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Outlaw Music in Russia

Name: Outlaw Music in Russia
Brand: UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS
SKU: 9780299340100
Price: 231.0 AUD
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UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESSISBN: 9780299340100

The Rise of an Unlikely Genre

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$231.00

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By Anastasia Gordienko
Imprint: UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS
Release Date: April 30, 2023
Format: HARDBACK
Pages: 336

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The Russian shanson can be heard across the country today, on radio and television shows, at mass events like political rallies, and even at the Kremlin. Yet despite its ubiquity, it has attracted almost no scholarly attention. Anastasia Gordienko provides the first full history of the shanson, from its tenuous ties to early modern criminals' and robbers' folk songs, through its immediate generic predecessors in the Soviet Union, to its current incarnation as the soundtrack for daily life in Russia. It is difficult to firmly define the shanson or its family of song genres, but they all have some connection, whether explicit or implicit, to the criminal underworld or to groups or activities otherwise considered subversive. Traditionally produced by and popular among criminals and other marginalized groups, and often marked by characters and themes valorizing illegal activities, the songs have undergone censorship since the early nineteenth century. Technically legal only since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the shanson is today not only broadly popular but also legitimized by Vladimir Putin's open endorsement of the genre. With careful research and incisive analysis, Gordienko deftly details the shanson's history, development, and social meanings. Attempts by imperial rulers, and later by Soviet leaders, to repress the songs and the lifestyles they romanticized not only did little to discourage their popularity but occasionally helped the genre flourish. Criminals and liberal intelligentsia mingled in the Gulag system, for instance, and this contact introduced censored songs to an educated, disaffected populace that inscribed its own interpretations and became a major point of wider dissemination after the Gulag camps were closed. Gordienko also investigates the shanson as it exists in popular culture today: not divorced from its criminal undertones (or overtones) but celebrated for them. She argues that the shanson expresses fundamental themes of Russian culture, allowing for the articulation of anxieties, hopes, and dissatisfactions that are discouraged or explicitly forbidden otherwise.

Anastasia Gordienko is an assistant professor of Russian and Slavic studies at the University of Arizona.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments A Note on Translation and Transliteration Introduction 1 Contextualizing the Shanson Phenomenon 2 Criminals' Music from Its Origins to the Early Soviet Period: A Glorified Archetype 3 Soviet Underworld Music: From the Bolshevik Revolution through the End of the Stalin Era (1917-1950s) 4 From Post-Stalinist Censorship to the Contemporary Mainstream: The Birth of the Shanson 5 The Shanson: Main Features and Tropes 6 The Shanson in Russia: From the Slums to the Kremlin 7 Turning Russia's Immediate Reality into Song Epilogue: The Shanson-Soundtrack to Russian Reality Glossary Notes Bibliography Index

"Gordienko makes a valuable and convincing argument for the tangible effects that popular music can have on politics and culture, rather than music only serving as a reflection of society for scholarly observation. It will surely be a foundational work."-- "The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review" "Wonderful and thoroughly engaging. . . . Breaks new grounds."-- "Slavic Review" "Vivid and engrossing. . . . The sophistication of [Gordienko's] methodology--which is as likely to refer to Adorno and Habermas as it is to historians and sociologists of Russia--is lightly worn and informed by some fifteen years of close-up anthropological observation working in the world of Russian and Ukrainian broadcasting."--Slavonic and East European Review "[Gordienko] is among the first to conduct in-depth research on [shanson]. The result is this detailed, extensively documented study."--CHOICE "A seminal work of simply outstanding scholarship. . . . Unique and highly recommended."--Midwest Book Review "A rigorous examination. . . . [Gordienko] unearths many intriguing aspects of the shanson. Russophiles and musicologists will savor this impressive study."--Publishers Weekly "A clear and entertaining overview of a vital, integral part of post-Soviet Russian culture--a joy to read."--Eliot Borenstein, New York University "This fascinating book, both deeply researched and highly entertaining, provides valuable insights into Russian cultural history and should be required reading for all interested in the history of Russian popular song."--Karen Evans-Romaine, University of Wisconsin-Madison

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