Language policy/music policy in Soviet Russia

As Anderson's (Reference Anderson1983) seminal work on the relationship between word and sociopolitical affiliation has convincingly shown, the adoption of a common language has been an integral element in the creation of the conception of a ‘nation’, especially one whose physical size precludes actual, concrete intercourse among the various inhabitants. As early as the late 18th century, Russia – in the context of a growing wave of nationalist sentiment throughout Europe (both Western and Eastern) – took steps to produce a ‘common’ language, with the production of a Russian dictionary and, early in the 19th century, an official grammar.Footnote ⁹ Such steps toward codification and solidification were, however, rendered even more imperative at the close of the Russian Civil War in 1921, at which time the Bolshevik leaders were faced with a vast, polyglot empire, comprising not only non-ethnic Russians speaking literally hundreds of languages and dialects (largely in the Caucuses and Central Asia), but also a Russian populace whose regional linguistic variations and staggering rates of illiteracyFootnote ¹⁰ served as a bulwark against univocal communication and mutual comprehension. As Smith (Reference Smith1998) suggests, the Bolsheviks, understanding the importance of both the ‘form’ and ‘function’ of language – each dependent upon the other – for the development of a powerful and stable geopolitical entity, undertook a two-pronged effort in order to linguistically unify a dizzyingly disparate populace. In keeping with the Soviet rhetoric of putative equality, the first, in connection with the Russian speaking populace (the majority), aimed for a compromise between standardisation and democratisation; the second, in connection with the non-Russian speaking peoples, was a goal toward Russification, tempered by nativisation. Equality in theory, however, differed from actual practice, and in most instances the policies of the language initiative (eventually called ‘language construction’, iazykovoe stroitel'stvo) had the end result – if not the explicit, stated aim – of rendering Russian the ‘high-status’ language. In Smith's estimation, ‘[t]he non-Russian languages enjoyed the right to autonomy but not the right to equality. The government allowed them to develop in various ways, but never so much as to become coequal with the status and prestige of Russian’ (Smith Reference Smith1998, p. 175).

As noted, the effects of the ‘language construction’ were manifest in the most basic elements of the ‘forms’ of the innumerable languages which came under its sway, including Russian itself; here, ‘unnecessary’ or otiose letters or signs (e.g. the ‘hard sign’ or tverdyi znak, ‘ъ’), viewed by some as vestiges indicative of aristocratic excess, were largely eradicated. In other instances, in the non-Russian speaking areas of the Union, previously oral languages were given written form (and concomitant grammars), and alphabets were often changed with an almost insouciant frequency.Footnote ¹¹ Such initiatives, however, carried out by an army of government-supported linguists and bureaucrats, were never entirely successful in realising the certainly unrealistic goal of ‘monoglotism’ – due not only to the lack of resources necessary to implement such an enormous undertaking, but also to the constant friction between the ‘bottom-up’ and the ‘top-down’ factions present at every level.

With the ascension of Stalin, the experimental initiatives of the NEP years – partially, and at least putatively, due to pecuniary concerns – were tabled, in favour of the construction of ‘cultural orthodoxies’ (Smith Reference Smith1998, p. 143). And while a ‘literal’, ‘formal’ standardisation of languages may not have come to full fruition, its worth nonetheless progressed past the simply utilitarian, and formal structure was, as Gorham (Reference Gorham2003) suggests, integral to the efficacy of language as hegemonic tool; through the process of ‘linguistic routinisation’, the Party's ‘language’ became more accessible and authoritative to a wider segment of the populace. This language – most often delivered via the prestige of Russian – became the symbol of party allegiance and concomitant power, a ‘cue to membership’ (Gorham Reference Gorham2003, p. 139). Such allegiance – and, moreover, subservience – was also symbolised grammatically, as Smith's (Reference Smith1998) incisive reading shows: passive verbal constructions and the absence of active verbs in party disseminations ‘hinted at a preexisting, even “magical” reality, always immutable and true’ (Smith Reference Smith1998, p. 146). Ultimately, language and message were to be held to a standard of ‘clarity’, were to reflect a ‘real reality’ (Smith Reference Smith1998, p. 146), such language being widely disseminated via the party's main print media, Pravda [Truth] and Bolshevik. This control of the press, as Brooks (Reference Brooks2000, p. 18) notes, had far-reaching and deep consequences, resulting in a ‘full-fledged seizure of the public imagination’. Beyond the realm of putative ‘information’ (or ‘truth’), both the producers and consumers of the ‘literary’ realm were enjoined to become men and women who ‘understood words and their “concrete” meanings’ (Smith Reference Smith1998, p. 147).

