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

Conclusion

Conclusion On the cusp of the 1950s and 1960s, guitar poetry was poised to become one ofthe central sociocultural phenomena of the post-Stalin period. Bards quickly became emblematic of an entire generation and beyond, as more and more young people turned to guitar poetry as singer-songwriters and as listeners; and, in doing so, drew together into communities around their common interest in bards' eminently accessible songs. As this study has shown, though, in many ways guitar poetry was also a phenomenon of the margins and of the marginal. On one hand, guitar poetry was rooted in various types of marginality, from the generic (in its diverse roots and its musico-poetic hybridity) and the aesthetic (in the sounds of "bad singing ," amateurish guitar technique, and poor-quality magnitizdat tapes); to the physical (in the spaces in which it developed and flourished) and the sociopolitical (in its uneasy interactions with fully sanctioned cultural activities and its delicate negotiation of the gray area between the permitted and the prohibited). For several generations of Soviet young people, moreover, guitar poetry was an important means of self-fashiOning, communication, and community-building, all processes that are integral to marginality. On the other hand, marginality was also embedded in guitar poetry itself as an element of composition, in the selection and treatment of specific themes, in the use of seemingly trivial details, and in the deft handling of multiple generic codes. Grounded in an understanding of the margins as interstitial arenas of social and cultural fusion, instability, and change, this analysis offers buth a new approach to guitar poetry and also a new way ofconceptualizing the crises and strnggles of the immediate post-Stalin period as complex manifestations of a marginal state. In so doing, it firmly situates the great eruption of the "in between" into Soviet life in that same period, rather than (as is more widely argued) in the 1970s and 1980s. Among the ideological quandaries that were precipitated by Stalin's death and the dismantling of his legacy, issues surrounding the cultural, moral, and ideological vospitaniye of Soviet youth-the problem of reshaping essential "Sovietoess" and a concomitant 181 Singing the Self sense of Soviet identity while removing the Stalinist foundation on which these had long depended-occupied an extremely promioent place. But the simultaneous "crisis" io Soviet song deprived ideologues ofa key iostrument of vospitaniye, one that was felt to be particularly important for reaching Soviet youth. Thus, the Soviet cultural establishment initially greeted amateur sioger-songwriters' efforts with tentative praise, viewing them as a wellspring of popular creativity that could be channeled io service of the state, not least as a much-needed aid to vospitaniye. But this early approbation faded rapidly as the impossibility of corralling guitar poetry perrnanendy and definitively became iocreasingly obvious. The standard weapons of institutionalization and oversight, cajoling and co-opting, threats and censorship were deployed; but they were of limited utility in combatting guitar poetry's popularity and its relatively unhiodered spread across the entire Soviet Union. The formation ofClubs ofAmateur Song provided structures io which Party organs, the Komsomol, and the KGB could scrutinize bards' and fans' activities, for example. But bards' and fans' williogness to operate simultaneously withio and outside such constraiots-and even more, their adeptness at doiog so-meant that KSP activities were never fully controllable. Even as particular bards were struck off approved concert lists, clever organizers contrived to enter them into song competitions on an entirely legal basis. Even as urban concerts and festivals were restricted or banned, guitar poetry enthusiasts continued to organize rallies io sylvan settings and to carry songs with them on expeditions to the far-Hung reaches ofthe Soviet Union. Similarly , while censuring and censoring could be effective io targeting the most outspoken bards, such heavy-handed tactics were impractical against legions of guitar-strumming young people and scores of songs that lacked explicidy anti-Soviet content. The discourse ofvospitaniye and the related discourse oflichnost' underpioned official concerns about the wildfire spread of guitar poetry and its particular popularity among young people. For Soviet youth of the postStalin period, guitar poetry-perhaps especially guitar poetry ofan apolitical cast-appealed not just as a means ofentertainment; but also, as attested by the numerous firsthand accounts analyzed here, as a means ofself-discovery, self-fashioniog, and communication with like-minded iodividuals. That is, lichnost' was as much a part ofthe discourse about guitar poetry and the guitar poetry movement as it was of official...