СОЛНЕЧНАЯ ПОЛЯНА

МЕЖДУНАРОДНОЕ ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННО-ПУБЛИСТИЧЕСКОЕ ИЗДАНИЕ
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      Журнал: «СОЛНЕЧНАЯ ПОЛЯНА»    2012,   № 4    Сентября

Дэвид ГИЛЛЕСПИ

Фото, Биография с сайта people.bath.ac.uk»

       Как-то на запись на радио пришел поэт Александр Милях и подарил мне журнал «Англия» - я его храню как дорогой подарок – потому что этот журнал был одним из последних! Журнал перестал выходить! А в нем были и новости культуры, и рассказы, и дневник обыкновенной английской семьи! Закрылось такое дивное окошко! Но осталась моя тяга к далеким меловым горам! Время от времени я перечитываю этот журнал и словно ощущаю реальную возможность встречи - как будто вновь открываю окно в Англию! Эти страницы мне помогают искать! И, благодаря этим страницам – как талисману – я нашла сэра Дэвида Гиллеспи! Он был в жюри фестиваля Тарковского, и я ему позвонила и пригласила сотрудничать, и он ответил согласием – и я помчалась искать угол на радио, чтобы выплакаться! Потому что, когда внезапно сбывается мечта – почему-то иногда хочется плакать!
Давайте вместе с вами прочитаем статьи сэра Дэвида Гиллеспи – на русском и на английском языках!

Teaching Interests

* Russian language, ab initio to postgraduate simultaneous and consecutive interpreting
* Russian and European film
* Twentieth century Russian literature

Publications

* Valentin Rasputin and Soviet Russian Village Prose, 1986, London, vii + 98 pp.
* Iurii Trifonov: Unity through Time,1992, CUP, x + 249 pp.
* The Twentieth Century Russian Novel: An Introduction, 1996, Oxford, viii + 181 pp.
* The Life and Work of Fedor Abramov (ed. and trans.), 1997, Evanston, Illinois, xii + 138 pp.
* Nineteenth Century Russian Literature: An Introductory Reader (co-authored with Boris Lanin),
Bristol Classical Press, 1998, viii + 132 pp.
* Early Soviet Cinema: Innovation, Ideology and Propaganda, 2000, London, x + 114 pp.; reprinted 2005
* Russian Cinema, 2002, London, x + 201 pp.
* Russkaia proza nakanune postmodernizma (co-authored with Boris Lanin), 210 pp., Moskovskaia
nalogovaia akademiia, Moscow, 2004

Author also of over 20 chapters in books, over 20 journal articles, numerous book reviews in Modern Language Review, Slavonic and East European Review, Russian Review, Slavic Review. Over 60 conference papers and invited lectures in UK, USA, Canada, Russia, Germany, Belgium.

Research Interests

Recent and ongoing research includes: Russian science fiction movies; Russian film adaptations of Shakespeare; surrealist motifs in Russian film; postmodernist irony in the prose of Evgenii Popov; masculinity in the films of Sergei Eisenstein; the transformation of landscape in Russian film and art; Renata Litvinova and femininity in post-Soviet film.

профессор русского языка и литературы университета Бат (Великобритания)

The Sounds of Music: Soundtrack and Song in Soviet Film
David Gillespie, University of Bath

