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Litera
Reference:

Traditions of the 19th century ballads in the songs of the band "The King and the Jester"

Lochmelis Elizaveta Romanovna

ORCID: 0009-0004-0395-5483

Postgraduate student; Department of the History of Russian Literature; Lomonosov Moscow State University

119991, Russia, Moscow, Leninskie Gory str., 1

dostfm182181@mail.ru

DOI:

10.25136/2409-8698.2024.8.71295

EDN:

NFKABE

Received:

19-07-2024

Published:

19-08-2024

Abstract: This article deals with those features of the literary ballad genre, which are reflected in such songs of the group “King and Jester” (Andrei Kniazev is the lyricist) as “Fred”, “Faithful Wife”, “The Forester”, “The Hunter”, “The Bear”, “The Men Were Eating Meat”, “The Widow and the Hunchback”, “Necromancer”, “Reflection”, “The Master of the Forest”. The purpose of the article is to prove that “King and Jester” rely on genre tradition and classical examples, which means that their texts can be considered as an experience in reconstruction of ballad forms. Methodological basis: the work of the punk group “King and Jester” is examined using literary methodology (the author analyzes the lyrics of songs, identifies genre features that allow them to be classified as literary ballads). The author comes to the following conclusions: the rock poet turns to the romantic ballad due to the crisis of his worldview, since this genre, in addition to narrative and fantasy, carries an elegiac tonality, as well as a motif of the tragic insolvability of life’s collisions, the fatal doom of the hero who finds himself internally congenial to the world of the “scary fairy tale”, from which he appears on stage. The scientific novelty of the article is associated, first of all, with the subject of the study: it is shown that punk rock does not break with tradition, but, on the contrary, relies on it and preserves the constant features of the ballad genre, reveals a hidden craving for cultural dialogue and integrates into tradition. The article contributes to the study of Russian rock poetry as a phenomenon of modernity, and also deepens the understanding of the mechanisms of the ideological, thematic and cultural dialogue into which the rock poet enters with the classical tradition that precedes him.

Keywords:

ballad, romanticism, genre transformation, genre characteristics, punk rock, rock poetry, rites of passage, inversion, literary ballad, romantic ballad
This article is automatically translated.

This article attempts to identify some constant signs of the literary ballad genre, and then to prove that in the work of the "King and the Fool", as well as groups oriented towards the "KISH", there is a noticeable reliance on genre tradition and classical samples, which means that their texts can be considered as an experience of reconstruction of ballad forms.

A literary genre is a concept that implies a certain formal and meaningful unity of a whole complex of structural elements of a text, which causes, on the one hand, its stability, even inertia, and, on the other, its susceptibility to various kinds of transformations[1]. The latter leads to the fact that the same genre designation can cover a wide range of phenomena that vary at different stages of the historical and literary process, which is clearly seen in the example of a ballad, the establishment of genre boundaries of which has always presented a certain difficulty, as evidenced by the following remark by Merzlyakov: "<...> we ask <...> define for us what a ballad is, whether it has rules and boundaries <...>"[2, p. 188]. Cf.: "... a mysterious kind of poetry, known in England as a traditional ballad"[3].

Before proceeding to the analysis of rock ballads, it seems correct to identify the range of both formal and substantive characteristics that prevent the final destruction of this genre, since the genre category is characterized by "historical conventions" - "a set of norms and rules of the game" that tell how the reader "should approach this text", and "thereby ensuring the understanding of this text"[4, p. 186].

Thus, the Russian literary ballad, in particular its most widespread and productive Anglo-Scottish version[5], is an "intricate"[2, p. 187] lyric—epic genre that "came to us from Germany and England"[2, p. 187] (see V. A. Zhukovsky's translations from Schiller Goethe and W. Scott) and took shape at the beginning of the XIX century. in the coordinate system set by the aesthetics of Romanticism.

A romantic ballad is a small plot poem with a dynamic development of action, which is based on an unusual case (the motif of a person meeting with a wonderful, fantastic, otherworldly, and therefore frightening, taken as a plot-forming [6]) Anglo-Scottish and German varieties of ballads close to it (unlike the French, associated with a "strict strophic the form"[7, p. 35]) are characterized by a combination of lyrical ("rejection of the impersonal in favor of a personal narrative"[7, p. 38]), epic (plot, the presence of characters) and dramatic (dialogic replicas that play an important role in plot construction; later — finishing the speech portrait of characters) beginnings (see more details of Borovskaya's work[8],[9]). Reliance on dialogical constructions and the question-and-answer structure as a whole leads to an increase in the dynamics and intensity of the action.

