Alexander Bashlachev
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| Aleksander Bashlachev | |
|---|---|
| Image:SashBash.jpg |
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| Background information | |
| Born | May 27, 1960 Cherepovets, Russia |
| Died | February 17, 1988 (aged 27) |
| Genre(s) | Rock |
| Instrument(s) | 12-string guitar |
| Years active | 1984 – 1988 |
Alexander Nickolaevich Bashlachev (Russian: Александр Николаевич Башлачев) was a famous Russian poet, rock musician and songwriter. Bashlachev was born on May 27, 1960 in Сherepovets, Russia). He committed suicide on February 17, 1988
The rock poetry of Bashlachev is a ringing affirmation of Russia and her people, despite all the misery, degradation, and darkness it recognizes there. Bashlachev’s arrival in the capitals, after the celebrated liberal Soviet rock critic Artemy Troitsky had “discovered” him in his native Cherepovets, signaled a sea change in rock poetry. In the course of the few years separating Bashlachev’s emerging on the rock scene in 1984 and his suicide, he composed sixty or so remarkable lyrics. As his texts testify, Bashlachev sang of Russia’s hidden moral life, which the Western style bureaucratism imported into Russian by Peter I and passed down to Soviet times had not - so affirm Bashlachev’s poems - managed to trample down. “The Time of Little Bells” (“Vremia Kolokol’chikov”) is a paean to the Russian moral past, which the song views against a complex web of native Russian emblems brought into meaningful play with each other: kasha, birches, bells, laments, feasts, cupolas, troikas, and vodka. Although this is a poem that rewards rereading, we are not allowed to forget that it is also a song: its central conceit is to hear echoes of the great bells of the Russian spiritual past in the guitars and loudspeakers of Russian rock, while its verses resonate with external and internal rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and other rich sound orchestration. The song presents a double vision of time that plays the recent Soviet past against a distant, mythic past discovering behind the obvious contrasts an essential unity between the two times. The poet traces the path from a great past to a dwarfish present , beginning with the first stanza:
Долго шли зноем и морозами,
Все снесли и остались вольными,
Жрали снего с кашею березовой
И росли вровень с колокольнями.
We journeyed long in heat and frost.
Endured it all and remained free.
Devoured snow with birchy porridge
And grew to the height of belfries.
During the first phase of their journey through history, Russians were made free by their ability to suffer hardship (berezovaia kasha, “birchy porridge,” is a euphemism for a whipping). By feeding on privation and pain, they became spiritual giants among men. This led to a time of ideal communion (or sobornost’) among people and between people and God, whose voice was heard in the tolling of the bells. The Russians of the remote past were indeed united by the bell, in worship, sorrow, celebration, and danger: the bell protected them against enemies and fires, resonated with their emotions and uplifted them.
Если плачь - не жалели соли мы,
Если пир - сахарного пряника,
Звонари черными мозолями
Рвали нерв медного динамика.
When lamenting - we spared no salt.
When feasting - sugar-coated spicecakes.
The bell-tollers, with their black blisters,
Tore all the nerve of the copper loudspeaker.
Bashlachev’s point is that, whether in grieving or rejoicing, Russians know no measure. the bell-tollers of old, ringing the enormous bells of medieval Russia until their hands were reduced to black calluses, become an icon of this ancient strenuous emotional and spiritual life. By calling the bell a “loudspeaker,” the poet foreshadows the profane present from within the pious past in a surprising metaphor; rockers, it will later emerge, are the modern day analogue for the bell ringers of yore, tearing painfully at their guitar strings, seeking to reestablish the lost communion of the past, the spiritual harmony that makes giants of men.
Но с каждым днем времена меняются.
Купола растеряли золото.
Звонари по миру слоняются.
Колокола сбиты и расколоты.
But with every day the times change.
Over time cupolas lost their gilding.
The bell-tollers stumble about the land,
The bells are knocked down and cracked.
The fateful crack in the bells is also the schism of time: it divides present from past and spiritual life from profane. This slit evokes the many schisms, heresies, and wrenching Westward reforms imposed on Russia from the reign of Peter the Great until modern times. In this quatrain, Bashlachev vaults into the recent past and present, a time of disharmony (“We don’t sing any more, we’ve forgotten how to sing”), of stasis and stagnation (“Not a single wheel is greased./The whip is gone. The saddles have been stolen over time”), of dissipation (“We sleep and drink. Whole days and liters”), of profanity (“We’ve been chewing for ages: a blue streak with prayers”), of darkness (“We’ve been living for ages - in pitch black darkness”). But most important, the present is a bell-less age, a time of dislocation and solitude, of a vain search of a lost secret of harmonious living:
Чтож теперь ходим круг да около
На своем поле как подпольщики?
