A poignant composition about longing for the Motherland. Old Russian nostalgie Folk Song Lyrics: Alexey Zhemchuzhnikov Music: unknown author In addition to "Cranes" by Yan Frenkel and Rasul Gamzatov, there is another popular song with this name. To avoid confusion, it is often called by the first line - "Here under a foreign sky". This is one of the most famous nostalgic songs. The lyrics were written back in 1871 by Alexey Zhemchuzhnikov. A cousin of Alexey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, Zhemchuzhnikov is known primarily as one of the creators of the literary hoax "Kozma Prutkov". However, the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers dabbled in satirical experiments in their youth - Alexey Mikhailovich's later work was permeated with lyricism. By the time he wrote the poem "Autumn Cranes" (as it was originally called), Zhemchuzhnikov had been living abroad for almost ten years and was familiar with bouts of nostalgia firsthand. Zhemchuzhnikov died in 1908, and the poem was not set to music during his lifetime. It is not known exactly when "Cranes" became a song. According to some sources, it happened in the early 1930s, and the first gramophone recording, performed by N. Shevtsov, dates back to 1935. However, in the USSR, this composition became famous only twenty years later, when, after Stalin's death, the population was able to semi-clandestinely distribute homemade records "on the ribs" (that is, on X-rays) without fear of being severely punished. In the mid-1950s, these records were valued by music lovers more than officially released records, since they contained a repertoire often not approved by Soviet artistic councils. The leaders of the unofficial "hit parades" were the songs of Petr Leshchenko, who had already died by that time. He was also credited with performing "Zhuravli", and the "king of tango" Oskar Strok, with whom Leshchenko collaborated a lot, was sometimes listed as the composer. It is not known for certain whether Petr Leshchenko actually sang "Zhuravli", but he certainly never recorded them. On "Rebra", they distributed a recording performed by Nikolai Markov from the "Tabachnikov Jazz" ensemble. Markov then recorded more than forty songs from Leshchenko's repertoire, and the sharks of the recording business sold them as works performed by Petr Leshchenko. "We take a suitcase of records there, and a suitcase of money back," one of the musicians from "Tabachnikov Jazz" described the "distribution" mechanism. Experts, of course, could distinguish Leshchenko's voice from Markov's, whose style also showed the influence of Alexander Vertinsky and Vadim Kozin. But there were very few experts in the country who had heard Pyotr Leshchenko in the original, and the quality of the homemade records left much to be desired. Incidentally, if the question of the performer of "Zhuravli" was eventually resolved, the author of the music was never found. There is no evidence that it could have been Oskar Strok, so academic publications report that the melody belongs to an "unknown author". Other versions of songs were written to the music of "Zhuravli", for example, "Zhuravli nad Kolymoy" or "Zhuravli Afgana". In the 70s, the song experienced a new surge in popularity, as underground recording reached a new level: reel-to-reel and then cassette tape recorders appeared. “Here under a foreign sky” was then recorded by the Zhemchuzhnye Brothers, and then by many other chanson performers.