Русское зазеркалье (двуязычная версия)

‘She’ is of course Helena du Bouche, but we might want to see the ‘she’ of the poem as the Woman in general, as the archetypal Eve of the humankind. Somehow, the poet acutely feels the discrepancy between the physical beauty of a woman and her moral image. I do not mean to say that Helena du Bouche was a particularly bad woman, definitely not. You see, incels are not completely wrong when they describe us women as cruel, shallow, and selfish persons, just because we can be all that—and so can be men. From time immemorial, the blood or, rather, the psyche of each of us, regardless of our sex or race, is poisoned by our inward cruelty, selfishness, and sensual craving, and it is in beautiful women where this contrast between the aesthetic and the ethical side of the human being, between ‘satin skin’ and ‘poisoned blood,’ becomes mostly obvious. Certainly, I exclude female saints from this list—but then, when you deal with a truly saint person you forget about his or her sex, gender, or nationality. They don’t have any, much in the manner in which a river that flows into the sea ceases to be a river. Those who still want saint persons to have all these features—to have them as an essential part of their holiness, that is—do seem to have unlearned the very concept of holiness. Time will come when those ignoramuses will accuse Jesus Christ of being a patriarchal alpha male of perhaps a white supremacist and insist on replacing Him by a black female or a black transgender person. I am afraid that some of you may be close to taking this endeavour even now. You have the perfect right to do so, just allow me as an Orthodox Christian not to participate in it.

And if I stay alive

it’s all for a single

dream: like two blind children

we’ll climb a mountain,

Up there where only goats

walk, a world of the whitest

clouds—