Wartime songs: An attempt at genre analysis

Abstract

The article analyses Bakhtin’s theory of artistic text, using the example of mid-20th-c. Russian military songs (‘Granada’ [‘Grenada’], ‘Little Eagle’ [‘Orlyonok’], ‘Far Away, Across the River’ [‘Tam vdali, za rekoy’], ‘The Sacred War’ [‘Svyashchennaya voyna’], ‘Dark Is the Night’ [‘Tyomnaya noch’], etc). Focusing on Bakhtin’s idea that an artistic word recalls and reestablishes archaic genres, the researcher examines if a similar tendency can be traced in military song lyrics. A genre analysis shows that the lyrics tend to resurrect the seemingly forgotten archaic techniques of epic distance, epic monism, and syncretism. Russian wartime songs draw on and reinvent the genre features of biblical poetry, classical epics, and Byzantine rhetoric. Which element is responsible for this revival of the archaic? Upon examination of Bakhtin’s key theses, the author finds that Bakhtin’s concept of ‘great time’ is language. The poetics of military songs conforms to the ideas proposed by Bakhtin that an artistic text revives the archaic as a result of a subconscious language instinct.