Tiuremno-blatnaya lirika [SEC=PERSONAL]

[Olga Meerson]

Besides dissociation and such factors, there is another factor, less conscious for the choice of jargon words but often conscious in its motivation nonetheless--when the motivation is to tone down pathos or highfalutin' words. This often happens precisely when the speaker talks about something really close to their heart. Fear of inflated rhetoric often makes intellectuals -- especially if they are relatively young -- resort to lower stylistic level, including jargon. The highest praise I have ever received for a scholarly publication was from a Russian colleague, fifteen years my junior: "У тебя такой отвязный герменевтический драйв!" -- for an article on mutually clashing chronotopes and subjectively perceived anachronisms in "The Queen of Spades", not less! The dissociation from everything official or respectable seems to go much deeper than any purely political resistance. Someone here referred to a film about Arkadij Severnyj. Likh!
 achev's granddaughter is saying there that her grandfather and Panchenko really loved to sing blatnye pesni at any gathering that offered an occasion. (The ones she mentions in the clip, I know by heart, from... my parents). It is more about self-irony than any authority-resistance. But of course, my observation is purely intuitive--I am just trying to put to words something that was an integral and self-evident part of my upbringing, as well as of many people I knew. As for Shalamov, who hated the jail lore with his whole being--I feel he had the right to do so, as he saw the true horrors of the criminal world in the camps. Yet I can also see a point in the tastes of people like Siniavskij, who were poetically inspired by that lore. My husband--who is an Orthodox priest and not at all prone to the use of any lower registers of slang -- can nonetheless say about a confession, "об исповеди всегда дОлжно кочумать". He uses this lower style not be!
 cause he in any way disdains the topic but because he is overwhelmed w
i
th its sacredness, for which any regular "pious" words would remain inadequate. This tradition of using low registers to tone down any mention of the ineffable was not born with Russian intelligentsia. Rather, we can find exquisite samples of it already in Pushkin, let alone Dostoevsky etc.

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