New from Akvarium's Archives: "Our Life as Seen by the Trees"

Yesterday a remarkable document from the history of Russian rock music was made available to the general public - in ways that might actually help that same social body. In other words, ten songs from the archives of St Petersburg ensemble Akvarium have been released via the music service Kroogi for charitable ends. Proceeds raised by the sale of these songs, known en masse as "Our Life as Seen by the Trees," will be used to help victims of the recent forest fires in Russia. Kroogi is requiring downloaders to pay nothing more than one cent; hopefully fans of the band will feel obliged to offer more. Information about the charitable organization involved, headed by Dr. Elizaveta Glinka, can be found at the same online venue.

Akvarium frontman and lead singer Boris Grebenshchikov has provided some context for these songs, which are still full of hiss and crackle. It is worth translating in full. "In the summer of 1987, I was lucky enough to live for a while in the [northern] village of Valdai. At that time, the place had been completely untouched by civilization. I strolled across the hills of prophets, chopped wood, and played my guitar as I sat beside a hut, bathed in sunshine."

"In was in this idyllic setting that I started writing songs; the results really took me by surprise. They were totally different to the kind of things that Akvarium had been playing over the last few years. It became clear that these new works would become an album, but there was nowhere to record anything! Andrei Tropillo's studio didn't yet exist, and I had no desire to do business with the [state-run] recording company Melodiia... after recent experiences."

In was in this idyllic setting that I started writing songs; the results really took me by surprise

"On top of all that, new times had come to pass in Russia. Akvarium had acquired something of a 'heroic status,' and we were being torn apart [by new obligations?]. There was no time whatsoever to look for recording alternatives. As a consequence, the songs written in Valdai remained homeless. Nonetheless, at least some of them were worked into our playlists, and we perform them to this day. Others, conversely, have never been played live, even after all those years."

The black and white images in this post come from those same days in Valdai.

"Today [in 2010] we finally have an opportunity to both edit and publish that unrecorded album of '87. The songs are drawn partly from concert performances, made just after the Valdai trip. I'd like to thank everybody who helped to get these songs out, recorded, and who preserved them so well. Thanks be to God, also!"

Valdai's role in these compositions is very important. Its documented origins go back - perhaps - to the twelfth century. Lying roughly half-way between St Petersburg and Moscow, it would become a major center of monastic activity, fed by traffic between the two metropolises. This marriage of faith and trade, tradition and progress, found best expression in the craft of bell-making that would develop locally. The best musical tools used to call believers to church were cast in Valdai: they resonated with a melody of spiritual constancy and social cohesion.

The appeal of Valdai and that communal heritage would have been especially great in the late 1980s, when - as Grebenshchikov says - "new times" were beginning. The '80s saw economic growth in the Soviet Union slow to a moribund crawl. Mikhail Gorbachev tried to allow degrees of democratic expression in Soviet society and to inject relative free-market practice into the sloth-like socialist economy. The resulting shock to the system, however, was too great and Russia's fiscal structures buckled; "free speech" became rampant complaint. 

Hence the sudden acquisition of "heroic status" that Grebenshchikov mentions. The bold, often subversive rhetoric of rock music became a bona fide, nationally recognized civic soundtrack.

In the same way, Akvarium's songs of the late '80s are full of imaginary heroes, seemingly taken from boys' adventure tales, if not the hagiography of those "prophets" Grebenshchikov sensed in the hills and churches of Valdai.

A social revolution had turned peons into pioneers. They were celebrated in song.

Most interesting here is a related interplay of heroism and fate that we hear in "Our Life as Seen by the Trees," a competition of worldviews that is also very typical of the '80s. Figures from the Soviet cultural underground, to their amazement, suddenly found themselves thrust into the limelight. The liberties they hailed in their "subversive" lyrics were quickly shunted from the realm of fantasy to that of feasibility. The downtrodden minority, as we say, became heroes; their stubborn, low-level contrariness seemed, however, to some people to have been "fated." Put differently, why on earth did this happen?

The members of Akvarium had triumphed in several senses, yet were arguably robbed of their full self-definition, since social shifts - not choice - had fashioned their victory. The band's desire to see their triumph in its fullest, most satisfying terms led to songs in which various fictitious and literary victors show a maximum degree of agency and, it seems, willfully fail - all for the glory of their goals. After all, "true" heroes perhaps need to perish (or at least fail in some form) in order to show the full value of whatever they hold dear. 

Military and messianic figures therefore overlap on this album, as do generals and gypsies.

Perhaps the best example here is the song "Worker Bee" (Trudovaia pchela). The first line reads, amid the rustle of old reel-to-reel tape: "I'm a worker bee on the white snow." In other words, we're dealing with a drone that, having spent its life in service of a community, is then jettisoned by the "fated" workings of a seasonal cycle. It is kicked out of the hive and dies. That civic commitment is beautiful because it is cut short; its moral victory is its failure. It may not have chosen that loss, but the bee's self-awareness is a small triumph of a second order.

As the song says: "I am only a guest here; I'm valuable in that I leave." Whether one views that statement from the point of view of a cynical power (and its abuse of society's lower strata) or as the "messianic" romance of a tragic demise, the songs still makes sense.  As does the album's title. Once again, winners and losers are muddled as society realigns itself.

I am only a guest here; I'm valuable in that I leave

As socialist society began to crumble, different notions of civic cohesion came to the fore - as, for example, an ecological worldview. Life "as seen by ideology" in the early 1980s now became, amid widespread celebration, "our life as seen by the trees." Green politics began to emerge amid the rubble of politics per se. The pride of social triumph amid supporters of the environment, ironically, became a greater humility as human existence was seen from the viewpoint of nature as a whole. 

There is a sadness inherent in that ecological outlook; it turns a belief in social industry into an admission of nature's greater mechanics - and, therefore, our own transience. That same fleeting timeframe, however, also increases the worth or value of life itself. Grand (or crude) though such conclusions may be, they lie at the heart of Russia's experience in the '80s when dramatic alterations in the social fabric led to an equally dramatic register.  

By way of example, the image above suggests the epic or operatic framework within with the band now views these events of 1987 and the role of perestroika.

These ten songs from Akvarium lie, therefore, at the intersection of two opposites, bridging hubris and humility, victory and demise. Therein lies their value as an artistic document: the songs ponder both their new, significant presence and their impending or "fated" absence. It seems there's a good reason why they came to be in a monastery.