The poem was written at the beginning of the year 1917, which will be seen in Russia huge historical upheavals. It conjures up ignorant of all Contemporary archaic burial rites and grave goods. A Poet dreams of the possibilities of life: in the most humble earthly Form – as the Grass or in the cosmos as a star. He believes in the immortality of the soul, which is associated with the precious metal Gold. Alone, the soul, the piece of gold in the transitory human body, to survive as a “small sun”.
Vladislav Chodassewitsch, 1886 born in Moscow, came from impoverished Polish nobles and Jewish Intellectuals. From Hunger, cold and Terror in the civil war after the October revolution he fled in 1922 to the “Russian Berlin”, where hundreds lived thousands of country people as emigrants, and the development in their home country were waiting to see. Like many other intellectuals by the Bolsheviks expatriate, emigrate, he, in 1923, to Prague, wanders through Western Europe; Venice, Rome, Sorrento, and London is the name of the stations, before he leaves in 1925 and settled in Paris. There he lived in poverty and bitter of the fact of serious diseases drawn up to his death in 1939.
The poem is from the book “The way of the grain” (1920), whose eponymous opening poem on the 23. December 1917 was almost a year after the “Gold”poem. The one throws light on the other. There is a sower, in whose Hand is the seed “Gold” shines appears, before it falls into the “black earth”, where it will “die” and “out” will grow. The analogy with the soul, is also suggested here: “So gone my soul on the way of the grain: / Into the Dark to die and ed can occur, even.” Then my country will be “on” and “the people” called the walk through “this year”, die, and revive, because there is only “wisdom”: “the Living must go the way of the grain.” Chodassewitsch plays on a Bible instead (the gospel of John 12,24): “verily, Verily, I say unto you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, so much fruit it brings.”
In the waiting room of the re-birth
In the “Gold”poem, it is an individual, the dreams of his funeral, a I want to rise in the eternal cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The poem shows the Testament, the gesture of the “last will”, twice it means: I want, I want. But what is the symbolic tomb mean objects with which this person was buried in, right?
honey, poppy seeds, Gold. Nothing else: not ceramic, nor jewelry, nor weapons, neither of Bronze nor iron. Sweet food for the Afterlife, as in many cultures – not a Pharaoh took his “night journey” without honey cake pots and pans, honey. To poppy, the Plant, the noise, pain, lack and Forget promised. And finally, the metal of the eternity, everyone is weathering resisting, non-respectable by the destructive Power of oxygen. No other metal could symbolize the immortality of the soul is better than Gold. Therefore, the “little sun” in the discovered skeleton, which points to the “trace of soul”.
Who is buried here? No Roman would have preferred the fire-burial. A Scythian perhaps, a member of the warlike equestrian nomads in the southern Russian steppes? There is the grave of jewelry made of Gold played a significant role, and it was for a Russian easy to see the Scythian gold. Tsar Peter the Great had a “Siberian collection”, Tsar Nicholas I. made in 1852, these treasures in the “New Hermitage” in St. Petersburg available to the public.
