Andrei Dorokhin

Ruslan and Liudmila

For you alone, enchanting beauties,
Queens of my spirit, for your sake
Did I convert to scribal duties
Some golden leisure hours, and make,
To whisperings of garrulous ages,
Once-upon-a-time my faithful task.
Accept them, then, these playful pages;
And no one’s praises do I ask
From fate, but shall be pleased to thank it
If one young girl should love, and pine,
And peep, perhaps beneath her blanket,
At these unshriven songs of mine.

* * * * * * *

An oaktree greening by the ocean;
A golden chain about it wound:
Whereon a learned cat, in motion
Both day and night, will walk around;
On walking right, he sings a ditty;
On walking left, he tells a lay.

A magic place: there wends his way
The woodsprite, there’s a mermaid sitting
On branches, there on trails past knowing
Are tracks of beasts you never met;
On chicken feet a hut is set
With neither door nor window showing.
There wood and dale with wonders team;
At dawn of day the breakers stream
Upon the bare and barren lea,
And thirty handsome armored heroes
File from the waters’ shining mirrors,
With them their Usher from the Sea.
There glimpse a prince, and in his passing
He makes a dreaded tsar his slave;
Aloft, before the people massing.
Across the wood, across the wave,
A warlock bears a warrior brave;
See Baba Yaga’s mortar glide
All of itself, with her astride.
There droops Kashchey, on treasure bent;
There’s Russia’s spirit…Russian scent!
And there I stayed, and drank of mead;
That oaktree greening by the shore
I sat beneath, and of his lore
The learned cat would chant and read.
One tale of these I kept in mind,
And tell it now to all my kind…

- Aleksandr Pushkin