'Proletarian Music? But That Is for Free People': Narratives of Liberation and Transformation in the Development of Early Soviet Proletarian Song Culture

• In Event: Music and Liberation I: Music and Narratives

Abstract

This paper presents and compares narratives of the transformation and liberation of the self through song and singing in the Soviet 1920s and early 1930s using film, newspapers, and literature. Narratives of noisy singing hooligans and homeless children dominated this period, from the first Soviet musical to sociological texts. Transformed hooligans held in the thrall of harmful, individualistic songs were to find personal liberation, paradoxically, in collective singing. According to Pravda in a 1936 article about penal laborers at the Black Sea canal, when a former criminal was reformed, “from the depths of his soul breaks out a song. And what a song it is! A man who was born again wants to sing, compose verse, and rhyme. He wants to tell the whole world about the miracle that happened to him.” His new life drove out “‘criminal song,’ dull, prison, convict songs, [and] the dashing poetry of the rabble.” The Soviet new man and woman were depicted as explicitly musical and harmonious, and campaigns to inculcate proletarian and mass song in daily life were just beginning. As these narratives of personal transformation played out in a variety of media, their reception among the Soviet public, among whom criminal and tavern songs were very popular, was not always ideal. Through this dissonance, the role and function that song and popular music was to play to Soviet society is revealed, as well as the distance between the public and the concept of “the masses” for whom popular art was being created.

Author

• Elizabeth Abosch