woman himself!” The furious Stenka immediately decided what to do:
“I will give you all you ask for
Head and heart and life and hand.”
And his voice rolls out like thunder
Out across the distant land.
And she, with downcast eyes,
more dead than alive,
silently listens to the drunken
words of the ataman:
“Volga, Volga, Mother Volga
Wide and deep beneath the sun,
You had never such a present
From a Cossack of the Don.
So that peace may reign forever
In this band so free and brave
Volga, Volga, Mother Volga
Make this lovely girl a grave.”
Now, with one swift mighty motion
He has raised his bride on high
And has cast her where the waters
Of the Volga roll and sigh.
Now a silence like the grave
Sinks to all who stand and see
And the battle-hardened Cossacks
Sink to weep on bended knee.
“Dance, you fools, and let’s be merry
What is this that’s in your eyes?
Let us thunder out a chantey
To the place where beauty lies.”
For me, the crucial moment of the song is the final reversal: when the common warriors get what they demanded from Stenka, their reaction is stupefaction, horror, even weeping, and Stenka, in the true gesture of a Master, makes them accept the gift of what they wanted as a source of joy—you asked for it, now you got it, so be merry! But the feature that is really shocking for us today is the absence of the woman’s point of view: she was first kidnapped, raped, then killed, so how did she experience the situation? What about her own song, rendering her own horror? I think that you, Nadya, and your fellow fighters are creating something similar to the imagined song of the Persian princess …
So I am looking forward to our common struggle, with friendship and solidarity,
Slavoj
1 Kim Lane Scheppele, “
1984
, Hungarian Edition,” http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/1984-hungarian-edition/
2 Ibid.
3 Christopher Hitchens,
Arguably
, New York: Twelve, 2011, p. 634.
4 Ibid., p. 635.
5 Ibid.
“I will give you all you ask for
Head and heart and life and hand.”
And his voice rolls out like thunder
Out across the distant land.
And she, with downcast eyes,
more dead than alive,
silently listens to the drunken
words of the ataman:
“Volga, Volga, Mother Volga
Wide and deep beneath the sun,
You had never such a present
From a Cossack of the Don.
So that peace may reign forever
In this band so free and brave
Volga, Volga, Mother Volga
Make this lovely girl a grave.”
Now, with one swift mighty motion
He has raised his bride on high
And has cast her where the waters
Of the Volga roll and sigh.
Now a silence like the grave
Sinks to all who stand and see
And the battle-hardened Cossacks
Sink to weep on bended knee.
“Dance, you fools, and let’s be merry
What is this that’s in your eyes?
Let us thunder out a chantey
To the place where beauty lies.”
For me, the crucial moment of the song is the final reversal: when the common warriors get what they demanded from Stenka, their reaction is stupefaction, horror, even weeping, and Stenka, in the true gesture of a Master, makes them accept the gift of what they wanted as a source of joy—you asked for it, now you got it, so be merry! But the feature that is really shocking for us today is the absence of the woman’s point of view: she was first kidnapped, raped, then killed, so how did she experience the situation? What about her own song, rendering her own horror? I think that you, Nadya, and your fellow fighters are creating something similar to the imagined song of the Persian princess …
So I am looking forward to our common struggle, with friendship and solidarity,
Slavoj
1 Kim Lane Scheppele, “
1984
, Hungarian Edition,” http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/1984-hungarian-edition/
2 Ibid.
3 Christopher Hitchens,
Arguably
, New York: Twelve, 2011, p. 634.
4 Ibid., p. 635.
5 Ibid.
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