Such a ballad is traditionally based on a folklore plot, which does not allow us to exclude from among the main features of the genre "the atmosphere of the wonderful, mysterious, fantastic"[10, p. 4] and the sense of its genetic connection with pre-literary samples (first of all, a fairy tale and a folk ballad) embedded in the memory of the genre. It is no coincidence that Andrei Knyazev notes that in the mass consciousness ballad texts are associated primarily with scary fairy tales: "An outside observer will summarize all the work of "KISH" in one word — fairy tales..."[11, p. 1]

Thus, the central event in the Russian literary ballad, as well as in the folklore tale, is often the collision of a person with otherworldly entities (dead, spirits, otherworldly forces)[3, c. 51]. However, unlike a fairy tale, the hero of which moves from "his", mastered space (reality) to the world of the dead (nav) in order to eliminate the shortage [12, p. 44], the ballad is characterized by a directly opposite development of the border crossing situation: a character from an "alien", "otherworldly" space (often dead the groom, as, for example, in the ballad "Lyudmila" by Zhukovsky or "Olga" by Katenina) falls into the harmonized sphere of the "local" world, which upsets the situation of balance and causes tragic consequences.

It is therefore no coincidence that the ambivalent nature of the rites of passage is actualized in the ballad. The bride does not come to life in a new status, instead of a wedding ceremony, a funeral is constructed, and the house is replaced by a grave: "Your house is a coffin; the groom is a dead man"[13, p. 13], the same for Katenin: "— "House is a dugout." - “How is it in it?" — "Closely""[14, p. 94].

The inverted fairy tale motifs and rites of passage described above can be found in a number of songs by the band "The King and the Fool". The action in them, as in the translated ballads of Romanticism, takes place in the conditional European Middle Ages. The plot situation is presented in a lapidary way. The language is quite simple, which is also one of the characteristic features of the ballad [15, p. 71]. The action develops dynamically due to dialogues between the characters of the songs.

So, in the song "Fred", the main character goes to clean his well, in which he finds a skeleton dressed in a "girl's dress"[16], and "for some reason"[16] takes it home. Wells in folklore are traditionally associated with "death, transition to another world"[17], as well as with the motif of "rebirth in a new quality"[17] (often the characters become better and more beautiful upon their return), here the dead are transferred to the world of the living, and the "dead groom" is replaced by the "bride". It is important to note the negatively colored semantics of details (dirty well, "muddy water"[16]) that portend bad things: the next morning Fred's legs are taken away and he goes crazy, but the unconsciousness of his actions is emphasized in advance ("And for some reason, here's the question, / Took him to his house"[16]). The traditional motif of "true love" for a fairy tale ("He began to call his find fate"[16]), which brings the enchanted princess back to life, awakens her and all the inhabitants of the enchanted castle, is also transformed, as it gradually brings Fred, obsessed with his love, to death: "From mad love / Every moonlit night / The dead rose, / Became overgrown with flesh"[16] and "I want to be with you always! / To imagine you alive, / Believe me, believe me, believe me, believe me! / Your life is worth my losses!"[16]

Another "passage" into the world of the dead in fairy tales is traditionally a hut on chicken legs — the dwelling of Baba Yaga, an old cannibal witch [18], localized on the border with the "dark forest" (otherworldly kingdom). The same locus is inversely recreated in the song "Faithful Wife": "On a rainy night, a guy got out of the forest / Suddenly saw a lonely hut"[19]. The hero does not go to the forest, but out of it and hopes to spend the night in a hut, the door is opened to him by an "old woman decrepit" [19] and, without asking anything, lets him into the house, prepares a bed and feeds him "well"[19] (the motive of dressing up and eating as part of the rite of passage). At night, the wanderer wakes up because he hears a loud groan from the basement (a locus functionally and symbolically equivalent to a grave), and asks the old woman: "Tell me, grandma, what is that noise?"[19] She replies that the spirit of her "late grandfather" sings in the basement "at night"[19]. The hero decides to go down to the basement and exorcise the evil spirit, and the old woman closes the door leading there. Soon, a "death scream" is heard from the basement[19] and the champing of the "terrible grandfather"[19]. Unlike a fairy tale or, for example, the song "The Gardener", which tells about a young man who was forced by his sisters to go to someone else's garden for flowers: "Brother, into someone else's garden, you, go, go / And you bring us other people's flowers"[20] (the recurring epithet "alien" marks the presence of a ban, violation of which leads the hero to death), in the song "Faithful Wife" the ban is violated as if involuntarily. The old woman does not eat the traveler herself, but does not forbid him to go down, although she knows that "everyone tries to stick their nose in <...> basement"[19]. Thus, the good in the text does not triumph over evil — the old woman becomes the cause of the hero's death, but she really turns out to be a "faithful wife" to her husband, despite the fact that she ruined him herself.

