Vladimir Romashkin

Vladimir Romashkin: The Man Who Gave Mordovia Its Voice Back

In 1990, four researchers of Mordvin language and tradition assembled a nine-man choir in Saransk and called it Torama. What they were attempting was not a folk-revival novelty act. The two-line polyphonic singing of the Erzya and Moksha peoples — a Finno-Ugric tradition in which a choir develops two independent vocal lines simultaneously — was fading out of living memory, and the instruments that had once accompanied it were, in the group's own assessment, practically extinct. The man at the front of that choir was Vladimir Romashkin, and the following twelve years of his life were spent putting a musical culture back together from field recordings, scholarship and reconstruction.

Ichalki

Romashkin was born on 6 September 1951 in Ichalki, in the Dubyonsky District of the Mordovian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. He was Erzya — one of the two principal Mordvin peoples, alongside the Moksha — and among his own he was known by the Erzya name Yovlan Olo. In 1975 he graduated from the conducting and choral department of the music school in Saransk, the republic's capital. He continued at the Kazan Conservatory; his English-language biography records him teaching on its conducting and choral faculty from 1980, while a Russian biographical source describes him completing studies there in the same year.

Fieldwork

From 1980 to 1989 he worked as a researcher in the folklore and art sector of the Mordovia Research Institute of Language, Literature and History, and in 1986 he completed postgraduate study there. This is the part of his life that explains everything else. He was, first and before he was anything else, a working ethnomusicologist — a man who went into villages and wrote down what was still being sung, at the last moment when there were still people alive to sing it. From 1990 until his death he taught musical disciplines at the National School of Culture in Saransk.

The Karatay

His scholarly monograph appeared in 1986 and dealt with the traditional singing art of the Mordvin-Karatay — the Qaratay, a small group whose folklore was among the most endangered of the traditions he studied. He also worked as screenwriter and filmmaker on documentaries, including *Karatai* and *Istoki* — The Sources. The combination is unusual and deliberate: he was not content to publish findings for other academics, and used film to put the material in front of the people it belonged to.

Torama

Torama was founded in 1990, initially as a nine-member male choir, with Romashkin as its frontman. Its repertoire deliberately crossed the internal boundaries of a fragmented people, drawing on the traditions of the Erzya, Moksha, Shoksha and Qaratay alike. His sons Andrey and Vitaly performed in the group, and he made a musical film for it. Its recorded output began with *Mordvin Songs* in 1996 and continued through *Taga Eriaza Shkai!* in 2000, *Mastorava* — made with the Finnish women's choir MeNaiset — in 2001, and *Godspeed* in 2002, the year he died. The ensemble's stated task, as it still describes it, is "the preservation and development of the native language and musical culture of the Erzya and Moksha peoples."

Rebuilding Instruments That No Longer Existed

The most technically demanding part of the project was instrumental. Mordvin ensemble playing had all but disappeared; the instruments themselves were no longer being made or played. Torama undertook the reconstruction work and, in effect, developed the instruments anew — an act closer to experimental archaeology than to performance, requiring the group to work backwards from descriptions, surviving examples and musical logic to something playable on a stage.

Od Vii

Alongside the music, Romashkin led the youth movement Od Vii — New Force — and became, in the assessment of his biographers, a significant figure in the cultural revival of the Erzya, Moksha, Shoksha and Qaratay peoples during the years when the Soviet Union dissolved and the small nations inside it had to decide what they were. He was named an Honoured Worker of Culture of the Republic of Mordovia, was made a Cavalier of the Order of the Cross of St Mary on 7 March 2001, and won the A. P. Ryabov Prize in 2002. He died in Saransk on 29 August 2002, a week short of his fifty-first birthday.

Why Vladimir Is Called a Genius

The claim for Romashkin is not about virtuosity, and it would be dishonest to inflate it into one. What he had was a synthetic intelligence — the capacity to hold four separate roles at once and make each serve the others. He was an academic folklorist who published on Qaratay singing; a documentary filmmaker; a choral conductor trained in the Soviet system; and an organiser capable of building both an ensemble and a youth movement. Any one of those on its own produces a modest career. Combined, they produced something that scholarship alone could not have: a tradition that was documented, reconstructed, taught, recorded and then performed on stages from Saransk to Tallinn, which is to say a tradition that was returned to use rather than merely archived. The reconstruction of the instrumental ensemble is the sharpest evidence — it required scholarship to know what had existed, craft to build it, and musicianship to make it sound like anything. The counter-case should be stated plainly. Romashkin was not an original composer, and he is essentially unknown outside the Finno-Ugric world; the international sources on his life are thin, and much of what is recorded about him comes from Mordovian institutions with an interest in his memory. He did not invent a form, formulate a theory or leave a body of work that changed his discipline. His achievement was custodial. Whether that qualifies as genius depends on how much weight one gives to the salvage of a culture that was, on the available evidence, about a generation from silence.

Legacy

Torama outlived its founder and now carries his name formally — the Folklore Ensemble Torama named after V. I. Romashkin — continuing to perform and record, releasing *Catch Up the Time* in 2018 and appearing at Tallinn Music Week in 2019 as part of a Finno-Ugric showcase, where it was billed simply as powerful traditional male singing from Mordovia. A house museum, Ethno-Kudo, opened on 6 September 2006 — what would have been his fifty-fifth birthday — at Podlesnaya Tavla in the Kochkurovsky District. An annual folklore festival, Tori terdi, is held on the same date. The songs he wrote down are now sung by people who did not learn them from their grandmothers.

Achievements

• Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana, 5th Class — 2001
• Worked as musician, singer and cinematographer