This bipartite scheme, with tripartite sub-divisions – geared toward, on the one hand, Russians, and on the other, non-Russians, and comprising the technical, pedagogical and ideological aspects of language – was carried out almost identically not only in the realm of the manifestly linguistic, from mass-media to literary creation, but in the area of musical production as well. After the revolution, Russian ‘folk’ practice – sometimes in the guise of putatively ‘authentic’ ‘folk’ choruses and orchestrasFootnote ¹² – were seen as vestiges of backwardness, while indigenous musical practices in, for example, Central Asia, were taken as impediments to the creation of a proletarian state not mired in the inherent divisiveness of ‘nationality’ (to say nothing of their ascribed ‘primitiveness’).Footnote ¹³ While the ‘folk’ was eventually ‘rehabilitated’ – partly through the reconfiguration of the ‘peasant’ as ‘agricultural worker’, as well as the dissolution of the RAPM (Rossiiskaia assosiatsiia proletarskikh muzykantov, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians) – both groups were subject to the same sorts of measures taken in relation to language. Scales, instruments and harmonies were standardised (‘technical’ aspects),Footnote ¹⁴ institutions of training and performance founded (pedagogical),Footnote ¹⁵ and ideological content determined from above. Interventions in musical practices also exhibited the same sort of tensions inherent in language policies, where the frisson between the Leninist imperative to ‘raise’ (podniat') the level of the workers' cultural proficiency, and the Stalinist ideal that it is the artist who must strive for comprehensibility, to be understood (poniat') (Barker Reference Barker and Barker1999, p. 28), were often at odds; but as with language, by 1934 (and the institution of Socialist Realism as the official mode of artistic production) the imperative was the creation of clarity, optimism and ‘realism’.Footnote ¹⁶ Mass songs (massovye pesni), such as those by Isaak Dunaevskii, became part and parcel of choirs' repertoires, as well as components of numerous Soviet films,Footnote ¹⁷ and ‘kitsch’ emerged as the progeny of the hyper-chaperoned, nervous intercourse between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. With the massovye pesni (as well as, although more problematically, the burgeoning genre of èstrada), the linguistic and the musical, both enlisted in the project of standardisation and univocality, were wed in service of ideological cultural creation.

Soviet rock, and counter-discourses ‘within’ the system

The desire for control of discourse via both language and cultural production necessitated and gave rise to a xenophobic panic around foreign cultural ‘invasion’, especially production emanating from the zenith of the capitalist ‘culture industry’, the United States; yet panic alone was an insufficient prophylactic, and manifestations of American-inspired music – for example, tea-dzhaz (theatrical jazz) – appeared and gained a following in Russia as early as the 1920s.Footnote ¹⁸ In the late 1940s and early 1950s, both sartorial and musical style coalesced in the Moscow youth subculture of the stiliagi (from the Russian word stil', [style]), whose valorisation of things Western (generally American) – zoot suits, pompadours, swing music, slang and, eventually, rock ‘n’ roll – put them at odds with the establishment. Of apparently less perceived danger were the elements of Western or other foreign musical styles (in often stereotypical, sanitised guises) which often appeared in the Soviet genre of èstrada (and the closely related retro), both of which are replete with nods to jazz, mambo, cha-cha and tango. But perhaps one of the most restive movements of opposition, and one which would inspire abundant devoted followers, was Russian rock, the birth of which occurred in the late 1960s.Footnote ¹⁹ While the Soviet authorities would try to extinguish this music via intimidation, arrest, bureaucratic obstacles or censorship, rock music and musicians did, in fact, continue to both perform and even record and distribute their work (via magnitizdat, self-distribution on cassette tapes, and/or ‘bones’).Footnote ²⁰ Understanding the affective power of this youth style, the cultural authorities even attempted to co-opt what were perceived to be the salient musical attributes of the genre, and present them in a more acceptable and ideologically ‘healthy’ manner, via the new (and governmentally supported) ‘bands’ known as VIAs (vokal'no-instrumental'nyi ansambl', vocal-instrumental ensemble). I will not devote time to discussing the negligible ‘rock’ (musical) elements of these formations, in contrast with ‘authentic’ Russian rock;Footnote ²¹ rather, in keeping with my aim, I will focus on the lyrics – a focus which, as I will shortly discuss, is that of many Russian critics and fans themselves. Indeed, while both VIAs and the ensembles accompanying èstrada singers might make use of the gross appurtenances of rock performance, their lyrics differed in marked ways, the former's ‘clarity’, use of overdetermined imagery and sociopolitical buttressing in marked contrast to the latter's subversion and polysemy-engendering multivocality.

For example, the lyrics to VIA Verasy's [Heather] ‘Ia u babushki zhivu’ [‘I Live with Grandmother’] serve a didactic function, warning of the dire demographic consequences if hedonism and egocentricity are allowed to flourish; while material (consumerist) needs might be met – the child narrator notes that the house in which he lives is full of sweets, and a dog was bought for his enjoyment – he is nonetheless downhearted and bored as grandmother knits and grandfather naps, having no siblings with whom he might play in the courtyard:

Love, likewise, could be presented in the edifying context of cultural tutelage; specifically, the music lesson, in which solemnisation is the means of learning (and taming) music, is the site of amorous connections, as in VIA Ciniaia ptitsa's [Blue Bird] ‘Urok sol'fedzhio’ [‘Solfege Lesson’]; here, an archetypal ‘love at first sight’ scenario is presented:

This is not to suggest that literalness reigned supreme, as there are numerous examples of lyrics – especially in songs found in the genre of èstrada, many of the lyrics of which were written by established poets aspiring to ‘high’ literary quality – in which the symbolic replaces the material. In many cases, however, such symbolism bears the imprimatur of the Soviet acceptability, and symbols make reference to that which is socially and morally uplifting (often via recourse to nature); so, for example, the lyrics of ‘Zhuravli’ [‘Cranes’] make use of birds flying home to symbolise soldiers who never returned from war, and ‘Aist na kryshe’ [‘Stork on the Roof’] uses another aviary creature to suggest a desire for peace.Footnote ²²

Against this (verbal) background, the lyrics to rock songs were certainly of a different species. Not only were intimations of subversion and agentic resistance to be found,Footnote ²³ but dystopian invocations of ennui, estrangement and uncertainty were not uncommon, often in symbolically ambiguous ways. Of the first type, Mashina vremeni's [Time Machine] ‘Povorot’, [‘Turn’ or ‘Turning Point’] (1979), the lyrics to which are probably known by the vast majority of Russians under 50,Footnote ²⁴ stands as archetypal. In the first verse, the narrator acknowledges the trepidation and fear concomitant with veering from the socially prescribed, but characterises such transgressions as indeed ‘fated’. In the chorus, in highly gendered terms, people (or male ‘people’, it seems) are urged to face the unknown with courage:

Ultimately, citizens are entreated to leave through the gate, and to allow ‘the good’ to be their path; the sentiment of the lyrics, in the specific sociocultural context in which they were written and performed, probably needs little interpretation.