The enchanted forest is the main setting for many other texts of The King and the Fool, so the plots of the songs "Forester"[21], "Hunter"[22], "Bear"[23] are localized in it (or connected with it). The listed texts are marked by a dialogical structure (the inclusion of direct speech of the characters), as well as the preservation of the plot, that is, they represent plot works whose action develops in the fabulous space of the conditional European Middle Ages (the hunter, for example, is called Sebastian, and the hunchback from the song "The Widow and the Hunchback"[24] is Johann). In addition, the songs are filled with folklore, mystical and sometimes frightening motifs.

The plot of the song "Forester" reproduces the classic fairy tale scheme: a tired traveler asks for a night's lodging from a forester and stays in his lodge. The forester accepts him amiably and says that "among the animals" he has "no <...> enemies"[21] and that he likes to "feed the wolves"[21]. The forester's hospitality, his casual chatter "about this and that"[21] prevent the guest from suspecting any connection between these, at first glance, unrelated remarks, as a result, the denouement turns out to be novelistically sudden — the forester returns with a "gun at the ready" and announces: "Friends want to eat, / Let's go, buddy, into the woods!"[21]

Interestingly, the same technique is used in the song "Men ate meat", which tells about a groom who invited his wife's lovers to dinner and, pretending to be a cheerful and hospitable host, treated them to meat. However, the feasting and drunken peasants could not even assume that the groom had killed and fried his own wife, and therefore did not understand what the man who reproached them was really talking about: "I didn't keep track of her — that's my fault, / But tell me, is it really delicious?"[25]

A similar chronotope is recreated in the lyrics of the song "The Secret of the mistress of an antique watch"[26]: "the buyer of an antique watch"[26] accidentally finds himself in an ancient mansion "hidden among creepy forests" [26], and finds a clock whose hands "froze <...> more than a hundred years ago"[26]. The guest stays the night and secretly repairs the clock ("... he awakened an ancient thing from a dream"[26]), after which the hostess begins to age and finally turns to dust

The motif of stopped time, or a dream like death (known from such fairy tales as "Sleeping Beauty" by Charles Perrault, "Sleeping Princess" by Zhukovsky, "Snow White" by the brothers Grimm and "The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Heroes" by Pushkin), is also found in the song "The Fisherman". Its plot tells how a fisherman fell asleep in a boat and did not notice that "fog lay on the water"[27], which forced him to swim home "at random"[27]. Upon returning home, the fisherman found that "the clock is standing"[27], "flies are hanging in the air"[27], and his son "stands with his mouth agape"[27], and "the cat froze in jumping from a chair"[27].

Henderson, in his classification of traditional themes and motifs for English ballads, identifies the following: unhappy love (related motives of grief, passion, striving to overcome all obstacles), love for non-people, revenge for treason and adultery, forbidden love between brother and sister[3, pp. 29-57].

Almost all of these themes and motifs, with the exception of incestuous communication, are represented in the work of the band "The King and the Fool", as well as in a number of other Russian rock bands. Here you can name an independent project by Andrey Knyazev — "Knyazz", the group "Rotten Toten" and "Joe's Performance".

Of the songs of the group "Rotten Toten", "The Hair Merchant", "The Dead Hangman" and "Dinner at the Widow's" deserve attention. The last text tells about a woman who lived with her husband and received the dead in her house at midnight: "The head remained from the dead man as a memory, / She could tell a lot of interesting things"[28] and "And every evening, the clock just strikes midnight, / The dead come to her house to drink tea"[28].

The group "Joe's Performance" arose after the death of Mikhail Gorshenev and in many ways continued the traditions of the "King and the Fool". In particular, the songs "Fairy Princess" (about the connection of a man with a fairy princess) and "Portrait" are interesting, the plot of which tells how the portrait of an old man came to life and spoke, forcing the lyrical hero to step into the picture and exchange places with him: "Only my focus is not in this, you will now be a portrait, / And I will be a resident of your house"[29].

The motif of love for the creation of another world is present in such songs of "The King and the Fool" as "The One who looks out of the Pond" and "The Girl and the Count".

