Octobriana's Song

Octobriana's Song, like Octobriana herself, is endless. The part that we print here is the 12th of a series of instalments which began to appear in the PPP magazines in 1961. It is really the song of all the young members of PPP. Is it merely an extension of adolesence like most of their output? Almost certainly, and this is hardly surprising.

At any rate it is a cry of longing emerging from the isolation of Soviet totalitarianism, a cry of longing for freedom and a fuller life. I think that this 'pseudo-poetry', as the members of PPP themselves called it, occupies a unique place in the genres of romantic, exotic adventure. It has a peculiar suggestiveness, it is the key to a forgotten corner of the soul of modern man, arousing in us the nomadic instinct of our remote ancestors.

 

        Heart
        beating heart
        immense and unending
        foaming with the ardent blood of spring
        burning with the hot smell of trodden grasses
        and red heathers of the Mongol steppes
        carried by the gale from the northern plains
        Octobriana's heart
        her frenzied cry
        -- or was it a song?

        Who knows?

        A song, most likely
        Her white she-camel stirred the red desert dust
        Out of the unknown they rode to nowhere.

        Rockets boomed somewhere overhead
        but she did not hear them.
        Novas exploded in the galaxies
        and she heard only the cry of migrating birds
        right overhead
        and those flocks drove her on.
        The white woman's big breasts leap in the gallop.

        Like a shot cougar
        she roared her song.

        She knew her song had no end
        because neither had her journey.

        Her song had no words.
        Now her screams returned
        in thousandfold echoes
        from the volcanoes on the horizon.

        That echo stirred her blood
        in the saddle between her thighs
        and in her nipples.

        She knew nothing.

        Now she only foreboded and felt
        that for her there was but one way
        and one salvation --
        the horizon.

        The longing for the horizon and what is waiting beyond it
        the rainbow-coloured atolls with whispering palm trees
        the sunken ruins of Lemuria, Atlantis and Mu
        speech and rituals of people of another colour
        a savage temple shining under an outlandish sun
        campfire smoke in the jungle
        tropical night alive with millions of insects
        seeking after lost caravans
        hunts for he-gorillas and safaris for ivory
        junks and kayaks on the Pacific waves
        perhaps even the Flying Dutchman
        a glinting keen assegai
        unknown shores
        clothed in mists
        cannibal drums beating
        and the roaring of sacred beasts.

        The inextinguishable longing for life
        and the wind carries her song to the unknown and beyond
        the Javanese kriss at her side clanks through the desert
        and the tireless legs of the she-camel
        carry Octobriana beyond the horizon
        and on
        and on
        and on

by Petr Sadecky

extracted from Octobriana & The Russian Underground (1971)

Index