Going solo: Leonid Fyodorov
The Auctyon frontman spoke to The St. Petersburg Times ahead of a local gig to present his new solo album.
Published: July 4, 2012 (Issue # 1716)
YEKATERINA KUZMINA
Auctyon frontman Leonid Fyodorov will perform songs from his new album on Thursday at Dada club.
Leonid Fyodorov, the frontman of avant-rock band Auctyon, will premiere his new solo album in the city, performing songs set to the poems of the Soviet-era poet
Alexander Vvedensky at Dada club this week.
Called “Vesna” (Spring), the album was released on the Moscow-based Ulitka label on May 18 and showcased in Moscow on the same day. St. Petersburg’s premiere, scheduled for later that month, was however postponed due to illness, Fyodorov said speaking to The St. Petersburg Times this week.
“I got sick, something terrible happened to my voice,” he said.
Fyodorov himself provided all of the instrumentals and vocals for the album, except for one track to which his wife contributed some vocals. The album follows “Yula” (Whirligig), his seven-piece band’s full-fledged album released in October 2011.
With Auctyon, Fyodorov composes the music, while keyboard player Dmitry Ozersky writes the lyrics. In his solo output, however, he frequently uses work by avant-garde poets, such as Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922) and absurdist Vvedensky (1904–1941).
“It occurred to me to try doing it in a childlike way — pretty simply,” he said. “That’s how I did it.”
Fyodorov, who is now based in Moscow while the rest of the band still lives in St. Petersburg, said he wrote and recorded “Vesna” quickly, in about two months during the winter. “Everything was composed and recorded simultaneously,” he said.
Despite the title’s faux optimism, the album’s material is fairly dark. “Vvedensky is not a fun guy at all,” Fyodorov said. “Or rather he’s fun, but in his own way.”
Alongside Daniil Kharms, with whom he launched OBERIU (an acronym for The Union of Real Art), Vvedensky formed the bulk of Soviet absurd literature, although they were officially children’s writers, since only their poems for children were published in their lifetimes.
OBERIU made its public debut by holding a public reading at the Leningrad House of the Press in 1928, with Vvedensky introducing the poets.
Fyodorov first came across works by Vvedensky, who died in custody in 1941, in the late 1980s when his poems started to appear in Soviet periodicals.
“I wasn’t very interested at first, I thought he was just some guy who was still around,” Fyodorov said.
“I first read him when [author] Vladimir Erl published him maybe in 1987 or 1988. Or 1986. He published him in [Leningrad Communist youth newspaper] Smena at his own risk, on its poetry page. I read it and thought, ‘How interesting that he is like us.’ I cut it out and deliberately took it to show it to Ozersky. We were happy for a while. ‘What a guy.’”
Fyodorov wrote his first song set to a Vvedensky poem in 2000, when Moscow author Sergei Solovyov offered him the opportunity to contribute to a music disc that accompanied a literary almanac that Solovyov had published.
For the CD, Fyodorov wrote a music track to a poem called “Syn” (Son) and recited a poem called “Vozdukh” (Air).
He returned to Vvedensky’s legacy in 2005, when he recorded a full album entitled “Besonders” (German for “particularly” or “specially”) with avant-garde double bass jazz player Vladimir Volkov in 2005.
Being officially labeled as children’s writers did not help Kharms and Vvedensky much during the Stalin era. They were arrested in the mid-1930s and exiled as a result of the “Children’s Writers’ Case” in which investigators tried to prove that the authors put “encoded anti-Soviet messages” into children’s poetry.
Just as with Kharms, who was arrested and starved to death in a Leningrad mental hospital in January 1942, Vvedensky’s fate was tragic.
“He was arrested in Kharkiv [for ‘counterrevolutionary propaganda’],” Fyodorov said.
What happened to Kharms and Vvedensky was not known until the 1980s.
“One version has it that he [Vvedensky] was simply pushed off of a train, and the other has it that he caught typhus and died on his way, though it’s unclear where he was being taken.”
Most of Vvedensky’s work is believed to have been lost, but some was saved by philosopher and friend Yakov Druskin. Druskin entered Kharms’ apartment, which had been sealed off after his arrest, and removed manuscripts, which included some by Vvedensky, during the Siege of Leningrad.
“I got Vvedensky’s two-volume collection when it came out in 1993,” Fyodorov said.
“It included an essay by Druskin called ‘The Star of Nonsense,’ which I think is the most accurate work about Vvedensky.
“Everybody died and he [Druskin] was the only one who survived. He didn’t touch the manuscripts for 15 years because he was hoping that they would come back.”
Years later, Fyodorov met Vvedensky’s stepson, Boris Viktorov, who still lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
“He is the son of [Vvedensky’s] wife, Galina Viktorova. I keep in touch with him, he’s a very interesting man,” he said.
