Poems and Songs of Vladimir Vysotsky. Our Life Has Lots of Edges.

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Commentary to the song “About the Chinese Problem”.

Here is stanza 2:

If the things are so on, it’ll be curtains for us, Soon there will come the end of this era — These Chinese people really pretend to deprive Our planet of its atmosphere.

As the epigraph to this song, there can be used the words of Porphyry Ivanov, peace be upon him: “They (people) live on their own, apart from Nature, thinking it is an inexhaustible source, and do not care about the consequences that may occur as a result of the irrational activities of man.”

In 2016, there came out Lyudmila Fionova’s article “What shall we breathe?” (this article is in Russian), where she described in detail the issue of the rapid deterioration of the atmos­phere condition. But if all people were adherents of the environmentally responsible way of life...

There is a good film about our relationship to Nature, which is called “Kin-dza-dza!” (1986) (there are English subtitles). The song from this film “Mama, mama, how shall I endure that?..” can become for us topical when come true the words of Porphyry Ivanov, peace be upon him, about the awaited mes­sen­ger: “And he will fight, shout across the universe up to the moment when falls from the height a small, very small thing. It will force us to be­lieve this man — we shall grasp at that, but it will be too late.”

Here is this song:

Mama, mama, how shall I endure that? Soon the days here will be really cold. I have no warm o’ercoat nor strong footwear, I have no warm underwear at all.

The planet shown in this film can be described in the words of Vladimir Vysotsky (this text is an interpretation of the poem “In this circle...”, written in 1971):

Why do I stand all at sea, Curse up hill and down dale? ’Cause each word that sounds here Calls to make the buy or sale.

The song was written in 1965.

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