A typical passage in an oral epic poem from Russia known as a bylina (plural: byliny) might go like this: “It was not two mountains that collided, it was not two clouds that rolled together, it was the old Cossack (Il’ia) coming together with Podsokolnik (falconer)” (135).
At the height of the Stalin era, there appeared poems called noviny (“new songs”), the most successful ones performed by singers of byliny. The noviny reworked the structural and thematic mechanisms of the byliny to celebrate the heroes and feats of the new age. So a poet could now declare, “It was not the White Sea that became agitated,—a dashing heart began to tremble, powerful shoulders moved, Iosif-light [Stalin] began to reason” (141). In a masterful and accessible treatment, Margaret Ziolkowski lays out the pre-history and history of the noviny. This book will be of value to a range of scholars, from investigators of Russian folklore or the history of folkloristic research to those considering more specific topics, such as the notion of authenticity or the textualization of oral traditions.
The first three chapters detail the several phenomena that allowed for the emergence of the noviny. Chapter 1, “Tampering with the Folkloric Evidence: Famous and Infamous European Precedents,” reviews the work of James Macpherson (the “translator” of Ossian), the Brothers Grimm, Vuk Karadži? (a collector of Serbian epic), and Elias Lönnrot (the compiler of the Kalevala). Ziolkowski charts how and why they reshaped the material they gathered and also explores contemporaries’ reactions to their work. Precedents emerged for “the manufacture of political folklore in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Far from betraying their various European predecessors, Soviet scholars in a sense expanded upon existing tendencies like the inconsistency of aesthetic and methodological criteria and the use of folklore in the service of political goals” (31).
Chapter 2, “Oral Composition: Early Russian Observations and Assumptions,” introduces some of the pre- and postrevolutionary Russian collectors of byliny and historical songs—namely, Pavel Rybnikov, Aleksandr Hilferding, Aleksei Markov, Andrei Grigor’ev, Nikolai Onchukov, Boris and Iurii Sokolov, and Mark Azadovskii—and looks at their understanding of oral composition. Ziolkowski focuses on their views of the impact of literary works on oral performers, and their grasp of the oral compositional process. She detects an increasingly “tolerant relativism regarding the influence of printed materials on the singers of byliny and tellers of folk tales” (56). Accordingly, the stage was set “for the cultural validity of innovative and experimental folklore, what the Sokolovs call ‘written folklore’” (56), that is, for the emergence of the noviny. Similarly, these researchers’ inadequate understanding of the ways an oral poet works presaged subsequent efforts “to manipulate composition—poorly grasped strategies command less respect than carefully observed techniques” (56-57).
Chapter 3, “Engaging with the Folk in Prerevolutionary Russia,” looks first at the fieldwork and editorial practices of the figures introduced in the previous chapter. Intervention and interference were the norm: they were quick “to orchestrate performances to a lesser or greater degree, to exercise an arbitrary selectivity, and to edit and manipulate transcribed material at multiple stages of the publication process” (87). These practices anticipated the work of folklorists when it came to Stalinist-era noviny. The chapter’s last section, “Rural Performers on the Urban Stage,” shows how these researchers made certain star performers, such as Trofim Riabinin and Mar’ia Krivopolenova, into representatives of the tradition in the eyes of educated urban elites. These tours showcased the dynamics of the complex interactions between singers and folklorists that would also play a part in the creation of the noviny.
The second portion of the book explores the noviny proper. Chapter 4, “The Making of the Noviny,” examines the period from 1920 to 1940. Additional factors, beyond those discussed in earlier chapters, paved the way for the noviny. For example, singers saw little reason to demand faithful transcriptions of their performances, while folklorists cast the oral performer as an authorial figure and argued that folklore’s social function was paramount. Accordingly, the thinking went, performers could be guided to produce work advantageous to the young socialist state. What is more, byliny, it was argued, were in fact of non-aristocratic origin: as descendants of the byliny, then, the noviny were welcome arrivals. The noviny themselves resulted often from collaborations between a (amateur) folklorist and a performer, such as between Nikolai Leont’ev and the singer Marem’iana Golubkova and Viktorin Popov and the singer Marfa Kriukova. Leont’ev, for instance, provided Golubkova with accounts of the state’s leading figures and institutions. Straightaway, scholars set out to defend these new works as rooted in tradition, but others balked at some of their stylistic features, such as what they deemed ineffective reuse of the byliny’s formulae and topoi.
