Translated material
Common place
Kirill Speshnik
In Russia there is only one point where one hundred thousand completely different people gather voluntarily every year
In Russia there is only one point where one hundred thousand completely different people gather voluntarily every year
The Grushinsky Festival, held annually on the first weekend of July on the Mastryukov Lakes near Samara, is considered to be the most widespread festival of art songs. And it is true. As well as the fact that a very noticeable proportion of its participants have a very distant relation to this song. On the one hand, Grushinsky is a traditional and quite convenient meeting place for the most active members of song clubs from German Dortmund and Israeli Ashdod to Vladivostok. On the other hand, all of them taken together constitute, God forbid, ten percent of the total number of inhabitants of the ephemeral tent city. The rest are simply residents of Samara and Tolyatti who came to spend a weekend in nature, take part in the famous party and listen to visiting stars for free.
Several hundred young talents, seduced by the apparent simplicity of the genre and the opportunity to soar in a couple of days from complete obscurity to the right to stand on a par with the classics, are participating in the festival competition. True discoveries like the Muscovite Ksenia Polteva (who, however, managed to become known to fans of the genre even before Grushinsky - see “Results” of June 6 of this year) require a separate discussion, but besides them there is a lot of interesting things. This year, for example, I had the chance to hear an author whose songs, if properly designed, could be successfully passed off as unknown creations by the king of tango and foxtrots, Oscar Stroke (whom the author could only have heard in very early childhood). Culturally, such people (and among the crowd of competitors there are authors who have preserved the style of mass Soviet songs or tourist songs of the 60s in enviable freshness) are the rarest relics, living fossils like the famous lobe-finned fish. The state should have taken them under protection. Most of the competition participants prefer, of course, more common samples (usually choosing between a classic art song, Russian rock or folk rock and the latest wave of pop hits). In the process of communicating with the jury, boys and girls gradually realize that the tediousness about poetic meters, which they learned in school literature lessons, turns out to be directly related to song lyrics, that “the fresh smell of a beloved” and “the smell of a fresh beloved” are not the same thing, etc. True, it doesn’t reach everyone - some, in turn, try to enlighten the jury that, they say, this is all unimportant, the main thing here is different...
Missionary work is generally characteristic of Grushinsky, including in the most literal sense. Perhaps more noticeable than others are the Samara Hare Krishnas, who have been attending the festival for almost all of the post-Soviet years. Their activities are clearly fruitful: this year there were noticeably more figures in pink and orange togas. There were no noticeable representatives of other well-known confessions, but amateur preachers regularly came across, explaining something (sometimes with a guitar and from the stage) about the astral plane, the aura and the need to be kind. And in general, you never know at what moment you will run into the next educator and what exactly he will try to convert you into. The author of these lines witnessed how a certain person passing by someone else’s parking lot saw an open book by Mikhail Shcherbakov on it - and immediately, with the words “ah, you love poetry, but do you know such an author...” began propaganda poetry of Boris Grebenshchikov.
The activity of politicians this year was minimal, although, according to the head of the combined police detachment, a report was drawn up against someone for illegal campaigning (the last day of the festival was the election of the governor of the Samara region, which is why the current governor Titov even tried to negotiate with the organizing committee about postponing the entire event for a week, but in time I realized that I could just as well ask the Volga not to flow for a day). Famous guests Sergei Kiriyenko and Oleg Sysuev (the latter has been invariably helping Grushinsky for many years) quietly sat through the main concert and left without attracting attention to themselves. But, as usual, trade flourished magnificently: “profile” literature and audio-video products, souvenirs, toys and especially food, from dry cereals to home-made cabbage soup. Grushinsky is a harvest for Samara small traders, who collect almost the average monthly income from it in three days.
Thanks to the efforts of all these people - organizers, sponsors, writers, preachers, agitators, traders and just vacationers - what began 32 years ago as a gathering of friends of the deceased tourist Valery Grushin, has grown into a holiday for everyone, into the same attraction as the carnival in Rio or Oktoberfest in Munich. For Russia, the phenomenon of Grushinsky is completely unprecedented: where else in Russia is there a place in which one hundred thousand people would gather annually - for whatever it is, but of their own free will?