Film and Music under Stalin: Playing Ideology’s Tune
In Soviet cinema, the importance of music exercised critical minds even before the coming of sound. In 1926 the Austrian-born Edmund Meisel wrote a musical score that he performed with orchestra for the Berlin showing of Battleship Potemkin, which hugely impressed the director Sergei Eisenstein, and Meisel was asked to compose a score for October a year later. Eisenstein subsequently began formulating his own views on the role of sound and music in film. In the late 1920s, the anticipated arrival of sound film gave rise to much debate on the role of music, with Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Grigorii Alexandrov putting their names to a joint ‘statement on sound’ in 1928. These directors saw the role of sound and music as integrated within the montage structure of a film, thereby heading off the perceived challenge that sound could provide to film montage. As the statement makes clear: ‘Only the contrapuntal use of sound vis-a-vis the visual fragment of montage will open up new possibilities for the development and perfection of montage. The first experiments in sound must aim at a sharp discord with the visual images.’
      Soviet cinema did not, therefore, regard sound and music as passive or ‘silent’, as it were, not simply providing what Royal S. Brown calls ‘dramatically motivated musical backing’ that would characterize Hollywood films. In Soviet films sound would be endowed with an organizing or structural function. Film was intended to educate the masses in ‘high’ cultural values, and, under Stalin, this went hand in hand with the ‘authentic, historically specific depiction of reality, in its revolutionary development’. Music, too, had to play its part. Music could enhance and even determine analysis, comment and judgment, ‘in the spirit of socialism’.
      This article seeks to analyze the role of music, in particular song, in Soviet film blockbusters, especially of the 1970s. I have chosen films where the music is deliberately foregrounded, so that it assumes both a structural and organizing role within the narrative. I have chosen also to concentrate on films that feature ‘urban’ songs, and those that depict village life, often accompanied by a wide diversity of folk musical genres. In all the films chosen, the music is endowed with both an emotional (for the purposes of viewer recognition and identification), and an intellectual (to aid understanding and interpretation, and so to construct meaning) function.
      The Soviet Union’s greatest composers, Sergei Prokof’ev and Dmitrii Shostakovich, both worked extensively in film, the former becoming renowned for his contribution to Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevskii (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1944-45) and Shostakovich beginning a productive collaboration with Grigorii Kozintsev in 1929 that would last until the 1970s. The Eisenstein/Prokof’iev collaboration has been described as ‘one of the highlights in the history of the cinema, both because of the quality of the music itself (both Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible have been arranged into concert suites), and because of the ingenuous way in which it was used’ (Brown, p. 144). David Bordwell has further noted that in Alexander Nevskii Prokof’ev’s music ‘creates motifs aligned with the two forces: the folkish tunes of the Russians versus the German invaders’ Catholic hymn’. Furthermore, the composer’s low, ominous brass and woodwind characterizes the Teutonic Knights as irredeemably evil, just as Eduard Tisse’s camerawork caricatures them in grotesque and monstrous images. Tension is heightened in the climactic battle on the ice through rushing orchestrals, sudden crescendos and abrupt pauses.
      Ivan the Terrible contains an array of musical genres: religious chants, chorals, soldiers’ songs, church bells, lullaby, and orchestrals all form part of the narrative of both parts, and it is often unclear whether they are actually part of the film’s ‘reel reality’ (the diegesis), or imposed on as soundtrack (non-diegetic). It was in these scenes that Eisenstein attempted to create ‘a complete harmony of sound and colour’.
      Prokof’ev’s film music in its conception remains ‘intellectual’, designed as a structural motif to aid interpretation of the film’s themes. Here he can be compared with Dmitrii Shostakovich, whose greatest innovations in film music were not in the area of soundtrack and score, but diegetic music, in particular, song. The best-known musical element of the Maxim Trilogy (1934-38) is the urban song ‘Krutitsia-vertitsia shar goluboi’, arranged by Shostakovich, which opens the second film of the trilogy, The Return of Maxim (1937). Much of this film is shot in a smoke-filled bar, and these scenes are regularly punctuated by songs that, together with billiards and drinking, offer an affirmation of male working-class culture. This and other songs, especially those performed to guitar by Mikhail Zharov, contain a direct appeal to the emotions and sensibilities of a working-class audience, thus combining both popular culture and ideology to produce a particularly Soviet form of political entertainment.
      The Stalinist popularisation of music, and the blurring of ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’ genres, can also be seen in the musical comedies of Alexander Ivanovskii in the immediate pre-War years. A Musical Story (1940) and Anton Ivanovich Gets Angry (1941) both try to erode the boundaries between classical and more ‘popular’ music, in order to make the musical classics more accessible to working people. Anton Ivanovich brings the genre of operetta and the more ‘serious’ classical mode of opera closer together, and the dismantling of such hierarchies meets with the approval of Bach himself! A Musical Story demystifies and even deconstructs the aristocratic earnestness of classical music in order to show the all-inclusiveness of Stalinist cultural policy, and the possibilities of social progression: in the Soviet Union even the humblest taxi-driver (played by the popular opera singer Sergei Lemeshev) can become a nationwide star.
      The musical comedies of Grigorii Alexandrov and Ivan Pyr’ev in the 1930s and 1940s can certainly be called ‘blockbusters’ in the modern sense, and the immensely popular songs they contained undoubtedly were a major factor in their success. These films provided accessible and enjoyable entertainment, with the ideological kernel given a suitably sugary coating through the medium of music. The songs of Isaak Dunaevskii in Alexandrov’s films (The Merry Lads, 1934, The Circus, 1936, Volga-Volga, 1938), and in the collective farm musicals of Pyr’ev (Tractor Drivers, 1939, The Kuban’ Cossacks, 1949-50), were crucial in the popular success of these films, and remain popular today. In Alexandrov’s films the music would be familiar to an urban audience, a mixture of ‘jazz, music-hall and military marches, however unlikely that combination may appear’. Pyr’ev’s films employ mainly folk melodies that complement the uplifting pictures of a thriving and happy workforce enjoying the benefits of life in Stalin’s sun-blessed socialist paradise, and therefore clearly aimed at a rural workforce. As Richard Taylor concludes: ‘By entertaining the mass audience with glimpses of utopia, the Stalinist musical promoted the illusion encapsulated in popular songs not only that “Life has become better, comrades, life has become happier” but further that “We were born to make a fairy-tale come true”’ (Taylor, p. 24).
      Soviet directors therefore saw the early sound film as a totality of sensuous experience, where the visual image was supported and even complemented by its musical or sound accompaniment. Soundtrack both supported and enhanced the film’s ideological message (although Eisenstein could also be said to subvert it), and song made that message immediately accessible to the target audience. Music and song had to be in tune with Stalin’s grand symphony. In post-Stalin film, popular song, in particular, could more emphatically lay claim to the expression of a private realm, and soft, lyrical songs across a variety of genres could guarantee box-office success.
Film Music after Stalin: Urban Song

