Bayushki Bayu: A Song History

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The Soviet Poetic Dictionary (1966) treats the lullaby as a lyric genre of its own, popular in folk poetry, and the folk lullaby it gives as its example opens with the words "bayushki, bayu."[1] The same dictionary names Mikhail Lermontov's "Cossack Lullaby" (Kazachya kolybelnaya pesnya) as an example of a lullaby written by a Russian poet, and that poem carries the refrain at the close of each stanza.[1][2] The Lermontov Encyclopedia (1981) dates the poem to 1838 on the strength of a copy that the poet's grandmother sent in a letter in November 1838 to mark the birth of a child.[3][2] The poem was first printed in 1840 in the journal Otechestvennye zapiski, in its second issue of that year.[3][2]

Porcelain figure of a peasant woman in a lilac jacket and yellow headscarf holding a jug

Imperial Porcelain Manufactory, St. Petersburg, Peasant Woman from Ingria (Ingermanland), hard-paste porcelain, ca. 1780–1800. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its Russian setting; it has no connection to the song.

The encyclopedia records several legends about how the poem came to be written.[3] The most widespread places it on the Terek River in the Cossack settlement of Chervlenaya, after Lermontov heard a Cossack woman singing her baby to sleep; the scholar Irakli Andronikov favored a village in the Kuban instead.[3] It finds no factual support for the idea that the poem greeted the birth of a son to A. M. Vereshchagina, and it treats as refuted the theory that it was written after the battle of Valerik in 1840.[3] Lermontov may even have composed his own music for it: his biographer P. A. Viskovatov was told by General Potapov that the poet set the lullaby while a guest at Potapov's estate, Semidubrovnoe, in Voronezh province, but the music could not be found.[4][3]

Many composers set the poem, among them Aleksandr Varlamov, Eduard Nápravník, Aleksandr Grechaninov, Vladimir Rebikov and Nikolai Myaskovsky.[3] Pauline Viardot included it, as "Berceuse cosaque" in a French version by Louis Pomey, in her Douze mélodies sur des poésies russes.[5][3] The encyclopedia adds that within the nineteenth century alone the poem had been printed more than ninety times in school readers and music collections, which helped fix its words and tune in popular memory, and that, as of its 1981 publication, the song was still being collected from singers throughout the country, usually with a shortened text.[3] The sources consulted here do not say whose melody became that popular tune.[3] In the United States, the tenor Saveli Walevitch recorded a song titled "Bayoushky bayou," which the discography describes as a Russian lullaby, singing to his own guitar in Camden, New Jersey, on May 24, 1928; it was issued as Victor 81263.[6]

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Sources

  1. Poeticheskii slovar' (Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1966), via Academic.ru: "Kolybel'naia pesnia".
  2. Wikisource (Russian): "Kazach'ia kolybel'naia pesnia (Lermontov)".
  3. Fundamental Electronic Library (FEB), Lermontovskaia entsiklopediia (1981): "Kazach'ia kolybel'naia pesnia" (Z. I. Vlasova).
  4. Lermontov Encyclopedia project (RKhGA): E. I. Kann and A. Novikov, "Muzyka v zhizni i tvorchestve Lermontova" (1939).
  5. Oxford Song: "Berceuse cosaque" (Pauline Viardot).
  6. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix BVE-45063. Bayoushky bayou / Saveli Walevitch".