* SONG *

 "The fairy tale unfolds on the way, but the song is a true story." In other words, the fairy tale can be changed on the move, while a song on the fly is much harder to create. Therefore, it must exist before the performance.
 Of course, the singing does not exclude the improvisation, one the same song was played often in different ways, even in a few melodic variants. Such freedom gave space for individual abilities; everyone was free to the best of their ability to improve the lyrics. As a result of natural perfection, continuous and incremental appeared in popular culture, hundreds of thousands of songs and gems such as this:

 "Do not sit there, girl, late at night,
 You do not burn, do not burn wax candles,
 You do not sew, do not sew the brocade canopy,
 And do not spend, do not waste gold.
 After all, you will not sleep in the canopy,
 You will rest, the girl, in the blue sea,
 In the blue sea on the yellow sand,
 Hugging the steep banks,
 Kissing the gray stone."


 Nine of these lines with imaginative saturation would be enough for the song, but this is just the introduction. The girl's response to the threat of death is this:


 "Do not make me angry, good fellow!

 I'm a girl not without the family,

 I have a father and a mother,

 Father-mother and two charming brothers.

 I'll ask my brothers to shoot you.

 Shoot you; consume the soul.

 I will build a bone tower,

 From the ribs make floors,

 Out of the hands and feet build the seat,

 From the little head make the salt shaker,

 From joints cut cups,

 From the bright eyes - wine charms,

 From your blood brew beer.

 I'll call all my girlfriends,

 I'll set them all on the benches,

 And I will sit on the seat.

 You girlfriends, my sweethearts!

 I will give you a riddle,

 Very hard and impossible to guess:

 I live in my lover, walk over him,

 Drink him, drink his sweet blood."


 Distant echoes of the pagan past can be felt in these words as if from the very womb of the Earth's history. This is not congruent with the time of Christianity.

 The tragic confrontation between the sexes, their disparate equality and unity is felt in another, more pre-Christian in its spirit song:


 "In the forest, it was, in the hazel-wood,

 Was a black horse standing by,

 For three days, it was not fed,

 For a week, it was not given to drink.

 There is wife finished husband,

 Stabbed him with a sharp knife,

 The heart pulled out.

 At the damask knife, the heart roused itself,

 And the wife then grinned.

 Put it into the cold cellar,

 Stamped with the right leg,

 Right elbow on the window

 Bitter tears flow out of the window."


 Judging by these songs and at a certain percentage of frivolity, one might think that the women of ancient and medieval Russia only were doing that were killing their husbands.
 (Incidentally, just this logic is used by the researchers of vulgar-sociological, as well as openly demagogic persuasion. He then selects and sometimes tries to discover history.)
 The songs, for example, the epic like a fairy tale, have selected the extreme expressions of hypertrophied rituals. National identity has expressed its interest to underline the evil deeds with a figurative exaggeration. The evil is portrayed in its intense concentration in such a clot, horrifying the listener. Such imagery also played the role of kind of vaccination: better to try and survive the evil (in songs, fairy tales) than the actual harm. That's why the folk ballads have clearly defined plot structure:


 "As I go, young man, on the road,

 Catching up with me two friends,

 In my eyes, they make fun of me, a fine fellow,

 That my wife left the house,

 Doesn't care for our love the child,

 She travelled on all the horses,

 Worn out some young people.

 I returned, young man, to the vast courtyard,

 The young wife came out and greeted me,

 She was wearing a white shirt without a belt.

 I took out, young man, the sharp sword.

 I cut off my wife's unfortunate head,

 The head rolled off to the horse's feet.

 I went, young man, to the stables,

 All my Raven horses are well,

 I went, young man, to the nursery,

 My dear child is swinging happily in the cradle.

 ... Oh, why I had listened to somebody's opinion!"


 Natalya Samsonova used to sing a song with the same plot but with a different tune:


 "Cossacks were coming, Cossacks were coming,

 Cossacks were coming home from the service in the army."


