Русское зазеркалье (двуязычная версия)

Isn’t it beautiful? The performer has replaced the original kozy, ‘goats,’ with gryozy, ‘dreams,’ perhaps fearing that ‘goats’ would sound too trivial. But it is precisely these prosaic goats that make the picture fully authentic. The poetic landscape of these six lines reminds me of a similar picture of the King and the Queen, Adam and Eve of the yet-to-be-borne Venerian humankind, who come to the top of a sacred mountain, accompanied by all sorts of animals, in order to meet their gods and to receive instructions from them. (The literary source of this image is closer than you might think: it is The Voyage to Venus by Clive Staples Lewis, a much underestimated novel by the chronicler of Narnia.) The poet eagerly admits his ignorance, his blindness, so to speak; he perhaps desires to be a ‘blind child,’ recognising this as the only possible condition that enables a person to learn what one has to learn. I think it would sound very banal if I said that anyone has to empty oneself before he or she can feel oneself up (spiritually, I mean). The banality of this thought doesn’t make it less true.

In his dream, as the poem goes on to say, the poet and his beloved climb the mountain where only goats normally walk, in order

—to hunt for wilted

roses, to listen to dead nightingales.

[translated by Burton Raffel & Alla Burago — https://gumilev.ru/languages/774/].

Sounds creepy, what? I mean, can a person really listen to a dead nightingale? And why are the roses wilted? There are, I think, two ways to interpret these two concluding lines.

One of them is to see the whole poem as the pessimistic prediction of the ‘Decline of the West’ (I am of course referring to Oswald Spengler, a German philosopher of history, and his famous book Der Untergang des Abendlandes, first published in 1918). Spengler is not left alone in his pessimism, as many works of art created in Europe at the beginning of the last century express a very similar weltanschaaung. I want to quickly refer you to Vier letzte Lieder, or Four Last Songs, composed by Richard Strauss in 1948, the last of which, Im Abendrot, sounds as an uncanny counterpart of our romance. The song was composed after the poem by Joseph von Eichendorff—here come its first and its last verse.

Through sorrow and joy

we have gone hand in hand;

we are both at rest from our wanderings

now above the quiet land.

<…>

O vast, tranquil peace,

so deep in the afterglow!

How weary we are of wandering—

Is this perhaps death?

What in the spiritual landscape of the West makes the composer ask this sorrowful question? What makes us see the poet—both of them, maybe—as the Anti-Adam of the Western culture, witnessing its end, not its beginning? You are free to answer these questions or—if the answer is obvious—to see them as rhetoric exclamations.