Song continued to be an integral part of a film’s structure and ‘message’ after the death of Stalin. Indeed, it became a vital element of the blockbusters of the ‘stagnation’ years, when politically safe but entertaining films played to full houses and encouraged Soviet citizens to believe that they lived in a prosperous and just environment, protected from the dangers of the outside world by an ever-vigilant state. Song could add an extra dimension to an established genre, or turn a feel-good movie into a sentimental weepie, audience recognition leading to nostalgia and a yearning for lost youth. Two films here are of great significance: Vladimir Motyl’’s White Sun of the Desert (1969) and Vladimir Men’shov’s Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears (1979). Both were immensely popular and unashamedly populist, and both use song as a major structural motif.
      A few words should here be said of the cultural background in the 1960s and 1970s. In literature, one of the major aspects of the post-Stalin ‘thaw’ was the emergence of a body of young writers whose work became known as ‘youth prose’, whose main works were written and published between 1956 and 1964. The attention paid to the problems and ambitions of young people also found its expression in film. Georgii Daneliia’s ‘lyrical comedy’ I Wander Around Moscow (1963) gave early roles to Nikita Mikhalkov, Inna Churikova and Irina Miroshnichenko, and combined a patriotic message of social contentment with a catchy, lively score that is sung later in the film, and thus becomes part of the diegesis. Both content and soundtrack work together to show young people at ease in a sun-blessed Moscow, helping to build the future of a bustling, cosmopolitan city.
      In the late 1950s and 1960s, the politically sensitive lyrics of the guitar poets Bulat Okudzhava, Alexander Galich and Vladimir Vysotskii, reached a mass audience through the medium of the tape-recorder. Magnitizdat became the musical equivalent of samizdat, banned literature produced and distributed in typewritten copies. The music of magnitizdat is generally urban songs, played for a young audience. Both Vysotskii and Okudzhava were born in Moscow, and Galich studied there. All of these ‘bards’ are represented in Soviet cinema. Galich worked as a scriptwriter until the 1960s. Vysotskii appeared in over twenty-five films between 1959 and his death in 1980, performing his songs in many. Among the most memorable of these are Stanislav Govorukhin’s Vertical (1967), Kira Muratova’s Brief Meetings (1967), Gennadii Poloka’s Intervention (1969) and Iosif Kheifits’s My Only One (1975). However, Vysotskii’s songs do not add much impetus or dynamic to the plot, nor insight into the emotional dramas depicted. The superstar Vysotskii is given a public forum to perform his own songs in his highly individual style, and the Soviet viewer can catch a glimpse of a controversial talent whose career was at best tolerated by the Soviet authorities.
      Okudzhava contributed music to the elegiac Belorussian Station (1970), where war veterans find themselves unable to adapt to society twenty-five years on, and the song’s refrain (“nam nuzhna odna pobeda/Odna na vsekh”; “my za tsenoi ne postoim”) serves to underline their lament for the loss of single-mindedness and unity in the post-war generation. Okudzhava and his collaborator Isaak Shvarts provided the song ‘Vashe Blagorodie, Gospozha Razluka’ for the extremely popular Civil War comedy/drama The White Sun of the Desert. The film is set in Central Asia, but the guitar music and song that increasingly merge into the soundtrack belong to the 1960s urban song culture of metropolitan Russia. The film is set far away in both time and space, but the guitar music in particular gives it a contemporary resonance (the song was written in 1967).
      In the film the sands of the desert are contrasted with the rushing waves of the clear blue sea, next to which the final climactic battle takes place. Motyl’’s film has a catchy score that alternates balalaika strings, guitar and orchestrals, with brief shots of the lush greenery of the Russian countryside that the main character (Sukhov: ‘dry’) misses so much. Indeed, both the music and the dialogue establish a semi-parodic, whimsical tone.
      Two stanzas (the first and third) of ‘Vashe blagorodie, gospozha razluka’ are sung by Pasha Vereshchagin, a former Russian customs officer, yearning for home with vodka and his long-suffering wife his only moral supports in a world that has passed him by. His own home is like a shrine to a distant world, with photographs, a samovar, and a seemingly endless supply of vodka symbolizing the Russia he has lost. As he sings, Vereshchagin’s’s homesickness as reflected in the song is ‘transferred’ to Sukhov, as the camera moves to him sitting outside on the sand and listening:

Ваше благородие, госпожа Разлука,
Мы с тобой родня давно, вот какая штука.
Письмецо в конверте, погоди не рви…
Не везет мне в смерти – повезет в любви!

Ваше благородие, госпожа Удача,
Для кого ты добрая, а кому иначе.
Девять граммов в сердце, постой, не зови…
Не везет мне в смерти – повезет в любви!

(‘Your Esteemed Honour, Lady Separation,
You and I have long been kin, that’s the gist of the matter.
A letter in its envelope, wait, but don’t tear it,
Death brings me no luck – that will come with love!

‘Your Esteemed Honour, Lady Happy Fortune,
For some your kindness knows no bounds, for others it is different.
Nine grams are in my heart, wait, don’t call me,
Death brings me no luck – that will come with love!’)

These words provide various thematic motifs for the narrative. They point to the physical dangers of the conflict, Vereshchagin’s sadness and Sukhov’s separation from his beloved wife Katerina Matveevna. The guitar chords and the song’s melody become part of the film’s soundtrack, assuming the twin roles of backdrop and commentary.
      The White Sun of the Desert was seen by 34.5 million people in 1970, and was the tenth most popular film that year. Another film that combined music and contemporary popular culture, and one that featured urban song much more centrally, is Vladimir Men’shov’s Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears. It was released to popular acclaim in 1979, and awarded the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film a year later. The title refers to a Russian proverb, and the film relates the emotional ups-and-downs of three female friends (Katia, Liuda and Tonia) in Moscow from the 1950s through to the late 1970s. All three have come from the provinces to find their fortune and happiness in the big city, and all three have differing fortunes over the two decades of the film’s action. Katia becomes pregnant and brings up her daughter alone. Liuda marries an ice-hockey star who takes to the bottle, and they divorce. Tonia marries Nikolai, and they represent the conventional happy family.
      There are plentiful diegetic and non-diegetic songs that serve as musical signposts to guide the (Soviet) viewer throughout the decades, stirring both recognition and nostalgia. The film opens to a panorama of 1970s Moscow, framed by Sergei Nikitin singing Iurii Vizbor’s song ‘Alexandra’, which establishes Moscow as the location of the film:

Не сразу все устроилось, Москва не сразу строилась,
Она горела столько раз, росла на золе.
Тянулось к небу дерево, и только в небо верило,
А кроме неба верило натруженной земле.

Александра, Александра, что там вьется перед нами,
Это ясень семенами крутит вальс над мостовой.
Ясень с видом деревенским, приобщился к вальсам
венским,
Он пробьется, Александра, он надышится Москвой.

Москву рябины красили, дубы стояли князями,
Но не они, а ясени без спросу росли.
Москва не зря надеется, что вся в листву оденется.
Москва найдет для деревца хоть краешек земли.

(‘Our lives work out not instantly, and Moscow grew inconstantly,
It burned and burned so frequently, and grew again on ash.
A tree stretched up towards the sky, and only in the sky believed,
But not just the sky, in overworked earth it kept its faith.

‘Alexandra, Alexandra, what is spinning there before us,
It’s the ash tree with its seedlings dancing a waltz above the road.
A rural-looking ash tree, joining waltzes in Vienna,
It’ll make it, Alexandra, it will breathe the Moscow air.

