Translated material
Nostalgia's birthday
25 years ago, “Old Songs of the Main” came out. Yuri Saprykin explains how this project helps us understand the history of Russia
Exactly 25 years ago, on the night of January 1, 1996, public Russian television (current Channel One) showed “Old Songs of the Main” - a film that became the beginning of the famous music cycle. It is generally accepted that this cute musical, in which the pop stars of the 1990s re-challenge pre-perestroika hits, symbolizes the reconciliation of post-Soviet Russia with its Soviet past (and in the future this reconciliation has even been too far). Is it so? At the request of Medusa, Yuri Saprykin, head of the regiment project , answers this question.
On the night of January 1, 1996, Hippolytus’s New Year's voice from the Irony said “Public Russian Television represents ...”, Leonid Agutin twisted the curly Chub, the girl’s trio in colorful sundresses (the link of the field brigade), Natasha Koroleva (daughter of the chairman) and Lada Dance (lifting. Divorce)-delayed "here someone went down the hill," and it began.
What exactly began, then it was not yet clear: hardly one of the spectators thought at that moment that here, a new era came-rather, on the contrary. One of the creators of the fateful show Leonid Parfyonov recalled that the idea of the program “Bravo” prompted the idea for the name of the program - “He would sample a new song about the main thing”. It remained only to replace one word: with the twelfth hit of the chimes, “New Songs” became “old”.
The authors of “Old Songs of the Main” repeatedly said that the idea of the show appeared almost by accident: Konstantin Ernst and Leonid Parfyonov shot a film about Alla Pugacheva and noticed that at her concerts the most violent applause was accompanied not by her own hits like “Million Scarlet Roses”, but a song from the Soviet film “Simple History” with Nonone Mordyukova. In the original, she is singing behind her scenes by opera singer Valentina Levko: “To live without love, perhaps simple, but how to live in the world without love.”
In the repertoire of Pugacheva of the mid-1990s, this is an inserting number, a lonely tribe of the departed Soviet era; It was somehow not accepted to re-attach Soviet songs at that time, but for the new Europeanized pop-skiing-Presnyakov, Vetlitskaya, Alena Sviridova and the Moral Code-is completely unthinkable. Ernst and Partenov also belong to the new Europeanized generation: the first is known for the Matador program, where he tells the wide audience about incomprehensible Gensbur, Godard and Fassbinder, the second is the author of the weekly final release of non -political news, made in fundamentally non -impaired language. The Parfenov portfolio has also a series of “Portrait on the background” about the icons of Soviet pop culture: with the new laconic-ironic intonation-about imperial pop titans, such as Zykina and Magomaev.
The new musical show in the logic of its creators is to some extent a postmodern game, a combination of an incompatible, cooperative pop and a large imperial style, the Dun group and the Kuban Cossacks. Postmodernism, but not only: it is also guessing the secret desires of the audience: the post-Soviet culture in five years has not created anything comparable with the Soviet song-kinematographic canon, the Mexican series and hits of Alena Apina have already bored, the soul asks for something native.
However, there is another component in “Old Songs” - let's call it therapeutic - which, apparently, produced the effect of such a deafening, as they would say today, cotton.
LNG cannot be perceived outside the television and political context of the mid-1990s, and inside this story, the sensational New Year's concert is a special role. The end of 1995 is also the end of the first presidential term of Yeltsin, a five-year plan, for which the country has gone from collective hope to national depression. Burnt savings, closed factories and research institutes, grandmothers selling bread along the roadsides in order to feed themselves at least somehow. The non -frighted Soviet people, out of habit of trusting the TV, become victims of the hellish scam: “Two Volga for each voucher”, “You are not a freebie, you are a partner”, “We are sitting, but the money is coming.”
The new pop culture of the free Russia-the very “rich people also cry” and “skirt from Plush”-looks as attractive as it is humiliating. Muscovites in 1991 defend the White House from the communist revenge-and two years later they go to the streets to demand a communist revenge. And then they vote in the elections for the LDPR. And two years later - for the Communists. The place of faith in a promising future is a desire to hide in the reliable past. And here is the first Chechen, and the first large terrorist attacks. The country is suppressed and demoralized, the country needs to be treated.
Strictly speaking, the appearance of “old songs” on the body was not such a sensation: a nostalgic New Year's concert is largely perceived as an expanded version of the “Russian project”, a campaign of social advertising with a nostalgic-Soviet shade that arose on the air of ORT in mid-1995. We see in these videos recognizable Soviet people in recognizable Soviet surroundings, and this is no longer “scooping” and not “Sharikovs”, as it was customary to say in post -perestroika fuse; Not the rudiments of the past that should be ashamed of their own squalor are good good honest people, the same, a spectator like you.