“He’s an engineer, now retired because he’s about 77. He wrote a thin book of memoirs published in Kharkiv that is remarkable in its own way.
“They [Vvedensky and Viktorova] were amazing people — there is no one like that now. Viktorova was of German origin, all her relatives were thrown into prison, but they were both Orthodox Christian and both vehemently hated anti-Semites. She took any manifestation of anti-Semitism as a personal offense, even if she was more German than Russian.
“Naturally, she hated Stalin and the others — that’s why she changed jobs very frequently; she was kicked out of every job because if anybody asked her, God forbid, she said what she thought directly, without any hesitation. She did so before Stalin died in 1953. When her grandchildren were brought to her and asked about Stalin, she replied, ‘My little ones, I must say Stalin is a villain.’ Everyone was horrified.”
The other reason that Druskin preserved the archives without trying to distribute them, Fyodorov suggested, was due to the sheer innovation of Vvedensky’s poetry that few contemporaries could understand.
“They say that somebody read out a Vvedensky poem, it was either ‘Elegy’ or ‘Air,’ to Anna Akhmatova after the war and she brushed it aside,” he said.
“She didn’t even realize that this poem was greater than everything she wrote during her whole life.”
In a way, Vvedensky and OBERIU poetry were originally influenced by Futurist poets such as Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchyonykh.
“But there are big differences,” Fyodorov said.
“First of all, he [Vvedensky] was Orthodox Christian, and all his poetry is very Orthodox Christian. This might be his fundamental difference from Khlebnikov. But of course they [OBERIU] mixed with Khlebnikov and visited Kruchyonykh and felt that they were the most left-wing. They mixed with [poet] Alexander Tufanov and [artist] Kazimir Malevich as well.
“But the difference was probably that they called themselves OBERIU — The Union of Real Art, so they did real art. They were not formalists, they were into different things.”
Fyodorov said there was some truth in composer and philosopher Vladimir Martynov’s view that Russian literature ended with Vvedensky.
“There is no literature,” Fyodorov said. “It’s pointless to bother with literature when there isn’t any.”
Fyodorov’s album, however, opens with a song whose author is unknown. Called “Topl” (a distorted version of the word “topol,” which means “poplar”), its text came from 76-year-old Leningrad-born, Tubingen, Germany-based poet Henri Volokhonsky, who included it in his book “Memories of the Long Forgotten” as a folk song.
“He told me it was a folk song, so I credited it as ‘traditional,’ but maybe he wrote it himself and then forgot that he had, I don’t know,” said Fyodorov, who has collaborated with Volokhonsky on several albums.
Fyodorov admitted he had never heard the original song. “Henri sent me a track that he had recorded about ten years earlier, so I kept it,” he said. “He read it out or sang it, I don’t know how to describe his manner. Declaimed it. Then I added some [music] to it.”
The other non-Vvedensky song on “Vesna” is “Dusha” (Soul), written to Ozersky’s lyrics. “I thought [the song] fit [the album] OK,” Fyodorov said.
The album’s themes and the era it refers to sound relevant in the context of City Hall’s official newspaper publishing a collection of quotes by people condemning feminist punk band Pussy Riot, whose members have been in prison for about four months for singing an anti-Putin “punk prayer” in a church, a throwback to the massive condemnations of “enemies of the people” during the Stalin era.
“If you think about it, nothing has changed at all since then,” Fyodorov said.
“People can be sent to prison for nothing, just the same as they could then. Just like power was usurped then, it is still being usurped. The system has not changed; whatever you call it, it has remained the same. One thing is allowed, and another thing is not allowed. At some point they will make it so that nothing will be allowed at all. Power was usurped by the Bolsheviks in 1917 and it remained the same; nobody apologized, nobody was punished. [The current authorities] are their successors.”
Although his band Auctyon was known for some rebellious songs and their independent stance during the 1980s, Fyodorov dismissed the current Russian protest movement, calling it “meaningless.”
“They should have protested when something depended on it,” he said.
“Putin was being groomed for the presidency in 1999. They [the people] could have changed things then, but everybody — many of those who are against him now — was happy and praised him. Protests help the authorities themselves; they can say, ‘See, we have protests here.’
“There were absurdities then and there are absurdities now, I can’t see any difference. Everybody thought that something drastic had taken place in Russia, but there’s been no drastic change; power was passed from some people to other people who are exactly the same — dull-witted and evil. They are the same, only a little younger.”
Leonid Fyodorov will premiere his solo album “Vesna” at 7 p.m. on Thursday, July 5 at Dada, 47 Gorokhovaya Ulitsa. Metro Sennaya Ploshchad / Sadovaya. Tel. 983 7050