‘Moscow’s adorned by rowan-trees, the oaks stood by like princes royal,
But ash not oak grew ever up, not asking if they cared.
Moscow does hope in earnestness that green will be its finery,
Moscow will find for every tree its tiny piece of land.’)
This song explains much of what the film will be about. Moscow is a resilient place that has seen its fair share of ruin. The ‘seedlings’ billowing about Moscow’s streets represent those who come to the big city from out of town, usually the village. With hard work and determination these people can achieve their goals, and their dreams will come true. (Stanzas three and four are then repeated.) In other words, human affairs are like the trees that grow in Moscow, the new ash trees outgrowing the old prince-like oaks as time goes by, but with each one assured its own place of land.
      The melody of ‘Alexandra’ becomes integrated with the soundtrack in key emotional scenes: when the heroine Katia brings her new-born baby (to be called Alexandra) out of hospital, and again when she meets her child’s father twenty years later in a Moscow park. Throughout the film background music plays a crucial role. The late 1950s are referenced by popular songs (including Spanish and Italian) played on a radio, and TV clips of the topically satirical chastushka-performing duo Shurov and Rykunin. The voice of Klavdiia Shul’zhenko singing ‘Davai zakurim’ echoes in the background as the three friends relax at Nikolai’s dacha in the late 1950s, and is repeated in the same location twenty years later, thus prompting recognition and nostalgia. The 1970s are represented by the music of Boney-M, indicating the sanitized Western pop made officially available to the younger generation, and thus showing the progressive openness of the authorities. The soundtrack also features songs by Dmitrii Sukharev and Iurii Levitanskii. Songs of seasonal change – winter giving way to spring – serve as pointers to the human world, as Katia (Vera Alentova) falls for the charismatic, multi-talented and self-effacing Georgii (Alexei Batalov).
      Men’shov’s film shows how, in the end, love can conquer all obstacles, and the use of song throughout offers a lyrical, sentimental accompaniment to the motif that you’re never too old to fall in love. Romantic melodies serve as bridges between scenes, and contribute to the powerful emotional pay-off at the end.
      Men’shov’s film also works on a different level, however: as a politically conformist trawl through two decades of Soviet social history. In scenes set in the late 1950s, real-life players pop up in cameo parts: Andrei Voznesenskii reading his poems in public, the young Innokentii Smoktunovskii waiting to be noticed, and the established actors Georgii Iumatov and Tat’iana Koniukhova rushing past adoring fans to watch a new French film. Any Soviet viewer over the age of forty would thus be encouraged to relive their youth, and recall their own fond memories. The film also constructs a myth of trouble-free social progress, where in the 1970s ordinary Russians shop in Western-style supermarkets and carry home their goods in plastic bags (definitely defitsit in those days). Social cohesion is also there for all to see, as academics rub shoulders with humble technicians, and living standards improve beyond measure. It is possible for a single mother to get to the top of her profession without a man in her life, and society is sufficiently compassionate as to give her a single room in a workers’ hostel in which to bring up her baby. The appearance of the man ‘without faults’ Georgii brings a fitting resolution to the fairy-tale.
      Those social vices that do exist are threatening but non-political. Men can be heartless sexual predators, but two decades on they are lonely middle-aged losers. Professional sport can lead to alcoholism, as sports fans buy rounds for the faded ice-hockey star Gurov. In the end, though, a woman’s place is with her man, and she shouldn’t earn more than he does.
      Vizbor’s song is played again as the closing credits roll, but in a slightly different variant. Whereas the verses that open the film set out the main themes, the final playing of ‘Alexandra’ emphasises closure. Firstly, it is performed by a male-female duet (Sergei and Tat’iana Nikitin), echoing the love partnership of Katia and Georgii that is happily resolved. Secondly, the words emphasise ‘love’ (‘true’, ‘pure’ and ‘maternal’), the end of ‘sadness’ in a Moscow where the Garden Ring Road becomes as close and dear as a ‘wedding ring’, and identification with Moscow’s ‘destiny’:

Не сразу все устроилось, Москва не сразу строилась,
Москва словам не верила, а верила любви.
Снегами запорошена, листвою заворожена,
Найдет тепло прохожему, а деревцу земли.

Александра, Александра, этот город наш с тобою
Стали мы его судьбою, ты вглядись в его лицо.
Что бы ни было вначале, утолит он все печали,
Вот и стало обручальным нам Садовое кольцо.

Москва тревог не прятала, Москва видала всякое,
Но беды все и горести склонялись перед ней.
Любовь Москвы не быстрая, но верная и чистая,
Поскольку материнская любовь других сильней.

Александра, Александра, этот город наш с тобою,
Стали мы его судьбою, ты вглянись в его лицо.
Что бы ни было вначале, утолит он все печали,
Вот и стало обручальным нам Садовое кольцо.

. (‘Our lives work out not instantly, and Moscow grew inconstantly,
Moscow believed not words, but believed in only love.
With snow powdered, and with greenery bedecked,
It will find warmth for the passer-by, and earth for the tree.

‘Alexandra, Alexandra, this is our town,
We are part of its destiny, look into its face.
Whatever was in the beginning, it will relieve all sadness,
And the Garden Ring has become our wedding ring.

‘Moscow did not hide its worries, Moscow has seen much,
But grief and troubles bowed down before her.
Moscow’s love is not sudden, but true and pure,
As maternal love is stronger than all others.

‘Alexandra, Alexandra, this is our town,
We are part of its destiny, look into its face.
Whatever was in the beginning, it will relieve all sadness,
And the Garden Ring has become our wedding ring.’)

      Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears remains a funny and entertaining film. It foregrounds popular culture and song, in particular, as a barometer of social change over two decades. It is a tale of everyday life, but made at a time when political dissidence became reality and the Soviet economy was entering terminal ‘stagnation’. There is no social comment here, every cloud has its silver lining, people are honest and hard-working, they have good friends and fundamentally society is stable. This conformist message was commercially successful, as the film was seen by 84.4 million viewers in 1980 (Zemlianukhin and Segida, p. 257). It offers a seamless combination of popular entertainment, romantic fairy-tale, and neutral politics, with all these functions supported and directed by the use of music and song.

