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Chastushka (tɕɪsˈtuʂkə, chastushki) is a traditional musical genre of short Russian humorous folk song. Usually associated with high beat frequency, thus the name, coined from in the meaning of "quick". While the root of chastushki can be traced to ancient folklore of dance and wedding songs as well as performances of balagurs (Russian version of minstrels), the genre itself had crystallized fairly recently, in the last third of the 19th century, under the influence of social shifts caused by the abolition of serfdom and industrialization. Spread of the squeezebox in the mid-19th century and its use for the accompaniment created partial separation of chastushki from dance music.
In 1889, Gleb Uspensky was the first researcher to identify the new poetic form and assign the name "chastushki" to it. Typically many chastushki are sung one after another. Chastushki make use of a simple rhyming scheme to convey humorous or ironic content. The singing and recitation of such rhymes were an important part of popular culture of peasants and industrial workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The close equivalent of chastushki in the Western culture is limerick.
The basic form is a simple quatrain making use of an , , or rhyme scheme.
Usually humorous, satirical, or ironic in nature, chastushki are often put to music as well, usually with balalaika or accordion accompaniment. The rigid, short structure (and, to a lesser degree, the type of humor used) parallels the poetic genre of limericks in British culture.
Sometimes several chastushki are delivered in sequence to form a song. After each chastushka, there is a full musical refrain without lyrics to give the listeners a chance to laugh without missing the next one. Originally chastushki were a form of folk entertainment, not intended to be performed on stage. Often they are sung in turns by a group of people. Sometimes they are used as a medium for a back-and-forth mocking contest. Improvisation is highly valued during chastushka singing.
In the early 1920s chastushki were used by Komsomol in organized village gatherings as a form of anti-religious propaganda, subjecting the church and the rural clergy to ridicule using the traditional rural poetic form.Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996; pg. 50. Scholar Lynne Viola provides one such example of an anti-religious Soviet rhyme, rendered here in literal English translation:
All the pious are on a spree,
They see God is not at home.
He got drunk on homebrewed liquor,
And left to go abroad.
Given the difficult economic circumstances of the Soviet peasantry in the late 1920s and 1930s, many chastushki were of an anti-government form, with the singing of anti-Soviet couplets a common practice at peasant festivals of the period.Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants, pg. 271, citing an archival file. Following the assassination of Communist Party leader Sergei Kirov late in 1934, chastushki sprung up relating the killing to a recent decision to terminate bread rationing, including this literal translation of one example provided by scholar Sheila Fitzpatrick:
When Kirov was killed,
They allowed free trade in bread.
When Stalin is killed,
They will disband all the collective farms.Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants, pp. 291–292.
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