In contrast, the lyrics of Viktor Tsoi, lead singer of the novaia vol'na (new wave) band Kino, are often affectingly ambiguous, the fecundity of the language leading beyond literal meanings. A prime example is the group's ‘Gruppa krovi’ [‘Blood Type’]Footnote ²⁵; although here the military imagery is abundant – in the chorus, for example, the narrator, noting that both his blood type and serial number are on his sleeve, asks for good luck ‘in battle’, so as to not be left lying in the grass – the rather abstract or atmospheric quality to the lyrics in the verses suggests that the ‘battle’ might not be (only) military or material. The first verse, for example, alternates the opposed spheres of domesticity and combat, the home and the streets, but suffuses both with an almost surreal quality:

That the narrator may indeed be referencing (metaphysical or existential) ideas or ideals, rather than quotidian events, seems to be highlighted by the fact that, in later verses, he abjures victory ‘at any price’ (noting that he does not want to stand with his foot on anyone's chest), and although he repeats his desire to stay (at home) with his interlocutor, confesses that he cannot; a distant star is calling him to some sort of ineluctable path (‘зовет меня в путь’).

Debates and diatribes about the ‘literary’ values of Russian rock lyrics relative not only to those non-rock forms synchronically and geographically situated proximately, but also to their Anglo-American counterparts, are certainly productive of contextually useful mythologies, ideologies and political positions, if not any sort of objective ‘truth value’. But it is exactly those mythologies that are inherent, either manifestly or tacitly, in the discourse of critics (most notably Troitsky Reference Troitsky1987), fans, and the performers/composers themselves,Footnote ²⁶ that underlie the importance of Zhanna Aguzarova as a social force.

Bravo's appearance in 1983, in a society perched on the vertiginous precipice of perestroika was, in several respects, indicative of a continued symbolic and performative questioning of the Soviet meta-narrative; with their neo-stiliagi trappings and unabashed valuation of American rock ‘n’ roll, the band, similar to anterior and contemporary rock performers, operated within a register in opposition to Soviet ideological and juridical structures. Indeed, the lyrics of several of the band's songs functioned, according to one's specific cultural location, as covert critiques of Soviet conformity. For example, the superficially benign ‘Koshki’ [‘Cats’] – devoted to nothing more radical than housecats – contained the following lines that allegedly rankled the Soviet censors:

While TroitskyFootnote ²⁷ claims that the censors were mollified by the band's explanation that the lyrics were based on the work of an American children's poet, and thus described the characteristics of American cats (and, by extension, served as an indictment of American culture), the police nonetheless appeared at one of the band's performances on 18 March 1984, at the Moscow club Mosènergotekhprom. Although possibly apocryphal, some accounts have the arresting officers indignant that Aguzarova had called the Moscow metro a ‘green mole’ (‘zelenyi krot’) in the song ‘Staryi otel'’ [‘The Old Hotel’], reminding her that ‘the metro was built by communists and komsomol members’.Footnote ²⁸ What is, however, indisputable is that Aguzarova – most probably due to her forged passportFootnote ²⁹ – was arrested and spent (again, depending on the source) a year in prison and/or a psychiatric institute.Footnote ³⁰ After her internment, she returned to the Novosibirsk area, working at a logging company, but eventually returned to Moscow (and Bravo). In 1988, however, she left the group and embarked upon a solo career.

Such narratives, regardless of veracity, serve as support for a historiography wherein the instruments of power, in the form of ideological speech (and speech acts) are overthrown only by their revolutionary inverses. Certainly, an attention to words (including lyrics) is indispensable in theorising the dynamics of counter-hegemonic discourses in the specific context of Soviet history; as I have mapped out earlier, linguistic control (and, analogously, linguistically inflected methods vis-à-vis music) was practically synecdochal for social control in Soviet space, so that recourse to this very modality in terms of illuminating opposing discourses may seem not only natural but inevitable. However, a monomaniacal focus on ‘word’ – both from the vantage point of object of study, as well as disciplinary pretension – forecloses upon other avenues of theorisation likely to lead to an alternative understanding of social formation, communicative efficacy and the workings of dominance. In this case, a focus on Aguzarova's music, especially her voice, is crucial.

Aguzarova's musical ‘language’

Aguarova's reluctance to give interviews, coupled with her propensity to offer somewhat ‘bizarre’ answers on those occasions when she deigns to submit to questions, have certainly added to her mystique; in the approximately 26 years since she first appeared publicly as a performer, her proclamations have arguably grown more ‘eccentric’. In a 1997 interview on the television programme Disk kanal, for example, following a performance, she was asked to name her favourite superzvezdy (superstars); Aguzarova replied with a stream (almost ‘stream of consciousness’) of names, some referencing actual performers, some apparently offered simply by dint of their consonant and assonant similarities to surrounding sounds.Footnote ³¹ On a 2006 episode of the programme Kukhnia na TVTs [The Kitchen on (Channel) TVTs],Footnote ³² when asked to whom she last wrote a letter, the singer replied ‘Santa Claus’. And on the red carpet of the MUZ-TV [short for Muzykal'noe televidenie, Music Television]Footnote ³³ awards, after coughing into the microphone of one of the event's hosts, she made no effort to hide the fact that she didn't know the interviewer's name (‘Rostarguev is your name?’ ‘No, my name is Razygraev’).Footnote ³⁴ But rather than viewing such responses as evidence of addled consciousness (due to either psychiatric illness or excessive controlled-substance use, both of which have been posited as causes for Aguzarova's behaviour), they may also be seen as later manifestations of the singer's relationship to language, a relationship that was evident in her earliest work with the group Bravo.