The Rhythms of Village Life

Films about rural life are generally more reflective and lyrical, with music, and especially folk song, reflecting a more insular, occasionally nationalistic agenda. Musical motifs have been dominant in films about village life since Ivan Pyr’ev’s collective farm musicals in the 1930s, but early post-Stalin films attempted to focus less on the material prosperity and massive harvests that Pyr’ev portrayed, and rather on ordinary people and their emotions. One of the earliest post-Stalin films set in the countryside was Stanislav Rostotskii’s It Happened in Pen’kovo (1957), a film that is highly significant in its use of music and song to frame and even direct the narrative.
      The opening credits are accompanied by sentimental strings rising to triumphalist orchestrals as the camera dwells on lyrical rural vistas: this is a happy and united Russia. Rostotskii’s film is adapted from an important ‘Thaw’ novella by Sergei Antonov whose main theme is the post-Stalin shift towards the ‘humane’ management of agricultural production and the need for technological modernization. Rostotskii’s film focuses not so much on the production theme as on the emotional melodramas in the village community. Larisa is the daughter of the collective farm chairman, and therefore a prize catch for any eligible bachelor. She gets married to Matvei, the ceremony conducted under a portrait of Stalin. Matvei’s eye is then caught by Tonia, an educated visitor to the village from Leningrad. Tonia, too, is very much taken with Matvei’s good looks and rugged charm.
      In a key scene, Tonia lies alone in bed obviously yearning for Matvei, as he is in his bed with Larisa in a pose of surprising erotic frankness. Both scenes are linked by the background playing of Nikolai Dorizo’s 1953 song ‘Ognei tak mnogo zolotykh’ (music by Kirill Molchanov), with the following first verse:

Огней так много золотых
На улицах Саратова,
Парней так много холостых,
А я люблю женатого…

(‘There are so many golden lights
In the streets of Saratov,
So many bachelor boys,
But I love a married man.’)

      The song reflects Tonia’s adulterous feelings for Matvei, and Matvei’s for her, and so the linking music transfers Matvei’s erotic intent from Larisa to her. Music and song then become the battleground for the resolution of this triangle. Matvei sings in the newly erected village club, and here he expresses both his feelings for Tonia, and the impossibility of keeping it a secret (he is accompanied by a female chorus in folk costume):

От людей на деревне не спрятаться,
Нет секретов в деревне у нас.
Не сойтись-разойтись, не сосвататься,
В стороне от придирчивых глаз.

Но не бойся, тебя не обидим мы,
Не пугайся, земляк, земляка,
Здесь держать можно двери открытыми,
Что надежнее любого замка.
За полями, садами, за пасекой,
Не уйти от придирчивых глаз,
Тем, кто держит свой камень за пазухой,
Ох, им трудно в деревне у нас.

(‘You can’t hide from people in the village,
There are no secrets in our village.
You can’t love or part or woo,
Away from censorious eyes.

‘But do not fear, we will not offend you,
Let not one local man fear another,
Here you can leave your doors open,
That is more reliable than any fortress.

‘Beyond the fields, the orchards and the apiary,
You can’t escape censorious eyes,
Those who covet a secret wish,
Oh, it’s difficult for them with us.’)

This is a remarkable song not only in that it brings into the public arena the affair between Tonia and Matvei, but also for what it says about the broader political environment. ‘Censorious eyes’ seek out secrets, privacy is difficult to maintain in a tightly-knit community, where close bonds, ironically, deny personal freedom. The wider political allegory is there for all to hear.
      Larisa fights back with her own brand of song. Immediately after Matvei’s song she takes the stage and exposes the affair through a lively and risque chastuska, to the increasing embarrassment of the public:

Мне мой милый изменяет,
Эх, что это за новости?
Я бы тоже изменяла,
Не хватает совести.

У соперницы моей
Кудри вьются и висят,
Красоты – на сто процентов,
Дури – на сто пятьдесят.

Соперница моя –
Тонкая-претонкая,
Только струны натянуть,
Балалайка звонкая.

Говорят, что я горда,
Ну, пускай и чешутся.
Лучше гордою любить,
Чем на шею вешаться.

Я свою соперницу
Отведу на мельницу,
Измелю ее в муку
И лепешек напеку.

Ко мне милый подошел,
Милка, я тебя нашел,
Не ты нашел, а я нашла,
Борьба за качество пошла.

(‘My darling is unfaithful,
But that is nothing new to me.
I would also be unfaithful,
But my conscience won’t allow it.

‘My rival in love
Has hair that curls and hangs loose,
One hundred percent of beauty,
Stupidity – one hundred and fifty.
‘My rival in love
Is slim and slender,
But just pull tight her strings,
And she’s like a loud balalaika.

‘People say that I am proud,
Well, let them have the itch to know.
Better to love and be proud,
Than hang round someone’s neck.
‘My rival in love
I’ll take down to the mill,
Pound her into flour,
And bake bread loaves out of her.

‘My darling comes up to me,
Beloved, I’ve found you.
But I’m the one who has found out,
And the fight for quality now begins.’)

