Lel’ (or Lelo) is the Slavic god of erotic passion; Yarila is the Slavic god of fertility.
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I fell in love with you on amber day, ..When new-born laziness was bleeding ..In radiant gleam of azure ray ..From every grateful branch proceeding.
Your trunk grew white, as white as drunken daze ..Of lake-land waters foaming. ..And jolly Lel, with mocking plays, ..Your beams’ black hair was combing.
Himself, Yarila, gloriously did crown ..With verdant wreath your inky tresses ..And braiding it began to drown ..Sky’s azure tone with green caresses.
Sergei Gorodetsky with his wife: portrait by Ilya Repin, 1914
Gorodetsky (1884-1967) started his poetic life as a Symbolist; abandoned that movement and founded Acmeism with Nikolai Gumilev; and became a convinced Soviet poet – pretty much immediately after the Revolution, if this poem from 1917 is anything to go by.
Oh, how I loved you, land that bore me,
My Russia, freedom’s motherland,
When under whip you languished sorely,
Stayed silent did your people grand.
Your faith was wild and quite unseeing,
For resurrection long your wait!
And now that prison’s gates are freeing,
I see your victory in full spate.
As stately now in celebration
As when a slave and all was loss,
When dignity and exaltation
Were crucified upon the cross.
Of lasting peace for all the cosmos,
Of will, fraternity, love’s flood
You sang with ballads that were selfless
To peoples perishing in blood.
As sun in eastern aspect’s climbing,
From you a message thus is borne,
Bells hellish battle’s end are chiming,
Of living people’s truth’s the morn.
And day of garden’s beauty’s nearing
When enemies, who now are friends,
Like soldiers on the front mines clearing,
Will say: “The truth from you descends!”
Oh Russia, how I love you dearly,
Your people over world now raise
The fiery tablets for all clearly,
Unending freedom’s tablets blaze.
lingua fennica 