Русское зазеркалье (двуязычная версия)

I must remark, though, that such a simplified reading of the second verse of the song sits at odds with both the first verse and the general atmosphere of the film. Some Soviet films did try to give political hints to their audience, but I think we can safely exclude Mary Poppins, Goodbye from this category. A facile reading like this makes me think of the popular meme with a horse whose backside is depicted realistically and whose head is drawn in a very sketchy, childlike manner. Soviet authors for kids didn’t produce rubbish, whatever else they did.

What is the wind of changes, then? It is, to use the ‘unpardonably old-fashioned terminology,’ the second arrival of Christ: a unique event in human history that would ‘change the world physically.’ A doubtful reading of a song for children, you might say, but not an improbable one, when we take into account that ‘the wind of changes’ has never ever blown before and that its coming will stop the evils of our life for ever. The new wind is predicted as a one-time arrival, not as a recurring process. What recurs throughout the ages is the evil winds of our losses that are there now and that have always been, but that will be there no more.

Certainly, ‘doubtful’ is too mild a word for my risky attempt to freight the ‘wind of changes’ of the Soviet song with this meaning. You are of course free to reject my reading of the second verse, as well as the idea of Christ’s second arrival in general. The tiny problem is that, by doing so, you also reject all hopes for the fundamental change of the human nature for the good—and agree to go by the evil winds of petty grudges for ever and ever, as long as the Earth rotates. In another book by Revd Dr Williams, I came across a passage that—or so it seems to me—perfectly explains what I am now trying to phrase.

One can read without that response; the only thing the novelist has to say then is that the question still lies on the table: how much can you live with? The issue over the anchorage of values is not going to go away just because the response of Orthodox (or any other) Christianity, for whatever reason, fails to persuade. And the refusal of the freely admitted paradoxes of Christian belief does not absolve you from paradox and struggle. If you cannot live with the tension Ivan so unforgettably depicts <…> you will have to live with another kind of tension, the recognition that such a ground of value is indispensable for a recognizably human life, yet at the same time an illusion depending on the human will [Williams, Rowan. Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction. London: Continuum, 2008. P. 235].

Ivan Karamazov has a lot to say in his long scornful tirade, and his vigour almost makes us forget that it is precisely the eternal harmony at the end of times which he so fiercely defies stating that God’s world is unjust; in other words, it is exactly the powerful ‘wind of changes’ that comes to rectify all things at the true end of history, it is the Christ of the Apocalypse against whom Ivan rebels and to whom he ‘most respectfully returns his ticket.’

You see, Alyosha, it may well be that if I live until that moment, or rise again in order to see it, I myself will perhaps cry out with all the rest, looking at the mother embracing her child’s tormentor: ‘Just art thou, O Lord!’ but I do not want to cry out with them. While there’s still time, I hasten to defend myself against it, and therefore I absolutely renounce all higher harmony [Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Transl. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002].

But if you, like Ivan Karamazov, are unable to live with this tension, if you accuse the ‘wind of changes’ of coming too late, or if you—like true atheists which Ivan is not—reject the very idea of this final all-rectifying force as unrealistic and laughable you will have to live with another sort of tension, namely, with the fact that everything you can rely upon are the evil winds of human losses that creep into our hearts, crush our hopes, and are certain to return each year, each month, each day until the Earth goes round.

Soviet culture, ‘unable to live with the tension Ivan so unforgettably depicts,’ has essentially done with the preceding spiritual legacy—it was aspiring to manage without any religion at all. It is very strange to observe how, in its brave attempts to produce a New Man, it was effectively recreating its secular substitute. If sacred texts of all religions were destroyed their essence could perhaps still be restored from Soviet songs, including songs for children.