      Tonia’s public humiliation is complete. Although she loses Matvei, who is reunited with Larisa, Tonia’s ‘song’ becomes part of the soundtrack, reminding the audience of her love and her pain. The songs identify and develop the film’s daring permissiveness: extra-marital love can be just as sincere and heartfelt as that within the family. In post-Stalin times, people, after all, are only flesh and blood, and have a right to their own privacy.
      The use of folk music in film in the 1960s and 1970s became infused with a more nationalistic fervour. If ‘youth prose’ and films about young people in the early 1960s concentrated on life in the cities, ‘village prose’ and corresponding films looked at the Russian peasant and his way of life. The rural theme in literature soon developed a more radical agenda, affirming the innate values of the village as the basis for a moral regeneration of Russia, and vehemently denying the legitimacy of urban and Western-influenced lifestyles. These motifs became apparent in films, reinforced by their musical accompaniment.
      Nikolai Moskalenko’s Russian Field (1971) offers a traditional, patriotic picture of rural Russia, a picturesque backdrop to the emotional and political dramas that are given centre stage. Numerous lingering shots of the Russian countryside –a serene panorama of rivers, fields, trees and an endless sky that represent the natural contours of the land – allude to the nation’s geopolitical importance, accompanied by angelic chorals and balalaika strings. The USSR is strong militarily because of the values instilled by the Russian countryside. The men go off to fight a foreign invasion (probably China, but not explicitly stated), while the women till the land, against a constant backdrop of folk and popular song.
      These women are explicitly equated with the natural world. The figure of Fedot’ia Leont’evna (Nonna Mordiukova), who loses her husband to a younger woman and her son to armed conflict, reflects the strength and indomitability of the village community. The patriotic theme is thus conveyed threefold: the visual splendour of a lovingly filmed rural landscape, the flag-waving heroics of the Soviet military defending the ‘Russian field’, and a soundtrack that emphasises the pseudo-folkloric and quasi-messianic (the score is by Alexander Fliarkovskii, songs by Leonid Derbenev).
      The rest of this paper concentrates on the films of Vasilii Shukshin. Shukshin was an enormously popular writer, actor and director who concentrated on rural themes, and the sense of social dislocation felt by former peasants forced to leave the land. Moreover, Shukshin speaks to the millions of people who are the victims of the Soviet Union’s massive social upheavals, as Geoffrey Hosking notes: ‘They are the children of the Soviet Union’s whirlwind years of social change, in which tens of millions of people were torn away from their backgrounds and homes. Shukshin’s heroes are the uprooted, who have left one milieu and never quite settled in another’.
      Shukshin directed five films between 1964 and his untimely death in 1974: There Lives Such a Lad (1964), Your Son and Brother (1965), Strange People (1969), Happy Go Lucky (1972), and Red Guelder Rose (1973). He also acted in his last two films, as well as in dozens of films by other directors, and is the author of numerous short stories, novellas and screenplays. Shukshin’s films became extraordinarily popular, so that at the time of his death he had achieved ‘superstar status in the Soviet Union’, and was in ‘a category by himself.’
      Shukshin’s first film, There Lives Such a Lad, does not display the director’s fascination with the possibilities of soundtrack and music that would become evident later. It features single-string guitar chords, but the music, like the magnificent mountainous landscape, is kept strictly in the background. There is no mistaking the musical emphasis of Your Son and Brother, however. It opens with romantic orchestral strings accompanying shots of a river in spring, ice floes heralding the release of nature after the long winter. A folk melody follows shots of women, birds and the natural world. The first few minutes are filmed as slice-of-life documentary, before any dialogue or narrative development.
      The story begins with the return of Stepka to his native village, where he is met by his mute sister. However, this is no ordinary prodigal son returning to the family nest after travelling far and wide. Stepka has escaped from prison, and thereby added two years to his sentence, simply to spend a day and night in his home, with his family and those close to him. There is no condemnation of Stepka’s act, but rather the film celebrates the Russian man’s natural link with his land and his roots, affirmed by a background of folk music and female chorals. The film provides positive images of rural life, with shots of the interiors of peasant huts and bathhouses. Folk melodies, accordion playing, chastushki and dancing reinforce the cinematic realization of the simplicity and basic honesty of peasant life. The Russian peasant is essentially good if impulsive, a man with ‘soul’ who needs to be close to his land and his roots.
      Compare this to the next scenario, set in the town where Stepka’s brothers Ignat and Maxim live. Here there are endless crowds and queues, the impersonality of relationships underscored by the cacophonous jazz rhythms blaring from a radio set. Urban life is generally characterized by a lack of harmony and decency, where families argue. When the brothers travel to their native village, they find a mythical picture of wholeness and purity, where girls wear white and human activity takes place against a majestic backdrop of mountains, forests and lakes. There is no wanton drunkenness or social alienation here, all rural workers are serious, honest and industrious, and at the end of the film water flows, strings play and life goes on: ‘Vse pravil’no’ (‘Everything is as it should be’), is the film’s final motto.
