Talk:Bard (Soviet Union)

Unification Aspects: The Bard represented the finest tradition of the poet as not only entertainer but as conscience of the nation. Some of them, such as Vladimir Vysotsky, struck such a chord with the people that they were among the most popular figures in the entire nation. The poetic tradition in Russia was always very important, as political censorship was the tradition in Imperial Russia as well as its successor state, the Soviet Union. Since overt political speech was prohibited, new ideas or criticism of the state were usually expressed in poetic form, through the use of poetic devices, such as metaphor. It was not unusual to fill Lenin stadium in Moscow for a poetic reading during the 1970s. The work of the bards, however, was produced underground and circulated through samizdat' or self-publication. The bards challenged not only political orthodoxy but the stagnation that had set in during the Brezhnev era. However, the significance of the Bard movement cannot be expressed in purely political terms. These poets were not political figures except that they challenged the orthodoxy of the official version of Soviet life by their very existence. They re-introduced the personal that could not be expressed in official life or in socialist realism. They stood as a testament to truth and to the human spirit that could not be made to bend before the lies that made up official Soviet reality.

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