In the first text, the border crossing is described classically: the mermaid "takes" to the bottom of the artist, who "longed for something of his own"[30], he "plunges into eternal sleep"[30]. However, contrary to folklore tradition, the wrecking of the mermaid turns out to be unintentional — she begins to cry and ask: "Oh, why did he die?"[30] (the replica is constructed as if the mermaid was surprised that she was involved in the death of the artist, and did not want her).

In the song "The Girl and the Count", the plot situation is connected with the fact that the "beautiful lady", dreaming of gaining immortality, walks with the count along the moonlit alley of the park, in the distance, in the gloom, the "outlines of the castle" are visible[31]. The count is obviously a vampire: despite the fact that this is not stated directly, his characterization gradually develops into a holistic image. First of all, the very choice of the noble title determines the associative series and refers to the precedent name: count — Count Dracula (the hero of the novel of the same name by Bram Stoker, although the plot was widely known earlier, see, for example, "The Legend of Dracula Voivode" by Fyodor Kuritsyn, written at the end of the XV century). Further, by indirect characteristics, other details of the image associated with Gothic romanticism are recreated in the mass consciousness: it is believed that vampires have a special magnetism and attractiveness ("The count's maiden hugged very tenderly"[31], "What a deep look you have, how it attracts and beckons! / I can't understand myself: I am strongly attracted to you. / You are so mysterious, you have enchanted me, / And my flesh and blood are in your power!"[31]), are nocturnal, blood-eating creatures whose immortality condemns them to eternal loneliness ("... the count is always alone under the icy vault of darkness"[31], "Morning will become a dream, and the night will last forever!"[31]), and therefore begins to be understood as a curse ("Oh, how many of them are ready to give their blood for pleasure!"[31]).

The motive of revenge for treason is presented in the song "The Witch and the Donkey", which is built as a monologue of the lyrical heroine — witch, with a "difficult fate"[32], whose love is "in trouble <...> doomed"[32]: "As a child, a gypsy woman predicted to me that if I fell in love strongly, I would ruin my beloved, / That I would not forgive treason and would take cruel revenge: / Not on purpose, but out of evil I would turn him into a donkey"[32]. Despite the fact that the plot has a tragic ending (the donkey decided to "bring his end closer"[32], "I drank something, ate something and, poor guy, died"[32]), it is perceived as an almost comic story due to the fact that the reader's expectation is violated: it turns out that the heroine was actually jealous for a short time and did everything possible to "somehow look cute return"[32].

In "The Sorcerer's Doll", one of the most famous songs of the band "The King and the Fool", it is the tragically ended love (despite the hero's warnings, the girl became a victim, a "slave" of the sorcerer, who forces her to "hunt people"[33]) that pushes the hero to try to take a risk and break the dark spell: "A lot of books I've read, / I've seen a lot of tricks / Don't try to hide your secret from me!"[33] The spatial organization of the text recreates the somewhat naive cliches of Gothic romanticism: the hero goes to his beloved's room, sneaking along the "dark, gloomy corridor"[33] of a castle or crypt. The only thing that he hopes can protect him is a pectoral cross ("The cross on my chest, / Look at it"[33]), however, the finale of the song is open — it is not entirely clear whether the hero achieved his goal, whether he survived or only managed to feel danger a moment before how the narrative ended: "Everything happens like in a terrible dream. / And it's dangerous for me to be here!"[33]

At the same time, in the work of the King and the Fool group, the process of lyricization and monologization of the ballad is noticeable, coupled with the removal of the opposition "friend" — "stranger", which is key for mythopoeic consciousness, and the displacement of action and characters into one plane. So, there are texts constructed as confessions of villainous heroes ("Necromancer"[34], "Master of the Forest"[35]), described as "martyrs of their talent"[34], doomed to "eternal torment"[35] and "eternal boredom"[35]; their lives "full of suffering"[34], since they remained only half human: "The man disappeared, he is no more, / And a demon came out of his body into the light"[35] or "Half human — half dead! <...> I am like a wolf among sheep"[34]. The same is true in the song "Bear", marked by the motif of werewolf. A drunken sorcerer turns a bear into a man: "They took away the enchantment / Soul peace. / The question arose / — Who am I?"[23]

The internal conflict reaches its climax in the song "Reflection"[36] — the water surface becomes the boundary that the hero intends to cross: "My essence rebelled against me"[36] and "There is only one remedy — sink to the bottom"[36]. An alter ego, a doppelganger, who "brought in <...> a life of suffering"[36], is the one "who came from the looking glass"[36].

