Poems of Emigration: "Simply People Who Couldn't Think as Instructed"

Russian history has produced a subgenre of poems and songs about emigration (something American history has fortunately been largely spared). I blogged in March about Yevgeniy Kliachkin's "Farewell to the Motherland," and I also like the great Bulat Okudzhava's poem that begins,

How good it is that Zworykin left
And invented television there
If he had not left the country,
He, like all the rest, would have gone to Golgotha….

How good it is that Nabokov left
Not sharing with anyone the secrets of parting
How lucky that was! And on how many prophets
Their native land showed no mercy! …

Not a happy sentiment, but, hey, Russia's is not a happy history. In any event, a few weeks ago I came across Robert Rozhdestvenskiy's "The Talented Were Leaving My Country," written about the emigration of the 1970s. Here are the opening stanzas, which I found to be the most affecting; as usual, apologies for the flawed translation:

The talented were leaving my country,
Taking with them their dignity.
Some having sampled the Gulag gruel
And some a week before it.

Those who left weren't some sort of heroes—
How to tell who's a hero and who's not?
Simply people who couldn't think as instructed
Even if those were the very best of instructions ….

Comments

[Mr. Bumble]

Sad that a country that had the potential to be the antipode equivalent of the US has been unable to pull itself out of the swamp of failure, first by clinging to feudalism long after most of the world moved on from that failed system only to replace it with something worse.

[gVOR08]

George Kennan's big question in the "Long Telegram" was whether Russia was behaving as they were because they were communist or because they were Russia. Seems clear now it's because they are Russia.

Nick Kristof, noting that his family name was Krzysztofowicz, has a column at NYT today talking about the contrast between the westernized ex-Soviet bloc countries now and when they were under Moscow. His line is you used to almost not need color film in a uniformly gray communist Poland. But his point is that these countries hold a lot of Russian speakers, many emigres from Russia, who held some loyalty to Moscow. A loyalty now largely destroyed by the war.

[Paladin_44]

For those interested, here's a link to Kristof's column. Hope its not paywalled.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/15/opinion/russian-speakers-ukraine-putin.html

[grb]

gVOR08 : “you used to almost not need color film in a uniformly gray”

My ex-wife was East German and we traveled to Berlin not that long after the wall came down. For some reason we couldn’t get a decent flight into Tegel, flying into Frankfurt (am Main) and driving to Berlin instead. That was fine by this architect, as it allowed a side trip to see Vierzehnheiligen and Dessau Bauhaus.

You could tell when you crossed the old border because all the vibrant colors disappeared and were replaced by a ubiquitous mud brown drabness. This was even in the landscape, as the old West German countryside was often vast fields of rapeseed then a blazing buttercup yellow.

On the other hand, my Ex grew up in communist East Germany watching Little House on the Prairie and Bonanza dubbed into German. You never knew when you’d face a total cultural disconnect, like being clueless on the concept of Gilligan’s Island.

[Anon]

This last week I was reminded of this blog when I was watching a funeral on zoom and the preacher said people had "voted with their feet." That is all.

[John F. Carr]

In my family (by marriage, not an ancestor) was a Russian man who couldn't return home after the revolution. He settled in New England and helped end the use of mercury in the hat industry. For readers under 100, Americans used to wear hats. Real hats with dead animal parts, not backwards baseball caps. Fashionable hats were made in Danbury, Connecticut by treating fur with a solution containing a quite large amount of mercury. There is still a lot of mercury contamination in sediment in the area. But from the 1940s or so hatters were no longer routinely poisoned on the job.

Word of the day: carrot (verb), to treat a pelt with mercuric nitrate to convert it to a wearable form.

[Mr. Bumble]

…and of course the source of the term “mad as a hatter”.
The result of mercury poisoning.

[Ed Grinberg]

Просто люди не умели думать строем,
даже если это самый лучший строй...

I'd translate this as:

It's just that [these] people couldn't think in formation,
Even it it was the best possible [political] system.

These two lines are a little tricky to translate because of the word строй. In the first line, it's used in the sense of "to march in formation" (идти строем). In the second, in the sense of "political regime / political system / political order / form of government."

[Eugene Volokh]

You may be right; I had to take some liberties with those two lines, and I'm not confident in the result. Your approach might be better, though I'm not sure.

[Doug Huffman]

At the moment I am trying to learn Bokmål in anticipation of a Hurtigruten cruise a year away. I will try Russian language after.

[Billie34]

The poem is very beautiful and has a deep Mini Crossword meaning