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