Thus, the rock poet turns to a romantic ballad[37], since this genre, in addition to narrative and fiction, carries in its core an elegiac tonality (sad reflections on the injustice of life and its meaning), as well as a sense of the tragic insolubility of life collisions and internal conflicts, the fatal doom of the hero to death. Hence the lyricism, the monologue of the ballad, and the confessional tone of its tone.

At the same time, the "periodicity of the return of the ballad genre" noted by researchers [38, p. 234] and its actualization is largely due to the fact that poetry becomes a means of understanding the unreal real, in which a person of the XX–XXI centuries is immersed, and the hero of the ballad turns out to be internally related to its world, involved in it — to the universe of "scary tales", from which he appears on stage, or even physically moved into it, which symbolically marks the crisis of the punk rock poet's worldview.

References
1. Borovskaya, A. A. (2009). Evolution of genre forms in Russian poetry of the first third of the 20th century. Astrakhan: «Àstrakhan University» publishing house.
2. Merzlyakov, A. F. (1980). Letter from Siberia. In Literary criticism of the 1800–1820s (pp. 187–188). Moscow: Fiction Publ.
3. Henderson, T. F. (1912). The ballad in literature. Cambridge [Eng.]: The University Press; New York, G.P. Putnam's Sons.
4. Companion, A. (2001). Demon of Theory: Literature and Common Sense. Moscow: Sabashnikov Publishing House.
5. Atkinson, D. (2014). The Anglo-Scottish ballad and its imaginary contexts. Cambridge: OpenBook Publishers.
6. Prozorov, Yu. M. (2016). «The spirit is captured by fear...»: the «terrible» in the aesthetics and poetry of V. A. Zhukovsky. Russian literature, 2, 19–50.
7. Borovskaya, A. A. (2009). Genre transformations in Russian poetry of the first third of the twentieth century (Abstract of Doct. Sci. in philology thesis, Astrakhan).
8. Borovskaya, A. A. (2009). Dialogization of ballads in Russian literature of the late XIX – early XX centuries. Bulletin of Samara State University, 3(69), 101–107.
9. Borovskaya, A. A. (2008). Role ballads in Russian poetry of the first third of the twentieth century. Humanitarian research, 4(28), 102–110.
10. Mukhina, Z. I. (2000). Russian literary ballad of the 1830s–1850s: history and poetics of the genre (Abstract of Cand. Sci. in philology thesis, Samara).
11. Kniazev, A. S. (2018). King and Jester. Old Book. Moscow: AST Publishing House: Kladez.
12. Propp, V. Ya. (1928). Morphology of the fairy tale. Leningrad: Academia.
13. Zhukovsky, V. A. (1959). Lyudmila. In V. A. Zhukovsky, Collected works in 4 volumes (vol. 2, pp. 7–13). Moscow; Leningrad: State publishing house for fiction.
14. Katenin, P. A. (1965). Olga. In P. A. Katenin. Selected works (pp. 91–98). Moscow; Leningrad: Soviet Writer.
15. Gummere, F. B. (1907). The popular ballad. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
16. Kniazev, A. S. Fred. Retrieved from https://korol-i-shut.su/songs/text/fred.html
17. Golubeva, E. V. (2009). Wells as a sacred spatial locus. Young scientist, 10(10), 222–225. Retrieved from https://moluch.ru/archive/10/702/
18. Ladygin, M. B., & Ladygina, O. M. (2003). Brief mythological dictionary. Moscow: Publishing house of the NOU «Polar Star».
19. Kniazev, A. S. Faithful Wife. Retrieved from https://korol-i-shut.su/songs/text/vernaya-zhena.html
20. Kniazev, A. S. Gardener. Retrieved from https://genius.com/Korol-i-shut-gardener-lyrics
21. Kniazev, A. S. The Forester. Retrieved from https://korol-i-shut.su/songs/text/lesnik.html
22. Kniazev, A. S. The Hunter. Retrieved from https://korol-i-shut.su/songs/text/ohotnik.html
23. Kniazev, A. S. The Bear. Retrieved from https://korol-i-shut.su/songs/text/medved.html
24. Kniazev, A. S. The Widow and the Hunchback. Retrieved from https://korol-i-shut.su/songs/text/vdova-i-gorbun.html
25. Kniazev, A. S. The Men Were Eating Meat. Retrieved from https://genius.com/Korol-i-shut-men-were-eating-meat-lyrics
26. Kniazev, A. S. The Secret of the Mistress of the Antique Clock. Retrieved from http://www.korol-i-shut.ru/popup/lyrics/204/
27. Kniazev, A. S. Fisherman. Retrieved from https://genius.com/Korol-i-shut-fisherman-lyrics
28. Alekseev, E. («Rotten Toten») Dinner at the Widow's. Retrieved from https://vk.com/topic-172324813_40190081
29. «Joe's Performance» Portrait. Retrieved from https://genius.com/Joes-theatre-portrait-lyrics
30. Kniazev, A. S. The One Who Looks Out of the Pond. Retrieved from https://genius.com/Korol-i-shut-she-who-looks-out-of-the-pond-lyrics
31. Kniazev, A. S. The Girl and the Count. Retrieved from https://genius.com/Korol-i-shut-a-girl-and-an-earl-lyrics
32. Kniazev, A. S. The Witch and the Donkey. Retrieved from https://genius.com/Korol-i-shut-a-witch-and-a-donkey-lyrics
33. Kniazev, A. S. The Sorcerer's Doll. Retrieved from http://www.korol-i-shut.ru/popup/lyrics/666/
34. Kniazev, A. S. Necromancer. Retrieved from https://korol-i-shut.su/songs/text/nekromant.html
35. Kniazev, A. S., & Gorshenev, M. Y. The Master of the Forest. Retrieved from https://korol-i-shut.su/songs/text/hozyain-lesa.html
36. Kniazev, A. S. Reflection. Retrieved from https://genius.com/Korol-i-shut-reflection-lyrics
37. Levchenko, O. A. (1994). Russian romantic ballad of the 1820s–30s: Materials for bibliography. In Problems of modern Pushkin studies: Collection of articles. Pskov.
38. Verina, U. Y. (2017). Renewal of the ballad genre in Russian poetry at the turn of the 20th–21st centuries. Bulletin of Udmurt University. Series: History and Philology. Vol. 27, Issue 2, 229–239.

