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.
Then the old man turns around, and the author gets goosebumps, because the person is obviously sleeping—or maybe he is not sleeping, since he is said to stare at our hero and to sleep at the same time. Another combination of two factors excluding each other, as fog and snowflakes, and that also reminds me of Eyes Wide Shut, a 1999 erotic mystery psychological drama film directed by Stanley Kubrick. Does this ‘sleeping’ refer to his shut eyes or does it mean that he is asleep ‘spiritually’? I do not know, although I have my ideas about it. ‘Who are you, old man?’ the hero of the song shouts at him. The old man utters a guffaw without answering the question and disappears.
‘I wouldn’t believe my eyes,’ the author further says, ‘I would regard everything as the product of my imagination, but then…’ But then, in some years, he sees the old man again—in the mirror. His black hair has turned grey, so now he can recongise himself as the old man he has encountered before in that strange place.
This is, put in simple words, what the lyrics of the song are about. You can notice a characteristic feature of medieval bard songs that also comes to light here: it tells us a story rather than explores the author’s feelings or otherwise deals with subjective states of his or her mind. A very noir, almost psychedelic story as it is, it is still a narrative.
How much can we get from this story? This largely depends on us.
Those of you who have ever watched Dead Poets Society, a 1989 American drama film, might remember the famous ‘Understanding Poetry’ scene. Allow me to give its outline. Mr Keating, the brilliant non-conventional teacher of English, asks Neil, one of his students, to read aloud from the course textbook. Neil then starts to read. The chapter that he is reading is entitled ‘Understanding Poetry’ and written by Dr J. Evans Pritchard, Ph. D. Dr J. Evans Pritchard is in all probability a fictional character. I would like to cite at length what the boy is reading. Here it is.
To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme, and figures of speech, then ask two questions: 1) How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and 2) How important is that objective? Question one rates the poem's perfection; question two rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the poem’s greatness becomes a relatively simple matter. If the poem's score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a graph and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness. A sonnet by Byron might score high on the vertical but only average on the horizontal. A Shakespearean sonnet, on the other hand, would score high both horizontally and vertically, yielding a massive total area, thereby revealing the poem to be truly great.
Mr Keating then calls the whole preface ‘excrement’ and encourages his class to tear this page out, to rip off the entire preface. In the dustbin with Dr Pritchard it goes.
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.
