Singing the Self: Guitar Poetry, Community, and Identity in the Post-Stalin Period

Chapter Five

Overt Marginality: Antisovetchina Spinu vyaluyu sgorbya, Ya zh ne prosto khulu, A grazhdanskiye skorbi Serviruyu k stolu! Hunching my limp spine, I'm serving to table Not just criticism, But civic sorrows! -Aleksandr Galich, "Desire for Fame" Chapter Five KEENLY ATTUNED TO BOTH cultural and sociopolitical developments, guitar poetry swiftly became an important arena for addressing socially pressing and politically sensitive themes around which public discourse was closely guarded. Emblematic of such engagement is guitar poetry's persistent and highly varied treatment of alcoholism and drunkenness and ofthe Gulag. Both ofthese tupics featured prominently in Soviet everyday life ofthe post-Stalin period, but public debate surrounding them was restricted in various ways. By the advent of the Thaw, the Soviet "alcohol problem" was subject to a "soft" taboo. Comedic representations of drunkenness and alcoholism were sometimes possible in official culture; but at the same time, every effort was made to suppress information about the extent ofalcohol problems in Soviet society and the severity oftheir consequences . By contrast, the Gulag was one of the preeminent ''hard" taboo themes of the post-Stalin period, admitted to public discourse ouly in limited and closely monitored forms. In guitar poetry, by contrast, both topics provided rich material for sustained creative exploration, sometimes deftly humorous and sometimes opeuly critical, but always closely observed and deeply relevant. In this chapter , guitar poetry's multifaceted treatments of drinking and alcoholism and of the Gulag are analyzed as manifestations of overt marginality. Choosing tu sing about politically sensitive topics, bards actively placed certain songs 101 Singing the Self in the margins of acceptable public discourse. As a conseqence, such songs come closest to notions of "resistance" and "protest" that are often ascribed both to the margins and to guitar poetry itself. At the same time, however, it was as much the way the bards handled sensitive themes, the kinds ofdirect comparisons and indirect associations they drew out, that provoked criticism from and anxiety within the Soviet cultural and ideolOgical establishmentand in not a few cases, complex responses from discomfited guitar poetry fans as well. Ultimately, it is preCisely in this tension, in such songs' resistance to easy classification, that their overt marginality is most clearly visible. DRINKING AND DRUNKENNESS IN OFFICIAL DISCOURSE OF THE POST-STALIN PERIOD By the late 1950s and early 1960s, official struggles against drunkenness and alcoholism were not new. Statistical information from the annual almanac Narodnoye khozyaylftva SSSR (The Domestic Economy ofthe USSR) shows a steady rise in alcohol production over two decades; and both this rise and pointed remarks in the Soviet press support the conclusion that, by the 1960s, there had been "an increase in alcohol consumption and an increase in habitual drunkenness and alcoholism among Soviet citizens."' Yet, for a brief period during the Thaw, alcohol consumption, even in flagrant excess, became an acceptable topic for relatively unfettered comedic representation . The early 1960s were the heyday of Leonid Gaidai's enormously popular slapstick comedies, for example, in which excessive drinking and drnnkenness playa major comedic role. Gaidai's rollicking short mms Pyas Barnas t neabychnyt kross (1961; The Dog Barnas and the Un1JS1Jal Rnce) and Samoganshchiki (1962; The Maonshiners), which feature a bumbling trio of petty criminals known collectively as ViNiMor, ''brought two important themes from folk culture to the Soviet screen: alcoholism and crime."' While drinking is somewhat incidental in Pyas Barnas (the plot revolves around an ill-fated fishing trip and the desire ofViNiMor's dog to play fetch with a dynamite-laden stick), it is entirely central to Samoganshchiki, the first part of which, as Aleksandr Prokhorov describes, consists of "a series of physical jokes about making and consuming alcohol in a fairy-tale-like hut in the middle of the forest."' What is especially notable about these shorts is their affectionately hedonistic bent: far from "engag[ing] in a satire of antisocial behavior," they present ViNiMor as lovable buffoons, "rehabilitat[ingl the ritual ofthree males consuming a half-liter bottle ofvodka."' This relative laxity was short-lived, however. Beginning in 1963, Na102 Overt Marginality rodnoye khozyaystvo SSSR stopped reporting vodka output as a separate category, instead including it (along with other beverage sales) under "other foodstuffs"; as a result, this new category "immediately became the largest single item in the retail sales statistics, accounting for a third of the total."' This shift augured a trend toward statistical sleight-of-hand that increased further under Brezhnev...