Evidence of something that didn’t happen – Weekend

Music by Alexandra Pakhmutova, lyrics by Nikolai Dobronravov: this is the first association associated with a Soviet song, like “fruit – apple” or “poet – Pushkin”. 75 years together, hundreds of works, all possible awards and prizes, the status of undisputed classics, acquired in the middle of a long life. For the second half of the Soviet 20th century, the songs of Pakhmutova and Dobronravov were like a coordinate grid or a cloud of tags: they marked reality as the official authorities wanted it to be. Pakhmutova wrote about war, space and sports, for anniversaries and congresses, about Malaya Zemlya (in the footsteps of Brezhnev’s memoirs) and Lenin-party-Komsomol, for large construction projects and heroic professions (geologists, pilots, submariners); about everything that was considered important. All official songwriters tried to do something similar, but among the decorated pop generals, the Pakhmutova-Dobronravovs stand separately, not in the general ranks. Yuri Saprykin tells how they did everything that the party and the government wanted from them, but at the same time went somewhere aside; while remaining within the prescribed framework, they expanded them from the inside.

These songs immediately coincided with their time: they appeared at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, when Soviet people began to have a private life. Not a barracks, not a barracks or a communal apartment, but an apartment in a five-story building – and the accompanying right to one’s own inner life, which does not coincide with the general choir. The song’s optics take on a human scale: Pakhmutova and Dobronravov go to the construction of the Bratsk hydroelectric power station and see there not the frame of the future dam, but girls who “dance on the deck” and “believe in difficult happiness.” Around the same time, Mikael Tariverdiev began working, giving Soviet song an injection of Baroque and Renaissance music, and Andrei Petrov, enveloping it in restrained northern melancholy. Pakhmutova, in comparison, remains within the conventional Soviet framework; her songs grow from the music to which people dance, walk, and feel sad—this is an urban romance, a march, a waltz; they can almost always be played by a brass band. But, minus the obligatory pioneer-Komsomol works, which still appeal to the collective principle, these songs deal with the inner life of the soul.

In the early songs of Pakhmutova-Dobronravov there is still a lot of characteristically Soviet lyricism, “zhivinka” and “little man”, their optimism in a few years will seem old-fashioned: for example, the heroes of “The Irony of Fate” in the mid-1970s sing the iconic song of the last decade “The Main thing, guys, don’t grow old in your heart” – no longer on a taiga trail or at a rest around a fire, but in a bathhouse, naked and drunk. But this diminutive art gradually acquires a different dynamic – and soars from too human lyrics to romantic pathos. The imperative of many of Pakhmutova’s songs is to fly, swim, get home, go beyond human limits, where everything will change in an incredible way: the star Altair will suddenly light up in the sky of familiar apartments. The lyrical hero of these songs deals with the primary elements, the blind unpredictable elements: snow, wind, night flight of stars. The alarming distance is calling. The song itself should burn like wildfire. Even revolution in these texts is most often not a specific historical event, but an image of overcoming, transformation, and the word “Komsomol” occupies a place in the row between “love” and “spring”.

In a sense, this romantic sublimation also works for the needs of the state: a person is not allowed to calm down on a well-deserved small-sized sofa; He is always dragged somewhere – on a hike, a flight, on a long business trip, to a Komsomol construction site. But Pakhmutova’s harsh romance is no longer justified by “building a bright future,” but by the possibility of some kind of internal transformation. This semantic superstructure colors the so-called objective reality: everyday hardships and hard work are repackaged here into the matrix of an existential breakthrough. Historians call such mechanisms “emotional mode”: it is customary to experience certain circumstances and situations in this era in this way. It is not even necessary to actually experience it, but to keep it in mind as an example: Pakhmutova sets this ideal emotional spectrum for her time.

