Yanka Dyagileva

One of the most difficult, disturbing, and hauntingly beautiful voices of Soviet rock, Yanka Dyagileva came to prominence only after her 1991 suicide, when scores of bootlegs and concert recordings rose to the surface. Her romantic and artistic ties with Grazhdanskaya Oborona -- founder and Russian punk rock instigator Egor Letov -- shaped both her life and legacy as first lady of Russian punk, while her folkloric lyrics and melodies tell a somewhat different story. Reissued, remastered recordings reveal deep, foreboding basslines that rumble like distant thunder behind Yanka's pressing vocals. Tentative guitar riffs strike out and fizzle, but her vocals persist, surrounded by jangly, abrasive instrumentation, and the angst-ridden noises of a parallel movement: Seattle-born grunge rock. Yanka's anti-social nature and equally anti-social texts sealed her fate as a virtual unknown during her lifetime; she was suppressed by the Soviet regime, which controlled access to all recording studios. Yana Stanislavovna Dyagileva, known to all as Yanka, was born in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk on September 4, 1966. Her parents noted and nourished her artistic talent from a young age. Her earliest influences, dating back to her school days, included British poetry and the songs of Boris Grebenshikov. In 1987, Yanka first made the acquaintance of Egor Letov, a famous political troublemaker and founder of the punk rock group Grazhdanskaya Oborona. They spent the summer and fall hitchhiking across the country, holding impromptu performances and recording sessions. Yanka's first public appearance was at a punk festival in the Siberian town of Tumen, where she performed under the name Velikiy Oktyabr (Great October) with Letov, guitarist Igor "Jeff" Zhevtun, and drummer Evgeniy "Jackson" Kokorin. The group's renditions of Yanka and Letov's collaborative works, Ural ballads about friendship, love, and indolent Soviet youth, reflected more Yanka's encyclopedic knowledge of Russian folk music, than Letov's penchant for punk rock. Yanka herself, with her spacy gaze and iron-straight, waist-length hair, was the embodiment of a female devotee of the '60s American folk revival. The pair recorded a muddy bootleg called Deklassirovaniy Element ("Declassed Element") in a local amateur studio, a basement fitted with an old Saturn tape recorder. Eventually, their hitchhiking circuit set them down in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). Yanka's homemade recordings had trickled south to the rock capitol, where underground venues, mostly house shows called kvartirniki, impatiently awaited her arrival. There, as in Moscow, she exercised an inescapable magnetism to audiences that drank in her every agony. Local press called her a siren, a delicate miracle, and the Madonna of rock. Beginning in 1988, her writings became more abstract and sinister, fixated on imagery of tall buildings and falling. Often, she wrote from a male point of view. In January of 1989 the reclusive singer performed her first public concert in Moscow. Again in February she performed with Letov in Leningrad, this time at an intimate memorial concert for suicide casualty, poet, and singer Alexandr Bashlachev. The rock poet was a great influence on Yanka, and some say, a personal acquaintance as well. She was by then a member of the Leningrad Rock Club, performing frequently, though always with Letov and rarely more than a couple of songs at a time. At one such concert, dissatisfied with her amateurish band, she broke her guitar on the stage and walked off. It might not have been much of a statement in the west, but in Russia it was enough to earn her the moniker of "Lady Punk." Early in 1991, Yanka recorded four dark, disturbing tracks: "Vyshe Nogi ot Zemli" ("Higher Than My Feet Above the Ground"), "Na Doroge Pyatak" ("On the Path of My Heels"), "Pro Chertikov" ("Of Devils"), and "Pridyot Voda" ("The Water Is Coming"). A spring tour was planned for Yanka with Boris Grebenshikov, but before its first leg, the singer, complaining of depression, returned home to Novosibirsk. On May 9, the story goes, Yanka went out for a cigarette in the woods by her home, never to return. Days later her body was found in a nearby river. Her presumed suicide precipitated an avalanche of written and sung tributes, as well as a wide release of materials never publicly released in her lifetime. ~ Sabrina Jaszi