Aguzarova's song ‘Odin potselui moriaka’ [‘One Kiss of a Sailor’] from her first solo album (1990's Russkii al'bom [The Russian Album]) will serve as a useful inroad in this regard; the lyrics to the first verse are as follows:

The chorus that immediately follows finds the narrator expressing her loss of desire for her lover, as well as her own agency and independence: she doesn't want him, and asks him to forgive her not only for the fact that she's not with him, but also that she is no longer his. The narrative of the song – taken here to mean both a specific ‘plot’ and an emotional trajectory or gestalt, as adumbrated via the text – appears fairly straightforward: heterosexual carnal coupling, followed by the male's (probably foreseen) blithe departure, engendering the ex post facto resolve of the female not to continue this unsatisfying relationship, averring her lack of emotional connection to her erstwhile bedmate. In the second verse, however, the resolve appears less concrete, as the narrator, explaining that since ‘the heart isn't stone, blood isn't water’, she might capitulate in the future, that ‘tomorrow it's possible I'll tell you “yes”’ (‘сердце не камень, кровь не вода/завтра возможно скажу тебе “да”’). Yet Aguzarova's vocal delivery of the chorus, which is twice repeated, adds significant layers to the literal/literary presentation of the story; if, as Bakhtin (Reference Bakhtin, McGee and McGee1986) suggests, ‘words are nothing’ without the crucial adjuncts of intonation, phrasing, pauses, inflection, then the chorus of ‘Odin potselui’ serves as a convincing embodiment of such a posit. Specifically, the first appearance of the chorus, delivered in the lower part of the singer's register, sounds almost mechanical, ennui-laden, emotionally detached; the addition of a short laugh after ‘forgive me’ (‘прости меня’) adds a suggestion of cheerful disdain. The second appearance, however, is delivered in the upper reaches of Aguzarova's chest voice, and the same words delivered in a gravelly shout take on far different meanings; in this instance, when she proclaims ‘I'm not yours’ (‘я не твоя’), the listener is more likely to believe her than not.

But such variables as intonation and timbre – not, as I will shortly discuss, to be considered in any sense ‘paralinguistic’ – are only portions of what can be considered Aguzarova's linguistic (and thus systemic) transgressions, transgressions which jab at the weakening membrane of textual enclosure and overdetermination. For, as the song continues, the coda introduces yet another salient attribute of Aguzarova's handling of melodic material via the voice: here, she dispenses with words entirely, making use only of vocables.Footnote ³⁵ It is at this point of the narrative that propositional meaning is abandoned, where the constraints of language are transcended.Footnote ³⁶

The use of such vocables is not restricted to this one instance, but is an integral part of many of Aguzarova's songsFootnote ³⁷; in fact, there are examples of entire choruses comprising only wordless pitches, as is the case with the song ‘Zvezda’ [‘Star’], from the same album. Here, the singer oscillates between a powerful chest voice and an equally affecting head voice, apparently at the very top of her register (see Example 1).

Example 1.

‘Zvezda’, vocal line, chorus.

Likewise, the chorus of the previously referenced ‘Koshki’, from her repertoire with Bravo, is of similar construction. But if the transcription of ‘Zvezda’ is only a pale description (and an even more wan prescription) of what Aguzarova's voice produces (or what another singer should produce), then any attempt at transcribing ‘Koshki's chorus is better abandoned before the certain ensuing failure. For what is inherent in ‘Zvezda’, although not apparent in the gross transcription (Example 1) below, is even more evident in the vocal line of ‘Koshki’: while both include discrete pitches as part of the melodic palette, both also make great use of rapid slides, upward and downward, in approaching and leaving a ‘stable’ pitch. Neither line, with their abundance of inflections between articulations,Footnote ³⁸ their ‘digital events’ connected via ‘analogue processes’, is amenable to the sort of transcription used in the notation of Western music – the same sort of transcription/notation that was, not incidentally, used in the attempted standardisation (and regulation) of both Russian and non-Russian musics within the Soviet Union. Furthermore, any attempt at phonetic approximation of the sounds Aguzarova makes (here, in terms not of pitch and duration, but of specific phonemic arrangements) would likewise produce no more than a caricature of the actual sonic product; ‘transcribing’ the chorus of ‘Iak’ [‘Yak’], for example, might produce ‘waddaddi, waddaddi, waddaddi wuhchidaddi’, but such a product, due to the fact that, as ‘newly invented’ ‘words’ the reader (listener) has no anterior sonic template upon which to draw (and thus re-create specificity or detail), would give only the most vulgar of imitations of what had actually been produced via the singer's body.