First Peer Review

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The article is written on an urgent topic (its relevance, in our opinion, is determined by the need for a deep scientific literary and linguistic analysis of the texts of modern songs as an exceptionally significant culturally and socially significant material), based on the stylistically insufficiently researched material of the song texts of the group "The King and the Fool". In it, the author attempts to identify the plots, motives and stylistic features of the traditional Russian ballad of the XIX century, characteristic of the lyrics of the group's songs, which are clearly stylistic in nature. In the course of the study, several important observations were made at the level of plot analysis, the most interesting of which, in our opinion, are related to the motive of the characters' transition between the worlds of the songs. The article as a whole is written in scientific language, in a single scientific style (see below for specific remarks). Nevertheless, with a fairly high overall assessment of the article, we believe that it needs authorial revision of both a technical and substantive nature. 1. If the author undertakes to talk specifically about stylization, he must understand that stylization is a phenomenon of stylistics, which means that its markers should be found, first of all, directly in the text, at the level of language, and not general plot similarities. It seems to us that the article will significantly benefit from a more detailed analysis of the texts, their lexical and syntactic features, which are significant in the context of the stylization issue. So far, the author writes that "the language is quite simple", but does not prove this position in any way (not to mention that the selected material obviously has much more subtle and interesting approaches to the ballad at the linguistic level than the general simplicity). Of course, it is possible to postpone this kind of analysis for future research, but then the purpose of the article cannot be to prove that the texts of "The King and the Fool" are stylization. 2. When it comes to song lyrics, it seems superfluous to talk about the series dedicated to the band, and – even more so – the biographies of the band members. The author's reasoning is interesting, but goes beyond the topic and "falls out" of the text. It is necessary to link to the topic more reasonably or exclude it. For example: "The reflection of the frontman — the Pot — is personified in the TV series "The King and the Fool" (Andrei Knyazev was one of the producers, that is, the final product can be considered the result of creative reflection of the band member and the author of the lyrics directly) in the form of a demonic buffoon, who appears when the Pot goes into an altered state of consciousness (alcoholic intoxication or psychedelic experience), in which there are arguments with this "evil double", pushing to leave life at the peak of popularity. This kind of "switching" between planes — real, biographical, telling about the formation of the group, its development, internal conflicts and, finally, the death of a Pot, and fantasy (the creators defined the genre of the series as a "punk fairy tale") — allow you to embody on the screens the plots of such songs as "Forester", "Hunter", "Bear", "Sudden Head", "Men ate meat", "Widow and Hunchback"[24], etc." 3. Despite the prevalence of the stage names Pot and Prince, it is necessary to indicate the real names of the performers at each or at least the first mention, and not at the end of the article. 4. The links are designed incorrectly. Direct quotations with page instructions cannot in any way refer to different sources, especially multilingual ones: "Such a ballad is traditionally based on a folklore plot, which does not allow us to exclude from among the main features of the genre "the atmosphere of the wonderful, mysterious, fantastic"[8, p. 4],[9, p. 196],[10] and the sense of its genetic connection with pre-literary samples embedded in the memory of the genre (first of all, a fairy tale and a folk ballad). It is no coincidence that Andrey Knyazev notes that in the mass consciousness ballad texts are associated primarily with scary fairy tales: "An outside observer will summarize all the work of "KISH" in one word — fairy tales ..."[11, p. 1],[12]". The article is promising and can be accepted for reconsideration after the author's revision.