 These Cossacks "have the shoulders epaulets, on the chest straps." One Cossack was met by his mother, and she said that his wife gave birth to somebody's child. So Cossack kills his wife, goes to the cradle, and by the "appearance" in a child learns that he is his own son, then kills himself.

 Another song is about a husband who had left home for an overnight robbery and how he "came back home in the bright light morning."


 "... He sent me, young wife,

 To wash the bloody dress.

 I washed half of it,

 And another half threw into the river,

 I found the brother's shirt …."

 The same commitment to the ballad is clearly seen in the later songs, such as "By Don walks" (incidentally, terribly spoiled by a modern pop-single execution, recorded on the LP), "The colour crimson moon," "I remember when I was still young." These songs have already been impacted by the powerful influence of literary poetry. The romantic plot goes hand in hand with melodic degeneration, associated with the disappearance of folk tradition and a general decline in song and choral music.
 Thus, the lyrics "In the Garden of the Valley," which was very popular in the '30s and '40s, cause a smile by its naivete. The form there seemed to be deliberately contrary to the in-depth folk content. However, the contradiction mentioned above may well be traditional. This concerns mainly gaming and choral songs, the semantic content of which is expressed not so much by words as by rhythm and melody. Such songs are composed of the traditional figurative pieces:
 "In the net in the field of the white birch sits a bird peacock." Birch in the songs can easily be replaced by a curly rowan tree, the peacock by the nightingale. It has been allowed a total plotlessness.

 Anfisa Ivanovna (my mother) says that as early as adolescence, girls of the village Timonikha sat on logs and sang, "In the field, there is a birch." The ending of this beautiful, at first almost story song is remarkable:


 "Hunters ran out,

 Gray hares were chased ..."


 What has to do with the birch, which "no one twisted"? - Asks a reader, expecting songs to have an excellent plot and special meaning? But that's the thing that really has nothing to do. This song should be sung, at the very least, to be enjoyed. One has to sit on logs in the spring or participate in a dance to comprehend the soul of another song:


 Chuvel, my Chuvel,

 Chuvel-Nevel, Vel-Vel-Vel,

 One more miracle, the first miracle,
 Marvel, my native land!


 The rhythmic set of harmonies, incomprehensible (in fact: what is this "Chuvel"?), completes a strange expression of joy, a logical address to the land, called "the first miracle." And what is this homeland, small or large? - Once again, I will ask the miracle-rationalist. But I will not get the answer.

 The song ties together the verbal richness of the people with a wealth of music and ritual.


 LAMENTATIONS *


 Lament, weeping, lamentation is some of the oldest types of folk poetry. In some places of the Russian North-West, it has survived to our days, so a lament, like the Lament of Yaroslavna of the eighth century "The Story of the Army of Prince Igor" can be heard even today.

 A lamenter in some places was called a wailer; in others - just a crier. Of course, as storytellers, they often become professionals, but the lament was available to most Russian women on one or another artistic level.

 Lamentation was always individual, and the reason for it could be any family grief: the death of a close relative, somebody has gone missing, any natural disaster.

 Because with grief, like happiness, there is no standard, similar to sorrow in another house, then the laments may not be the same. A professional lamenter must improvise; a deceased relative is also specific in mourning. She laments for a particular person - for her husband or brother, son or daughter, for a parent or grandchild. Traditional images that have lost their freshness and power because of frequent, for example, repetitions of tales concerning a particular family to an inevitable tragic occasion bring incredible, sometimes terrifying emotions.

 Crying out about an unbearable, even unimaginable in normal conditions, grief was almost a physiological necessity in everyday life. After bawling, a woman would overcome halfway the irreparable trouble. Hearing the lamentations, the world, people share grief and take over the burden of loss. Grief seems to be spreading out among people. In mourning, besides the sobs and tears as it were, in order, their physiology goes into the background, the suffering becomes spiritual through imagery:


 "You surge up, now, a menacing cloud,

 Fall down a gray stone,

 Crumble the mother-damp Earth,

 Split in two the grave!

