Abstract

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.

Avtorskai͡a pesni͡a, a music genre originating in the 1960s in the USSR, combines amateur music-making with poetry reading and writing. Translated by Gerald Smith as “guitar poetry”, it features a vocal performance of preexisting and original bardic poetry under guitar accompaniment. While it has gained scholarly attention as a way of disseminating underground literature and as a dissident movement, its artistic value as a form of performance remains undiscovered. Fading into the nostalgic memory of the Soviet Union, is it still worth listening to today? This article aims to develop an analytical method of bardic songs to reveal their interpretative potential in the interplay between text and performance. By examining two specific renditions, this article explores how vocal enactment frames lyrics in various ways to create a dramatic space of dialogue and confrontation. Performers manipulate their distance with the text performed and the performance as an interlocutor with the writer and the composer. The interaction between several authorships and personalities (lichnost’) forms a dramatic design, which inspires and welcomes new coauthors and reenactment. The practitioners of avtorskai͡a pesni͡a constantly activate, enliven, and innovate the relationship between the individual and the work from the past.

Keywords: guitar poetry, Soviet music, avtorskai͡a pesni͡a, performance, theatre, lichnost'