Rus in Gwalia

This  is Nicole Crossley-Holland, who I have blipped before. At 80 she is still teaching Russian history classes in the Welsh countryside. I no longer attend them but I always try to get to her Christmas gathering for current and past students.

This year the numbers were small and there was none of the entertainment and dressing up she loves to organize. She has been unwell and since she can no longer drive after dark the meeting, in a village hall in Ceredigion, was only a brief one. But Nicole loves to party so we brought some eats and as we sat around with our plates on our laps she treated us to an acapella rendition of that  famous Russian song, Stenka Razin.  Here she is singing it.

This song is special to me. There was little music in the household when I was growing up, although, unlike me,  both my parents had good singing voices and would occasionally, when slightly lubricated, break out a tune. In my teens however a Dansette gramophone was purchased and my father returned  one day with an armful of Russian records from Collett's left-wing bookshop in London's Charing Cross Road, the only place where you could then get stuff from the Soviet Union. Mostly they were the folk songs he had heard in his youth. Stenka Razin immediately became my favourite, the melody was so catchy and sentimental (it was a huge hit for The Seekers in 1965 as The Carnival is Over).

Stenka Razin was a 17th century Russian rebel leader and pirate who with his Cossack followers seized the ships of rich merchants on the Volga. He became a sort of Robin Hood character redistributing wealth to the impoverished peasants and welcoming the destitute and the desperate into his increasingly powerful rebel army. For years he seemed invincible even when the forces of the Tsar were ranged against him but eventually he was betrayed, captured and ghoulishly executed in Red Square, Moscow, in 1671.

The song concerns a legendary episode in his life. On board ship with his new wife, a beautiful Persian princess, his attentions to her are such that his bloodthirsty men accuse him of having gone soft and lost the will to fight. Furious, he stands up and declares

"I will give you all you ask for
Head and heart and life and hand."
And his voice rolls out like thunder
Out across the distant land.

Volga, Volga, Mother Volga
Wide and deep beneath the sun,
You have never such a present
From the Cossacks of the Don.

So that peace may reign forever
In this band so free and brave
Volga, Volga, Mother Volga
Make this lovely girl a grave.

With that he casts his bride into the river (she is just a chattel after all...)
As the Cossacks fall about weeping he urges them to make merry.

Many years ago, when eating in a Russian restaurant in Paris, I asked the  musicians who were entertaining the diners for this song and they were delighted to oblige. It's a memory I cherish.  By coincidence, Nicole  sang it in French today, since she is Parisian born and bred.

YouTube offers many, many versions. Here's one with visuals from an early film, here is the great Russian bass Chaliapin, and here is the Don Cossack choir.

[My title Rus in Gwalia is inspired by the book Gwalia in Khasia by Nigel Jenkins, about the Welsh Methodist minister Thomas Jones who in the 1880s went to live among the Khasi people of NE India, learnt their language and was the first to transcribe it into a written form.]