Heroic romance is not the only tonality characteristic of Pakhmutova: among hundreds of songs there are purely official ones (“To the Sunny World – yes, yes, yes”), and familiar table songs (“Listen, mother-in-law, dear friend, help”), and touchingly soulful (“I can’t do otherwise”); Often I would like to narrow this spiritual breadth. Her heroic-romantic line is also played out in different registers – right up to disappointment and a tragic ending. Burning too bright ends in burnout, Pakhmutova also has something like this: we are separated from fairy tales, we have already played the first half as we sincerely loved – Gradsky’s voice is trembling, and it is clear that this is so sincerely never will be again. Or here’s another thing: Pakhmutova’s main songs about the conquest of space (this would seem to be the apotheosis of Soviet optimism) are a four-track requiem for Gagarin, not glorification or a solemn ode, but farewell. And here another topic that is most important for Pakhmutova-Dobronravova arises.

One of the highest points of their entire song corpus is “Tenderness” performed by Maya Kristalinskaya. The theme is as old as Yaroslavna’s cry: the beloved has left, the earth is empty without him. The hero the singer is addressing is a pilot or astronaut, he is somewhere in the sky and will return in a few hours. This is if you look at the text, but the music takes you into another dimension: cold, loneliness, languid pre-dawn melancholy. The text is written from the perspective of a woman left on the ground, the music conveys the state of a pilot lost in the sky. Perhaps forever.

“Tenderness” is one of the things in which Pakhmutova and Dobronravov talk with death. Their songs either stop before the last threshold, peering into the darkness (“My finishing ribbon, everything will pass, and you will accept me…”), then they try to break through, entering another dimension (“Do you know what kind of guy he was? No, not “was”, because he conquered death!”), sometimes it seems that they sound from the other side: “Everything, like smoke, has melted away, your voice is lost in the distance” – where can “your devoted Orpheus” sing about this? throughout the entire range of emotional modes, the authors must say something about the meeting with death, without this the series will be incomplete – and here it is not the heroic romance that Pakhmutova-Dobronravov cranked up to the maximum that is manifested, but specifically Soviet stoicism. trials and hardships build character, life on the edge is the best life possible, and dignity must be maintained even in the face of the inevitable.

In fact, these songs don’t really fit in with the reality that gave birth to them. Was the average listener of Pakhmutova in the 1970s ready to join the “brotherhood of those who despised death”, to what extent was this cynical society “only with the truth along the way” and were the real construction brigades at least somewhat (in a good sense) furious? Sometimes fiction is stronger than reality: the power of these songs was enough to cancel eyewitness accounts after the fact. In the logic of today’s fans of everything Soviet, there was authenticity and truth in the song “And the Battle Continues Again,” and memories of the general apathy of the 1970s and endless queues for sausage are a dirty slander aimed at denigrating a great era. And yet it is impossible to deny these songs some degree of reality; for many they determined, if not the very texture of life, then at least the way in which it was experienced. That “extra, dysfunctional mental floor” that Pelevin wrote about in 1993 in his essay “John Fowles and the tragedy of Russian liberalism.” “An additional space of awareness of oneself and the world, which in a naturally developing society is available only to a few”; “Sovok spent his days very far from normal life, but not far from God, whose presence he did not notice” – well, this kind of presence, unrecognized and unnoticed, can be discerned in these letters and notes.

One of the most famous songs by Pakhmutova-Dobronravov is “Nadezhda”. It was written in 1971: this is the year when Yuri Trifonov wrote “The Long Farewell” and Alexey German filmed “Road Check” – both are looking in the past for the origins of the compromises and moral dilemmas that the coming decade faces. Pakhmutova and Dobronravov are also, in a sense, looking back at the past time, preparing to live a completely different future, only this gap in time is conveyed in the song as a distance separating in space. The lunar voice of Anna German is singing again from somewhere on the other side – a little regretting that home is far away, songs remain unsung, life separates you from loved ones and much is lost from sight. None of this no longer exists, or maybe it never happened, but it is more real than everything that is happening now: all we know about it now is that it is illuminated by some unfamiliar light. There is something unknown and alarming ahead, and, as before, one can rely only on simple stoic principles: one must be calm and stubborn. Everything good and dear is left behind or somewhere far away, they still cannot be forgotten, but there is no point in looking back at them – as Orpheus was advised. In a sense, “Hope” is a self-description; a song about how Pakhmutova-Dobronravov’s songs work. Memories of what did not happen, but what cannot be forgotten; evidence of something that did not happen, but was clearly experienced. An unfamiliar invisible light. Monument to Hope.

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