      Strange People opens with the song ‘Milen’kii ty moi’ sung on the soundtrack by Shukshin and his wife Lidiia Fedoseeva-Shukshina, accompanying a shot of a young child in a field of flowers in summertime. An orchestral score then takes over as the film’s narrative begins. The film is structured around three stories: ‘Bratka’, adapted from Shukshin’s 1967 story ‘Chudik’; ‘Rokovoi vystrel’, based on the 1968 story ‘“Mil’ pardon, madam!”’, and ‘Dumy’, which recreates a story of the same name from 1967. Throughout communal singing and folk song are never far from the action, and there is very little non-diegetic music: ‘Milen’kii ty moi’is a girl’s pained plea to her married lover, and his rejection of her, and recurs later in the narrative. Soft guitar music accompanies shots of the fields, rivers and sunsets. Popular band arrangements add an uplifting, life-affirming note to the events and personalities in the film. Only in the last of the stories, ‘Dumy’, does pop music interrupt and dominate, the bombastic lyrics of the younger generation threatening the stability and traditions of past ages. Balalaika chords, accordion, and finally opera music on the radio all accompany the ‘reflections’ of the elderly Matvei Ivanovich (played by Vsevolod Sanaev) on his life, his accomplishments, and his mortality. The film ends on a lyrical and reflective note, as the different musical genres and generations combine to enable Matvei Ivanovich to come to terms with life and the passing of the ages.
      Happy Go Lucky begins with balalaika music and the actor-director Shukshin shown against rolling fields, a scythe in his hand as in the Russia of old. Here even horses are preferred to cars as transport. As Vania Rastorguev and his wife Liuba (Shukshin and Fedoseeva-Shukshina) prepare to leave for a holiday in the south of European Russia, they are seen off by their neighbours singing around a table. The song is a sad one, showing that in a tightly-knit community parting even for a short time is a cause for sorrow. In this film, too, the accordion plays, people sing and dance against panoramic shots of fields, river and sky, and accordion and balalaika melodies accompany the couple as they travel by bus from the village to the railway station.
      The train journey Vania and his wife take through Russia in Happy Go Lucky is, like the typical train journey in Soviet film, above all one of social discovery. Various types come and go: a petty criminal (the actor Georgii Burkov); a supercilious bureaucrat who looks down on village types, and who even tries to have Vania arrested for drunkenness; and a respectful professor (Vsevolod Sanaev again) who invites Vania to address his students in Moscow. Their long train journey is punctuated by popular music, Vania himself singing a folk song, and students in a neighbouring compartment addressing ‘Rossiia–matushka’. The picture we get of Russia is essentially one of social harmony and national pride, a rejoicing in the vastness of the country, with only slight reservations about the fickleness of human nature. All this is set to folk music and song, both as background score and as part of the narrative, an all-encompassing sensuous celebration of a mythical, almost abstract Russia that stands outside of historical time and socio-political reality.
      Such a picture of Russia recurs in Shukshin’s most famous film, Red Guelder Rose, which opened just a month before he himself died. As John Givens has noted, the film ‘is not so much a movie as a melody’, part of the actor-writer-director’s ‘synthetic thinking’ where he can ‘weave seamlessly various media – words, sounds, images and music – into one meaningful whole’ (Givens, pp. 273-4). Givens also notes that the film’s music is a mixture of traditional folk song, modern stylizations, balalaika strings, popular band music and criminal songs (blatnye pesni), all identifying and reflecting the film’s main narrative concerns: Russia’s twentieth-century history, and the moral, spiritual and psychological effects on the individual of cataclysmic social change. Shukshin’s earlier films may emphasise social cohesion and conciliation, but Red Guelder Rose focuses on tragedy and loss, with the music actively contributing to a quasi-Christian narrative of persecution, sacrifice and martyrdom.
      The film begins in a prison, with criminals reaching the end of their sentence singing the sad ‘Vechernii zvon’. Shukshin as Egor Prokudin is unable to keep time in the chorus – an obvious symbol of his social and cultural alienation, further developed in the course of the film. Then balalaika strings come in for the opening credits. Prokudin is released from prison, visits his former gang, then attempts to go straight as a tractor driver, symbolically returning to his rural roots. In scenes set in the village, collective farm workers sing round the table in sad and elegiac tones, and Prokudin’s isolation and loneliness are reinforced by sentimental balalaika and guitar strings. The Russian countryside is filmed as green fields lit up by sunshine, gleaming churches and groves of birch trees. The artificiality of officially sanitized folk music is satirised at a public concert by a chorus of female singers dressed in folk costume, whose performance is given a political colouring by the presenter’s speech.
      Shukshin the director gives crucial scenes great emotional power. Prokudin sees his mother for the first time in twenty years, though wearing dark glasses so as not to betray any emotion publicly. He breaks down and cries to an accompaniment of orchestral strings, a gleaming white church and birch trees in the background.
      Prokudin’s efforts to go straight are ultimately to no avail, as his former gang catches up with him and he is shot by his former boss, Guboshlep (Georgii Burkov again). In the moments leading up to this final confrontation, Prokudin drives his tractor across the fields, against another background of birch trees, balalaika strings playing on the soundtrack. He is shot in a birch grove, smearing these sacred Russian trees with his blood, and dies lying on the earth he has just ploughed, accompanied by an angelic chorus. As Guboshlep says: ‘on byl muzhik, ikh na Rusi mnogo’. These words are endowed with both symbolic and allegorical significance.
      Egor Prokudin has led a life of petty crime since being uprooted from his home at an early age. His failure to find a home is representative of a whole generation. Moreover, the murderer Guboshlep justifies an experiment in social engineering where people are simply ‘wood chips’ that ‘fly’ when the ‘forest is cut down’: the cost doesn’t matter, as there will always be others to take the place of those that have fallen. The word ‘Rus’’ suggests Russia not as a geographical or political entity, but the Holy Russia of myth and legend. Prokudin’s fate is symbolic of the peasant’s lot, and an allegory of Russia’s twentieth century suffering.
      In these final moments the music heightens the film’s powerful resolution, both articulating and bringing together the symbolic, allegorical and mythical strands. The lone singer in Prokudin’s black-and-white prison-camp memory performs the song ‘Pis’mo materi’, a rendering of a sad and sentimental poem by Sergei Esenin from 1924, set to piano and guitar accompaniment by Pavel Chekalov. This song becomes integrated with the soundtrack in the moments before Prokudin’s death:

