Nickolas Khimerik is a MARS-REERS student at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, studying nationality in the late Soviet context.
A young woman lights a cigarette and drunkenly falls asleep. Her room quickly catches on fire and firefighters soon arrive at the scene to save the day. However, they are hesitant. They have children—they don’t want to die. It is the youngest firefighter who proves most courageous, rushing into the flames to save the incapacitated woman from her fate. He carries the woman out of the flames as the other firefighters pour water all around to extinguish the fire.
It is here that tragedy strikes: the firefighters pour so much water that they flood the entire building. The young firefighter, unable to swim, drowns. Now comes time to bring in the rescuers. They, with their scuba gear, begin diving to retrieve the drowned corpses of the woman and the firefighter. But alas, with the firefighters gone, everything begins to heat up again, and a few children playing with matches cause the fire to start all over. The rescuers are now forced to leave and so, the firefighters return only for the cycle to continue.
This is the plot of the 1996 bard-rock song Molodoi pozharnyi, written and performed by Maxim Litvinov under his pseudonym, Venya D’Rkin. The song must not have been among his most popular at the time, as the best surviving recording of it was made during a performance in an informal apartment concert.
During this performance, Venya typically clenches his teeth and sings in a deep, unsettling moan. His eyes are closed and his expression is deadpan, contrasting with the absurdity of his song’s plot. Beyond its shocking first impression, the song has a captivating subtext that can be interpreted as a metaphorical depiction of life under late socialism. Litvinov masterfully utilizes a rarely used literary form—the dokuchnaia skazka or “annoying tale”—to explore how, like an Ouroboros, Soviet ideology devours itself. Molodoi pozharnyi, despite the ridiculous plot that unfolds in its lyrics, thus functions as an epitaph for the Soviet century.
The lyrics take the style of the Russian storytelling tradition of dokuchnye skazki. These stories are meant to parody the structure of traditional fairy-tales, which typically follow a banal linear plot. Yet dokuchnye skazki have one defining feature: they have no clear ending, and can be told in perpetuity, much like the self-referential “Song That Never Ends.”
Beyond existing merely to drive parents and caretakers insane, dokuchnye skazki subvert traditional narrative arcs by depriving them of a resolution. Whereas most fables hinge on a conflict and resolution, the latter of which typically serves to teach a moral, the dokuchnaya skazka offers no such cognitive relief. Like Sisyphus pushing his boulder towards a peak he will never summit, dokuchnye skazki only serve to emphasize a lack of closure, rather than any sort of possible resolution achieved by the protagonist’s wits or perseverance.
In Molodoi pozharnyi, Litvinov uses the structure of the dokuchnaia skazka in opposition to Soviet-style Marxist determinism. Marxism frames history as a linear plot wherein the proletariat-protagonist struggles against, and overcomes, the evils of class oppression to create a classless, utopian society. However drawn-out or violent the struggle, achieving the ideal of full-fledged communism is the ultimate narrative conclusion.
The reality of life under Soviet socialism, however, better resembles a dokuchnaya skazka. As Litvinov, a late-Soviet subject, had ample opportunity to observe, the construction of communism never concluded, but only grew increasingly over-budget and overdue. By the end of the Soviet project, the system became mired in promises undelivered and labor unrewarded by an aging politburo. Accordingly, ommunist idealism slowly waned, as fewer and fewer citizens continued to believe in the ultimate resolution Soviet officials promised it would eventually bring.
In Litvinov’s song, we can see the titular “young firefighter” as representing the Marxist protagonist or new Soviet man. Young and naive, he is ready to take on any challenge, even when the odds are stacked against him. Tragically, despite giving his best, most heroic performance by attempting to save the drunken damsel, he does not succeed. Instead, his comrades inflict further challenges by over-performing their own duties. Whether their over-performance was a result of distress, negligence, or malicious intent is irrelevant: the result is a displaced protagonist sabotaged by his own comrades. Soviet, and even post-Soviet history, offers many parallels to this kind of pointless, overactive striving that aims to reach a high ideal but ends up making people’s lives worse, from the single-minded fervor of the early revolutionaries ahead of 1917 to attempts to privatize the post-Soviet economy practically overnight in the early 1990s.
Having perished in the struggle for salvation, the young firefighter is replaced by what the song calls “rescuers,” who seek to to solve the new problem (flood) created in the course of fighting the earlier one (fire). The absurdity here lies in the combined redundancy and inefficiency of these two roles, as well as their mutual exclusivity. The rescuers only appear when the firefighters leave and vice-versa, but cannot be seen working together despite how interconnected their duties are. As though hailing from rival agencies within the sclerotic late-Soviet bureaucracy, the rescuers and firefighters never communicate directly and never consider their broader shared objectives. The outcome of their refusal to communicate is not a utopia, but a dangerous environment that is alternatively flooded or on fire.
Although on paper, a dokuchnaia skazka might go on forever, a a live performance of such a text must eventually end. In the best-known performance of Molodoi pozharnyi, Litvinov opts for a rather abrupt ending. Through gritted teeth, he screams an expletive followed by the word sovok and concludes with some loud-heaving breaths and indistinct grumbling. Sovok literally means “shovel” or “scoop,” but is also a slang term for the Soviet Union or its citizens. In the late- and post-Soviet contexts, sovok was used specifically as a pejorative designation for outdated, “Soviet-style” rigidity in political, social, or aesthetic life.
With its implication that the idealistic firefighter and rescuers are nothing more than misguided sovki, Litvinov’s final lyric cements the impression that his song is a comment on the Soviet project. “Molodoi pozharnyi” implicates the Soviet Union as the instigator of the vicious cycle—the ceaseless burning and drowning—that requires an endless stream of firefighters, or rescuers, to solve. But alas, with the firefighters gone, everything begins to heat up again...
