Tag: “Predstavlenie”

Good Clean Fun

Photo: Pelagiya Tikhonova/Moskva Agency (via Moscow Times)

All modern entertainment that “undermines” traditional values should be banned in Russia, conservative philosopher and “Russian World” ideologue Alexander Dugin has said.

“Only morally healthy entertainment should be allowed — first of all, round dances and traveling around one’s native land, and even better, pilgrimages to holy places. Everything else should be banned,” Dugin wrote on his Telegram channel.

According to Dugin, a healthy nation should have wholesome leisure activities, “and not all of that stuff.” As a negative example of entertainment, he cited KVN, which has become, he claims, “a poisonous matrix of degeneration.”

“The sinister nature of this pernicious phenomenon is now clearly visible. [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky, [comedian Maxim] Galkin, and all the rest,” Dugin said.*

Earlier, the philosopher claimed that the West regards Russia as its principal foe because Russian President Vladimir Putin has been reviving traditional values and liberating the country from global influence. This, in his opinion, is what provoked the disgust of Western “progressive elites” with Putin.

Dugin has also argued that Russia has neither a parliament nor democracy, but a de facto monarchy headed by Putin, who can do whatever he wants. The philosopher noted the irrelevance of certain laws in Russia, as well as the people who propose or support them. In his opinion, all of this is “boyars dancing for the time being,” that is, until the sovereign pays attention to the antics of these “selfish and thieving bastards.”

Dugin has argued that Russia itself is the Katechon — the last bulwark against the Antichrist, who today reigns in a West “totally perverted” by LGBT+, postmodernism, relativism, and transhumanism.

The philosopher has dubbed the war in Ukraine “the most important event in history.” In his opinion, it is being waged on behalf of a multipolar world, with many superpowers. Consequently, according to Dugin, Russia will free other countries of the world from Western liberal imperialism, in whose grip they are trapped. And yet, Dugin acknowledged that Russia would lose a great many people in the course of the war.

* Zelensky was captain of the Kryvyi Rih KVN team Kvartal 95 from 1998 to 2003.

Source: “Dugin suggests banning all forms of entertainment in Russia except round dances,” Moscow Times Russian Service, 23 July 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

[...]

Enter Thoughts of Days to Come, dressed to the nines in khaki blouses.
They are lugging atom bombs, ICBMs, a launching pad.
O, how they reel, dance, and caper: “We are warriors and carousers!
Russians and Germans will fall together; for example, at Stalingrad.”
And like old widow Matryona, cyclotrons are dumbly howling.
In the Ministry of Defense a nest of crows is loudly cawing.
	Look at the pillow. What do you know!
	Shiny medals all in a row.

	“Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
	“A pint of vodka, they say,
	Soon’ll be a ruble a pop.”
	“Mom, I really don’t love Pop.”

Enter a certain Orthodox, saying: “These days I’m number one.
I’m pining for the sovereign, and in my soul the Firebird flares.
Soon Igor will reunite with Yaroslavna and have his fun.
Let me make the benediction or else I’ll box you on the ears.
Worse than evil eye or herpes is the plague of Western thinking.
Sing, accordion, and drown out the saxophone, jazz’s vile offspring.”
	On the icons they plant a kiss,
	Sobbing victims of circumcis—

[...]

Source: Lib.ru. Translation by the Russian Reader

This Be the Verse

I saw Joseph Brodsky for the last time at Victoria Schweitzer’s place. He had just gone through a second operation on his heart. He had been expressly forbidden to smoke, but he bummed cigarettes from me and said he could not work without smokes. Joseph read us his new poem “Predstavlenie” [“A Vaudeville”; 1988?] which he had dedicated to Mikhail Nikolayev [Schweitzer’s husband, who had died in 1987]. He read in his usual manner, a drawling tone that emphasized the musical and rhythmic flow of the stanzas and thus made it hard to understand their content. (Once, at Oxford, when Brodsky was reading his poems to a large audience, a female English Slavist had asked me, “Is this like liturgy?”) When I read “Predstavlenie” on the page, it struck me it was Brodsky’s dying verse, although he would go on living for several more years. The past and present, as they emerged in the poem, were illuminated by a transcendent rather than an earthly light. I consider the poem one of his masterpieces.

—Igor Golomstock, A Job for an Old Policeman: A Pessimist’s Memoirs (Moscow, 2015), p. 288

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

[…]

Enter a Cop shouting, “Basta!” The prosecutor squares his jaw.
The door to the regular guy’s cave opens sans Ali Baba’s code.
Great-grandson or great-grandfather rolls a cart in the shaft’s dark maw,
Weeping crystal tears reflecting the color of the motherlode.
And on Death’s moonlit plain, beyond the pale the living never cross,
Studded with gold incisors, a jawbone sparkles with permafrost.

There long will be veins enough
Of those who’ve bitten the dust.

“I have a pad, but getting there’s a chore.”
“I’m a crane driver, not a whore.”
“Life arose like an addiction
Before the egg or the chicken.”

We have filled the entire stage. All that’s left is to climb the walls,
Soar like a hawk under the big top, shrink into a roundworm.
Or everyone, foaming at the mouth, puppets and all,
Should suddenly copulate in unison to breed a new life form.
For, economizing space, what other shape can the multitude assume,
If not the cemetery’s ranks, if not the checkout’s black queue?

We demand the steppe’s expanses
Without a chain reaction!

“We demand a sentence without relief!”
“Who is hollering ‘Stop, thief!’?”
“In her notebook she drew his penis.”
“Let me go, for the love of Jesus.”

Enter an Evening in the Present, a house in the boondocks.
The tablecloth is arguing interior design with the drapes.
Ruling out palpitations (nonsense I’d put in brackets),
One gets the sense Lobachevsky has been subtracted from space.
Grumbling leaves the color of money. A mosquito’s steady buzzer.
The eye is too frail to magnify the two-by-threes of those gone forever,

Who have sprouted as thick grass.
But they won’t be the last.

“From lovemaking, children are born.
Now you are alone in the world.
Remember the song I’d sometimes hum
Softly when twilight would come?

“This is the mouse, this is the cat.
This is the watch tower, this is the camp.
And this is Time that, on the sly,
Sentences Mom and Dad to die.”