Second Peer Review

Peer reviewers' evaluations remain confidential and are not disclosed to the public. Only external reviews, authorized for publication by the article's author(s), are made public. Typically, these final reviews are conducted after the manuscript's revision. Adhering to our double-blind review policy, the reviewer's identity is kept confidential.
The list of publisher reviewers can be found here.

Russian rock poetry is being studied quite seriously in the framework of the literary process of the second half of the twentieth century. There are a lot of high-quality, constructive, "complex" studies. It is worth noting that everything attracts interest – it's the format, the style, the language, and the semantic lines, genre verification is no exception. Actually, the reviewed article is aimed at analyzing the tradition of the ballad in the texts of the King and the Fool group. I believe that the subject of the study is legitimate, while it correlates with one of the headings of the publication. As the author notes at the beginning of the work, "the article attempts to identify some constant signs of the literary ballad genre, and then to prove that in the work of the King and the Fool there is a noticeable reliance on genre tradition and classical samples, which means that their texts can be considered as an experience of reconstruction of ballad forms." The paper presents both theoretical and practical levels. In my opinion, a good reference is given regarding the ballad genre, the so-called historical and cultural section is appropriate. For example, "the Russian literary ballad, in particular its most widespread and productive Anglo-Scottish version[4], is an "intricate"[2, p. 187] lyric—epic genre that "came to us from Germany and England"[2, p. 187] (see V. A. Zhukovsky's translations from Schiller, Goethe and W. Scott) and took shape in the early 19th century in the coordinate system set by the aesthetics of Romanticism," or "the central event in the Russian literary ballad, as in a folklore tale, often becomes a collision of a person with otherworldly entities (dead, spirits, otherworldly forces)[3, c. 51]. However, unlike a fairy tale, the hero of which moves from "his", mastered space (reality) to the world of the dead (nav) in order to eliminate the shortage [10, p. 44], the ballad is characterized by a directly opposite development of the border crossing situation: a character from an "alien", "otherworldly" space (often dead the groom, as, for example, in the ballad "Lyudmila" by Zhukovsky or "Olga" by Katenina) falls into the harmonized sphere of the "local" world, thereby upsetting the situation of balance and causating tragic consequences," etc. As you can see, references and citations are given in a balanced, moderate manner, while being true and accurate. The analysis of the texts of The King and the Fool is objective, methodologically correct (the level of empiricism should also not be excluded): "the inverted fairy-tale motifs and rites of passage described above can be found in a number of songs by the band "The King and the Fool", the action of which, as in the translated ballads of Romanticism, takes place in the conditional European Middle Ages, whereas the plot situation is presented lapidarily, the language is quite simple, which is also one of the characteristic features of the ballad[13, c 71], and the action itself develops dynamically due to dialogues between the characters of the songs...", or "The negatively colored semantics of details (dirty well, "muddy water"[14]), which portend bad things, seems important: the next morning Fred's legs are taken away and he goes crazy, but the unconsciousness of his actions is emphasized in advance ("And for some reason, here's the question, / He took it to his house"[14]). The traditional motif of "true love" for a fairy tale ("He began to call his find fate"[14]), which brings the enchanted princess back to life, awakens her and all the inhabitants of the enchanted castle, is also transformed, as it gradually brings Fred, obsessed with his love, to death: "From mad love / Every moonlit night / The dead rose, / Became overgrown with flesh"[14] and "I want to be with you always! / To imagine you alive, / Believe me, believe me, believe me, believe me! / Your life is worth my losses!"[14]" etc. I think the work is interesting, the writing style is focused on the scientific type. The author pays due attention to the plot of the songs of the band "The King and the Fool", which is basically true. For example, "the plot of the song "Forester" reproduces the classic fairy tale scheme: a tired traveler asks for a night's lodging from a forester and stays in his lodge. The forester accepts him amiably and says that "among the animals" he has "no <...> enemies"[18] and that he likes to "feed the wolves"[18]. The forester's hospitality, his casual chatter "about this and that"[18] prevent the guest from suspecting any connection between these, at first glance, unrelated remarks, as a result, the denouement turns out to be novelistically sudden — the forester returns with a "gun at the ready" and announces: "Friends want to eat, / Let's go, buddy, into the woods!"[18]". But there should be more illustrations, examples, and the actual analysis itself! It is desirable to increase the text in volume, it also does not hurt to compare it with other rock bands, whether there is a "ballad reverse" in their work, whether it is like this or looks different. Therefore, in the format of recommendations, I say relative to this. In general, the work meets the requirements, it will be useful for those who study the history of rock poetry, Russian musical culture. The conclusions of the text are in tune with the main block; a number of basic positions regarding the unfolding of the theme are spelled out: "the rock poet turns to a romantic ballad [27] (a small plot poem with a dynamic, intense development of the plot, which is based on an unusual case), since this genre, in addition to narrative and fiction (the motif of a person meeting with a wonderful, fantastic, otherworldly, and therefore frightening, taken as a plot-forming [28]), carries in its core an elegiac tonality (sad reflections on the injustice of life and its meaning), as well as a sense of the tragic insolubility of life collisions and internal conflicts, the fatal doom of the hero to death, hence the lyricization and monologization of the ballad, and the confessional nature of her tone." Thus, it can be stated that the material is relevant, new, non-trivial, but it needs to be expanded, supplemented by the analytical part. The article "Traditions of the ballad of the XIX century in the songs of the group "The King and the Fool" after revision can be recommended for publication in the magazine "Litera" of the ID "Nota Bene".

