“His blood will beat out the path”: A case from the history of Soviet song heritage

Abstract

This paper dwells upon textual history, existence and reception of one of the songs related to Russian revolutionary subculture - “The gloomy forest stands around like a wall” ( Ugryumiy les stoit stenoi krugom ) - which has not been added to the official Soviet song canon in the pre-war Soviet period. Meanwhile, as I show at the beginning of the paper, the song is quite relevant in contemporary usus. This is exemplified, for example, by cover versions on YouTube. It is peculiar that these clips are not “historical” only; the song turns out to be an actual means for describing contemporary political and social atmosphere. We are dealing with a rather rare case when a text, initially little-known and pushed to the periphery of collective memory, into the “archive”, is included, if not in the song canon, then at least in some “zone of cultural visibility”. The reconstruction of the history of this song by Alexander Vermishev reveals the key moments that contributed to its modern reactualization. We tried to present the most complete history of the text by referring to the poem “Forward!” ( Vpered! ) published during Vermishev’s lifetime and then comparing it to the text of the song. Our assumptions about possible transformations and migrations of the text are hypothetical, but in total they can be sum- marized as follows: 1. The poem precedes the song; 2. Transformations of the text switch the genre register from lyro-epic to lyric (this is accompanied by a change in poetic meter); 3. The melody, which transforms the melodic structure of popular romances of the early 20th century, plays a special role in the abovementioned transformation of genre nature; 4. The reactualization of the song can be associated with the social atmosphere of the Khrushchev “thaw”; during that time the song entered the repertoire of choirs (first - Omsk Russian Folk Choir, then - the Pyatnitsky Choir), and disk records of it appeared; 5. A special role in the return of the song was played by its use in Gleb Panfilov’s movie “I request the floor” ( Proshu slova ) (1975), the brief analysis of which concludes the paper.