Aguzarova's utterances, in these and many other examples, are indicative of an accentuation of the semiotic register, as opposed to the symbolic, the two modalities of the signifying process theorised by Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic Language (1984). Here, the former, the product of the ‘semiotic chora’ – ‘a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated’ (Kristeva Reference Kristeva1984, p. 25) – are those elements of language which are not reduced to communication of meaning in a lexical sense: the rhythms, pauses, intonations, the kinetic force. The semiotic, conversely, is the register which had been most commonly (indeed, almost exclusively) attended to by linguistic theorists, encompassing those elements of language most amenable to (and theorised, certainly by dint of this supposed accessibility, as most fundamental to) linguistic communication: content and meaning embedded in an ‘algebraic’ structure. While the first ‘precedes the establishment of the sign’ and ‘is not, therefore, cognitive in the sense of being assumed by a knowing, already constituted subject’ (Kristeva Reference Kristeva1984, p. 27), the second ‘is a social effect of the relation to the other, established through the objective constraints of biological (including sexual) differences and concrete, historical family structures’ (Kristeva Reference Kristeva1984, p. 29). According to Kristeva, signifying processes are never, however, an either/or proposition; rather, they all always encompass both registers in an irresolvable tension. The power of the former to indeed ‘revolutionise’ comes from its force as the progeny of the destructive power of the drives, remembering here the omnipotence of that most puissant of drives – Thanatos, the death drive. This power, and the prominence of the semiotic, related by Kristeva to the work of the post-symbolist poets, does not only result in a literary transformation, however; rather, the very fact that the symbolic, the realm of social effects and dynamics, is challenged by the semiotic can be seen as analogous to a political revolution.Footnote ³⁹

Yet there is still another register on which Aguzarova's vocal performances, once again bound up with the question of ‘meaning’, signal a break with anterior constructions and practices of Soviet linguistic control, a register in which the specificity of an embodied subject – rather than a transcendental ego – is implicated. As an inroad to this, I must first part ways with Kristeva's assertion that music, as a signifying system, is entirely semiotic (Kristeva Reference Kristeva1984, p. 24); while it is incorrect, I think, to posit an overly-close correlation of structures of meaning between musical and linguistic communication, to posit music as existing entirely outside the symbolic register (ignoring, for example, the possibilities of a ‘grammar’ or ‘syntax’ of harmonic language or melodic motion) is equally incorrect.Footnote ⁴⁰ But what is of greater importance here is the source of the line, the melody – specifically, a human voice, a sonic source that is not, say, a saxophone or garmon' (Russian accordion), and can only with great harm be omitted from the analysis of music as communication. A human voice, with all of its Barthian ‘grain’ (Barthes Reference Barthes, Frith and Goodwin1990 [1977]) is a manifestation of a subject capable of an utterance. But can such an utterance, arising from a context of symbolic and linguistic overdetermination, ever be the production of an ‘individual’?

Vygotskii's (Reference Vygotsky and Kozulin1986) conception of ‘inner speech’ may bring us closer to answering in the affirmative. In direct contrast to the theories of Piaget, who hypothesised a stage of ‘egocentric speech’ in children, one that is asocial and solipsistic, and that ultimately involutes as speech becomes socialised (address to an other), Vygotskii argued that such speech is neither asocial nor without further evolution; while for Piaget speech begins as asocial and progresses to the social, for Vygotskii, the exact opposite holds true – it is the earliest speech which is, in fact, social, always supposing a listener, and moving through the stage of egocentric speech allows the subject to reach a higher, more individuated status via inner speech:

This inner speech, however, is not simply ‘speech minus sound, but … an entirely separate speech function’ (Vygotskii Reference Vygotsky and Kozulin1986, p. 235) with specific attributes, most notably a disappearance of the subject (because it is already known to the speaker), and a predominance of predication. Concomitant with a diminution in both sound and number of words, ‘meaning is more than ever in the forefront’ (Vygotskii Reference Vygotsky and Kozulin1986, p. 244).Footnote ⁴¹ Additionally, although the quantity of words is reduced, each word becomes ‘so saturated with sense that...it becomes a concentrate of sense. To unfold it into overt speech, one would need a multitude of words’ (Vygotskii Reference Vygotsky and Kozulin1986, p. 148). The multivalence of each component of this internal speech renders its translation into external speech difficult, if not impossible. Indeed, as this inner speech approaches ‘thinking in pure meanings’, so that ‘words die as they bring forth thought’ (Vygotskii Reference Vygotsky and Kozulin1986, p. 249), and as such thoughts are often comprehended as complete, complex gestalts (which must, externally, be broken down into separate units),Footnote ⁴² the communicative value of inner speech seems negligible.

It is, however, exactly this foregoing conception – a type of speech that has disposed of words, that is apprehended as gestalt, in ‘pure meanings’ – that suggests to me the possibility of imagining internal speech as a not entirely interior phenomenon, but one that may take a different form in an external context, a musical form. I am not proposing a direct cognate, an auditory analogue of inner speech but, rather, the suggestion that the vocables (not ‘nonsense syllables’) which are produced in certain contexts may be seen as internal gestalts externalised; they may not ‘communicate’ in the way that speech does, but they are not simply random concatenations of pitches, either, devoid of meaning. Additionally, it is through this jettisoning of ‘words’, the stock and trade of the Soviet apparatus, that individuation may be made audible.

