Ann Allen from Birmingham, AL posted YOU GOTTA SEE THIS......Amazing and Beautiful!
I caught the name Ksenya, and it is a Russian name - my niece is Ksenya - and I clicked to see what this Russian girl (she is young, born in 1985) did to get the praise.
What I saw was a stunning performance, and I spent all 8 minutes on one breath... I was speechless...
I left a comment, showed the YouTube video to my wife and my son, he in turn, showed me other examples of this incredible art form... but they were not the same.
Not in the skill, which is amazing. But in my opinion, Kseniya went went far beyond that. It is not a picture, that she is presenting, it is a story. She has many of those, and this one is a compressed story of the life of the whole nation, which went through the devastating war.
Then I received an e-mail from a Polish lady, who said she understood part of it, and she read what I wrote about it, but she asked me the meaning of some episodes, and it donned upon me, that to truly feel it one had to grow in the former USSR. It is more than a story that Kseniya amazingly performs in front of us, it is also the sound, and it all nostalgically whisks us through the times, returning us to where the tears of joy and sorrow were together in that our so difficult past.
And I thought that I would not harm Ann by showing it again here, and commenting on it, so that you can watch it with your eyes... and a tiny little bit with mine
It starts with idyllic prewar evening, and then you see the planes coming, and the Annnouncement of the war, how the nation heard it on 22nd of June 1941, and then you hear the song, which became the war hymn (melody - Aleksandrov, lyrics Lebedev-Kumach)
The Sacred War
Arise, beloved country!
Arise, for mortal fight
With Fascist hordes despicable,
The forces of the night.
''Refrain:
Let waves of righteous fury
Swell up as ne'er before
And spur us to the vict'ry of
Our sacred people's war.''
And then yo see the cradle and you hear one of the most popular war-time songs - Dark Night (music - Bogoslovsky, lyrics -Agatov)
Dark is the night, only bullets whistle over the steppe,
Only the wind hums in the wires, the stars flicker dimly.
This dark night I know that you, my love, are not asleep,
And by our child's bed you secretly wipe away a tear
Then she is holding the so called Triangle, that dreaded small envelope from the frontline, which was called the burial letter.
Then the monumnet. And you hear a song written after rthe war, the song where the poet thinks the fallen soldiers become white cranes and they fly high in the sky and call us. Very beautiful lyrics... (here it is translated by Peter Tempest)
CRANES
I sometimes think that riders brave,
Who met their death in bloody fight,
Were never buried in a grave
But rose as cranes with plumage white.
And ever since until this day
They pass high overhead and call.
Is that not why we often gaze
In solemn silence at them all?
In far-off foreign lands I see
The cranes in evening's dying glow
Fly quickly past in company,
As men on horseback used to go.
And, as they fly far out of reach,
I hear them calling someone's name.
Is that why sounds in Avar speech
Recall the clamour of a crane?
Across the weary sky they race,
Who friend and kinsman used to be,
And in their ranks I see a space-
Perhaps they're keeping it for me?
One day I'll join the flock of cranes,
With them I shall go winging, by
And you, who here on earth remain,
Will hear my loud and strident cry.
And that image of a sailor (it is a sailor cap he wears behind the window), and a child in the same sailor's cap on the window sill, they are waiting for their loved one to come back, and he never will...
... and she writes in Russian: "You are always here"
Comments(16)