Arcady Severny

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Arcady Severny (Zvezdin) (Аркадий Северный; Аркадий Дмитриевич Звездин) (March 12, 1939 - April 12, 1980) was a popular singer from Leningrad (St. Petersburg). He was very popular in the Soviet Union in the 1970s primarily because of his performances of anti-Soviet and criminal songs. He sang more than 1,000 songs based on criminal folklore and literature. Severny worked with well-known Russian jazz and restaurant musicians. He recorded more than 80 albums, both solo and orchestral.

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[edit] Early life

Severny was born Arcady Dmitrievich Zvezdin in the town of Ivanovo near Moscow. Contrary to popular belief, in his childhood years he was neither a hooligan nor a poor pupil. On the contrary, he belonged to the so-called "golden youth" with his father occupying a senior position with the Ivanovo railroad. The young Arcady did well at school, and loved to play the seven-string guitar. Thanks to a very good memory, he could perform a large number of songs. His older sister once gave him a thick copybook filled with song lyrics, including numerous prison songs; he quickly learned this peculiar repertoire and eagerly sang such songs in polite company.

After graduating from school in 1957, Arcady left for St. Petersburg, where he enrolled in a Forestry Academy (S.M.Kirov Forestry College), and participated in amateur musical and theatrical productions including student ensembles that wrote and performed their own songs written in English in the style of Louis Armstrong. Having become completely engrossed in student amateur art, he did not study very diligently and after each term was on the verge of being expelled. Finally, he had to discontinue his studies for a while and took an academic leave of absence.

[edit] First recordings

Once, in the company of friends, Arcady sang about a dozen songs that he had recorded on tape. In 1963, his first recordings, with a total recording time of 35-40 minutes, were released. Upon receiving his degree in 1965, he was given an administrative job at SoyuzEksportLes (Wood Export Union). Nevertheless, working in an office environment was of little interest to him; he wanted to sing, and two years later destiny gave him his chance. In the summer of 1967, Arcady became acquainted with one Rudolf Fuchs, a person who recorded singers and songwriters who played the guitar. Fuchs had the idea of making the novice’s first album in the form of a refined hoax, specifically a non-existent radio program, which was allegedly broadcast on the airwaves. Severny performed prison songs on the radio at the request of the program’s listening audience.

There was good reason for Arcady choosing the pseudonym Severny. First of all, he wanted to lend more credibility to the artificial image of a prison singer, and since many convicts were sent to prison in the north of Russia, the pseudonym fit well (‘severny’ is Russian for ‘northern’). Secondly, the pseudonym served as a cover, since in those years one could actually be sent to prison for giving underground concerts.

In any case, the fake radio program turned out to be a major success. The audience was intrigued not so much by the songs as by the question of how could such a program appear on Soviet radio? No one could even guess that it was a joke.

[edit] Popularity

In 1968, Arcady was discharged from the Soviet army where he served as lieutenant for a year in a helicopter regiment not far from St. Petersburg. Having demobilized, the singer learned that during the period of his mandatory service, his popularity as a singer had grown considerably. He then received an invitation from producer Sergei Maklakov. Arcady performed his songs throughout an entire evening at Maklakov’s place. The result was 500 meters of recordings on the now outdated reel-to-reel tape recorder that were quickly disseminated throughout the entire Soviet Union and eventually gave rise to the popularity of the performer’s prison songs. It was with great pleasure that music lovers all over the country listened to the singer’s slightly hoarse voice performing such revived songs as Roast Chicken, School of Ballet Dance, I Lived in Noisy Odessa, Mother, I’m In Love With A Pilot, Tram #10 Passed By, and many others. During the recording, Arcady Severny would repeat In Odessa-, Back when I was in Odessa-, and so forth. Because of this, and of the stylized Odessa manner of performance of the songs, quite a few people believed that the singer himself was from Odessa.

[edit] Legacy

Severny managed to combine and concentrate practically the entire intonational lexicon of the "prison song" genre. Moreover, although it was understood that all this is a stylization, the genre remained one of the most prominent in the 1970s and 1980s underground scene.

It should also be noted that the official culture of the Soviet "stagnation" period not only had as its foil the light non-conformism coming from the direction of the intelligentsia, but also the dark culture of the criminal world. This because Severny was not recognized by the authorities as a singer, he became a cult figure in the USSR with the entire country dying to get a hold of the recordings of his private concerts. Russian criminal culture thus became an essential integral part of the greater Russian culture.

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