Sound Archives From the Margins of the Soviet: Recording Gypsy Tales and Songs in the Late Soviet Union
Résumé
The chapter recounts how two Muscovites, writer and poet Efim Druts (1937–2018) and bard Aleksei Gessler (1945–1998), decided to record Romani tales, songs and oral memories in the Brezhnevian USSR, at a time when Gypsy folklore was rediscovered and reintegrated into official culture. Perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union made it possible to clarify the sociological context of these sound archives, notably through the use of black literature characteristic of post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s. Druts and Gessler thus belong to the very small circle of specialists in the Gypsy world, which developed on the bangs of the academic world in the Soviet Union and, more broadly, in Eastern Europe, and documented the complex sociological universe of populations forced into sedentarization and constituted as objects of cultural promotion while in reality retaining a specific way of life.