There is a city

Assa – Асса (1987) – was one of the most impressive cult films of the last years of the Soviet Union and it has remained popular ever since. Not only because the film, featuring a band playing for the Soviet upper crust in the Yalta pleasure resort, included the songs of such contemporary underground cult bands like the already mentioned Akvarium, Bravo or Kino. But also because this film was an open revolt against the lying and dreary regime. And not in a destructive way, but simply by placing side by side the sincerity of its young protagonists seeking their own way, truth and beauty, and the cynicism of the all-devastating regime and its beneficiaries.

(The director of the film, Sergey Solovev has just published, after twenty-two years, the continuation of the film with the title Assa 2, likewise with Tatyana Drubich in the main role. I am very curious whether he has managed to continue and actualize his former criticism.)

This spirit pervaded the closing song of the film Перемен! – Change! – performed personally by the greatest rocker of the age, Korean-Russian Viktor Tsoi. The first two minutes of the detail below display how the pianist of the band takes Tsoi to the head of the personnel department of the restaurant who requires of him his – non-existent – documents, certificates and permanent address, while rattling off the regulations of the restaurant in a monotonous voice. Almost as a reaction to it, a song is started in the restaurant (1'55") which by the end of the film enlarges into a live concert with several ten thousand participants, giving news about such an uproar in the heart of the empire of which we, in its Hungarian border province sunken into peaceful compromises, had not much idea at that time.

Вместо тепла зелень стекла, Вместо огня - дым. Из сетки календаря выхвачен день. Красное солнце сгорает дотла, День догорает с ним, На пылающий город падает тень. Перемен требуют наши сердца, Перемен требуют наши глаза. В нашем смехе и в наших слезах И в пульсации вен… Перемен, мы ждем перемен. Электрический свет продолжает наш день И коробка от спичек пуста, Но на кухне, синим цветком, горит газ. Сигареты в руках, чай на столе,- Эта схема проста. И больше нет ничего - все находится в нас. Перемен требуют наши сердца, Перемен требуют наши глаза. В нашем смехе и в наших слезах И в пульсации вен… Перемен, мы ждем перемен. Мы не можем похвастаться мудростью глаз И умелыми жестами рук. Нам не нужно все это, чтобы друг друга понять. Сигареты в руках, чай на столе,- Так замыкается круг. И вдруг нам становится страшно что-то менять. Перемен требуют наши сердца, Перемен требуют наши глаза. В нашем смехе и в наших слезах И в пульсации вен... Перемен, мы ждем перемен.

Instead of warmth, just the green glass, instead of fire – just smoke. A day ticked off in the calendar. Red sun shines destructively burning out our days. Darkness falls on the smoldering city. Change, our hearts require change our eyes require change. With our laughter and tears, with the beating of our veins… Change, we look forward to change. Electric light continues our day and the matchbox is empty, but the blue flower of the gas burns in the kitchen. Cigarette in hand, tea on the table – it’s a simple scheme. And nothing more – all the rest is within. Change, our hearts require change our eyes require change. With our laughter and tears, with the beating of our veins… Change, we look forward to change. We can’t boast with a wise look neither with skillful gestures. We don’t need it to understand each other. Cigarette in hand, tea on the table – the circle is closed and we manage to change something. Change, our hearts require change our eyes require change. With our laughter and tears, with the beating of our veins… Change, we look forward to change.

However, the most memorable song of the film was not this one, but the Город – City, or Город золотой – Golden city by Akvarium. The English translation below is by Mikhail Morozov.



Aquarium: Город золотой (Golden city). Mosfilm recently does not allow the embedding of this video, but you must listen to this song together with the video taken from the film.

Под небом голубым есть город золотой С прозрачными воротами и яркою звездой, А в городе том сад, все травы да цветы, Гуляют там животные невиданной красы: Одно, как желтый огнегривый лев, Другое вол, исполненный очей, С ними золотой орел небесный, Чей так светел взор незабываемый. А в небе голубом горит одна звезда. Она твоя, о ангел мой, она твоя всегда. Кто любит, тот любим, кто светел, тот и свят, Пускай ведет звезда тебя дорогой в дивный сад Тебя там встретит огнегривый лев, И синий вол, исполненный очей, С ними золотой орел небесный, Чей так светел взор незабываемый.

Beneath the sky of blue The golden city stands With crystal-clear lucent gates And with a star ablaze A garden lies within It blossoms far and wide And beasts of stunning beauty Are roaming inside The lion with a fiery-yellow mane And the blue calf with eyes so deep and bright And the golden eagle from the heavens Whose eternal gaze’s so unforgettable And from that sky of blue The star is shining through This star is yours, oh angel mine It always shined for you Who loveth is beloved Who giveth light is blessed So chase the light of guiding star Into this awesome land The fiery lion will meet you at the gate And the blue calf with eyes so deep and bright And the golden eagle from the heavens Whose eternal gaze’s so unforgettable.

