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Russians about Russia

What is it: rock music or rock poetry?

In the beginning of nineteenth century one of the most famous Russian poets said, that in Russia a poet is always more than a poet at all, and nowadays another one continues his phrase like “In Russia all the poets are rock musicians”. In fact, it is more than a truthful opinion.

The specific feature of Russian poetry of the end of the last century is that almost all poets of that time were rock musicians. The period of Iron Curtain, which lasted for about a half of a century and which was the symbolic and ideological boundary separating USSR people from “harmful impact” of the western culture, leaded to the situation when those youth unsatisfied with the political situation inside the country started listening to forbidden Western rock music and our own bards like Vladimir Vysotskiy. Then they took guitars and Russian rock’n’roll movement was born. The early Russian rock bands have much in common – the social protest and rock’n’roll pathos in the lyrics made them known underground, not among the wide public. In 1980s political and social changes in the country allowed soviet rock music to enter the media and become widely available.

Since the time when Russian rock stop being considered as forbidden music it has stayed popular and there have appeared some characteristics referred only to this kind of music. The main reason why our musicians are considered as poets is that in Russian rock the lyrics have always played a far bigger role than music in contrast to the Western rock culture. For the last several years in Moscow bookshops you can find lots of literature dedicated to this phenomenon as well as collected poems of Bashlachev (Russian rock bard), Shevchuk (the leader of DDT), Tsoy (the founder of Kino = The Movie) and many others.

The older gets Russian rock the more it bears a strong resemblance to Russian classic poetry. Alisa (equal to the name Alice) and DDT (=Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) became famous for their patriotism, closeness to fatherland. Mashina vremeni (The Time Machine) and Voscresen’e (The Sunday) continue looking answers for the “eternal” questions of our life. There also many new bands have appeared. Spleen and its leader Vasil’ev has already stood among the rock poets for his unique style of writing. The abovementioned reasons were traditional for our poets and they became traditional for our musicians. So why do not we start considered our rock as a new kind of poetry?

To sum up, I want to say that as well as our generation and generation of our parents learnt by heart works by Pushkin, Lermontov, Esenin, who were the classic Russian poets, and the generation of our children will study in school poems written by Kinchev, Grebenschikov and Makarevich, who were rock musicians but poets of nowadays.

P.S. On February 19 suddenly died of heart failure Yegor Letov, the leader of Russian rock group Grazhdanskaya Oborona (The Civil Defense). He was buried in his native town Omsk, but all over the whole Russia adults and youth came to the appointments in memory of the great Russian Poet.

Khakimova Sophia, 10 a