The article analyses a song called “Alimentiki” popular in Soviet Russia in 1920s-1930s. In this song a man tells a story of an attractive young woman whom he only saw once in his life. After a while, the court makes him pay alimony to the woman, in order for her to support her child. By analyzing various versions of the song’s lyrics, circumstances in which they were recorded, family law of early Soviet years and the literature of that time period, the author determines a time frame of the song’s origination, the ways it was spread, social practices and discourses that triggered such song to appear, defined its plot and particular elements of its content.

An article examines 63 variants of the song “Techet rechka po pesochku…”, or “Rechechka”, widely known by its’ criminals’ versions sang by Vladimir Vysotsky, Bulat Okudzhava, Alexander Galich and others. Almost unknown however remains the fact that the song is still quite popular among country people. An analysis of musical and textual structure is carried out, both of the variants which existed among soldiers, cossacks and in criminal milieu. The ways of textual variation, evolution of the plot and motives are traced as well. Some audio versions of the song 37 out of gathered 63 are represented on a special Web-page.

In this article ten variations of a song from the traditional Russian game named “Kite” are analyzed from the point of view of structure and semantics. The lyrics serve as an example for the specificity of the words in the game context.

The paper describes the structure of urban songs distinguishing two groups of plots, which have many types of textual variation (after careful analysis of 1500 texts). The research is based on corpus of urban songs, which were recorded in Russian villages in XX century. This corpus consists of published materials and recording made by the author.