Русское зазеркалье (двуязычная версия)

As it seems, Hamlet’s famous monologue doesn’t deal with either firm believers or firm atheists. It is spoken by someone who doubts, by someone whom you perhaps would eagerly identify yourself with. Dubitare humanum est, to doubt is human, isn’t it? I would go even further and say that Alexander Rosenbaum, too, has taken no side between firm believers and firm atheists—he, like Hamlet, does not initially recognise his, or maybe his father’s, own ghost. (Is the person that his protagonist sees actually a ghost? Another question to explore.) Some of you regard the very possibility to doubt in anything as your safe harbour. At the end of their lives, those persons may be unpleasantly surprised by the fact that doubt, while having made them more intelligent (arguably so), has failed to remove their anxiety and fear.

I hope you will now agree with me when I say that this song doesn’t score so very low even on the vertical. But there is still more in it. How much we can get from any work of art depends on how attentive we are to its details. Of course, there always remains the possibility of our misinterpreting those details or of our squeezing them so hard, figuratively speaking, that they give away more than the author actually put into them. And yet, I am not afraid to squeeze them hard, because I firmly believe that getting more from an artwork than its author wanted us to give is definitely better than getting less than that from it. So will you please follow me in my exploration of allegedly minor details of this story?

Here they are. Firstly, pay attention to the snowflakes that do not melt when landing on the old man’s body as well as to the fact that he is walking on water as if it were solid ground. Is he a living human being, or a ghost, or perhaps a zombie? An average body temperature of a living man would probably melt the snowflakes, so the alter ego of the author is probably not alive. On the other hand, the same snowflakes would not stick to a ghost, so he cannot be a ghost. A walking dead body? No, because he guffaws at the author and then instantly disappears, thus excluding all three possibilities. What makes us believe that this meaningful encounter has really happened? I guess it is the fact that the author recognises himself in a mirror as the old man he once saw, thereby confirming that this encounter was not just a product of his own imagination. But then, where could it possibly happen? Was it a real location, say, somewhere in the Leningrad region? But how could it be real, considering white fog and snowflakes, the two factors that cannot easily coexist? I believe the question makes no sense at all. Here comes another lengthy quotation.

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say

What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,

Which in the very thought renews the fear.

So bitter is it, death is little more

—which seven lines, translated from Italian by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, open the ‘Inferno,’ the first book of the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. Do we really want to interrogate Dante Alighieri about the exact location of his dark forest? Do we really pretend to believe that that forest physically exists, or had ever existed, somewhere in Italy? I think it is safe to say that this forest exists in poet’s imagination only. But wait: haven’t we agreed before that anybody’s imagination has no value at all as it only produces pure phantasms?