In the year 1984, the USSR State Committee for Television and Radio
ordered a five-episode TV miniseries called "Guest From the Future"
("Гостья из будущего") based on the children's story "One Hundred Years
From Now" ("Сто лет тому вперёд") by Kir Bulychev. The five episodes
were broadcast across the Soviet Union from March 25 to March 29, 1985,
during the spring school vacation. During the final scene of the last
episode, and throughout the closing credits, the song "The Glorious Far
Away ("Прекрасное далёко"; "прекрасное" is variously translated
"wonderful", "glorious", or "beautiful") is played, sung by soprano
Tatyana Daskovskaya. The song is a poem by Yuri Entin set to music by
Evgeniy Krylatov. Both the miniseries and the song were huge hits.
In a 2002 interview, the composer Krylatov described the song as "a
call, a prayer, a plea that [our] children might live better than we
do." Entin's words translate thus:
I hear a voice from the glorious far away,
A voice amid the silver morning dew;
I hear the voice, and the alluring road
Turns my head like a carousel in my childhood.
O glorious far away, don't be cruel to me;
Don't be cruel to me, don't be cruel!
From a fresh start, to the glorious far away,
To the glorious far away, I begin my journey.
I hear a voice from the glorious far away;
It calls me to wondrous lands;
I hear the voice; it asks me strictly
What have I done today for tomorrow.
O glorious far away, don't be cruel to me;
Don't be cruel to me, don't be cruel!
From a fresh start, to the glorious far away,
To the glorious far away I begin my journey.
I swear I will be purer and kinder
And I will never leave a friend in trouble;
I hear the voice, and hurry to follow its call
On a road where there are no footprints.
O glorious far away, don't be cruel to me;
Don't be cruel to me, don't be cruel!
From a fresh start, to the glorious far away,
To the glorious far away I begin my journey.
Here is the song as it was sung in the miniseries by Ms. Daskovskaya. In
this version, Daskovskaya sings "it calls me to lands not heavenly"
instead of "it calls me to wondrous lands"; Entin changed the text
afterwards to "wondrous lands" at the request of Krylatov.
Other performances:
The Big Children's Choir (Большой Детский Хор) of the USSR State Committee for Television and Radio, conducted by A.S. Popov, with soloist Olya Korolkova;
Vladimir Zelentsov (heavy metal);
The Ukrainian pop music duo "Время и Стекло" ("Time and Glass");
A commercial for Aeroflot (Russian Airlines) featuring the song;
The Siberian string trio "Silenzium";
Yulia Savicheva and the children's choir of the All Russian State Television and Radio Corporation, with composer Yevgeniy Krylatov at the piano;
The Lithuanian rock group "Lemon Joy".
The expression "glorious far away" ("прекрасное далёко") is a curious
one; according to Russian Wikipedia, it was coined by the 19th century
writer Nikolai Gogol to describe Italy, where he lived for twelve years.
Some translations of the song lyrics render it as "glorious future",
drawing on the film's portrayal of the far future as a utopia filled
with technological wonders where, as Garrison Keillor might say, all the
women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children --
exemplified by Alisa Selezneva, the film's principal character -- are
above average. But there was no sense of futurity in the expression as
Gogol used it, only distance.
The remarkable thing about Entin's lyrics, written for the officially
atheist Soviet state, is not merely that they contain a prayer, the
threefold repitition of "don't be cruel", so reminiscent of "Lord, have
mercy"; but that the song as a whole describes a conversion, something
not unlike that of Paul on the road to Damascus. The singer hears "a
voice in the silvery morning dew" that "turns my head like a carousel in
childhood", leading the singer on a long journey to something glorious
and distant, by "a road on which there are no footprints." This is
powerful language.
One line in particular stands out: "А сегодня что для завтра сделал я"
("but what have I done today for tomorrow?"). Today, in a world
threatened by climate change, resource depletion, and a deeply flawed
economic system that promotes greed and selfishness and values the good
of the one over the good of the many, this is a question all of us
should be asking ourselves.
Just three weeks before the song was first heard by Soviet TV viewers, a
man named Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. During his six
years in office, profound changes took place in Soviet society that led
to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the abandonment of socialism,
and the rise of reactionary nationalism and kleptocratic crony
capitalism in Russia and the other nations of the former USSR. In a
supreme twist of irony, the song imagining a wonderful future has become
an anthem of nostalgia for millions remembering a happy childhood in a
Soviet Union now long lost. YouTube clips of the song have attracted
hundreds of comments expressing nostalgia for the Soviet Union.
"Конрад Карлович", writing in October, 2017, goes so far as to say:
"this power has sunk into eternity, like the legendary Atlantis. The
death of this great civilization was a tragedy of a planetary scale
comparable only to the fall of the Roman Empire."
"Mihail Raptoroff", in September, 2017) wrote:
"forgive us, Alisa; we have not lived up to your expectations."
"Dmitry Ermolayev", writing last month (November, 2017), posted:
"And communism was so close ... tears come to naught, when you realize -
how now we are far from social happiness. People, it was good - this is
our Soviet country. Yes, unfinished, but, it was not necessary to
destroy it. You have to finish it. Look into those eyes. After all, for
us now, these aliens are good. And we have ("оскотинились" = "become
like cattle?") in a market economy, in this backward ideological
paradigm of capitalism. After all, even at the end of the existence of
the USSR there was a hope for a bright future. A miserable bunch of
shameless, unprincipled thieves destroyed our hopes, engendering in us a
new pernicious idea of a personal material good."
"Marina Malina" wrote defiantly in October, 2017: "the victory of
communism is inevitable. V.I. Lenin. Death to those who betrayed the
USSR!".
"Antip Stonin" wrote just last week (December, 2017): "28 years [old?],
and I weep like a little boy."
I am sixty years old and American; the Soviet Union was our arch enemy,
but when I discovered the song, it brought me to tears as well.