Zinovy Gerdt recalls in the subway, as he wrote to the girl on the glass "I love you." Nonna Mordyukova - a traine in an orange vest - curses, and then puts up with her product Rimma Markova. Evgeny Sidikhin and Nikolai Olyalin at the wheel of a combine are discussing whether they will have time to remove the grain before the rain. We will definitely have time, everything will be fine, we love you - a sunbathing voice comforts you.
Without daring to unfold the decommunization program, having survived confrontation with the “red-brown”, the authorities obviously chase a course for reconciliation. Both the videos of the “Russian project” and the musical numbers of “Old Songs” should mitigate social wounds by an unambiguous message: we are all children of the same country, between its Soviet and post -Soviet period there is no impassable abyss, we take all the good with us - Mordyukov, and Gerdt, and the warmth of human relations, and the soft intonations of Soviet films, and of course, loved tables.
Alarmist publicists see in this conciliatory aesthetics a game on the field of the Zyuganovo electorate; Indeed, any of the numbers of “old songs” is ideally suited for the role of the Emergency Situations Anthem - but if the political technological calculation was present in these shows, it was much thinner. In the upcoming presidential campaign, the media oligarchs controlled by Zyuganov will not at all as a hero of good Soviet cinema, but as a demon-destroyer, ready to destroy the barely outlined stability, to deprive the Russians, for example, by right of the food they won. The future election of Yeltsin in this logic is the same guarantee from shocks, overcoming the gap between the eras, like the bridge from Marina Ladynina to Christina Orbakaite, laid in “Old Songs”.
The cultural signs of a new era, which symbolically began with “old songs”, are repeatedly described: playing with nostalgia for the Soviet turned out to be so successful that since then it became a supporting design of official culture. It is at this moment, on the night of January 1, 1996 (and regardless of the then intentions of the authors of the show), the world of infinitely reproduced pop cultural nostalgia-concerts with the RIMACS of old hits, films about the heroes of the Soviet past, a line of compulsory Gaidaev comedies on the holidays, immersed as a past, immersed in the past, are well familiar to us. Goskanals, where Edita Piekhi’s personal life continues to be the same paramount importance as the intrigues of the State Department in the near abroad.
In a sense, at this point there is an understanding of Russian history as a collage from incompatible figures and quotes united in a phantom-conflict past; In this space there is no difference between Shulzhenko and Lada Dance, or between Nicholas II and Stalin. This eclecticism is our collective identity. No matter what patriots-recorders say, it was the “old songs about the main” that the post-Soviet cultural code (long before the advent of this term) was ideally formulated: a real “scrap” uniting a nation in a new Russia, the embodiment of genuine traditional values was not Prince Vladimir, not Peter and Fevronia and Tolstoy-but the Soviet Estra and Cinema, a peculiar way They feel the feeling of “warmth” and “sincere”, quotes from films and songs of that era that turned into memes (again, long before the appearance of this term).
The request for “sincere” was the more powerful, the less “warmth” remained in the real world: the 1990s and 2000s became a time of social atomization, the destruction of household solidarity and mutual assistance. Nostalgic cover versions and film screenings have become a kind of social anesthesia, which allows you to not notice the obvious fact-in the new reality there is a lot of good, but it does not look like a sweet absurd universe with New Year's campaigns in the bathhouse and bay fish on the third street of the builders. Nostalgia for the model of “old songs” is not a desperate and doomed desire to “return everything back” and not a melancholy experience of the impossibility of returning to the old, but a pure illusion, a phantom sensation of the “last past”, in which any social and technological changes freeze in a constant New Year's bay one.
It is this set of nostalgic references, of course, not eternal: the generation of the 2010s, instead of shedding a nostalgic tear over the guitar overcoming, “I like that you are not sick with me”, scribbling posts about how Nadia could choose this toxic asshole. The new generation has new objects of nostalgia: instead of quotes from Gaidai, there are quotes from the “brother”, instead of Kristalinskaya-Bulanov, the 1990s become a new last past, or a generalized late/post-Soviet world, as in the series “inside Lapenko”.
Of course, it can be assumed that the new generation works with the past different than the authors of “old songs”, that their nostalgia is passed through the filters of metamoderm and post -stones, “no to understand” - although the same mood is hidden behind the whole conceptual apparatus that it was read in “old songs about the main” at the time of their release: the desire to fail, as in a comfortable chair, in familiar seats. Motives and images - and at the same time ironically pull away from them; The fact that at the site of the invoice of Lonid Agutin now the glued mustaches of Alexander Gudkov does not change the essence of the matter. Here someone went down from the hill, hold on tightly by the steering wheel, the driver, friendly faces, the lights of cheerful eyes. Oak is a tree, a rose is a flower, Pugacheva is a singer, death is inevitable.
Yuri Saprykin , project manager "Regiment"