Aleksandr Rozenbaum and the Jewish Avtorskaia Pesnia

• In Event: The Cultural Politics of Jewish-Russian Identity during the Late 1950s-1980s

Abstract

In a recent interview, Aleksandr Rozenbaum (b. 1951) pointedly disavowed that his songs belonged to the auteurist musical genre of the Russian singer songwriter or bard, known as the avtorskaia pesnia. Certainly, the songwriting style of Rozenbaum—with its tendency to foreground one affect in each composition, at the expense of a range of possibly clashing impulses—could not seem more different from the emotional irony and paradox that typically characterize the avtorkskaia pesnia. In this presentation, I will examine Rozenbaum’s early songs as attempts to formulate a distinctly Jewish avtorskaia pesnia, in response to the work of earlier Jewish-Russian songwriters and performers such as Iurii Vizbor and Mark Bernes.

Author

• Alexandar Mihailovic, Hofstra U