On The Media

But with the shifting perspectives that convulse Russia on a regular basis, nostalgia is very much on people's minds. For many Russians, the dark days were also the golden days of youth, of long nights over a bottle with friends and the bittersweet struggle for self-expression.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER/SINGING]

Those days are preserved as in amber in the music of the Russian bards, like Vladimir Vysotsky, who sang about the longings and frustrations of the '60s generation, now nostalgic for the days when they had something to fight against.

NATALIA IVANOVA: Some people, they have their own nostalgia for the pioneer camps. Can you imagine?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Natalia Ivanova is the editor of the literary magazine Znamia, once an important journal of art and ideas, where elliptical language conveyed subversive messages.

NATALIA IVANOVA: Our magazine in the beginning of the Perestroika, we have one million copies. Now we have four thousand and a half. But there's no nostalgia for that very time -for me. Better it will be the society free and we not so important, just having only art for art.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: As for the new generation of bards, they're popular, drawing hundreds of thousands to an annual festival. And while the best of them credit the great old bards, Vysotsky, Bulat Okudzhava and Alexander Galich as inspirations, now they have a different role. Timur Shaov is one of the best of the new breed.

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I sat down with Shaov in his Moscow flat and began at the beginning. What do you write about?

TIMOR SHALV: About life.

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR TIMUR SHAOV: About life.

[RUSSIAN/SIMULTANEOUS INTERPRETATION]

When people ask me where I get material for my songs, I always say the material is all around me. It's walking in the streets, driving around in Mercedes, begging in subways. For me to write a song, I need to be in a light, cheerful but annoyed mood.

When I see our Duma voting, I can respond with a song. Material’s in the air. For instance, one of my songs is devoted to Delta Airlines. They lost my luggage and so I wrote a song.

[LAUGHTER]

I still haven't gotten my luggage back. No one believes me. My American friends say they should have at least paid me. Anyway, I never got any money from them, so I wrote a song about how they stole my baggage.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: In the old bard tradition, the songs are almost uniformly sad. It sounds like in the new bard tradition. The songs are ironic, upbeat, funny.

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR TIMUR SHAOV: Young people today are different. They don't ruminate so much. I do not know whether it's good or bad, but they're playing happy songs, and I think that's good.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How are the times different now? I mean, what characterizes these times?

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR TIMUR SHAOV: It seems to me that back in Stalin's day, people would say that life is better, life is merrier, but that was tongue in cheek. But I've always been an optimist. It seems to me that the life today is much better. But we must still be on our guard so that we don't sleep through it.

I mean, what characterizes our time is that there are no shake-ups, no revolutions. It's not like it used to be when every day you would wake up and people would say, hey, guys, this morning it's a whole new country. Now things are different. You seem to wake up in the same country.

But everything moves quietly, quietly, and when you wake up it seems as if things are not going quite the way you really want it. So this is very dangerous. But apart from that, these are good times.

[RUSSIAN]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You said that you write about how the times are changing. What's the starkest change that you see?

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR TIMUR SHAOV: I suppose, after all, it is freedom of speech. Everything else begins with it, it seems to me. Everything else is based on that—economy, law, etc. Every sphere is dominated by whether there is freedom of speech or there isn't freedom of speech.

If we lose it now, there won't be any economic success and we'll go back to how it was. I'm convinced that we will, and I do not want my country to become a regime like one determined by the drilling of its oil, like some despotic Asian or African country. I really don't want that.

[RUSSIAN]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The original bard tradition reminds me a little of the American tradition of the protest song that emerged in the early '60s, and along with it came this idealistic belief that you could change the world with your music. Does anybody hold that belief here, now?

INTERPRETER FOR TIMUR SHAOV: Well, I'm a cynic. I'm pragmatic. The role these songs play in our country today, thank God, they're more aesthetic than a political role. Maybe, God forbid, the time will come again when it will have to play a political role.

But nevertheless, they won't show me on television. Even when I sang in the festival on Moscow Echo—that was recorded for TV—they showed the whole thing except for my song. I'm not going to claim there was pressure on freedom of speech. You know, maybe they had artistic reasons to cut me out. Maybe they didn't like my vocals or the way I played guitar.

But you can see a trend towards self-preservation, you know—people who try to be holier than the Pope, and they will cut out totally innocent things. So I don't have any illusions. I'm not for television. Well, it's all right. My CDs are passed around. People share the CDs just like in the old times, just like Vysotsky records were passed around.

And as for the role of the bard song today, it doesn't aim to overturn the world, but if it must, we'll be singing something else.

[RUSSIAN]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What song didn't people get to watch on state television?

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR TIMUR SHAOV: The song was called Elect Me. I decided, as a joke, to run for president. At the concerts I usually say, Putin is leaving, and since there's no one to replace him, I decided to run. And I will sing you my election program in this song. It's quite an innocent song, though I understand what might have frightened them about it.

[RUSSIAN]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: If elected, will you serve?

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR TIMUR SHAOV: I really hope they don't elect me. God forbid. Better I should go back to being a doctor.

[RUSSIAN]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I'll vote for you.

[LAUGHTER]

INTERPRETER FOR TIMUR SHAOV: Thank you.

[LAUGHTER]

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER/TIMUR SHAOV SINGING]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That's it for this week's show from Russia. For more information, check out our website on onthemedia.org.

[MUSIC/TIMUR SHAOV SINGING]

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