Between despair and hope

Nikolay Ovchinnikov - about the collection "After Russia"

Famous Russian emigrant musicians recorded a collection of songs on verses of little-known Russian emigrant poets of the past. It is called "after Russia." His curator was philologist Roman Liberov. Nikolai Ovchinnikov tells why this attempt to lay a bridge between two emigrations is an amazing example of a successful tribute - because they are not in fact.

Tributs are sick. From Mandelstam to Lagutenko, from “Cinema” (the author of the text was the curator of the latter) to “DDT”. I give a tooth, there will also be ahead of songs for poems, say, Yesenin or re -tribberries of the “king and jester”. The problem of such tributes is usually that there are many material for remaking, who want to get with it - too, but in the end it turns out an album, the main advantage of which is the fact of its appearance. More than three ten (!) Coiling “Tattoos”, more than four dozen (!!) Cooping “DDT”. Everyone is interested in how the heroes of the New Age re -sing the familiar songs to everyone - but the Caver turns out, as a rule, weak and uninteresting. Musicians or on duty take up the reproduction of the same arrangement as in the original, or try to crush it for themselves.

With songs on poetry poets, the same trouble.

The musicians take a poetic form alien to them, try to bend her under their own sound - as a result, white threads stick out so that you can’t hide.

A collection of songs for Mandelstam's poems, supervised by the same Liberov, is an example. 21 Songs from musicians who rarely miss - from Tequilajazzz to Oximiron - and in the end, almost all the arrows fly past. It is not possible to preserve speech. It turns out to take familiar letters and sing something of your own on them.

And in general, it is surprising that the collection “100 years after Russia” eventually did not become another stupid tribute.

The collection is dedicated to the first large wave of Russian emigration, which is just 100 years old. Then everyone fled from the war and the Soviet regime - and now everyone is running from the war and the Soviet regime. The authors of the original sources are mostly little -known heroes of emigrant poetry, who never met their reader in Russia.

So they are now returning “to Russia with poems” (as in the last track Rasvet to the verses of George Ivanov. The biography of the writer who lived in France was typical for that wave - lived in poverty, was loved by his associates, died in poverty and terribly sick (he had leukemia). Ramazan Akhmedov, hiding under the pseudonym, is very well understood, what is very well understood, what is very well understood, what is very well understood. He also writes a poet of a new generation, who is forced to sing differently in the new conditions and not to apply for many in the last decade.

Perhaps this coincidence in the sensations helped most participants in the tribute to feel someone else's text and carefully enter it into their music. They take music with them abroad in order to then return it to the listener through streaming and show how great the despair of a person, divorced from their homeland, from his own roots. From your own language.

Despair is the first obvious emotion on the album. With despair, the coin “execution” is performed under the chatter of synthesizers to the verses of Vladimir Nabokov, a rare representative of the lost generation of Russian literary emigration, which has become famous. With despair, the Ural veteran of Rap Naum Slik “in a dream” is read by Vadim Andreev and Yuri Mandelstam: “Oh, this rock, oh, this darkness of senseless sleep!”. With despair and an anguish, he reads the poems of “man begins with grief” by Alexei Eisner from “caste”. "The world of blue will ring and crumble."

With the wildest despair, Akapella Misha Dymov and Mila Varanin sing the poems of Nikolai Turoverov about leaving the Crimea and the murder of a horse who wanted to sail for his man - but could not, because "my batman did not shoot by." Here the hip-hop-worship of Khmyrov unites the verses of Yuri Odarchenko and Vladimir Smolensky about life on the edge of the night, about darkness on the heart and the desire "in the grave as soon as possible", because "there are so many places in the damp earth."

“After Russia,” is the album of two generations who have lost their chance to change, lost faith in them, lost their country.

The most indicative track here is the evil “Parnas” by Sergey Bongart performed by Noize MC: Russian literature dies in it, and then the mice served. They will eat all of us and nothing will remain of us - probably one of the most powerful existential fears in forced emigration.

And on the other hand, there is hope. Vera Musaelyan from “Aloe Vera” sings with hope of Lidia Chernyavskaya’s verses: “This is not important now ... months are going quietly, months take care of the months, they remember the months about us,” she pulls under the quietest electric pass. Here in a half -whisper, Felix Bondarev sings the poems by Georgy Raevsky about admiration for beautiful trifles for busts of an acoustic guitar: the blue sky and butterflies.

The most amazing songs turned out to be in the range between despair and hope (the authors of the disk with the same name, “Porn films”, recorded the most disastrous track on the album, in which there is too much drama and too little poetry - the Russian rock is too poorly synchronized with the poetry alien to it: “Naiv” and “The leg brought together!” - and both at the end collided.

Firstly, the “flags” of Tequilajazzz on the verses of Boris Poplavsky. The leader of the collective Evgeny Fedorov called this track a requiem "in Russia as a country that every time in history strives to succeed, celebrating some kind of speculative metaphysical eternity." The flags will be inflated by the same, but not with us, and there may be little sense in this. This song rhymes well with the “America” of the same Tequilajazzz: there the hero went on a delightful journey of his own free will.

It turned out that this journey as a result is a flight from reality, which then will throw you where you never wanted.

Secondly, already specified "return to Russia-poems." The sad and bright at the same time ballad that we will die, but our books will still not eat up. True, we will be neither hotly not cold from this.

“After Russia” is an example of an amazing combination of a good idea and good feeling. In fact, they do not tribate, but a collection of good and skillful performers who were looking for and have not yet found their own words to describe their condition. Emigrant musicians almost do not sing about how they now live (except, perhaps, Noize MC and Arseny Morozov) and how the country that rejected them lives without them. It turned out that all words were already spoken 100 years ago. Nothing changes. Either we will eat us mice, or we will resurrect and return to Russia with poems. And all that is left to us now is to enjoy blue. And in the damp earth there are still many places - we have time