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humanities 499 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 theatre, with especial sympathy for the current artistic director, Monette. It will be interesting to compare it to the festival=s more expensive official history, which is promised for 2002. (BRIAN PARKER) David MacFadyen. Red Stars: Personality and the Soviet Popular Song, 1955B1991 McGill-Queen=s University Press. xii, 320. $55.00 Contrary to popular wisdom, music is not an international language. Even when the basic European conventions of tone, scale, and melodic structure are observed, what constitutes the popular and the appealing in another culture=s music can often be mystifying. The runaway success of the Sovietera pop known as >estrada= is certainly a case in point: the listener who has not been brought up on >Victory Day,= >Good Morning!= or the charmingly untranslatable >Posidim, pookaem= (>Let=s sit and talk a while, emphasizing the sound Ao@ [be it stressed or not]=) will probably not spend any time hunting for their MP3s on the web. But ignoring estrada means turning a deaf ear to one of the most important elements of Soviet popular culture, one of the few phenomena that appealed to Soviet citizens of all ideological persuasions. Dissidents, shop clerks, and party hacks all spent the 1970s and the 1980s listening avidly to estrada diva Alla Pugacheva. David MacFadyen=s Red Stars not only explains why, but also explains why we should care. MacFadyen brings a number of invaluable assets to his study of the Soviet popular song, not the least of which are an understanding of music and an expertise in the Russian poetic tradition. But MacFadyen=s most unusual qualification for a Western Slavist is that he appears genuinely to like estrada. From his North American vantage point, it would be all too easy for him to make jokes at the expense of his subject matter, since some of the hairstyles, outfits, and lyrics displayed in Red Stars almost beg for punch lines. Much of what makes estrada different from North American pop lies in the music, which obviously cannot be reproduced adequately in a printed volume, but the abundance of well-chosen (and well-translated) song lyrics that MacFadyen includes demonstrates one of estrada=s defining features: its unrelenting sentimentality. The vocabulary of the estrada song relies heavily on stock nature imagery (clouds, rivers, stars, birds, and the inevitable Russian birch tree), while the wistful subject of the majority of the lyric songs is a hopeless, though often jaded, romantic who seems only distantly acquainted with irony. MacFadyen takes estrada seriously, both on its own terms and within a larger cultural and philosophical context, coming to remarkable conclusions about evolving notions of selfhood and society in Soviet and post-Soviet times. MacFadyen structures his book around an examination of the works and careers of the seven central figures in Soviet estrada: Edita P=ekha, Iosif Kobzon, Irina Ponarovskaia, Sofiia Rotaru, Lev Leshchenko, Valerii 500 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Leont=ev, and, of course, Pugacheva (so larger than life that she is the subject of two entire chapters). He uses these singers to approach the central dichotomy of estrada, the tension between >lyric= and >civic= songs, a tension that could make or break careers in the 1950s and 1960s, but is resolved or overcome in some of the works of the 1980s. For MacFadyen, the lyric/civic dynamic is in itself largely a reflection of an even more crucial question for estrada, the question of lichnost= (personality). MacFadyen argues that estrada is built on the relationship between the singer and his or her audience, which in turn depends on the development of a compelling personality with which the audience can identify or at least admire. There is no estrada without lichnost= (a concept that easily slips from mere >personality= to >stardom=), but lichnost= itself was highly problematic for the collectivist ideology of Soviet culture, which in the years that begin Red Stars had only just begun to retreat from the cult of the most famous lichnost= of all (Stalin). MacFadyen draws fascinating parallels between personality in estrada and the developments in post...

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