Why Are Whales Silent?

Record cover text: “And don’t you know why whales are silent? But the answer to that is just as simple—say, as to the question: ‘Where do dreams come from?’ or ‘What do I know?’ In any case, today we’ll try to figure out much more of what we see every day—together with the poet Igor Maznin, who came up with these questions, and the actor Vsevolod Abdullov. We’ll attempt to understand thoughts that come to mind not only for people, but, let’s say, for the cheerful dog Barbos…

We’ll meet a “cheerful, carefree” grasshopper about which adults have invented so many unflattering things, forgetting entirely that he… is a poet. We’ll go to a “long-ago castle under the hill,” to an unheard-of feast; we’ll scramble there along a moonbeam, to where dreams come from; we’ll learn what goes on in nature when spring arrives, and how winter, reluctantly and grumbling, gives way to it.

Every person, no matter how old they are, has moments when they want to suddenly swing the window wide open and see what’s happening out there—outside, in the enormous, mysterious, cramped and boundless world. Suddenly you want to forget all affairs and troubles and think about all that makes up such familiar and yet unfathomably beautiful and mysterious life.

And then the scientist takes up a camera, straps on a backpack, and, making his way into the deepest wilderness where even the paths aren’t visible, begins to creep like a boy, following the tracks of some little fox—and once he catches up with it, he quickly lifts the camera to his eyes. Then a little girl, on her way from kindergarten, suddenly falls into deep thought while watching snowflakes whirling in the air, and surprises the talkative father with her rare, not-at-all-childlike remarks…

So it is with Igor Maznin’s poems too. Light, open, lines that practically memorize themselves—phrases-questions by the poet—as if suddenly opening windows into an unknown, alluring world full of secrets, of nature and human sensations and thoughts, of small discoveries and great good curiosity about life.”
N. Puchkina