With ‘Koshki’, we certainly have those elements of ‘transgression’ generally singled out for analysis in readings of cultural ‘resistance’: the lyrics replete with surreptitious sociopolitical critique; the form of the music – here, a modified version of the harmonic structure known as the ‘ice cream changes’ (I-vi-IV-V) which, along with the 12-bar blues, was one of the most recognisable harmonic armatures of early rock ‘n’ roll – unambiguously indebted to American popular culture; the instrumentation of the combo (the typical rock ‘n’ roll formation of drum kit, bass, guitar, saxophone and keys); and all manner of other visual and spatial variables, from garments, to publicity photographs, to performance venues. All of these registers were certainly put into service by the performers of Russian rock, but it has generally been the first – the text – that has been posited as the sine qua non of the genre's worth, both aesthetically and politically;Footnote ⁴³ Russian rock battled the suzerainty of language through the very instrument of oppression. However, with Aguzarova, it is the instrument itself that is negated, its very ontology performatively questioned and exceeded. If the Soviet apparatus lay upon a foundation of standardisation and control of language, and a linguistically inspired control of ‘unwieldy’ musics, then the existence of a musical discourse such as Aguzarova's – none of the registers of which are amenable to transcription or lexical meaning, in any true sense – can be considered a revolution of sorts. This is not to suggest that the maqam-based musics of, for example, Tajikistan, were actually conquered by transcription, that they were somehow more easily fitted within a foreign system of notation; nor is it meant to suggest that there were not polysemic apprehensions (or outright refusals) of ‘official’ messages in the decades leading up to the 1980s. What I am suggesting is that the existence of Aguzarov's music, her voice, serves as a material, symbolic and semiotic (in the Kristevan sense) confirmation of the fact that a control founded upon semantic and syntactic variables could never be absolute and that, furthermore, the system cannot negate the individual. Coming on the heels of the Brezhnev era, when linguistic controls were in many regards increased,Footnote ⁴⁴ Aguzarova's idiosyncratic handling of melody and ‘text’ signalled that a space existed outside and in excess of ‘official discourse’, one that would not to submit to the control of musical or linguistic transcription. Aguzarova makes real the possibility of an outside to the system, not simply a reconfiguration or reappropriation of the instruments of the system.

Emigration and the prodigal Martianess

Although I have posited Aguzarova's creation of an outside, suggesting a bifurcated system defined spatially, I would like to briefly offer a critique of my own conjecture; in short, it is possible to view Aguzarova's various positions, practices and performances as destructive of any sort of conceptualisation of ‘system’, insofar as they may be based on a binary logic. A Russian of Ossetian lineage; a woman in the overwhelmingly male space of ‘rock’ music; a performer/composer who is categorised or perceived as exhibiting the stylistic conventions of rock, rock ‘n’ roll, pop or dance musics (and a performer of popular music who studied folk singing at the Ippolitiov-Ivanov Conservatory in Moscow); garbed alternately, or even concurrently, in either ‘feminine’ (gowns, belly tees, platform shoes, outré hair and make-up) or ‘masculine’ (men's suits or military jackets) attire;Footnote ⁴⁷ in each instance, she is both terms, each of which negates the other via their existence in one and the same person and location.

The very positioning of ‘Martian’ as ‘outside’ might itself be problematised in late and post-Soviet space. On the one hand, an interest in or symbolic evocation of the extraterrestrial appears to align with the Soviet system in several ways. In the realm of literature, Aleksandr Bogdanov's novels Krasnaia zvezda [Red Star] (1908) and Inzhener Mènni [Engineer Menni] (1913), as well as his post-Revolutionary poem ‘Marsianin, zabroshennyi na zemliu’ [‘A Martian Stranded on Earth’] (1924)Footnote ⁴⁸ – the last of which appears to have been the intended basis for a never completed third novel of a trilogy – presented a communist utopia, set on Mars. On a more pragmatic, ‘scientific’ level, several Soviet and post-Soviet scientists have focused their energies on examinations of UFOs and extraterrestrial life,Footnote ⁴⁹ sometimes in connection with the government; Stalin himself, as early as 1948, was said to have enjoined scientist Valerii Burdakov to examine top secret materials concerning the alleged crash of a UFO near Roswell Army Air base (Ramet Reference Ramet, Ramet and Crnković2003, p. 200). Some, such as Vladimir Azhazha, a Soviet navy submarine officer, physicist, professor of mathematics, and vice president of the All-Union Ufological Association in Moscow, saw the need to explore the possibilities of extraterrestrial life as integral to the protection of the country (Ramet Reference Ramet, Ramet and Crnković2003, pp. 206–7).

On the other hand, attention to or belief in the existence of life on other planets might be considered inherently anti-Soviet. While Azhazha purportedly shared his research in UFOs with both Eltsin and Gorbachev (Steiger and Steiger Reference Steiger and Steiger2011, pp. 222–3), it should be noted that, although in 1967 a UFO research division was created at the Moscow House of Aviation and Aeronautics, it was shortly thereafter closed down, followed by an attack on Ufology in Pravda. According to Ramet, ‘until 1989, UFO sightings could be mentioned in the Soviet media only to debunk them. Soviet citizens were forbidden to study UFOs or to publish concerning the subject’, ultimately leading to ‘the spawning of a UFO underground’ (Ramet Reference Ramet, Ramet and Crnković2003, p. 203). This efflorescence of a popular – rather than official – interest in the unearthly might be evidenced not only in the large increase in numbers of sightings and formations of amateur groups, but also in the sometimes almost delirious following of other purveyors of the mysterious, even the occult, such as psychic ‘healer’ Anatolii Kashpirovskii whose televised performances were said to have emptied the streets of Russia, as transfixed viewers remained glued to their television sets (Bennetts Reference Bennetts2010). But this popularity was not necessarily a bottom-up phenomenon engendered by the will of the masses; as some suggest, in much the same way that Kashpirovskii's initial maniacal following in the late 1980s coincided with a desperate search for certainty or answers in a sociopolitical context in which both seemed to be in short supply, his reappearance in 2009 may have been supported by the Russian authorities in order to ‘placate Russian society, to divert attention from falling living standards and rising state brutality’ (Bennetts Reference Bennetts2010). Such popularity might be engendered not only by local, but by global forces as well; as Ramet suggests regarding the aforementioned proliferation of amateur groups devoted to the study of UFOs (in Russian, NLO, neopoznannyi letaiushchii ob“ekt) in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe is ‘a classic example of the evolution of what was originally an American subculture into a (sometimes commercially driven) global subculture’ (Ramet Reference Ramet, Ramet and Crnković2003, p. 212, emphasis in original).

