We are increasingly hearing about new products created in the creative industries with the help of artificial intelligence. No sooner had the amazement over the second volume of Gogol’s Dead Souls generated by GigaChat under the guidance of a team of philologists and programmers subsided, than news arrived of a new, no less astonishing project.
We are talking about “Sumarokov”, an AI-assisted album based on poems by A. P. Sumarokov (1717–1777), by Eugene Gorny, released under the name Abzats Montana.
Eugene Gorny is a philologist and media scholar with an M.A. from the University of Tartu and a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a pioneer of Runet and the author of A Creative History of the Russian Internet. He was editor-in-chief of Zhurnal.Ru (1996–1998) and is a founder and director of the Russian Virtual Library, established in 1999.
We spoke with Eugene Gorny about the project and how the relationship between literature, music, and artificial intelligence is changing.
Interview: Mikhail Viesel
MV: We know who Sumarokov is: the “father of Russian classicism and Russian theatre,” who wrote odes, tragedies, and fables (as well as comedies, epistles, satires, elegies, songs, epigrams, madrigals, and epitaphs), waged a literary war with Trediakovsky and Lomonosov, quarreled with everyone, ended up drinking heavily in his old age, and died in poverty. But what is “Abzats Montana”?
EG: “Abzats Montana” has two meanings. Historically, it was a Novosibirsk–Tartu rock band that existed from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s; now it is my personal project where I make music using AI. In the historical Abzats Montana, I played guitar and sang—mostly songs with my own lyrics, though not exclusively. Igor Pilshchikov, now a professor at UCLA, played the bayan, and Vyacheslav Popov, now a well-known poet, played a simple flute and a vacuum-cleaner tube (“Puka”, as we called it). The voices of lovely girls on backing vocals nicely offset the band’s gloomy, playful absurdism. Then everyone finished their studies, went their separate ways, and Abzats Montana came to an end. No recordings survived.
MV: A typical story of a student rock band of that era. But then, like in a silent film, the intertitle “Years Have Passed” appears, and…
EG: In January 2026, I started experimenting with Suno, an AI music generator. To begin with, I decided to record the old Abzats Montana songs using this new technology. I started with “Dyrka” (The Hole), the first song I wrote when I was seventeen. I added a final verse ("The years slowly rushed by..."), which turned it into something quite different, and recorded more than two hundred versions, ranging from dirty electric blues and southern gothic to Italian opera buffa and Psychedelic Chastushki Boogie.
Then I wanted to imagine how a song about a hole in a pocket would sound in different countries at different times. I started, with the help of Qwen, translating the text into different languages, adapting it to specific times and places, and selecting suitable music. For example, styles for the English versions included Victorian music hall, British glam rock, and dark cabaret. For the French versions, I used progressive folk rock (in the vein of Malicorne) and impressionist choral writing (in the vein of Claude Debussy and Gabriel Fauré).
To give just one example of how specific the prompts could become, here is one for Neronian Latin:
A bawdy, rhythmic street song in colloquial Latin from first-century Rome, as though sung by a slightly tipsy freedman outside a thermopolium. Rough-edged and teasing, with an upbeat melody. Accompanied by tibia (the Roman double flute), lyre, and scabellum (a foot-operated percussion instrument). Performed in the colloquial Latin of Petronius’ Satyricon, with clear, rhythmic diction—intelligible and musical.
It really did turn out lively. In the historical Abzats Montana, we called this style “kozliki” (little goats).
Another prompt pushed this even further: Late Latin (4th–5th centuries) combined with heavy metal created the atmosphere of a black mass—especially when the text was sung backwards in the final section.
That’s how I had fun with Suno—exploring the capabilities of a new tool while also expanding my knowledge of musical genres and styles, instruments, and vocal techniques across different cultures and historical periods.
To have somewhere to publish what I was creating, I set up a Telegram channel and, without much thought, named it Abzats Montana. Thus, Abzats Montana took on its second meaning—no longer a band, but a neuro-human tandem.
MV: How did you come up with the idea of making an album based on Sumarokov’s poems? And why Sumarokov?
EG: The repertoire of the historical Abzats Montana included two songs based on his poems. I started with those, then added new ones, and that grew into an album.
I love Sumarokov, but not for what textbooks attribute to him. Among his merits are the founding of the Russian theatre, the creation of national dramaturgy, the codification of classicism, and the democratization of the Russian literary language. All of this is respectable—and of almost no interest to anyone. Sumarokov is respected as a historical figure, but not perceived as a living interlocutor. He is revered, but not read.
The image of Sumarokov constructed by Abzats Montana is the opposite of the schoolbook version. Instead of a rationalist classicist and court dramatist embodying the ideals of reason and duty, we see a sensitive private individual, obsessed with depression and tormented by the fear of death—a man who suffers, complains, and weeps, seeking comfort in the idea of God, yet in his heart foreseeing only annihilation and decay.
