The RIA translator wins yet another Big Green Weenie Award. The title isn’t Dreams of Space… if it were, Yolkin would’ve used мечты, not планы. Again, the translator trashes Yolkin’s play on words (it has overtones of “Comic Aspirations”). He showed the daftness of some teen dreams by using a pompous title juxtaposed with a faintly-ridiculous caricature. On top of that, it’s best to keep the boy’s exclamation to a single word, as is it in the original… doing one’s best to keep the somewhat-sardonic comparison between the grandiose remark with the prosaic reality… you CAN do it. Is Yolkin commenting on his own youthful dreams?
Родина слышит,Родина знает(Rodina slyshit, rodina znyaet: The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows) is a very popular Russian song released at the time of Gagarin’s flight, and most Russians think of the one when they think of the other.
The Buranovskie Babushki are mentioned below, here’s their Party for Everybody… if that ain’t Orthodox, I don’t know what it is (it’s NOT “Party for the Chosen and Affluent Few”).
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The Orthodox movement Soboryane said that it plans to show posters all over Russia promoting Orthodoxy depicting Hollywood star Tom Hanks. Andrei Vorontsov, the movement’s chairman, said that posters depicting famous people, including two Oscar winners, the Forrest Gump star and Russian film director Nikita Mikhalkov, amongst others, with quotes about Orthodoxy, would appear ahead of a major religious holyday. Vorontsov said that they’ve carried out a pilot campaign in Stavropol, the capital of the southern Stavropol Krai, which was beset by conflicts between ethnic Russians and indigenous people from the neighbouring Caucasus.
The “We are Orthodox” campaign inspired Orthodox activists in 25 other oblasts, which have similar events in their hometowns, Vorontsov said. Komsomolskaya Pravda quoted him as saying, “Activists will place posters or banners… depending on how much money that they have”. One can see samples of the campaign’s posters, featuring ESC stars Buranovskie Babushki and the 19th century writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, amongst others, on Soboryane’s page on vKontakte, Russia’s most popular social network site. Members of the movement were asked to submit their favourite quotes of famous people for the campaign, according to vKontakte’s official page, which has over 4,000 subscribers. Vorontsov told The Moscow News, “We’re in process of negotiating with the people we want to participate in the campaign. We hope that Tom Hanks will agree to take part in it”.
Hanks, who converted to Greek Orthodoxy on marrying actress and producer Rita Wilson in 1988, is cited in Russian as saying that he realises the importance of attending church services and the questions posed by Orthodoxy. One of the posters also features an image of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, with the quote, “If you haven’t met God on earth, you won’t find him in space”. Given the difficult relationship the Soviet establishment had with religion, his words could well likely reflect atheist views as much as Orthodox ones. However, Vorontsov said that Church spokesman Fr Vsevolod Chaplin, best known for his controversial views, endorsed the campaign. He also told KP that Orthodox activists in the Ukraine and Belarus contacted the Soboryane movement in order to stage similar events in their countries.