Chapter 5, “The Poetics and Politics of the Noviny,” examines the genre’s structures and themes. The chapter starts with a review of the byliny. We are introduced to the main protagonists of the mythological, Kievan, and Novgorodian byliny as well as to the genre’s typical episodes, motifs, and stylistic features. Ziolkowski then elucidates how three composers of noviny, Marfa Kriukova, Petr Riabinin-Andreev, and Marem’iana Golubkova, repurposed these familiar compositional mechanisms. The concluding section turns to the noviny’s subjects, ranging from the Civil War to polar expeditions to the German invasion, and posits that herein lies one explanation for the noviny’s ultimately lackluster reception: “Comprehensive reporting, whether fallacious or not, and epic creation may not coexist harmoniously. The noviny dealt in detail with important personalities and events, but regardless of ideological perspective, such things may not necessarily be the stuff of poetry” (152).
Chapters 6 and 7 lead us expertly through the reception of the noviny. Chapter 6, “Devaluing the Noviny,” considers the various criticisms brought against the genre. Discontentment was already brewing in the late 1940s. For example, Dmitrii Moldavskii and Ol’ga Grechina labeled the noviny pseudo-folklore, and reviewers of Anna Astakhova’s defense of the noviny, which rehearsed their connections to the byliny and argued for their “collective” origin, denounced the noviny as well. After Stalin’s death in 1953, the condemnations continued: “the majority of scholarly folklorists wished to preserve the notion of Soviet folklore as a significant and independent realm of artistic creativity, while simultaneously providing theoretical justification for dismissing the noviny and similar productions as authentic folklore” (168). At the same time, less strident voices eventually sought to be heard, and anthologies published in the late 1960s and early 1970s included a few noviny, such as Marfa Kriukova’s “All Stone Moscow Wept.” Over the course of the chapter, Ziolkowski neatly brings out the contexts of these discussions. First, criticisms of the noviny actually stemmed from a larger debate among Soviet folklorists over the importance and nature of collectivity and orality when it came to folklore. Second, folkloristics could not disengage from, and in fact came to mirror, the “twists and turns” of 1950s and 60s Soviet politics (181).
Chapter 7, “Late and Post-Soviet Folkloristic Assessment of the Noviny,” focuses on Soviet and post-Soviet reaction to Milman Parry’s and Albert Lord’s discussions of the oral poet’s compositional processes. Soviet scholars’ insistence that Russian and Soviet work on that very topic not receive short shrift morphed into criticism of the Americans’ findings. They challenged, for example, Parry’s and Lord’s concepts of “improvisation” (191) and “composition in performance” (192) and asserted the importance of “actual textual memory” (196). Ultimately, these positions reinforced the orthodox rejection of the noviny: “possible implications of the Parry-Lord theory regarding the viability of improvisation with a contemporary focus could be dismissed as exaggerated or naive” (199). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Americans’ work received a much more favorable reception but, as Iurii Novikov’s and V. A. Bakhtina’s monographs reveal, the noviny for the most part did not. The same charges were brought as before: the noviny were indebted to printed sources; they did not possess the traits of true folklore, collectivity and orality; they were the products of collectors’ interference and tampering. The book’s conclusion highlights some Western scholars’ more favorable views on the noviny, such as those of Cecil Bowra and Paul Zumthor.
Ziolkowski provides a great service in illuminating not only the byliny and the noviny but also the people behind them and the Russian scholarly reactions to the noviny. Few Western researchers will have had access to this material before. In addition, Ziolkowski helpfully articulates how the discussion of the noviny was really a discussion about matters that remain of interest to many folklorists: “The definition of collectivity, the role of the individual, the identification and significance of orality, the implications of literacy, the nature of memory and the relative importance of memorization, the weight granted to tradition” (187). Readers of, for instance, the eminent Africanist Ruth Finnegan will recognize these items. My only request is for more. I would have enjoyed seeing Ziolkowski go a bit deeper than she does (213-214) into the relationship of the noviny to the compositions of poets in other portions of the Soviet Union. Performers in, for instance, Ukraine also adapted their work when confronted with new political realities.
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[Review length: 1514 words • Review posted on February 26, 2014]