Если нам не отлили колокол,
Значит, здесь время колокольчиков.
Why do we beat around the bush
In our field - like underground men?
If no bell has been cast for us,
It means here - is the time of little bells.
Without a great bell, without the unifying idea of the native communal spirit life, Russians have become uprooted and lost; they drift about the field of time with only their “little bells” to guide them. But in Russian the “little bells” are also the “bluebells” growing in the thawing field after a long winter: they evoke a postcivilization, postindustrial return to the more natural pagan life, that preceded the entire cycle of Russian history just detailed. Through the pun “podpol’shchiki” Bashlachev evokes both underground solipsists of the nineteenth century, personified by Dostoevsky`s Underground Man and members of unofficial organizations in the twentieth century - that is, Soviet dissenters, including, of course, the unofficial underground culture that produced Russian rock and from which Bashlachev emerged. With the decay of the shared cultural values of the past, Russians have been forced into the more Western modes of isolation, individualism, and egoism, which have led to the misery the poem depicts. The destruction of the great bell of past harmony tolls the coming of the age of small bells, assurely a more fragmented and crueler epoch, but by no means a hopeless one.
А звени, сердце, под рубашкою
Второпях- врассыпную вороны.
Эй! Выводи коренных с пристяжкою
И рванем на четыре стороны.
You ring out, heart, under my shirt
Hurriedly - the crows fly off pell-mell.
Hey, lead out the shaft horses,
And we’ll tear off in all four directions.
The Russian who can still make out the tolling of his own heart has found a secret, internal echo of the great past. And even without knowing where to search for that lost harmony, if one races in all direction with famous Russian abandon, it is just possible, that one will prevail. Here Bashlachev rigs up, bell and all, the troika of the final paragraph of Dead Souls, Gogol`s emblem of Russia’s potential for leading the world into entire perdition or salvation. the troika has been reduced to a state of dreadful disrepair,
А на дожде - все дороги радугой!
Быть беде. Нынче нам до смеха ли?
Но если есть колокольчик под дугой,
Так значит, все. Заряжай, поехали!
But in the rain all roads lead off in a rainbow!
There’s hell to pay. Is this a laughing matter?
But if there’s a bell under the shaft-bow,
Then let’s go, charge it up, we’re off!
The passage suggests that so long as Russians hear the soul, the spiritual bell, in their bodies - and so long as artists (be it Gogol or Bashlachev) - can make it resonate - there is a hope for Russia.
We’re so long waiting. All wandered about dirty.
Because of this we began to look alike,
But under the rain we turned out to be different,
The majority is honest, good.
The Soviet brand of communion attempted forcibly to reestablish the lost harmony of the great Russian past, but it failed because its method was to reduce all to the lowest common denominator of humanity: instead of rerooting Russians in the soil of their spiritual past, in a free brotherhood of mutual faith and love, Soviet life simply trampled them into the mud. The song notes on the singer’s faith in his people’s miraculous capacity for moral regeneration.
И пусть разбит батюшка Царь-колокол -
Мы пришли!Мы пришли с гитарами.
. . .
Рок-н-ролл - славное язычество.
Я люблю время колокольчиков.
And though Father King Bell may be crushed -
We have come!We have come with guitars.
. . .
Rock’n’roll - splendid paganism.
I love the time of little bells.
Here the circle closes. Bashlachev envisages the spirit of contemporary culture, ideally rendered by the art of rock poetry, as a return to Russia’s primordial pre-Christian state, described in the first lines of the poem. After the smallness of Bolshevism, Russians have once again begun to discover goodness in their suffering and to grow spiritually as a result. They have rediscovered a sense of direction, have renewed their search for metaphysical change. In the beginning, the artistic medium best suited to convey this spiritual quest was the bell, a direct means of communication with God in a newly Christened Rus; later, in the age of schisms, this musical expression was lost and the harmony itself destroyed; then literature, like Gogol’s lyrical prose, became the oblique medium through which Russians best conveyed their sorrowful yearning for the cracked bell of past unity; but even literature was enslaved to foreign (Marxist) ideals under socialist realism. Rock poetry is the medium for a new age: combining music and poetry, direct and indirect intimations of harmony, the new bell - the “copper loudspeaker” - overpowers the lies of the recent past with its loud affirmation of an ancient, eternal truth. Bashlachev holds up the past as a sacred time against which he measures the profane present, although he also finds a redemptive value in the suffering of those who have strayed from past ideal into present misery.
[edit] External links
- Alexander Bashlachev
- Alexander Bashlachev (Some of his poems in English translation)