From the foregoing, it becomes clear how the official and the popular, the political and the commercial, the global and the local, all of which might be understood in spatial terms, intersect and interact with one another, implicitly questioning the very concept of discrete and self-contained interiority/exteriority. However, I would still maintain that a spatial variable – again, outside in opposition to inside – is one that figures prominently in an examination of Zhanna Aguzarova's work, celebrity and public reception, but that it is a spatiality that is, in the final analysis, both salient/essential and overcome/negated. The genesis of this complex configuration is generated in terms of physical, symbolic and historical spaces: specifically, Aguzarova's emigration to the United States in 1989 and return to Russia in 1996, as well as the increasingly frequent and visible/audible discourses of ‘alien-ness’ from and about her, all occurring in the post-Soviet era.

In terms of her artistic creation, lyrical references to space, including outer space, may be seen as early as the 1980s, during her time with Bravo; here, for example, in the song ‘Iak’, the title character meets his fate not on Earth, but after having flown to the moon. And on her Russkii al'bom, her most commercially, critically and artistically successful work, expansive and celestial images are encountered in such songs as ‘Orel’ [‘Eagle’] and ‘Zvezda’. Moreover, sonic representations of space are salient in both the use of high levels of reverb,Footnote ⁵⁰ as well as the registers of her voice – from a low chest voice to an almost operatic head voice, sometimes simultaneously (as in ‘Orel’, in which she, via overdubbing, harmonises with herself). But it is with the song ‘Zvezdy vsegda khoroshi’ (‘Stars are Always Good’ – especially at night, according to the lyrics), recorded in Los Angeles with Valerii ShumovFootnote ⁵¹ (and now using the name ‘Missis Nineteen Ninety's [sic]), that Aguzarova marks the beginning of an increasingly prominent discourse of extraterrestrialism, one subsequently taken up with vigour by the Russian media. As with the previous examples, the cosmic is evoked both lyrically and sonically, the tessitura of the song at the very top of Aguzarova's register, the narrator describing a future voyage into outer space:

A period of six years passed from the release of 1990s until Aguzarova released any new materialFootnote ⁵² – the song ‘Marsianka’ [‘The Martianess’], which also served as the title of the 1999 album. The song, however, which tells of a Martianess's perambulations around Moscow, her beauty the object of the Muscovites’ gaze, was the only newly composed track on the album; the remaining material comprised earlier cuts from both Russkii al'bom and her Bravo years. The following several years were similarly artistically unproductive, with limited performing, and her next ‘release’ a bootleg compilation entitled Raduga [Rainbow] in 2008. Here, the three new songs – the title track, ‘Koroleva krasoty’ [‘The Queen of Beauty’], and ‘Papa’ – deal with, respectively, the sky, a California prostitute, and her father's birthday; the remainder of the material, as with Marsianka, was culled from earlier sources.Footnote ⁵³ Of interest regarding the first song is the animated ‘video’ produced to accompany it, which features Aguzarova piloting a flying saucer, and leading the various denizens of the Russian capitol – policemen, babushki in headscarves, and young hipsters – into the sky, ultimately landing on a planet where Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Freddie Mercury, Bob Marley and Sergei Shnurov (of the SKA-Punk band Leningrad) have all assembled.

As noted earlier, expressions of and references to the singer's Martian-ness are not confined to her creative output, occurring with great frequency in media outlets as well (despite her management's having ‘forbidden’ any such references).Footnote ⁵⁴ In one interview Aguzarova, in reply to a question as to whether or not she is simply joking about her relations with aliens, stated that it's better not to jest about such things, as the aliens will ‘come and take you away’.Footnote ⁵⁵ In another television spot with the title ‘Marsianka po imeni Zhanna’ [‘A Martianess by the Name of Zhanna’], responding to the question ‘how is the weather on Mars?’, she stated rather offhandedly that it is ‘a little stormy, a little windy’, and that there are ‘golden sands’.Footnote ⁵⁶ And in a television advertisement for an upcoming (television) concert featuring Aguzarova singing a duet version of her song ‘Mne khorosho riadom s toboi’ (‘It's Good to be Near You’, from her Russkii al'bom) with superstar singer/parodist Maksim Glakin, the voiceover described them as ‘the famous television host and his cosmic half’. A brief clip of the performance is interposed, the smartly-dressed Galkin introducing his silver lamé-clad partner as ‘chelovek kosmichesoi muzykal'nosti’ (‘a person of cosmic musicality’).Footnote ⁵⁷

Finally, at the 2008 MUZ-TV awards, Aguzarova's appearance on the red carpet was met with host Andrei Razygraev's exclamation, ‘My God! A spaceship has landed! We've missed it, but from it has appeared the sensational [potriasaiushchaia] … come, dear alien, Zhanna Aguzarova!’Footnote ⁵⁸ Following his remarking upon her tinfoil-covered shoes (‘You've used up all the foil from your house?’ ‘Yes, I've done it handmade, spent six days’), Aguzarova progressed down the red carpet, Razygraev remarking further upon her ‘super ushi’ (‘super ears’, which she had decorated with some sort of electrical tape), and noting that ‘she only has to appear on the red carpet, and everyone looks with open mouths’. She was ultimately met by hostess Lera Kudriavtseva and, following some comically awkward body language – Aguzarova obviously retreating from the Kudriavtseva, who made repeated motions as if to touch her – the following exchange, initiated by the hostess, ensued:

