Русское зазеркалье (двуязычная версия)

Of the five artists I have named before, only Alexander Rosenbaum is still alive. Rosenbaum was born in 1951 in Saint Petersburg. You might want to know that he was given the honorary title of People’s Artists of the Russian Federation in 2001 and that he also has other state awards, among them the Order of Honour. Rosenbaum is an accomplished guitarist and accompanies himself on either a six- or twelve-string acoustic guitar. The person is still active creatively. In the musical landscape of today, Rosenbaum is known as an interpreter of outlaw, or criminal, songs (Russian blatnaya pesnya). Now, try to cope with the fact that the performer of criminal songs was given significant state awards. Doesn’t it stupefy you? In the future, I intend to say a few words about prison culture in Russia and its impact on Russian lifestyle in general.

Allow me to say that I am not an admirer of either prison culture, or criminal songs, or Rosenbaum’s experimentising with the genre. Like many Russians, I still love him for his songs of the Soviet period, to one of which you may listen right now. The name of the song is Veshchaya Sud’ba, which is roughly translatable as ‘Foretelling My Destiny.’ It was composed in 1986.

I think you would agree with me if I said that Alexander Rosenbaum sounds very dynamic and pretty much impressive here, not like your uncle or grandpa sitting on a sofa with a guitar in his hands. I am saying that because so many Russian bards, being working professionals in a non-musical occupation, do sound like our uncles and granddads. Their failure to provide a beautiful wrapper for what is inside, to use Victor Pelevin’s phrase again, has never prevented their audience from paying attention to them. Why? We shall discuss this question in the second part of our lesson. Unlike those bards, Alexander Rosenbaum is a musical professional who earns his living by the songs he produces. All this having been said, let us turn to the lyrics of the song.

The song describes a man—probably the author himself—who got lost while wandering no-one knows where. This unknown place is vaguely referred to as a field where you cannot see much because of white smoke spreading around. Maybe—probably even—it is fog, not smoke, because no fire is mentioned. There is a river there, and the water is cold. There is snow or, at least, there are snowflakes in the air. You might be able to explain to me how these snowflakes can coexist with fog: to me, it seems to contradict the laws of physics. While being in this remote place the protagonist encounters a miraculous old man. The old man, barefoot and in dirty rags, is not harmful or dangerous in any way; in fact, he doesn’t pay any attention to our hero at all, he just keeps walking across the river. The problem is that the river is not frozen over, and the author specifically mentions the fact that the old man walks on water as if it were solid ground. Another strange thing about the old man is that the snowflakes which land on his body do not melt, as if the old man were dead, but not dead as a ghost, because the snowflakes do not stick to ghosts, as you probably now. Having crossed the river, the old man goes on walking—or maybe descending into the ground. It begins to sound as a regular horror-movie, doesn’t it?

The author is wandering whether it is his own fate, or destiny, walking there across the river, and feels like asking—but no, he cannot ask anything, because his lips suddenly go numb.