Inexhaustible pity, "mercy for the fallen," including even the most inveterate brigands and murderers, gave rise to a special song layer. And let other refined aesthetes turn their nose in disgust - in vain! As popular wisdom tells us, not to renounce bag and prison, so in real life is bondage, prison and servitude went hand in hand. And in the twentieth century, few people at least didn’t take a sip from this bitter cup ...
Who is at the beginning?
Songs of bondage, prisons and hard labor, paradoxically, originate in the works of the most freedom-loving poet of ours, Alexander Pushkin. One day, while in the Southern exile, the young poet swung at the Moldavian boyar Balsa, and would have shed blood, did not interfere with those around him. So, during a brief house arrest, the poet created one of the poetic masterpieces - "Prisoner".
Much later, composer A.G.Rubinshtein put poems to music, and did not entrust it to anyone, but F.I. Chaliapin himself, whose name then thundered all over Russia. Our contemporary, singer of chanson-style songs Vladislav Medyanik wrote his own song based on Pushkin's Prisoner. It begins with a characteristic reference to the original: "I sit behind bars in a dungeon crude - No longer an eagle, and not young. I would settle down and go home." So she did not disappear anywhere - the theme of narrowness.
To hard labor - for the songs!
According to the famous Vladimirka, captured by artist I. Levitan, criminals of all stripes were driven to penal servitude in Siberia. Not everyone managed to survive there - mowing down hunger and cold. One of the first convict songs can be considered the one that begins with the line "Only in Siberia will the dawn begin ..." People with a good ear for music will immediately be asked: what kind of painfully familiar tune? Still not familiar! The Komsomol poet Nikolai Kool wrote the poem “Death of a Komsomol Member” almost to the same melody, and in the treatment of the composer A.V. Aleksandrov it became the most popular Soviet song ”There, across the river ... "
Another oldest convict song is considered to be "Alexander Central" or "Far away, in the country of Irkutsk". This is a kind of classic of the genre. Judging by the text, the song was born at the end of the XIX century, then was repeatedly rewired and supplemented. Here, really, - oral national, collective and multivariate creativity turned out. If the heroes of the early version are just convicts, then these are already political prisoners, enemies of the king and empire. Even political dissidents of the 60s. had an idea about this unofficial anthem central.
To prison ...
In 1902, along with the triumphant success of the social drama of the writer Maxim Gorky, "At the Bottom", an old prison song was included in the wide use of songs. "The sun rises and sets ..." It is her that are sung by the inhabitants of the doss-house, under whose arches the main action of the play unfolds. At the same time, few people even then, and today - all the more, represent the full lyrics of the song. Popular rumor even referred to the author of the play, Maxim Gorky, and the author of the song itself. To exclude this completely can not, but it is not possible to confirm. The writer N.D. Teleshev, half-forgotten nowadays, recalled that he had heard this song much earlier from Stepan Petrov, who was known in literary circles under the pseudonym Wanderer.
Prisoners' songs would be incomplete without the famous "Taganka". Rarely performing other people's songs, Vladimir Vysotsky made an exception for this thing and, fortunately, the recording was preserved. The name of the song is obliged to the Moscow prison of the same name. The song has become a truly folk one, simply because neither the author of the words nor the author of the music is known exactly. Some researchers attribute "Taganka" to pre-revolutionary songs, others - by the end of the 30s. last century. Most likely, these last are right - the line "all nights full of fire" unequivocally indicates the sign of precisely that time - the light in the prison cells was burning all day and night. On some prisoners, it acted worse than any physical torture.
One of the researchers suggested that the composer of "Taganka" was the Polish composer Zygmunt Lewandowski. Enough to listen to his tango "Tamara" - and doubts will disappear by themselves. In addition, the text itself was written by a man clearly cultural, educated: good rhyming, including internal, vivid imagery, ease of memorization.
By the twenty-first century, the genre was not dead — let us recall at least the Vladimir Central of the late Mikhail Krug. Some go out - others sit down ...
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