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No, I have contempt for the very essence
Of this formula of existence!
And then, relying on the sung miseries, he confidently tried on a prosecutor’s robe: “I
was not elected. But I am the judge!” And so he grew so confident, that in the lengthy Poem
about Stalin (The Legend of Christmas), where he in bad taste imagined Stalin as Christ, and
presented the key formula of his agnostic mindset — his really famous, the clichéd-quotes, and
so harmful lines:
Don’t be afraid of fire and hell,
And fear only him
Who says: I know the right way!
But Christ did teach us the right way. What we see here in Galich’s words is just
boundless intellectual anarchism that muzzles any clear idea, any resolute offer. Well, we can
always run as a thoughtless (but pluralistic) herd, and probably we’ll get somewhere.
Yet the most heartrending and ubiquitous keynote in his lyrics was the sense of Jewish
identity and Jewish pain (“Our train leaves for Auschwitz today and every day.”). Other good
examples include the poems By The Rivers of Babylon and Kadish. Or take this: “My six-pointed
star, burn it on my sleeve and on my chest.” Similar lyrical and passionate tones can be found in
the The Memory of Odessa (“I wanted to unite Mandelstam and Chagall.”).
Your kinsman and your cast-off
Your last singer of the Exodus.
As he addressed the departing Jews.
The Jewish memory imbued him so deeply that even in his non-Jewish lyrics he casually
added expressions such as: “Not a hook-nosed”; “not a Tatar, not a Yid”; “you are still not in
Israel, dodderer?” and even Arina Rodionovna Pushkin’s nanny, immortalized by the poet in his
works lulls him in Yiddish. Yet he doesn’t mention a single prosperous or non-oppressed Jew, a
well-off Jew in a good position, for instance, in a research institute, editorial board, or in
commerce — such characters didn’t even make a passing appearance in his poems. A Jew is
always either humiliated, or suffering, or imprisoned and dying in a camp. Take his famous lines:
You are not to be chamberlains, the Jews …
Neither the Synod, nor the Senate is for you
You belong in Solovki and Butyrki.
[the latter two being political prisons]
What a short memory they have — not only Galich, but his whole audience who were
sincerely, heartily taking in these sentimental lines! What about those twenty years, when Soviet
Jewry was not nearly in the Solovki, when so many of them did parade as chamberlains and in
the Senate!?
They have forgotten it. They have sincerely and completely forgotten it. Indeed, it is so
difficult to remember bad things about yourself.
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And inasmuch as among the successful people milking the régime there were supposedly
no Jews left, but only Russians, Galich’s satire, unconsciously or consciously, hit the Russians,
all those Klim Petroviches and Paramonovs; all that social anger invoked by his songs targeted
them, through the stressed “russopyaty” [derogatory term for Russians] images and details,
presenting them as informers, prison guards, profligates, fools or drunks. Sometimes it was more
like a caricature, sometimes more of a contemptuous pity (which we often indeed deserve,
unfortunately):
Greasy long hair hanging down,
The guest started “Yermak”
[A song about the Cossack leader and Russian folk hero]
hHe cackles like a cock
Enough to make a preacher swear
And he wants to chat
About the salvation of Russia.
Thus he pictured the Russians as always drunk, not distinguishing kerosene from vodka,
not interested in anything except drinking, idle, or simply lost, or foolish individuals.Yet he was
considered a folk poet.
And he didn’t image a single Russian hero-soldier, workman, or intellectual, not even a
single decent camp inmate (he assigned the role of the main camp inmate to himself,) because,
you know, all those “prison-guard seed” camp bosses are Russians.
And here he wrote about Russia directly:
Every liar is a Messiah!
And just dare you to ask
Brothers, had there even been
Any Rus in Russia?
It is abrim with filth.
And then, desperately:
But somewhere, perhaps,
She does exist!?
That invisible Russia,
Where under the tender skies
Everyone shares
God’s word and bread.
I pray thee: Hold on!
Be alive in decay,
So in the heart, as in Kitezh,
I could hear your bells!
So, with the new opportunity and the lure of emigration, Galich was torn between the
submerged Kitezh, a legendary Russian invisble city, and today’s filth:
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It’s the same vicious circle,
The same old story, the ring,
Which cannot be either closed, or open!
He left with the words: “I, a Russian poet, cannot be separated from Russia by the fifth
article. [The requirement in the Soviet internal passport - “nationality”]
Yet some other departing Jews drew from his songs a seed of aversion and contempt for
Russia, or at least, the confidence that it is right to break away from her. Heed a voice from
Israel: “We said goodbye to Russia. Not without pain, but forever. Russia still holds us
tenaciously. But in a year, ten years, a hundred years we’ll escape from her and find our own
home. Listening to Galich, we once again recognize that it is the right way.”
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