It belongs to the subtle allusions of the film that this song starts to play when the to-be-lovers enter the cableway (whose large iron cabins are marked with huge numbers, thus materializing and therefore legitimizing, as it were, the lightness of this former bourgeois entertainment). The cableway elevates them above the former resort area of Yalta, and the camera slowly glances over the eroded buildings, witnesses to a former, more civilized and livable world. The director also pays attention to such subtleties like the expression “awesome garden” being sung exactly (2'09") when the camera arrives to the miserable vegetable-bed knocked together of some broken roofing slates.

But the purpose of the sharp contrast between the “golden city” of the song and the real city is not just mere criticism. The film, in a beautiful way which also elevates us, viewers above the reality, projects the song onto the devastated city, thus letting us see * the surviving fragments of beauty in the houses, the inner courtyards, the few ornamental trees still existing. The fragments that still make the city livable and that we were also seeking so zealously in our Budapest of the 80’s.

For about twenty years this song was attributed to the band Akvarium. It was only in 2005 that Zeev Geizel managed to track down the real authors through a brilliantly executed detective inquiry, and to publish his results on the site of the Israelian Russian bards Israbard. They say that the melody comes from a Canzone attributed to the great papal lutenist Francesco da Milano (1497-1543) which was made popular across the Soviet Union by the disk “16-17th century lute music” of 1972. Geizel has also published the sheet music of this song, and I was already about to register it for the blog in my performance on the lute when I found by chance the original recording: *


“Francesco da Milano”: Канзона. From the album Лютневая музыка XVI-XVII веков (16-17th-century lute music, 1972), performed by Vladimir Vavilov

This melody became so popular that it even found its way into Soviet solfeggio manuals. But when Geizel tried to find out its exact title, he saw with surprise that his search only gave results in Russian language. This piece was completely unknown in the West. It did not even figure in the collection The Lute Music of Francesco Canova da Milano (1497-1543) of Cambridge, compiled in 1970 by Arthur J. Ness. And when Geizel asked the advice of the greatest Israeli historian of the lute Levi Septovitsky, he declared that this melody was neither Italian nor Renaissance, but rather some Russian folk tune.

The great Ukrainian lutenist Roman Turovsky, living in New York and participating in all imaginable lute forums, also informed Geizel that serious lutenists consider the album “16-17th-century lute music” a complete fake. His opinion was also confirmed by Professor Sándor Kallós from the Conservatory of Moscow. He told that the whole album included only one real lute piece, the Greensleeves, while the rest had nothing to do with the lute: they were all modern compositions. Perhaps the performer of this piece Vladimir Vavilov could have declared the truth, but he died just one year after the publication of the disk. In any case, since the publication of Geizel’s article Vavilov has been regularly indicated as the composer of the music of the Golden city.

The identity of the author of the lyrics was somewhat easier to establish. Although various sites have equally attributed it to Boris Grebenschikov, director of Akvarium, to Nikolai Gumilev, the husband of the great poet Anna Akhmatova who was executed in 1921, to the Decembrist revolutionary Mihail Volkonsky and even to Rabindranath Tagore, nevertheless on the site of Akvarium one can unequivocally read: “слова А. Волохонского и А. Хвостенко” – text by A. Volokhonsky and A. Khvostenko.

The names of the great Leningrad authors of lyrics Anri Volokhonsky and Aleksei Khvostenko, says Geizel, have become just as inseparable as those of Kamenev and Zinovev. The texts of Khvostenko who died in 2004 were also published later by his friends, but Geizel browsed it unsuccessfully in search of the Golden city. Finally he decided to call Volokhonsky who lives in Tübingen and who recounted him the story of this text exactly as he told it in a later interview. Of course this text had no place among Khvostenko’s collected poems, he says, because it was written in the short period of late 1972 when Khvostenko had already left the Soviet Union, but Volokhonski not yet. He sadly walked the streets, thinking about how to continue without his friend and co-author. It was then that he heard the album “16-17th-century lute music” at his fried, the painter Boris Akselrod who was just working on his mosaic panel “Heaven”. He was touched both by the music of “Francesco da Milano” and the picture of Akselrod, and under their influence he immediately wrote the text – alone.

However, the original poem and the text of Akvarium show a number of small differences. The most important among them is that Volokhonsky’s original title was not Golden city, but Рай – “Paradise” or “Heaven”. Consequently the first verse was “Над небом голубым”, that is “above the sky of blue” and not “Под небом голубым”, that is “beneath the sky of blue” as Grebenschikov modified it for fear of anticlerical censorship. This frame also helps to understand a number of details of the text. The Russian term “ангел мой”, “my angel” is usually used not for one’s lover but for one’s Guardian Angel in the daily prayer. And the three animals are those serving in front of God’s throne both in Ezekiel’s vision and in the Book of Revelations as it is so often depicted in the frescoes of Orthodox churches. “Grebenschikov made no mistake” says Volokhonsky “to give the title City to this poem. In fact, I wrote this poem about the City. The heavenly Jerusalem.”

