Dem'ian Bednyi, 'A Red Soldier Says Farewell'
A Red Soldier Says Farewell
As my dear mother
was seeing me off,
All of my extended family
came running up:
And where are you off to, young man?
Where to?
Little Vania, might you not be going
To enlist!?
Methinks the Red Army
Will always have enough bayonets.
The Bolsheviks will get by
Without you.
Are you going against your will?
Or perhaps you are eager?
Vania, Vania, you will die
for nothing.
Your mother has gone grey
from suffering on your behalf.
In yon field and hut
There is so much to do!
How well things are going for us now:
Spiffy-jiffy!
How much land got dumped on us
All at once!
Past hardships are no more,
Not even in our memory.
It would be better, dear, for you
To marry Arina.
You could live with a young wife.
Not just lay around!”
And then I made a bow to
my very own mother.
I bowed to my whole family at the threshhold:
“Don’t whine about me.
For God’s sake.
If everyone were like you,
You do-nothings,
What would be left of Moscow?
Of Russia?
Everything would go back to how it was,
to a hard fate.
Again they would take away from us
our land and freedom;
The nobleman would squat on the land
Like a vicious Maliuta Skuratov.
We would all wail in the bonds of
The cruelest type of serfdom.
But I am not going to a dance --
to some sort of shin-dig,
As I cast my elderly mother
upon your care.
With the Red Army I will go
On campaign,
I will wage deathly battle
Against aristocratic vermin,
What with the priest and the kulak --
Everyone’s talking about it:
A bayonet in the fat gut
Of the exploiters!
So you won’t give up? Then die,
The devil with you!
Paradise will be all the sweeter for us,
If it is taken by force,
Not the bloody, drunken paradise
Of those who would exploit us --
But our native Rus’, a free realm,
The realm of the Soviets!”
by Dem’ian Bednyi (1918)
As my dear mother
was seeing me off,
All of my extended family
came running up:
And where are you off to, young man?
Where to?
Little Vania, might you not be going
To enlist!?
Methinks the Red Army
Will always have enough bayonets.
The Bolsheviks will get by
Without you.
Are you going against your will?
Or perhaps you are eager?
Vania, Vania, you will die
for nothing.
Your mother has gone grey
from suffering on your behalf.
In yon field and hut
There is so much to do!
How well things are going for us now:
Spiffy-jiffy!
How much land got dumped on us
All at once!
Past hardships are no more,
Not even in our memory.
It would be better, dear, for you
To marry Arina.
You could live with a young wife.
Not just lay around!”
And then I made a bow to
my very own mother.
I bowed to my whole family at the threshhold:
“Don’t whine about me.
For God’s sake.
If everyone were like you,
You do-nothings,
What would be left of Moscow?
Of Russia?
Everything would go back to how it was,
to a hard fate.
Again they would take away from us
our land and freedom;
The nobleman would squat on the land
Like a vicious Maliuta Skuratov.
We would all wail in the bonds of
The cruelest type of serfdom.
But I am not going to a dance --
to some sort of shin-dig,
As I cast my elderly mother
upon your care.
With the Red Army I will go
On campaign,
I will wage deathly battle
Against aristocratic vermin,
What with the priest and the kulak --
Everyone’s talking about it:
A bayonet in the fat gut
Of the exploiters!
So you won’t give up? Then die,
The devil with you!
Paradise will be all the sweeter for us,
If it is taken by force,
Not the bloody, drunken paradise
Of those who would exploit us --
But our native Rus’, a free realm,
The realm of the Soviets!”
by Dem’ian Bednyi (1918)