Я по-прежнему такой же нежный
И мечтаю только лишь о том,
Чтоб скорее от тоски мятежной
Воротиться в старенький наш дом.

Я вернусь, когда раскинет ветви
По-весеннему наш белый сад.
Только ты меня уж на рассвете
Не буди, как восемь лет назад.

(‘I am still that same tender boy,
And dream only of one thing,
To leave behind my restless sorrow,
And return to our old little house.

‘I’ll return when the tree branches
Are spread out by our spring-like white garden,
But don’t you wake me up
At the dawn, as eight years ago.’)

At this point the song’s melody becomes part of the soundtrack, as the camera follows Prokudin in his tractor. The next two stanzas follow, with the singer being shown only for the final two lines:

Не буди того, что отмечталось,
Не волнуй того, что не сбылось, --
Слишком раннюю утрату и усталость
Испытать мне в жизни привелось.

И молиться не учи меня. Не надо!
К старому возврата больше нет.
Ты одна мне помощь и отрада,
Ты одна мне несказанный свет.

. (‘Do not reawaken memories of the past,
Do not bother that which did not come true,
Too early have loss and weariness
Been my lot to suffer in life.

‘And do not teach me to pray. No need!
There is no more return to the past.
You alone are my support and joy,
You alone are my ineffable light.’)
The guitar soundtrack stops abruptly as Prokudin catches sight of the car at the edge of the field containing the gang members, and this dramatic musical breaking-off signals the danger that he now faces.
      Esenin’s poem is in the form of a letter written by a son to his mother. The son has not been home to his native village for eight years, and he assures his mother that he has not forgotten his ancestral home, it is his source of inner strength, and he longs to return. The mother grieves, and waits for him. But the son has grown world-weary, and accepts that he has outgrown the village. Only the figure of his mother offers him moral support and spiritual sustenance in his adult life. Esenin’s poem encapsulates Prokudin’s own fate, as he too has not seen his mother for many years. The song thus conflates the destinies of the fictional ‘muzhik’ Prokudin, Esenin’s poetic son, and the author of these lines himself.
      The song therefore provides a powerful allegory for Prokudin’s death. Russian viewers would not need reminding that Esenin called himself the ‘last poet of the village’ before killing himself in 1925. Prokudin dies a peasant, having known only hardship and ordeals in his lifetime. In his various guises he represents all of Russia, its past and present, the village and the town, bravery and transgression: in the course of the film he is by turns the folk hero Egor Khrabryi, the urbane Georgii, the brutalized criminal Gore (‘woe’), the salt-of-the-earth Zhora, and the comically urbane Zhorzh, looking to so-called sophisticated Western ways for a ‘festival of the soul’, but failing.
      Shukshin’s use of music is thus loaded with an ideological agenda that is shared by other ‘village writers’ of the 1960s and 1970s. In Red Guelder Rose the village is a place where scars can be healed and people are inherently good, whereas the town is a haven of crime and debauchery. Tragedy comes when the town comes to the village. If other village writers advocated a return to the village, its ancient customs and perceived moral certainties for the regeneration of society, Shukshin shows this attempt as both futile and doomed. With the combination of visual images and soundtrack, Shukshin constructs a tragic nationalist myth, one with mass audience appeal.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Music and song in Soviet film have thus been much more than a ‘dramatically motivated’ background to enhance the emotional impact of the narrative. From the outset directors have sought to include music within the structure of the film, initially as ‘counterpoint’ to enhance and develop visual montage. In the 1930s and 1940s music was integral to the structure and meaning of many key films, from directors as diverse as Eisenstein, Kozintsev and Trauberg, Alexandrov, Ivanovskii and Pyr’ev. ‘Stagnation’ directors such as Men’shov and Motyl’ have been highly creative in integrating popular song within the framework of their films, making these films more accessible and enjoyable to an already appreciative audience. Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears, in particular, foregrounds song as both a thematic pointer and a means of promoting its conformism and social conservatism. In Shukshin’s films about village life, the use of music, whether this be popular, authentic folk or modern stylisations, encourages symbolic or allegorical interpretations, and thus actively contributes to the construction of a mythical discourse . In Shukshin’s films, the music is the message.

Filmography

Alexander Nevskii (‘Aleksandr Nevskii’), dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 1938
Anton Ivanovich Gets Angry (‘Anton Ivanovich serditsia’), dir. Alexander Ivanovskii, 1941
Ballad of the Valiant Knight Ivanhoe (‘Ballada o doblestnom rytsare Aivengo’), dir. Sergei Tarasov, 1983
Belorussian Station (‘Belorusskii vokzal’), dir. Andrei Smirnov, 1970
Brief Meetings (‘Korotkie vstrechi’), dir. Kira Muratova, 1967
The Circus (‘Tsirk’), dir. Grigorii Alexandrov, 1936
Happy Go Lucky (‘Pechki-lavochki’), dir. Vasilii Shukshin, 1972
Intervention (‘Interventsiia’), dir. Gennadii Poloka, 1969
It Happened in Pen’kovo (‘Delo bylo v Pen’kove’), dir. Stanislav Rostotskii, 1957
Ivan the Terrible (‘Ivan Groznyi’), dir. Sergei Eisenstein (Part One: 1944; Part Two: 1945, released 1958)
I Wander Around Moscow (‘Ia shagaiu po Moskve’), dir. Georgii Daneliia, 1963
The Kuban’ Cossacks (‘Kubanskie kazaki’), dir. Ivan Pyr’ev, 1949-50
The ‘Maxim Trilogy’, dir. Grigorii Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg: The Youth of Maxim (‘Iunost’ Maksima’, 1934); The Return of Maxim (‘Vozvrashchenie Maksima’, 1937); The Vyborg Side (‘Vyborgskaia storona’, 1938)
The Merry Lads (‘Veselye rebiata’), dir. Grigorii Alexandrov, 1934
Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears (‘Moskva slezam ne verit’), dir. Vladimir Men’shov, 1979
A Musical Story (‘Muzykal’naia istoriia’), dir. Alexander Ivanovskii, 1940
My Only One (‘Edinstvennaia…’), dir. Iosif Kheifits, 1975
October (‘Oktiabr’’), dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 1927
Red Guelder Rose (‘Kalina krasnaia’), dir. Vasilii Shukshin, 1973
Russian Field (‘Russkoe pole’), dir. Nikolai Moskalenko, 1971
Strange People (‘Strannye liudi’), dir. Vasilii Shukshin, 1969
There Lives Such a Lad (‘Zhivet takoi paren’’), dir. Vasilii Shukshin, 1964
Vertical (‘Vertikal’’), dir. Stanislav Govorukhin and Boris Durov, 1967
Volga-Volga (‘Volga-Volga’), dir. Grigorii Alexandrov, 1938
The White Sun of the Desert (‘Beloe solntse pustyni’), dir. Vladimir Motyl’, 1969
Your Son and Brother (‘Vash syn i brat’), dir. Vasilii Shukshin, 1965
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