Certainly the specific sources of such discourses must be taken into account; many (though not all) of the statements regarding the singer's ‘special connection to other worlds’Footnote ⁵⁹ have appeared in Russia's ‘yellow press’ (‘zheltaia pressa’), or on television ‘entertainment magazine’ shows, and clearly such media products seek to exploit Aguzarova's ‘eccentricities’ and ‘shocking behaviour’ (‘èpitazhnoe povodenie’) in an attempt to titillate and entertain viewers and readers, in much the same way that singers exhibiting ‘netraditsionnaia orientatsiia’ (‘non-traditional orientation’, a common euphemism for homosexuality) are exploited for their ‘shock value’. It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss such discourses as having negligible worth in the elucidation of cultural dynamics by dint of their ‘low’ status vis-à-vis other outlets making use of a putatively more critical and/or erudite apparatus. Rather, existing in the realm of truly popular culture, they often give voice to widely held cultural beliefs, desires and anxieties via recourse to others who are remarkably other. And in much the same way that the widespread presentation of homosexuality in such outlets affirms an incomplete and impossible foreclosure against alternate forms of intimacy,Footnote ⁶⁰ the construction of Aguzarova as existing, symbolically (or literally?) in a non-Earthly position, as an inoplanetanka, serves as a substantiation of the ability of the body, the individual, to exist outside the (political) system – the same sort of vnenakhodimost' found in her musical discourses.

It is not arbitrary that the realm of the musical in Russia has served as a location for a panoply of (often despised, often simply ridiculed) ‘others’: homosexuals, Jews, Roma and Ukrainians, for example. Rather, as Blacking (Reference Blacking1979) has posited – and as I hope to have shown in the discussion of Aguzarova's voice, above – musical communication is often the vehicle par excellence for transmission and performance of that which cannot (yet) be expressed through language. As such, I would like to finally turn to Aguzarova's song ‘Nezabudka’ [‘Forget-Me-Not’] in order to elucidate one final and critical point: for, if a desire for an outside exists in contemporary Russia, an equally strong anxiety accompanies it, one centring on instability, loss of position and, indeed, loss of identity.Footnote ⁶¹ Fittingly, in the context of what is to follow, the track is from her Russkii al'bom, the cover of which features the singer in full contradictory glory: gaze cast upward, hands in prayer, and face illuminated from above, she resembles a Baroque portrayal as a saint, a visage at odds with her Bolshevik-style clothing. What is equally important is the fact that the cover shows not one, but three identical images of Aguzarova, a visualisation suggesting that most (stereotypically) Russian of symbols, the matreshki (nesting dolls). ‘Nezabudka’ is in many ways an auditory cognate of this visual.

The song's structure may be analysed as comprising four distinct layers, each defined by its rhythm and harmonic structure, as well as its stylistic and symbolic features: the first, characterised by rapid, continuous triplet figures, makes use of synthesised clanging metallic sounds; the second is marked by a swing rhythm, modified 12-bar blues, jazz combo instrumentation, and frequent use of 7^th chords; and the third is an idiosyncratic hybrid which, due to the instrumentation (drum kit, piano, synthesiser, bass), harmonic structure (a repetition of the progression i-III), and vocal style (forcefully declaimed and vibrato-less chest voice) appears almost a cross between a Kurt Weil-esque cabaret song and 1980s Anglo-American new wave. The sections, using the numbers above, are arranged as follows: 1-2-3-1-2-3-[4]-1, with the [4] representing what is perhaps the seed from which the others have germinated: at the centre of these layers – which I might define as the industrial Soviet, the Western jazz, the decadent-into-postmodern hybrid – lies an unaccompanied voice singing what appears to be a traditional Russian song, the rural dialect and additive (and somewhat free) metre affirming its ‘authenticity’.Footnote ⁶² Thus, at the very centre of the piece, the heart, the seed from which all has germinated, the tiniest matreshka is deeply Russian. This same sort of cultural identity is exhibited in the previously mentioned ‘Raduga’ video (her spaceship takes off, after all, from Moscow), and in the following journalistic account of Aguzarova's time in California:

The three strings were those of Zhanna's balalaika, an instrument with which she ‘never parted’ in America, and which she carried with her on the tarmac when she returned ‘home’, leaving behind not only the bright, white letters of the legendary Hollywood sign, but the pimps and prostitutes on Sunset Boulevard described in ‘Koroleva krasoty’.

So, while Aguzarova is the Martian, the one-time émigré, the one who, via the corporeal and the audible performatively and symbolically attests to the possibility of the system's outside, she is also that outsider who returned, the Martian whose physical and cultural roots remain in the rodina, the motherland. In the specific context of post-Soviet space, where people overwhelmingly voice a mistrust of the ‘political’ (the ‘system’), yet overwhelmingly support the perpetual President Putin – most frequently citing a need for ‘stability’ – profound otherness as a subject position is thus rooted. Moreover, the ultimate outside to which she (literally) gives voice, and which she (literally?) inhabits is one almost entirely apolitical, one not located in the West, in spaces peopled by either ‘victors’ or ‘losers’, but in the cosmos, the realm of the Martianess. And, of course, Russian hero Gagarin.