Paradise Lost: Nostalgia and Commemoration in the Songs about the Native Village

Abstract

The article examines the songs of the 1970s–2010s about the native village. The lyrics of these songs include characteristic images and motives, which justifies seeing them as belonging to a certain popular and literary tradition. In line with this tradition, the story is being told from the viewpoint of a city dweller whose childhood and youth took place in the village. He is an emigrant whose relationship with the “country of origin” is unequivocally grounded in double dependence: emotional (love and nostalgia) and moral (duty and guilt). Thus, the songs under discussion construct a biographical narrative which presents the village as a paradise lost. In the songs of the 2010s, this narrative is complemented by a national history dimension: abandoned by its natives, the entire Russian village is doomed to disappear. In the context of the current trend of “new rurality”, the tradition of songs about the native village has undergone an unprecedented development. However, it stands alone in the framework of the village revitalization discourse: songs that steer imagining the village towards the (lost) past may be conceptualized in terms of nostalgic commemoration.