Third Peer Review

Peer reviewers' evaluations remain confidential and are not disclosed to the public. Only external reviews, authorized for publication by the article's author(s), are made public. Typically, these final reviews are conducted after the manuscript's revision. Adhering to our double-blind review policy, the reviewer's identity is kept confidential.
The list of publisher reviewers can be found here.

The article "Traditions of the 19th century Ballads in the songs of the King and the Fool group" is based on interesting and unexplored material – it analyzes the texts of a popular group, which are small stories based on plots from folklore, myths and legends. As a rule, researchers note that they are focused on the poetics of "scary tales", which is exactly what Andrei Knyazev pointed out, but in this article they fit into a different tradition. The initial thesis of this work is that the texts of the group reveal constant signs of the ballad genre and "there is a noticeable reliance on genre tradition and classical samples." This position is consistently proved during the analysis, which is based on a serious theoretical basis. The author of the article identifies the main features of the genre, its substantive and structural characteristics, in order to attribute them later in the rock ballads of the band "The King and the Fool". In particular, such elements as storytelling, the presence of characters, the combination of lyrical and epic, dialogical constructions and a question-and-answer structure, meeting with otherworldly entities, and the use of a rite of passage are noted. According to the observations of the author of the article, "inverted fairy-tale motifs and rites of passage can be found in a number of songs by the King and the Fool group," and "the action develops dynamically due to dialogues between the characters of the songs." The main part of the article is a consistent and systematic illustration of this observation. Such texts of the "King and the Fool" group as "Fred", "Faithful Wife", "Forester", "Hunter", "Bear", "The Secret of the mistress of the antique clock", etc. are analyzed. They consider the chronotope, the transformation of folklore elements, the motif of sleep, stopped time, the motif of a revived portrait, etc. It is important that the creativity of the group is considered in dynamics, the variation of techniques is traced (for example, the process of lyricization and monologization of the ballad is noted, which affects the form of the text – confessions of heroes-villains appear). It should be noted that the author of the article not only systematically examines the lyrics from the point of view of the specifics of embodying the content and structural parameters of the ballad in them, but also makes typological generalizations. The conclusions are convincing, their reliability is ensured by studying extensive literary material and relying on classical methods of literary research. The list of literature that accompanies the article consists mainly of the works of A.A. Borovskaya, the texts of the group and research on the specifics of the ballad genre at different stages of the genre's existence. I think that the author should pay attention to Pivkina E.V.'s dissertation "The specifics of the ballad genre in Russian poetry of the 1990s-2000s", which is written on material chronologically close to the group's activities, which will allow in further research to fit ballads not only into a romantic historical and literary context, but also to consider the originality of the genre searches of songwriters in sync.All of the above allows us to recommend the article for publication.
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