Русское зазеркалье (двуязычная версия)

What a bleak, what a morbid picture—what a true picture, one might want to say! How far is it from what we normally think poetry for children should depict or talk about! How dangerously close is this image of our world to that drawn by any major religion, be it Buddhism that sees samsara as the domain of suffering or medieval Christianity with its tendency to suspect Evil everywhere around us and especially within us! (I utterly dislike these three exclamation marks in a sequence that normally are to me a characteristic of bad style—I couldn’t help putting them, though.) Apparently, the authors of ‘Wind of Changes’ refuse to address their audience in the same language in which the creators of Hello Kitty and other such cartoon characters talk to theirs. The sad paradox is that some Soviet songs for children used to be more serious that columns in glossy magazines for grown-up persons of today—I highly recommend ‘The Infantilization of Western Culture,’ an article written by Simon Gottshalk and published in The Conversation on August 1, 2018, as an additional reading on the problem. The colour of the first verse is not green, to use the terminology suggested before; it is yellow—red perhaps.

The question of whether red is permissible in moral education of children asks itself. Can we talk to children about the true character of social affairs, as we see them?Can we—if seldom—ask them to embrace full responsibility for deeds that must be done, to do something beyond their abilities (provided there is no-one else to do the job), to—in the extreme case—sacrifice their lives for the sake of other fellow humans? The Soviet literature for children tended to answer these questions positively—less and less so towards the end of the Soviet Union, I must add—even if it admitted that a teenager ‘in the red zone’ is an unwelcome aberration of the normal order of things allowable only in extreme circumstances when perhaps the survival of the whole nation is at stake. I am very eager to know your own answers to the questions above in half an hour or so.

But then, the second verse goes on to say, there is another wind, the wind of changes. It will come and remove all evil winds. It will stop our treacheries, our separations from the people we love, and our petty grudges. The colour switches to green—and you in your capacity of a responsible parent can exhale now. You absolutely cannot if you are one of my students who want to speculate about the meaning of this song rather than to emotionally agree or disagree with it.

What is the wind of changes that the song promises will be there? The political reading of the metaphor is of course very inviting: a parallel to the ‘Wind of Change,’ a famous ballad by Scorpions written in 1990 and celebrating the ongoing collapse of the Soviet Union, is obvious. For a short moment in the world history, all controversies between the Russian and the North-Atlantic culture seemed to be reconciled and forgotten for ever. Allow me to remind you of the famous rhetoric question posed by Scorpions.

Did you ever think,

That we could be so close, like brothers?

This happy fusion of two cultures into one, this ‘end of history,’ in terms of Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama who is a living American writer and political scientist, never happened, though, and I would be very curious to know your ideas about who you think is responsible for the fact that it never did.