Grinlandia Bard Song Festival

Grinlandia is an All-Russian festival of author song, bard music, held each July on the banks of the Bystritsa River in the village of Basharovo, part of the city of Kirov, drawing around seven hundred performers from roughly one hundred fifty cities across Russia and the former Soviet Union each year.

Bard song, or avtorskaya pesnya, author's song, emerged in the Soviet Union from the 1950s onward as a distinct acoustic tradition built around performers who wrote and sang their own material, typically alone with a guitar, prioritizing literary, often understated lyrics over musical arrangement, and carrying with it an association with informal, semi-underground gatherings, since the form existed somewhat outside official Soviet cultural institutions even at its most popular.