Pyotr Mamonov. 2010/Georgiy Kurolesin/RIA Novosti
Qalam strives to explore the interpenetration of different cultures. To this end, we have decided to launch a series of playlists in which music mediates between different geographical and ideological spaces. Our first playlist is called ‘West to East: One Hundred Best Songs’. It will be updated several times a week, and its curation will focus on how Western pop culture has reflected the realities of the East, whether they are musical, geographical, religious, or political. (The terms ‘West’ and ‘East’ should be taken as broadly and arbitrarily as possible.)
This song by Pyotr Mamonov isn't among his most famous works, typically performed at concerts by the Mamonov and Alexei group in the early 1990s. Mamonov’s usual urban hallucination about street lamps flickering and Lenin breaks off in the middle into an absurd cry of ‘Let's go to China!’ It is clear that China is not a geographical point here, but a node of the subconscious. Funnily enough, something similar happens in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel King, Queen, Knave (1928), when one of the heroes, in the midst of vulgar thoughts about women, also suddenly realizes that ‘it would be good to go to China’. Interestingly, this phrase is absent from Dmitry Nabokov’s English translation.