall off this brink in any direction would mean turning the text into journalism or propaganda; such a transformation is quite possible, and now, perhaps, even realized. “Everything that is in this song is present in the current state policy in full force,” Shumov himself said in an interview in 2016.

“Kurchatov, Kalashnikov, Vintikov, Shpuntikova”

What will happen to the song “Forever”, if you remove the irony, is demonstrated by the track “Russian Lighthouses” released this year by Grigory Leps and Yulia Chicherina. The same principle: a listing of concepts and surnames that have become symbols of Russia, only instead of cold guitar new wave – old-fashioned pop hard rock from the anniversary evening in the Kremlin Palace. In this genre, there can be no question of any detachment: passion and strain in the voices are turned to the maximum. Shumov ironically connects Pushkin and Yevtushenko (with the clerical-sounding initial “E.”) in one line, adding here the surnames “Vintikov, Shpuntikova” – an allusion to the popular journalistic image during perestroika: they say, an ordinary person was a cog inside the Soviet system. The authors of “Russian Lighthouses”, in addition to the unconditional selection of classic writers and Soviet military leaders, without any irony, put Sholokhov and Pasternak next to each other (so what, both received the Nobel Prize), commemorate Tyutchev and Mandelstam, and there are also the words “Diaghilev is with us” and Brodsky.” The Leps-Chicherina track also shows how the sound of this list of symbols changes if it is not directed outward, but serves exclusively for internal use. Shumov’s exported “matryoshka-balalaika” should be unusual, a little exotic, they somehow arouse interest. The list of iconic figures from “Russian Lighthouses” can afford any eclecticism and tautology; they are not here for interest, but for self-winding: we are on a par with Tsiolkovsky, Levitan, etc., which means we are all great.

“Traditions, customs, Masha, Vanya”

In a certain sense, this is how any cultural canon works: the point is not what values ​​Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (Shakespeare, Moliere, Dante) passed on to their descendants or how they mastered the word – it is enough that they belonged to the national culture, this in itself increases the status of the whole nations in an imaginary ranking. “We are Tolstoy’s nation” does not mean the same pacifists, the same vegetarians or subtle researchers of the human soul; just as cool. He wrote novels better than anyone, which means that we, his compatriots, are good for something. The connection between the two statements is not logical, but purely emotional, and therefore works best in commercials and election campaigns.

Just as easily, based on emotions, the qualities that can be attributed to these universally significant cultural symbols are attached here: so in the Soviet school they said more or less about every writer that he was characterized by a love of freedom and hatred of tyranny, but now about them from the official point of view From the point of view, it becomes important that they cultivated their own, special, and did not accept what was coming from the West. The composition of the canon can be anything, but in the basic properties attributed to it, the voice of the state is heard – or, on the contrary, the cultural communities arguing with it.

“Breadth, expanse, Lucy, Styopa”

Russian culture is often credited with a certain defining quality; recently, “imperiality” is most often proposed as such. They recall the long-standing dispute between Milan Kundera and Joseph Brodsky: the Czech prose writer, using the example of Dostoevsky, argued that in Russia “feelings have been raised to the level of values ​​and truths,” and “national feelings, even the most noble ones, are capable of justifying the cruellest horrors at any moment.” This kind of statement can never be completely refuted: even in the most humane classic, somewhere in a diary or correspondence you can always find half a line that reveals a chauvinist in him, and in terms of the emotional chaos leading to the justification of evil, you don’t have to go far – about this in We are half the school curriculum.

But any such arguments start from one default assumption: that a national culture generally must have one defining feature that permeates and shapes everything else (including pancakes). The true grain, the “Koshcheev’s needle” is right there, the rest is decor that hides the essence. But this is no less a simplification than the “matryoshka-balalaika”: to present national culture in this way means to see only one of the possibilities realized in it.

Meanwhile, “traditions-customs” are not a list of concepts and names descended from heaven in a directive order; This is a choice that is updated every second, and not only by authorized departments, but by every person. From the materials available in cultural use, one can compile a canon of code-mindedness and a canon of veneration of rank, a tradition of European splendor and a line of specifically local chthony, and it is not Tolstoy and Dostoevsky who are to blame for the fact that these (and not others) ideas are in the air today, supposedly in advance everything that determined two hundred years in advance. If you want not to be an “imperial”, don’t be one; In culture, there are various sets of strategies and meanings and a compelling series of antecedents for this case. And among the different options for understanding Russianness, of course, there is one: loving and ironic, feeling kinship and able to look from a distance, distinctly national in essence and cosmopolitan in form. “Everything is ours forever” – this now applies to Shumov’s song itself.

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