the Common Place

By special request - a post today for Chris of the underverse. He’ll understand the oblique reference , I think. Video by legendary Soviet/perestroika band Aquarium. English translation courtesy of Anti-War Songs

Artem Troitsky, shown here bumming a cigarette off Kino guitarist Yuri Kasparian while lead singer Viktor Tsoi looks on, wrote the book on the 80’s underground rock scene in the USSR. He also seems, from what I’ve read, to be one of the few really independent journalists left in Russia. In an interview with the St. Petersburg Times, he recounts how Back in the USSR came to be written, and shares his views on the Russian music scene, then and now:

“But if we’re speaking about the songs, I was more interested in the lyrics, rather than the music. I really think that poetically Russian rock is at least not worse than American, although it’s absolutely different, of course.

“So when this paradigm of the 1970s/80s Soviet rock that was dear to me disappeared, evaporated, inevitably I lost my interest in it. But speaking about the music itself, I always say that we have some quite likable guys, whose work I treat with sympathy and understanding.”

One of the most “likable guys” of that era has to be Viktor Tsoi, who I personally think can hold his own as a songwriter on any territory, though of course given the challenges of the times a lot of the recordings are pretty rough. It seems, thanks to the Knackered Hack, that I am now part of a not-secret plot to bring the cult of Tsoi to the West.

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It was such a trip to come across Viktor Tsoy in a totally unexpected (for me) place: on 3quarksdaily. Though I guess given the catholic (notice the small c, my atheist friends) tastes of the bunch there I shouldn’t be too surprised.

The piece on 3quarks was an excerpt from this post on the Knackered Hack, which he followed up with a post tying together many threads, including this sleep- and vodka-befogged conversation:

Viktor: Mozhna Teem? (Can I speak to Tim?)

Knackered Hack: [sleepily] Da, eta Teem. (Yes, this is Tim)

Viktor: Teem, eta Viktor. Kak dela? (Tim, it’s Viktor. How are things?)

Knackered Hack: [In a moaning, evidently nauseous voice] Neechevo (So-so)

Viktor: Teem, u tebya seegareta? (Tim, do you have a cigarette?)

Knackered Hack: Nyet (No)

Viktor: Teem, ya ‘khochu seegareta. (Tim, I want a cigarette.)

Knackered Hack: Ya tozhe … Do sveedanye. (Me too … Goodbye.)

If this is true then it represents one of the more fluent conversations I ever had in Russian. So it’s sad that I wasn’t there to recall it. In vodka veritas, clearly.

Now, it’s been years since I’ve been around Russian speakers, except occasionally in my UCSC Extension classes, and those encounters typically do not involve the consumption of vodka and black bread. But since encountering KH’s post, I’ve discovered that Tsoy is very much alive on the internets, especially youtube. The sound quality is pretty uneven, but just hearing that much Russian has been like opening a window in my brain. I’ve been thinking about stuff I haven’t thought of in years, and finding I remember more Russian than I thought.

In particular I’ve been reminded of how Russian can be both extremely laconic and very musical at the same time. Take the opening line of “Posledniy Geroy” (Last Hero): “Noch’ korotka, tsel’ daleka” (”the night is short and the goal is far away”). I know, it’s not Pushkin, it’s only rock and roll, but I like it.

I wonder if anyone has done research about how language interacts with memory formation. This experience, of having a window open in my brain, reminds of when my grandmother’s wits were beginning to wander a bit, and I happened to say something to her in German. She answered in German and we had a mostly coherent conversation, but from then on, her language setting was stuck on German. This was very inconvenient for the rest of my family. (After a nap, she was able to speak English again.)

What is interesting was that High German was a second language for both my Grandma and me. High German was the language of church and (daily) Bible-reading in Mt. Lake, Minnesota, in the early 20th century. Mennonite Plautdietsch was the everyday language of family interaction. My dad grew up speaking neither because grandma was Moravian and spoke whatever it is that Moravians speak, and also because Grandpa was very modern (for a Mennonite) and wanted his kids to speak good English and not be labelled “dumb Russians.” Russian, not German, because they came from Mennonite colonies in the Crimea. Did my choice of foreign languages have something to do with ancestral memories? I have no clue, they just seemed like interesting choices at the time.

[I also posted on Viktor Tsoy and magnitizdat’ culture on Dangerous Intersection. KH promises that he will be posting more on Tsoy including personal photos and recordings from the time he spent hanging out with Kino in the mid-’80’s, so stay tuned. ]