I've always had a love of Russian music. It is often very sad, but usually melodious. Russian military music at its best can be very stirring. Some of the melodies for drinking or celebrating - or for forgetting one's sorrows - are also very energetic and vigorous. But mostly I like the melancholy songs, the beautiful gypsy melodies that express sorrow for unrequited love, for bygone days, for all the other sad things we face in life.
I liken this music to Country & Western with a thousand year history. That's a little bit unfair, but there is probably some truth to it. Many of these Russian songs are better when you have no idea what they're actually saying. I can't tell you how many times I've been disappointed to learn what the words actually mean. One song "Song of the Postman" is about a postman who finds his lover frozen in a snowdrift. Another is about a jilted lover who plans to throw herself to the wild beasts to be torn apart. In this country, we throw him to the beasts.
My grasp of the Russian language is weak. I studied Russian in high school some 35 years ago, and haven't had much occasion to use it ever since. I wasn't an altogether stellar student to begin with, so the result is that I am sadly out of practice. This makes things difficult for me as I try to track down and collect these songs.
For the Russian military songs, I was greatly helped by a Website called Sovmusic.ru. This Website commemorates Communism and many of its trappings, including its music. Fortunately for me, they have the lyrics to most of the songs. This made my life much easier, as I could directly connect the song with the lyrics. Most of the Russian music and lyrics on this site were in the public domain. This came about because the government owned everything during the Soviet era. Anything created there prior to the fall of the Soviet Union would either have been owned by the government, or else was produced long enough ago that the work would have passed into the public domain anyway.
In creating this Web page and checking the link to sovmusic.ru, I discovered that they actually have an English-language version of their Website. It is very annoying to discover this *now*, after all the struggling I did with the Russian version... |
I did not fare as well with the Russian folk and gypsy songs, unfortunately. While most of those are also likely to be in the public domain, finding them in the first place hasn't been easy. Because I want others to know of my travails, I am going to describe them in some detail. Feel free to skip down to the good bits, which would be links to the music or the lyrics.
My first problem was that the songs I wanted were written in Russian. Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which looks a little bit like Greek - from which many of its letters were borrowed. So, for example, I love a song called "Day and Night" - it's a very sad song of spurned love and bygone days. The Russians pronounce the song something like "dyen' y noch'". They write it as «День и ночь». Those funny angle brackets are how they use quotation marks.
Try typing this with your keyboard. That's the first problem - the keyboard doesn't usually produce Cyrillic text. You can make it type in Cyrillic - or just about any other language - if you muck around with the Control Panel. I did that - I can get the keyboard to output Russian or Hebrew, Sanskrit, and so on. Unfortunately, then you have the problem of not knowing which key produces which letter. When I type a, my Russian-activated keyboard produces ф. That's an 'f' sound. It would be very useful to have little letters stuck on the keys, telling me what letter they produce. But I don't have that, so it's all trial and error...
... except, I figured out a way to get past that, more or less. It's not pretty, but it works. It is just tedious.
First, I found a good deal of Russian text, many pages worth. I copied it all into a Word document. Using the find and replace feature, I got rid of all punctuation and spaces, so that only the letters would remain. Then I added a tab after every single letter. I converted this text into a table of one column, a single letter in each row. This made a huge and useless table. I sorted this table alphabetically. This yielded a huge table that had all the Russian letters in alphabetical order, but of course there were many duplicates of each letter. I removed all duplicates, leaving just one instance of each letter. I converted this table (having only 32 rows, the number of letters in the Russian alphabet) back into text. This gave me a single line of text composed of all the Russian letters, in alphabetical order. Like so: абвгд еёжзий клмно прсту фхцчш щыьэюя.
Now I had a sort of crude set of scrabble tiles from which I could construct words. I would copy each letter from this list, and paste it somewhere convenient. Doing this, I would build up a word. Pick the Д, paste it; pick the е, paste it right next to the Д; pick the н; pick the ь; and so on. Soon I'd have День и ночь or whatever word or phrase I was looking for. Then I could copy this whole phrase and paste it into Google and do a search on that phrase. Since these were either titles of songs, or phrases in the songs, I could often track down the lyrics.
If I was lucky, I would be taken to a page where I found the lyrics nicely displayed in stanzas, just like a poem. I wasn't often lucky. Most of the time I was taken to pages that discussed the song, perhaps linking to the lyrics or allowing a search for them. I couldn't always tell, since all of these pages were in Russian. If you do a Google search using a Russian phrase, in Cyrillic letters, you should expect to receive many pages in Russian; and none in English, basically. This was where things got sticky.
See, I really don't speak Russian very well. Even at my best, when I was fresh out of Russian class, I couldn't read an ordinary newspaper without consulting a dictionary quite heavily. The years haven't really helped me, except that I did learn how to swear fluently, which actually came in handy while I tried to collect these lyrics. No, there weren't any pages where I found those words; I simply was using them from time to time as I grew increasingly frustrated. Adding to the difficulty, Russian has added hundreds - maybe thousands - of new words since I learned the language, and gotten rid of a few letter in their alphabet. Just to make life interesting. Luckily, a huge number of those new words were ones borrowed from English - like "Beeznees Syemeenarr", or "Eenternyet". Really, I get spam for this all the time.
One annoying problem I had was with trying to do searches on these Russian websites. I'd painstakingly enter a phrase and click the button, only to be told that I was a durak, this wasn't a search text box but a place to enter your e-mail address. Chort voz'mi. Once I actually had the lyrics, I was pretty well set. I could copy, paste, format, or otherwise diddle with them to my heart's content.
Strangely, some of the most famous and popular Russian songs have proven to be the most difficult to find lyrics for. I can't account for this. There's a song called "Why should I worry?" that probably yielded a few thousand hits. None of the ones I was able to visit contained the lyrics. The expression itself is quite common in ordinary speech, apparently - "why should I worry", or "forget about it", something like that. This of course created many false hits. But even when I used the composer's name, or otherwise limited the search, I have been unable to find any sort of lyrics to that song. It is a puzzle to me.