“Let There Always Be Sunshine”: On Modern Contexts of Soviet Songs

Folkloristics 9/2 (2024): 127–154
Author: Irina V. Kozlova, Elena F. Levočskaja
Text:

In modern Russia, songs are included in various everyday contexts. Depending on the situation, the perception of the song and its meaning for performers and listeners changes. The songs which will be examined in this paper fall into the context of a public political action and acquire a protest meaning. First of all, these are Soviet songs, including children’s songs. T. Turino explains how and why a particular song is listened to in the context of Pierce’s semiotics: it is important to differentiate whether the song is a sign-icon (a sign of identity), a sign-index referring to experience or emotions, or a sign-symbol that can be interpreted. Based on the semiotics of music, it will be striven to answer the question of what place songs occupy in the public space of the 2010s. The material for the paper will be the observations made by the authors and their colleagues in the Monitoring of Current Folklore group during street actions from 2015 to 2021, as well as the interviews with the people who performed or heard songs in the context of public actions.

Keywords: : Soviet songs, public protests in Russia, the International, folklore and anthropology of city, semiotics of music.