Kvartirnik

Kvartirnik

Type	Informal cultural gathering
Associated with	Soviet and post-Soviet culture
Typical venue	Private apartment
Forms	House concerts, poetry readings, apartment exhibitions

Kvartirnik (Russian: квартирник, from квартира, kvartira, meaning "apartment") is an informal cultural gathering held in a private apartment, usually for a relatively small audience. Most commonly, the term refers to a domestic music performance, particularly by a singer-songwriter or rock musician. In broader usage, it has also been applied to poetry readings, literary evenings and exhibitions of art in private homes.

Kvartirniki became particularly associated with unofficial cultural life in the Soviet Union during the second half of the twentieth century. They provided settings in which musicians, writers and artists could present work outside conventional cultural institutions and maintain ties with audiences and other practitioners. Such unofficial activity was not necessarily intended as political opposition. Apartment concerts continued after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, while the term also came to be used for staged and televised events that recreated the intimate atmosphere of a domestic performance.

History

Background and emergence

Domestic concerts and literary gatherings existed in Russia long before the Soviet period. Musical salons and amateur music-making formed part of the cultural life of educated households in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although a direct institutional continuity between these gatherings and Soviet-era kvartirniki has not been established.

Changes in Soviet housing after the late 1950s helped shape the conditions in which private cultural gatherings took place. The large-scale building of separate family apartments created new possibilities for social life at home. Historian Susan E. Reid notes that the Soviet kitchen later acquired a mythologized reputation as a place for frank, intimate conversation, while cautioning against treating the home as an entirely autonomous or ideology-free space.

During the Khrushchev Thaw, informal literary and artistic circles developed alongside the growing popularity of avtorskaia pesnia (author's song). Singers including Bulat Okudzhava, Alexander Galich and Vladimir Vysotsky performed for invited audiences in domestic settings; some such performances were recorded on tape. Apartments were also used for meetings, readings and displays of unofficial artwork.

The 1970s and 1980s

By the 1970s and 1980s, apartment gatherings had become established in parts of Soviet unofficial culture. Rock musicians, whose opportunities for public performance could be constrained by institutional requirements, used domestic concerts to present new songs and maintain relationships with listeners.

The practice was especially important to the Leningrad rock scene. In her study of the city's rock culture, Polly McMichael describes apartments as spaces for music-making as well as everyday interaction among performers, listeners and friends. Musicians associated with apartment concerts included Boris Grebenshchikov, Mike Naumenko, Viktor Tsoi and Alexander Bashlachev. Citing an account of a visit to Sverdlovsk, Anna Svetlova describes an apartment performance by Naumenko and Tsoi attended by around twenty listeners.

Apartment exhibitions and informal intellectual meetings took place in other cultural circles. The organizers and participants did not necessarily use the same terminology for every form of gathering. The establishment of rock clubs and the expansion of opportunities for public performances in the 1980s changed the circumstances in which apartment concerts operated but did not immediately end the practice.

Forms

Music and literary evenings

A musical kvartirnik typically featured one performer or a small group before an invited audience. The size of the apartment and limitations on equipment often favored acoustic performance. The tradition was associated with both author's song and rock music. Literary scholar Nikolai Bogomolov describes author's song as a cultural form at the intersection of literature, music and urban amateur practice.

The relationship between Soviet rock music and literary culture is also evident in accounts of apartment performances. Boris Pozhenin compares the kvartirnik to a literary salon, emphasizing the circulation of songs and ideas among musicians, poets and listeners. However, Ekaterina Ganskaya cautions that the frequently asserted primacy of lyrics in Russian rock is itself partly a construction of the musical scene and its subsequent criticism.

Apartment exhibitions

Private apartments provided exhibition spaces for artists whose work did not fit the conventions of official Soviet art institutions or who lacked access to public galleries. Historians I. V. Turitsyn and S. G. Davydov explicitly use the term kvartirniki for such events, citing exhibitions associated with the Jewish artists' group Alef in 1976 and the groups Letopis and Alipiy in 1978. They also describe the arrest of V. I. Filimonov following the staging of the exhibition Contemporary Religious Painting in a residential space in 1976.

