Русское зазеркалье

The question is of course provocative: your humble lecturer doesn’t see it that simple. Igor Sarukhanov probably addresses his audience each time he says ‘you,’ ‘our love’ can therefore be easily interpreted as ‘our love for our country,’ our patriotism, a feeling that is ‘shy,’ ‘wants to escape into the fields’ and ‘has no shelter.’ You had to physically be in Russia in her 90es to feel why patriotism in Russia could—and still can, probably—be spoken about in such categories.

Let us now have a look at the second verse. ‘For thousands of years we, you and I equally, are doomed to…’ To “mykat’ ”, which verb leaves me almost helpless, Russian though as I am. The closest possible translation would be I guess ‘to suffer from’ and ‘to get along with,’ ‘to patiently endure something,’ ‘to suffer from something while you are getting along with it.’ A very Russian vision—I might even say, a very Orthodox Christian vision—of suffering which is ‘beneficial in itself’ (well, not really), as it allegedly ‘purifies our soul from Evil.’ I wholeheartedly reject this vision, which doesn’t mean to say that my rejection of it is in any way exemplary for a Russian—I might be a bad Russian, after all. This is what the Russian songs that we discuss in this course are about. Just touch any of them—and you will be overwhelmed, overflowed by the multitude of cultural phenomena it refers to, including Dostoyevsky, a thousand years of Russian Christianity, and God knows what else.

We are, the text says, doomed to maintain this half-friend-half-foe relationship with ‘something in our destiny,’ still left untouched ‘by the malicious ravens.’ Black ravens play an important part in Russian pre-Christian mythology; they usually symbolise Death. The song probably says that those of us who will be still alive will envy the dead. A very dismal vision of Russian life as a purgatorium, shared only by relatively few artists. I do not subscribe to it, and yet I felt like it wouldn’t be very fair not to mention those artists in our course altogether. It is the second part of the verse, though, that makes the whole of it so remarkable.

For thousands of years we are doomed to be waiting for the Driver, and then

We who have hearts of the rich but carry beggar’s bags will flop down in the mud, when [he] yells at us, ‘Go down!’

The Driver definitely must be seen as the Vozhd, the National leader, the Tsar. To be honest, I would not know what to say if you asked me where the line between a vozhd and a tsar should be drawn. To me, all these terms are synonymous, de facto if not de jure. Russia has always been, and still is, an authoritarian state. (This is what you wanted me to say, didn’t you?) To ignore this fact of our social reality would be absurd, and yet, your humble lecturer and Igor Sarukhanov happen to have diametrically opposed views on whether having a monarch is beneficial or bad for a nation. Any admirer of the British royal family would perhaps be on my side… We are not talking about my humble person, though. For Igor Sarukhanov, the Driver cannot help being a tyrant and a dictator, one who shouts at you ‘Go down!’—and then you bluntly fall in the mud, a rich man in your heart though you are. You probably remember Boris Berezovsky and the sad end of his life: he, too, had to obey this command and to ‘go down,’ speaking metaphorically. In Russia, you cannot contradict the Driver, however rich you are.

My subjective opinion is that Sarukhanov’s characters with their ‘hearts of the rich’ can hardly earn sympathies of an average Russian. It is the ‘poor and condemned,’ to use Dostoyevsky’s phrase, who win our hearts. We are not really sorry for the rich, thrown in the mud. Would the artist attribute ‘hearts of saints’ to his protagonists he undoubtedly would make us love them. The problem is, saints are not upset by the command to go down. This is what they are doing all the time, anyway. It reminds me of a short talk between the Russian Tsar and Bazil the Blessed, fool for Christ, in Boris Godunov, Modest Mussorgsky’s famous opera. Why does the beggar reject monarch’s humble request to pray for the salvation of tsar’s soul? Another question that we might want to discuss later on.

