Русское зазеркалье (двуязычная версия)

I have no reliable knowledge of what the empty house referred to in lines 2 and 20 really means. Is it Russia as a state (appropriate enough if you see the ‘Gosudaryunia’ of the first line as Her Majesty)? Is it Russian Orthodoxy (a logical subject of conversation when one talks to the Mother of God)? Is it Russian culture? Whatever it is, the collective narrator, the ‘we’ of the second line, feels that his (should I say ‘our’?) efforts are futile. His pessimism becomes self-explained if we think of Russia in 1992. The thoroughly built house of the Soviet Empire had collapsed; with its former inhabitants, the Soviet republics, showing no real interest for a new political union, with immigration to Western countries becoming a hidden desire of so many individuals, little effort it took to see the ruins of that house as (barely) empty. A not-so-straightforward reading allows us to call this text a prediction: in 1992, it was not easily possible to guess that all the beautiful churches, built in Russia after 1991, will become less and less visited over time and that the congregations of believers will be less and less numerous.

The already built house is empty. Other signs of our national humiliation make themselves clear in next lines. We ‘would sing till the first light of dawn, sing but never say it in words,’ which perhaps means that the glorious image of the upcoming Spiritual Russian Tsardom, spoken about by Russian writers, poets, and visionaries, from Dostoyevsky to Daniil Andreev and from St. Seraphim of Sarov to Vladimir Mayakovsky, was never established as a plain political and social reality. We as a nation cannot stop ‘drinking this piss’ (the dryan’ of the original Russian text actually stands for any bad and evil-smelling substance, but I do not think I want to object to this particular word choice). We cannot stop ‘daring this dare’ or, more exactly, we cannot stop hopelessly fighting the little devils of our national mythology, be these little devils bureaucracy, corruption, lack of money, or other trivial everyday problems of life in Russia.

‘So why is that?’—to quote line 13. All this, the songwriter says, happens because of our national lack of practical sense, metaphorically described as the wish to ‘embroider the snow with silver’ in the situation where more resolute, more effective, more down-to-earth measures, the ‘poison’ of the poetic text, must be taken. The bright future is still to come, it can come provided it is summoned with all the resolution we have. The difficulty of the historical tasks we face should not scare us away: ‘[t]he burden [won’t be] heavy to bear,’ which is a direct reference to the Gospel, to Christ who says to His disciples,

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and burden is light [Matthew, 11:28-30, NIV].

The former Soviet republics still may re-unite, the churches will again become crowded—provided we stay faithful to the Christian principles we must be guided by as a nation; given that we are brave enough to challenge our enemies. A peaceful person cannot really desire for enemies; what he or she can desire is to reveal his or her malicious would-be friends as such. ‘Now we know what silver is like,’ we know that all former policies, all our attempts to be friendly and nice towards ‘more civilised’ nations, have proved themselves as ineffective. ‘Let’s see what the poison can do.’ The major historical and geopolitical turn that Russia is taking right now was predicted by Boris Grebenshchikov in 1992 when only the most daring visionaries could dream of it.