Larisa Miller
Larisa Miller

The secret of the most beloved songs’ popularity is revealed: among other things, a song must be both new and yet somehow familiar, so that, as in a kaleidoscope, known elements come together to form a never-before-seen pattern.

Here is yet another variation on a long-familiar, but still very much alive theme. The vastness, freedom, the possibility of flight are beautiful —

“Open wide my prison cell, / Grant me daylight's shining glow;

… let's fly away! / We are free birds… /

To a place where the wind only roams…".

Such an idea of happiness; what’s more — of paradise, of course. Here both the liberty’s glint and the heaven’s dome are not accidental.Although the earthly or seemingly earthly beauty is also mesmerizing: the gentle slope, mountain ranges' line, hills, and fields.

But all this is seen by the one questioning (why don’t you fly?), while the heroine “never looks” there. She is about to leave not a prison, but her home, and she touches, “strokes” the wall and the door; the completely unpoetic word “latch” sounds piercing and outweighs all the conventionally poetic vistas. And here we are reminded not of Pushkin's and Lermontov's prisoners, but of Akhmatova's Lot's wife, who wants to take one last look at the red towers of her native Sodom and gives her life for a single glance. The questioner is being cunning: he knows why the heroine hesitates, why she doesn’t fly.

The second poem continues and overturns the first. Now the one left on the ground questions and seemingly doesn’t understand, while the one flying away either persuades the one staying not to grieve or grieves himself, remembering autumn and winter and articulating the familiar, quite recognizable imagery from many poems — but it’s all in vain.

The connection between those who have flown away and those who remain is fading. It is good on the ground. There is much sorrow in life. The world is beautiful anyway.

NADEZHDA SHAPIRO

Larisa Miller
Larisa Miller
WHY DON'T YOU LEAVE?

Why don’t you leave when they set you free?

Why don’t you fly when all gates are wide?

Why don’t you walk over hills and fields you see,

And the gentle slope, and the steep mountainside?

Why don’t you soar? Freedom smells of wind and of mint.

The edge of heaven’s dome is gilded with light.

The time of will has come, of liberty’s glint.

Choose any path that lies before you in sight.

Why do you linger, playing with the door latch?

Why do you stroke the tired wall’s design,

And never look at the celestial patch,

At distant expanses, at mountain ranges’ line?


— Where? I can’t fathom, try as I might.

Your voice grows fainter, losing its height.

Where are you going?

— To the mountain of nowhere

To chase snow-white doves in flight.

You live on earth, don’t succumb to fright.

On earth, it’s good at this time, so fair.

It’s autumn now. And soon winter will come nigh.

That winter, you remember yourself, how the snow did fly,

On the trees and the roof, it fell like rain,

On the trees, the road, the houses, from the sky...

We were going crazy, you and I,

Remember?

— Yes, but I can hardly hear you, it’s all in vain.


1979/1983