Russian Existentialism in Pop-Music
Discerning Russian Philosophical Views in one Popular Song
My previous essay, “The City That Isn’t There,” was deeply philosophical and addressed major civilizational questions. Yet it was also, in some way, personal. Its title matches that of a popular Russian song written by Regina Lisitz, with music and first performance by Igor Kornelyuk1. In modern Russian culture, “The City That Isn’t There” is a well-known metaphor associated with Saint Petersburg. The song became famous as the soundtrack to the noir TV series Criminal Saint Petersburg, which depicted mafia groups operating during the chaotic period we call “the wild 90s.” My parents watched the show when I was little, and I still remember both the series and the song vividly.
Only now do I realize how deeply philosophical and existential the lyrics are. The song reflects ideas shaped by thousands of years of tradition while simultaneously responding to the raw, lived experience of post-Soviet Russian life. Every Peterburzhets has heard it, and it riddled him with paradoxes. The song tells of a man who, day after day, losing and confusing the path, walks toward a city that “isn’t there.” What kind of question does such a phrase provoke? How can one walk to a city that isn’t there?
It’s important to clarify that my translation — “isn’t there” — is not exact, because such a construction simply does not exist in Russian language. We don’t say “there is” or “there isn’t” to refer to the abstract fact of existence. The Russian word там (“there”) always implies a certain — although perhaps, vaguely defined — location. So when Kornelyuk sings about a city “которого нет”, he is not saying “it isn’t there” but rather, simply, “it isn’t.” A more philosophical translation would be: “I am walking to the city that doesn’t exist.”
The song goes further: in that city, there is a hearth waiting for the hero — a hearth described as “an eternal sign of forgotten truths.” Only one step separates the walker from that place — and that one step is “longer than life.” It seems that Lisitz has found a poetic image of life as a constant journey toward transcendental meaning. A meaning that is objective and “waits” the traveller — but at the same time, no longer exists in the current world. It existed before and it is still true, but that truth was long forgotten. Reflection back into the past is indeed a very common theme in Russian thought.
There is almost certainly a strong influence of Russian Orthodox Christianity in this. Lisitz references biblical imagery in an interview regarding the song, and Kornelyuk, in one concert video, can be seen crossing himself before performing it. At the same time, we know the song was composed for a specific reason: Lisitz and Kornelyuk were commissioned to create a musical portrait of Saint Petersburg in the criminal 90s — a time when many felt that everything was about to collapse again, that the country was drifting into uncertainty and desolation.
How did they respond to that request?
The answer is astonishing in one small detail: while they were walking in creative tandem, it was Kornelyuk who composed the music first — without yet knowing what the song would be about. In other words, Lisitz wrote the lyrics after hearing the pre-composed music. When asked how that was possible, she simply said: “Well, shouldn’t a composer be creative?” She recalls listening to the music day and night until she finally understood what it was about: the hero is striving to reach something — not a future ideal, but something that had once existed, and had been forever forgotten.
This is deeply revealing. It shows that they were not just crafting a soundtrack — they were, in some sense, uncovering metaphysical truths embedded in the historical moment. I would venture to say that they grasped something akin to Viktor Frankl’s vision: the search for meaning within real life, where beauty and suffering, clarity and violence, are intertwined. But they added what seems to me a more Christian than Jewish twist — that this meaning is not only a future goal, but a lost inheritance. Something real that once was, but no longer is.
Now we are finally approaching a resolution of the riddle. The process of such striving can only be enacted through the perpetual act of remembering — not by aiming to achieve it in the future. Therefore, for the author of the song, the path is not one of progress, but of recovery: a search for a place that still shapes us, even though it isn’t.
And since memory is always incomplete, what once was can never be fully recovered in reality. Only through lived experience can something be perceived in its full span — and once it’s gone, no act of memory can bring it back in its wholeness.
That is why for the author, the walk never ends. The city that “isn’t” cannot be reached, only approached — and even that, only through the fragile and fleeting work of remembrance.
Yet even more gets revealed in how Lisitz herself explains her poetic process. She recalls Brodsky’s observation: that in a certain sense, you don’t write the poem — the poem writes through you. It carries you to places you never intended to go. But notice that something shifts from Brodsky to Lisitz. For Brodsky, this movement was not toward something lost, but toward something unknown — not a return, but a movement forward, the process of becoming led by the inner structure of poetic form to unknown places in the future. What Lisitz finds through memory, Brodsky found in the structure of unfolding itself. As for me — I’ve argued in recent essays that, at the most fundamental level, the creator is not an inventor who forges new paths out of will alone, but a responder who makes the primary choice to be confronted — and is then carried into the future by the path that confrontation reveals in time.
You can listen to it here, with a nice photo sequence.