HIS 242
A New Russian Culture?
Remarks by Professor Evans

St. Michaels

 

 

 

 

 

Saint Michael's Cathedral (Собор святого Архистратига Михаила) in Izhevsk, Russia, a city in the Western Urals noted for its armaments production. The cathedral was original erected between 1897 and 1915 and dedicated to Michael the Archangel. In 1937 it was demolished by the communist regime. As part of the Putin administration's appeal to the Russian cultural past and to the Russian Orthodox church, the cathedral was rebuilt to the original designs between 2004 and 2007 There was an earlier chapel on the site dating to the eighteenth century. Photo credit Noah Rucker.

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Well, here I have some brief remarks on some aspects of Russian culture in about the last fifty years or so. That's about the same amount of time that we covered in HIS 241 with the Golden Age and then earlier in this course with the Silver Age. While Leonid Brezhnev clamped down on much freedom of expression in the 1960s and 1970s, there were still important works produced by Russian artists. I'm going to comment only briefly on literature, music and cinema.

Let me start with some notes about Russian literature.

While there is some general cultural material in the textbook, and while I know quite a bit about the history of rock music in the world, I have to admit that I do not know many details about the wide diversity of Russian pop or rock music, but it is easy for me to single out Vladimir Vysotskii (Владимир Высоцкий, 1938-1980), as one of the most important figures in Russian music, poetry and cinema. His songs tend to be rambling, poetic discourses in roughly the same manner as some of Bob Dylan's extended songs ("Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," "Blowing in the Wind," "Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again"). Vysotskii also had a satyric quip about him, and a way to turn phrases that gave listeners an understanding of what he was really trying to say, but which couldn't be said (a sort of Aesopian language). Most of his music passed hand-to-hand on home-made cassette tapes. (Now you can find a lot of his music on the web. This site has a link to over twenty hours of streaming Vysotskii.) He was a troubadour, a bard, a musical poet that was the voice of his generation--even though he would vehemently disagree with such a characterization. Because of his tongue-in-cheek style, few of his recordings could be published while he was alive. He was also an extremely successful and much loved actor and is buried in the Vagankovskoye Cemetery in Moscow.

In cinema, Russia has had some truly talented directors, despite the Soviet regime's many obstacles. Here are just three:

Let me also take a quick note of the dissident movement in Russia in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, a movement that lingers in some form maybe even to the present. There are many people that one could take note of here, including Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sinyavskii (1925-97), Iulii Daniel (1925-88), Iurii Galanskov (1939-72), Aleksandr Ginzburg (1936-2002) and many more.

Two other prominent features of Russian culture in more recent years include:

While Russian society and its cultural expressions have changed greatly in the past fifty years (Just as it has in the United States and other countries of the developed world), we can look at the old saying, "the more it changes, the more it stays the same" (plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose), and conclude that some elements of Russian culture are timeless. As I've written here, literature is still prominent, and poetry like that of Vysotskii is still valued. Russian cinema continues the tradition forged by Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin in the 1920s, and the Bolshoi and Mariinksii ballet companies still tour the world as the epitome of classical ballet.

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Some recommended books

Some recommended websites