The whole of the second verse can basically be seen—or, rather, heard—as the voice of the Russian liberal intelligentsia, moaning about the fact that the ‘only civilised people in this wild country’ (sarcasm on my side) are forced to ‘go down’ by the Driver, be this Driver Nicholas I, Joseph Stalin, or Vladimir Putin. The pro-Western liberal intelligentsia in Russia will be lamenting until the second arrival of Christ. If Christ Himself asked those people to follow Him, to join Him in the Heavenly Kingdom, and to please leave behind all their petty thoughts and bad mental habits, this being the only condition for their rise—they would still say the strict Driver had forced them to go down. Does it sound too ecclesiastical? I cannot help it.

There are two things that reconcile me with this song, though, one of them being sweet memories of my adolescence. All these songs—along with some understanding of them—have been ‘transmitted’ to me by one of my teachers, a person of whom I think very highly, so they cannot be really bad, however sentimental it may sound. The second reason is the third verse of ‘Skripka-Lisa’ that asks us to

[g]et to the very bottom, come what may; let Sorrow and Darkness haunt you.

We have only one life, and we ought to remember that the ditch [into which we can fall] is pretty close.

This, finally, is very Russian. An average member of the pro-European liberal intelligentsia wouldn’t really try to get to the very bottom of things; he or she wouldn’t bravely face Sorrow and Darkness haunting him or her. Neither would he or she be very much concerned with whether he or she ends up in the ditch of evil thoughts and deeds or not. ‘It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile,’ according to Gordon Sumner commonly known as Sting. It takes being Russian to embrace what you cannot escape from; it takes being Russian to know the depths of one’s own depravity and not to fall into them. It also takes being Russian to actually fall into the ditch of your depravity, to get to the very bottom of it, and to morally resurrect.

Your questions are most welcome.¹¹

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[Сноска дальше.]

– You do look so very Alice-in-Wonderland, dear! – шестидесятилетняя женщина за столом директора в бледно-жёлтой блузке с V-образным вырезом осветилась улыбкой. Наверняка она имела в виду мою причёску и волосы до плеч, и ещё мою длинную юбку до середины голени, и белую блузку, вот это вот всё; кстати, лет десять назад я чёлки не носила. Да и два года назад: что я только не выделывала со своими волосами два года назад… Я невольно коснулась волос, тоже улыбаясь:

– You see, Mrs Walking, I am old enough to stop experimenting with my hair… It’s Mrs Walking, isn’t it?

Миссиc Уолкинг кивнула, подтверждая, что это именно она и есть. Через её cтол мы пожали друг другу руки, верней, просто соединили их и слегка встряхнули, как тут и принято пожимать руки.

– Pray take your seat, – предложила директор. Она мне явно нравилась, и не только своей приветливостью. – You were quite a success today, do you know that? I was impressed, too. You know, I was just passing by the door, when I caught some words of your lecture, so I stopped for a minute—you don’t mind my involuntary eavesdropping, do you? – Я прикусила губу, удерживая улыбку. Eavesdropping, положим, наверняка было не такое уж involuntary, но пусть: я бы то же самое сделала. Может быть, у них микрофон установлен в каждом классе, так что вовсе и не надо стоять под дверью, достаточно нажать на кнопку. – Did you like your group?

– I did, – ответила я: в конце концов, это было наполовину правдой. – I am only sorry we never went so far as to actually discuss the song. They attacked me with all sorts of general questions about Russia and personal questions about myself.

– What did they ask you, for instance?

– Things like… how does it feel to live here, and whether I really am a monarchist, or whether I really am Russian, the whole thing being probably just a hoax, an artistic performance of some sort, or whether there might be some reasons why I am afraid to criticise the Russian president even here, considering the Skripal case, or why I disagreed with the artist when he was just saying the truth, namely, that Russian life is hell, or whether I was serious when talking about Christ wishing to rise the Russian intelligentsia to Heavenly Kingdom or just meant it as a figure of speech, and whether I really am an Orthodox Christian believer…