 You go-to, the winds boisterous,

 Swing so thin shrouds,

 Oh, give it, Lord God,

 To my breadwinner-father

 In the frisky legs a walking,

 Into white hands strength,

 In the mouth of a speaking …

 Oh, I know, yes, I know,

 Knew by my thoughts it would not happen,

 From the army duty, you can buy way out,

 From captivity, you can come to the rescue,

 But from the mother-damp Earth.

 There is no exit, then, no exit,

 Not even an echo…."


 Death is the chaos and the ugliness overcome here by imagery, beauty, and poetry struggle with nothingness and win. Terrible grief, death, oblivion softened with tears, dissolved into the words of the lament and shared around the world. The world, the nation, people, as you know, do not disappear; they were, are and will always be (at least, so thought our ancestors) ...

 For example, lamentations have practical significance in another case at a wedding. A wedding ceremony would imply the game, a reincarnation, and therefore, as already mentioned, the bride does not always lament sincerely. A sad mood of the traditional wedding weeping contradicts the wedding, its spirit of fun and life renewal. But just that is the uniqueness of a wedding lament. In the course of the marriage, a bride was obliged to weep and wail, and tears are insincere, unnatural often become genuine, honest; such is the emotional impact of the image. Not allowed to go too far in crying, artistic wedding tradition in some places would switch the bride to a different tune:


 "Please give me, my God, father-in-law.

 Yes, for this length of service,

 Three boils in his chin,

 And the fourth under the neck,

 Like a red sun.

 He will get lost at the stove.

 And with soup, he would be scalded..."


 Modern lament that uses folk songs, even echoes of the epic, literate lamenter can write down, for this she needs some initial shock, that will awaken the emotional memory. Then starts working poetic imagination, and lamenters create their own work on a traditional basis. This happened with the collective farmer Maria Erokhin from the Vozhegodskiy district of the Vologda region. Starting with resentment ("I got married too young"), Erokhin vividly recounts all the significant events of her life:


 To go down the aisle - I was forcefully carried...


 A wedding ceremony is well described by Erokhin:


 I can not say that I am beautiful,

 But I had talent; people praised me.

 From my side, that's what they say.

 "Oh, what a berry we gave away,

 Like poppy flowers, the girl is worth the gold!"

 And those from the groom's side: "We are not worse than you,

 We are also worthy of your Maryushka ...


 Before carrying the bride into a "God-given home,"


 Says father of the bride to her future father-in-law:

 "Now she's your daughter, dear father-in-law,

 You are given a bell, with it even on the corner".


 Honestly, the people's attitude towards the family felt more in the chants: grudges are forgotten, and everything seems to go on:


 And I got used to everything,

 I don't mind mother-in-law.

 She has a hot temper that quickly subsides.

 If you abide by scolding words,

 then you can live, nothing to cry about.


 But Maria's husband became ill and died, leaving five orphans.


 I mourned, wept severely,

 How shall I live as a bitter widow,

 How to raise children, how to give them education,

 How I, a widow, bring them up?

 And all of these fell on my head,

 All the work, all the worries,

 All man's and woman's work.

 I run the house, while people are asleep,

 With the men together go into the field.

 And do ploughing for all day, almost to the night.

 All the trades I have taken,

 All the troubles I went through, and all the adversities,

 I was a lumberjack, and yes, I survived,

 I did timber rafting, and yes, not once nearly drowned,

 But good people will save you in any place.

 I gave education to all my sons,

 They are good men now and no worse than all.

 And next, I awaited an easy life,

 And I thought, pitiful sorrow:

 It will be easier to live; take a rest now.

 Oh, no, I wasn't born for this!

 Great grief fell on my head,

 My weak heart was wounded,

 It's never be cured,

 The only cure is the grave!

 That's the fate has done to me,

 It had robbed me of my two sons ...


 Surprising is the ending of this composition:


 You believe me, good people,

 I did not lie, did not invent anything,

 I wrote the whole truth,

 And that is only one-hundredth of it.

 I wrote it only for two days,

 But I've been already suffering for forty years ...