Русское зазеркалье (двуязычная версия)

To be sure, I admire Mr Keating’s being so energetic, so devoted to and so inspired by what he does, and I also like Robin Williams who plays him very much. I am not half as inspired as his character is. But I happen not to quite agree with Mr Keating on this particular point. Laughable as its attempts at geometric methods may be, this much-ridiculed and thoroughly discredited preface touches upon a very important problem, namely, that the importance of an artwork often is not up to its perfection, and vice versa. I only needed this very long digression from our subject to talk about the song of Alexander Rosenbaum which is in my humble opinion more artful than trying to really deliver to us an important message of some sort. It scores high on the horizontal but only average on the vertical, in terms of Dr Pritchard. At least, it was my first impression from it. What was yours? (A question for our discussion.) Be honest: doesn’t the song sound as a horror story? And if it is just a horror story, why should we engage ourselves in studies of Russian musical pulp fiction? To put it in other terms: can shocking and sensational fiction ever be seen as a true work of art? Why can it, or why cannot it, and what makes me ask you this question at all? Your thoughts on the subject will be most welcome in the second part of our lesson.

For now, Dostoyevsky comes to our rescue, as he often does, and answers my question positively, his novels being philosophical works of immense importance and shocking detective stories or, to put it more mildly, sensational page-turners at the same time. I am not saying that the song may ever rival with Dostoyevsky’s novels in their importance. And yet, it may contain more than just a horror story. Is it actually a horror story, and what makes you so easily agree with me when I say that it is? Let us explore this question before we deal with some meaningful details of the text.

Rosenbaum’s song is not a real horror story in the same way in which Dostoyevsky’s ‘gothic thrillers’ are not real detective stories. We know who has murdered the old pawnbroker at the very beginning of Crime and Punishment, so there is nothing for us to detect. Much in the same way, ‘Foretelling My Destiny’imposes no real horror on us. (Or maybe it does—about which I will talk later on.) There is nothing here to be horrified by. No-one dies or is seriously injured here—it is just that a middle-aged man discovers that he has got some grey hair, that he, too, is getting older, that he, too, will die. This banality fails to provide a plot for a fascinating horror-movie, the only drama where it can exist being the sad drama of our life. I, too, have got some few grey hairs now which fact I suppose makes me less ‘marketable’ on the vanity fair of our life—by the way, the allegory of vanity fair goes back to Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan, an English writer and Puritan preacher who lived in the 17th century, not to W. M. Thackeray, as many falsely think.