Vse ushli na front : The war theme and the bard movement in the Soviet Union

In the Soviet Union, literary writers were required to produce their work within the bounds of the cultural doctrine of Socialist realism or risk being subject to sanctions of the authorities. During the Khrushchev Thaw after the death of Joseph Stalin, there appeared the musical genre of avtorskaya pesnya (or author’s song), which was often described as part of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union. The genre nourished on as well as voiced criticism of Soviet life, and its performers, also called bards, became highly popular. The Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) was a common theme in Soviet literature, and also one of the main themes in avtorskaya pesnya. This study analyses the war theme in the songs of the three main bards of this genre – Bulat Okudzhava, Yuri Vizbor and Vladimir Vysotsky – in order to examine the genre’s relation to the norms of Socialist realism. These definitions compose the theoretical framework that is applied to the songs in interpretative readings to determine their relation to Socialist realism. The study analysed 21 songs with a war theme of Okudzhava, Vizbor and Vysotsky. Contrary to what might be expected, it is concluded that the war theme found in avtorskayapesnya generally conforms to the norms of the officially approved Soviet literature of war, but that the bards in some instances venture outside of the bounds of Socialist realism