Related informal gatherings were held beyond Moscow and Leningrad. From the late 1960s, the Tallinn home of Estonian artists Tõnis Vint and Mare Vint became a meeting place for artists and intellectuals, where works could be discussed and information exchanged. Andres Kurg argues that the design of the apartment itself formed part of the Vints' artistic practice. This is an example of the wider culture of unofficial domestic artistic meetings, although the application of the term kvartirnik to these particular meetings is not independently established.

Intellectual circles

Private homes also accommodated philosophical seminars, literary discussions and other gatherings of intellectual circles. An account of Hegelian seminars held in Moscow in the late 1960s and early 1970s explicitly refers to the meetings as kvartirniki. Nonetheless, the term did not have a uniform meaning across artistic and academic circles, and not every informal seminar held at home was regarded as a kvartirnik.

Organization and cultural significance

Conduct of gatherings

Kvartirniki were often organized through personal networks. A host supplied the apartment, while invitations circulated among friends, acquaintances of performers and members of the relevant cultural milieu. The number of attendees depended on the available space. At music performances, artists and listeners were generally close to one another, without a conventional stage or extensive sound equipment. Some events were free; at others, attendees contributed money toward the performers' fees or expenses.

The setting allowed performers to speak directly with listeners, respond to comments or requests, and adjust the programme. Svetlova identifies this close interaction as a characteristic aspect of the apartment concert, while noting that ideas of spontaneity and authenticity also became part of the retrospective mythology of Soviet rock culture.

Informal communities

The importance of apartment gatherings extended beyond individual concerts or exhibitions. They enabled the exchange of information and artistic ideas, and helped sustain informal social networks. McMichael's work on the circle around the band Aquarium describes how friendship, everyday activities and artistic production overlapped in 1970s Leningrad. Similarly, literary scholar Klavdia Smola treats communication within Soviet unofficial artistic and literary milieus as a component of the creative process itself.

The relationship of such gatherings to Soviet cultural policy varied. Apartments could provide alternatives to official venues, but participation in unofficial cultural activity did not necessarily amount to political dissidence. Anthropologist Alexei Yurchak stresses that some late-Soviet artistic communities developed practices neither aligned with official ideology nor organized as explicit opposition to it.

Recordings and magnitizdat

Some apartment concerts were recorded on tape. Copies could circulate beyond those who had attended the original performance, contributing to magnitizdat, the unofficial duplication and distribution of audio recordings. Musicologist J. Martin Daughtry discusses recordings of Okudzhava's performances made in Moscow and Leningrad apartments as examples of this practice.

Unofficial recordings were also important to Soviet rock. McMichael traces the circulation and subsequent commercial reissues of recordings by Aquarium in the 1970s and 1980s. A kvartirnik was a live gathering, however, whereas magnitizdat was a means of circulating sound recordings, whether or not they originated at an apartment concert.

After 1991

The dissolution of the Soviet Union changed the circumstances of apartment concerts but did not end the tradition. As possibilities for performing at clubs and other public venues expanded, home concerts became less necessary for some musicians, yet they continued through the 1990s and 2000s as a small-scale performance format.

In the twenty-first century, kvartirniki have been used by independent performers to meet listeners directly. A. A. Agarkova and N. S. Bezuglaya describe contemporary apartment concerts as an opportunity for musicians to introduce their work to audiences, often with acoustic instruments and, at times, collective improvisation or jam sessions.

The name has also been extended to performances held in clubs, studios and concert halls that deliberately recreate a domestic atmosphere. Svetlova interprets some of these contemporary productions as references to an idealized image of Soviet rock concerts. The television music programme Kvartirnik u Margulisa (Apartment Concert at Margulis's), first broadcast in 2015, is an example of this staged adaptation of the format.

The term has also appeared in cultural activities outside the former Soviet Union. In 2013–2015, a translation circle at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, organized music-and-literature meetings called kvartirniki. They included songs by Soviet and Russian performers, some presented in Polish translation. The post-Soviet history of the kvartirnik thus encompasses both continuing home-based performances and deliberate recreations of the format in other settings.

See also

• House concert
• Russian rock
• Magnitizdat
• Samizdat

References

This article "Kvartirnik" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Kvartirnik. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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