One can thus understand the reason why the Hebrew version of this song, sung by Anuar Budagov, is attributed in Israel – as Geizel writes – to the 11th-century mystical Spanish Jewish poet Judah Halevi, although it is a faithful translation of the original Russian poem. And this background also provides with a deeper meaning the contrast between the desired city and the actual reality in the above scene of Assa.

Jan van Eyck: Gent Altarpiece. Central panel with the Adoration of the Lamb, representing
All Saints and the heavenly Jerusalem (detail). I was about to finish this post
when I realized that both have their feast exactly today.

House-warming

Andrei Soroker is a programmer, musician and Russian. He threw these three talents into the scales when, in order to pay off the mortgage of their house, created the genre of virtual street music.

The house stands in the old quarter of San Francisco, a charming Victorian building, and as such, it has a thousand problems, accurately described by Andrei in his blog. The reason of its main problem is, however, not its age but our age, namely that as a consequence of the present crisis, it is worth only half of the mortgage that Andrei still has to pay off on it.

Andrei is obviously irritated by the fact, and he decided that before he would call in the mortgage and abandon the house with all they had hitherto paid, he would try to get some extra money to his programmer’s salary through virtual street music. On the site created for this purpose a couple of weeks ago he performs his own and his friends’ songs as well as those of classical Russian bards and of the heroic age of Russian underground in the 80’s. If you liked them, then by clicking on the house you can throw through PayPal one dollar per pixel into the virtual guitar case.


About this heroic age wrote Wladimir Kaminer in his first and perhaps most sincere book, the Military music of 2001:

In 1983 I got to know the innermost circles of the Moscow rocker world. This was at that time the most interesting society among all. My friends and I were looking for our heroes and we found them on the street. They were older than us, but they often behaved like children and they all played on the guitar. It was a wonderful time. The heroes of the 80’s simply started off and swept off the mock-heroes of the Soviet Union.

By clicking on the above image of the site you can watch Andrei singing one of the “hymns” of this heroic age, The man from Kemerovo of the legendary Akvarium group. He accompanies himself on guitar from playback, and the following English translation is also from him:

У меня были проблемы; Я зашел чересчур далеко; Нижнее днище нижнего ада Мне казалось не так глубоко, Я позвонил своей маме, И мама была права - Она сказала: "Немедля звони Человеку из Кемерова". Он скуп на слова, как де Ниро; С ним спорит только больной. Его не проведешь на мякине, Он знает ходы под землей. Небо рухнет на землю, Перестанет расти трава - Он придет и молча поправит все, Человек из Кемерова. Адам стал беженцем, Авель попал на мобильную связь, Ной не достроил того, что он строил, Нажрался и упал лицом в грязь; История человечества Была бы не так крива, Если б они догадались связаться С человеком из Кемерова. Мне звонили из Киева, Звонили из Катманду; Звонили с открытия пленума - Я сказал им, что я не приду. Нужно будет выпить на ночь два литра воды, Чтоб с утра была цела голова - Ведь сегодня я собираюсь пить С человеком из Кемерова.

I had some problems; I took things a little too far; The lowest bottom of the most-remote hell Appeared not terribly far. I called my mother, And my mother was right — She said: "Immediately, you must call The man from Kemerovo". He uses words sparingly, like De Niro; One must be mentally ill to argue with him. Catch him with chaff, you cannot, He knows how to move underground. The sky will collapse on the ground, The grass will cease to grow — He will come and silently fix everything, The man from Kemerovo. Adam became a refugee, Abel got caught in a mobile web, Noah didn't finish what he was building Got drunk and fell face-first into mud; The history of humanity Would not have been as skewed, Had they had the wisdom to connect With the man from Kemerovo. They called me from Kiev, They called from Kathmandu; They called from the start of the plenary session — I told them I will not attend. It is imperative to drink two liters of water before bed, So my head remains whole the next day — Because tonight I'm planning on drinking With the man from Kemerovo.

The identity of the man of Kemerovo is unknown even to my Russian friends who lived through this period, but this is exactly the mystery of the thing. Of course you can find the song also in the performance of the original author, the great guru of the Russian underground Boris Grebenshchikov, of whom Kaminer says:

If I listen to him now, I just laugh. Borya still lives and still sings. Sometimes I think he would do better to stop it.

But in the performance of Andrei you can hear exactly that gentle, meditative and absurd metaphysics that one loves so much in things Russian.

Andrei, his son Boris, and the house

The flat was very small, but we already knew the trick how to pack together a hundred persons on ten square meters. The youth of Kiev were even willing to stand in queue in the evenings just to listen to the play of Mammut for three rubles

– writes Kaminer. Follow their example. Shell out those three rubles, or thirty dollars or as much as you like. Or only five, but each time you regularly come back. And write your signature and address on the wall of the house. To leave your memory and to have your own little place in the house. Just like one did it in those good old time house-warming parties.

(Julene Harrison’s paper cut from Andrei’s blog)