Russian hippie slang, rock-n-roll poetry and stylistics: The creativity of Soviet youth counterculture.

Abstract

Soviet youth counterculture is a little studied phenomenon. This dissertation is an attempt at writing a short history of soviet countercultural movements combined with analysis of Russian hippie slang and soviet rock-n-roll poetry and stylistics, as major creative unifying factors in life of Soviet countercultural community. The dissertation consists of three parts. The first part presents the history of Soviet youth counterculture from its emergence in 1953 after Stalin's death up to 1968 (the year of birth of Soviet hippie movement). In this part are discussed such important countercultural movements as zootsuiters and beatniks of the 50-s and bohemian movements of the 60-s. In his investigation of the subject the author uses eyewitness accounts, memoirs and works of fiction dealing with the life of Soviet youth during the described period, as well as extensive personal interviews. The second part is entirely dedicated to major topics: discussion of ideology, world outlook, customs and codes of Soviet hippies, and to detailed linguistic analysis of Russian hippie slang. Discussion of hippie slang is entirely based on lexical materials found in our original Dictionary of Soviet Hippie Slang, given in the Appendix. This dictionary consist of approximately 840 entries--individual words and phraseologysms, collected by the author in the USSR, and covers the period of 1970-s. The third part of the dissertation deals with certain aspects of Soviet rock-culture. In this part the author attempts to determine what particular trends in Soviet rock-music are responsible for its uniqueness and what national cultural traditions had major influence in shaping the Soviet rock. The author centers his attention particularly on the post-punk movement and through analysis of its poetry and stylistics tries to show how this movement draws on national tradition of iurodivy (the holy fool) dating back to the Middle Ages. In this investigation the author uses materials from his archive of audio and video recordings of Soviet rock, samizdat publications of rock fanzines and numerous interviews with members of Soviet rock community.