I recognize in Sumarokov an exact description of my own inner states. That is precisely why “Terrible Anguish” was included in the repertoire of the historical Abzats Montana: it sat seamlessly alongside songs based on my own texts. Sumarokov matters to me not as a codifier of genres, but as a poet of inner experience.
The canonical image of Sumarokov is built around his historical role. Abzats Montana builds his image around states of consciousness. The feeling (или sense) of universal injustice and the fear of non-being (“I will fall asleep and never wake up”) resonates more strongly today than his programmatic odes and classicist tragedies. The Sumarokov in Sumarokov is not a museum classic, but a transtemporal figure speaking about what truly matters.
MV: And what is it that truly matters?
EG: The awareness of life's vanity and the memory of death: Vanitas and Memento Mori. These themes run through European culture, but they appear less and less in contemporary mass culture. Death in modern pop culture is usually someone else’s death, observed from the outside, not one’s own, experienced from within. Through Sumarokov, Abzats Montana brings the modern listener back to the experience of confronting their own mortality.
MV: Apart from its unconventional choice of poetic material, the album is striking for its polystylism—from authentism and orientalism to Soviet estrada and the Red Army Choir. In some tracks, the original is easy to recognize. At times, it’s unmistakably Sutkin. At times, Larisa Dolina. But then again, the same is true of live performers: they are told, “Give us Sutkin,” and they do—within the limits of their abilities.
EG: It seems to me you are trying to explain the new through the familiar, which leads to a kind of projection. This is perfectly normal, but I should note that I did experiment with Soviet estrada and the Red Army Song and Dance Ensemble, but not in this album. The foundation of the album lies in musical genres contemporary to Sumarokov. From there, I moved in two directions: backward toward the Renaissance, and forward toward contemporary musical forms. Initially I considered making the album in a strictly authentic eighteenth-century style, using period instruments and forms, but it turned out that mixing eras better served my purposes.
MV: Tell us more about that.
EG: The album is organised around three stylistic approaches defined by their relation to the historical time of the text:
Synchrony — authentic eighteenth-century genres such as French pastoral opera-ballet in the style of Rameau, cantatas, and tombeaux.
Diachrony — genres from other historical periods, including Renaissance lute songs, nineteenth-century operetta, 1930s hot jazz, 1960s garage psychedelia, early 2000s post-art rock, and 2010s future garage.
Fusion — hybrid forms combining elements across eras, where harpsichord and woodwinds meet syncopated bass lines, and lute intersects with electric guitar and trumpet.
Now about the dramaturgy of the album. At the beginning and at the end, there is pure authenticity. The album opens with a French pastoral opera-ballet and closes with an elegiac tombeau. This frame anchors the historical context. Inside it, there is a constant oscillation between times.
Polystylism performs two main functions. First, it dissolves the stable link between theme and style. In Sumarokov’s poems, motifs of vanity, despair, and mortality dominate. When the same theme passes through radically different stylistic regimes, the attachment of meaning to form disappears, and something irreducible to form emerges, although it exists only through its manifestation.
Second, it defamiliarizes the familiar in Shklovsky’s sense. Placing Sumarokov’s poems, with their lexical and syntactic archaisms, into contrasting contexts (for example, an “Anacreontic Ode” in avant-garde jazz with fast scat, or “You Have Captured My Heart” in future garage) strips away their museum-like aura. It forces a renewed hearing of the text, revealing the passion, despair, and tears that do not survive the school canon.
MV: How do you think AI music will develop further? What awaits us? New symphonies of Mozart, new hits of Presley? Or a further step—autonomous virtual idols?
EG: Parodying AI responses, one might say: “I am just a human and cannot assist with this request.”
Still, I will try to answer. The dominant trend in AI music today is reproduction of the known: familiar genres and forms, imitation of famous voices, and so on. This is inevitable and useful as a first stage, a kind of training ground, but it is not yet creativity in the full sense.
New symphonies of Mozart and new hits of Presley can already be produced; there is no need to wait for the future. But it is rather dull.
The creation of autonomous idols is more interesting, although idols are less about music than about media image, visual presence, and marketing.
As for music itself, what I would like to see is the emergence of new musical forms and unprecedented syntheses—a movement beyond the human, an expansion of the range of the possible.
The democratization of music production brought by Suno is encouraging. But hierarchies will remain. The availability of paper and pen did not produce crowds of Pushkins or Stephen Kings. Nor will a $10-a-month subscription to a magic music machine produce crowds of Bachs or King Crimsons.
Links
Listen to Sumarokov and other Abzats Montana albums here:
https://linktr.ee/abzatsmontana
The original Russian version of this interview:
GodLiteratury.ru