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singer whose occupation was to compose and sing verses in honour of the heroic achievements of princes and brave men. This initial reading of the term shouldn’t stop us from seeing some bards as minstrels who were medieval European entertainers. From the sixteenth century onwards, this latter term came to mean a specialist entertainer who sang songs and played musical instruments.

      In English, we also use the term to talk about outstanding poets, such as Shakespeare who is known as the bard of Avon. We also might want to very occasionally use this term in order to describe a songwriter who performs his own songs. Yesterday, I came across a question on funtrivia.com that asked, ‘Are there bards today?’ The answer was, ‘Absolutely, though we go by different job titles nowadays mostly. Today we're referred to as “singer-songwriters” or “composer-lyricists” or by some other coupling of terms for musicians who are at home in many areas of creation and performance of songs. Probably the best known living bard is Paul McCartney.’

      The last statement is arguable, of course, as your humble lecturer happens to think that the cultural importance of Sir Paul McCartney’s legacy is greatly overestimated. I used to live in Liverpool for almost three years, so I have my rights to say that. What I wanted to say is that our wish to apply the term to singer-songwriters is perfectly justifiable. I guess, though, that in Britain, unlike in the Soviet Union, you would only describe a music performer as a bard if you wanted to emphasise his or her outstanding poetic achievements, so you would only use the term as a ‘title of honour’ of some sort, or probably as an attempt at flattery. I believe this rare use of the term in Western countries has something to do with its origin. A bard, in the initial reading of this word, is a musician who praises victories of heroes, an official propagandist, in terms of today. A minstrel, on the other hand, originally was simply a wandering entertainer, not only a singer, but also a juggler, an acrobat, or a fool. Even though the word ‘fool’ has a specific meaning in this context which disallows us to mistake minstrels for ordinary fools, I do doubt that any of the successful song performers of today would want to enjoy the doubtful pleasure of being called either a propagandist or a fool for Christ.

      In Russia, the term has gained a much wider linguistic acceptance. No wonder, considering that no Soviet musician would be overly offended if you called him or her a propagandist which was a noble occupation or, in any case, which was what any ‘cultural worker’ in Soviet Russia was supposed to do. Russian culture also has a very special attitude to fools that originates from the period of the Tsardom of Muscovy when wandering monks and ascetics posed themselves as buffoons, maybe in order to freely expose the injustices committed by authorities and the rich men. Those ‘fools’ (the Russian word is yurodivy) were often seen as truly saint men. You might remember from the first lecture I gave that Boris Godunov, the first democratic tsar of Russia elected as a tsar in the meeting of the national assembly in 1598, humbly implores Bazil the fool to pray for the salvation of his soul. (Yes, we used to elect our national leaders even then: we have a tradition of democracy not many countries can be proud of. No, Boris Godunov was not a fictional character, and neither was Bazil the fool, although I don’t know whether this conversation has actually taken place.) A Soviet ‘creative worker’ or even an amateur musician was a propagandist whichever way you take it: either he or she was a bard admiring the war heroes and perhaps even propagating Communism, or he or she was a minstrel, a buffoon, a dissident cursing the social order, but never a simple entertainer.

      I hope that you had time to look at the article on bards in the Soviet Union I have forwarded to you for your general knowledge. Allow me to summarise it and say that the term bard came to be used in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s and continues to be used in Russia today, to refer to singer-songwriters who wrote songs outside the Soviet establishment. Because in bard music songwriters perform their own songs, the genre is also commonly referred to as author song, or avtorskaya pesnya.

      Bard poetry differs from other poetry mainly in being sung with simple guitar accompaniment as opposed to being spoken. Another difference is that it focuses less on style and more on meaning. The same I guess largely applies to Russian literature in general. ‘The substance of life doesn’t change much from one culture to another, but the human soul requires a beautiful wrapper,’ to quote from the Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Viktor Pelevin, a prominent contemporary Russian writer, translated into English by Andrew Bromfield. ‘Russian culture, though, fails to provide one, and it calls this state of affairs spirituality.’ In the second part of our lesson we probably discuss how you interpret this quotation and whether you agree with what Victor Pelevin says or not.

      The most famous bard in the Soviet Union was perhaps Vladimir Vysotsky. Other well-known bards were Alexander Galich, Bulat Okudzhava, Yuri Vizbor, and Alexander Rosenbaum. The five named persons might be—well, arguably so, of course—the most essential contributors to the development of the bard movement in Russia. The article on Wikipedia that I have forwarded to you yesterday gives a lot of other names, referring you to many fierce critics of the Soviet regime and/or Russia after 1991—such as Evgeny Kliachkin, for instance. ‘Fierce critics’ is perhaps too strong an expression where such definitions as ‘moaners’ and ‘complainers’ would perfectly do. You see, to be a critic of the regime is one thing, whereas to have real impact on the audience is quite another.

      Of the five artists I have named before, only Alexander Rosenbaum is still alive. Rosenbaum was born in 1951 in Saint Petersburg. You might want to know that he was given the honorary title of People’s Artists of the Russian Federation in 2001 and that he also has other state awards, among them the Order of Honour. Rosenbaum is an accomplished guitarist and accompanies himself on either a six- or twelve-string acoustic guitar. The person is still active creatively. In the musical landscape of today, Rosenbaum is known as an interpreter of outlaw, or criminal, songs (Russian blatnaya pesnya). Now, try to cope with the fact that the performer of criminal songs was given significant state awards. Doesn’t it stupefy you? In the future, I intend to say a few words about prison culture in Russia and its impact on Russian lifestyle in general.

      Allow me to say that I am not an admirer of either prison culture, or criminal songs, or Rosenbaum’s experimentising with the genre. Like many Russians, I still love him for his songs of the Soviet period, to one of which you may listen right now. The name of the song is Veshchaya Sud’ba, which is roughly translatable as ‘Foretelling My Destiny.’ It was composed in 1986.

      I think you would agree with me if I said that Alexander Rosenbaum sounds very dynamic and pretty much impressive here, not like your uncle or grandpa sitting on a sofa with a guitar in his hands. I am saying that because so many Russian bards, being working professionals in a non-musical occupation, do sound like our uncles and granddads. Their failure to provide a beautiful wrapper for what is inside, to use Victor Pelevin’s phrase again, has never prevented their audience from paying attention to them. Why? We shall discuss this question in the second part of our lesson. Unlike those bards, Alexander Rosenbaum is a musical professional who earns his living by the songs he produces. All this having been said, let us turn to the lyrics of the song.

      The song describes a man—probably the author himself—who got lost while wandering no-one knows where. This unknown place is vaguely referred to as a field where you cannot see much because of white smoke spreading around. Maybe—probably even—it is fog, not smoke, because no fire is mentioned. There is a river there, and the water is cold. There is snow or, at least, there are snowflakes in the air. You might be able to explain to me how these snowflakes can coexist with fog: to me, it seems to contradict the laws of physics. While being in this remote place the protagonist encounters a miraculous old man. The old man, barefoot and in dirty rags, is not harmful or dangerous in any way; in fact, he doesn’t pay any attention to our hero at all, he just keeps walking across the river. The problem is that the river is not frozen over, and the author specifically mentions the fact that the old man walks on water as if it were solid ground. Another strange thing about the old man is that the snowflakes which land on his body do not melt, as if the old man were dead, but not dead as a ghost, because the snowflakes do not stick to ghosts, as you probably now. Having crossed the river, the old man goes on walking—or maybe

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