БабочкаBabochka

Tarkovsky wrote “Butterfly in the Hospital Garden” in 1945. In December 1943, near Gorodok in the Vitebsk region, an explosive bullet hit him in the leg, and at the field hospital gas gangrene set in. His wife, Antonina Bokhonova, got a pass into the front-line zone and brought him to Moscow, where at the Institute of Surgery Professor Vishnevsky performed his sixth amputation. “Gradually, step by step, poem by poem, the poet returns to life,” writes his daughter Marina: from “Polka” and “In Memory of Friends” to “Butterfly in the Hospital Garden” and “Star Catalogue.”

His first book, due out in 1946, never came out after that August’s Party resolution on the journals Zvezda and Leningrad, and “Butterfly” reached a book only in 1966, in Zemle — zemnoye (“To the earth, what is earthly”).

The song leaves out the ending, which is where China is explained: the poet begs the butterfly not to fly away — “Don’t, don’t go looking for China… Soul, what do you want with China?” Vladimir Kaev, in an essay on Proza.ru, sees in her a nurse in the hospital garden with something Eastern in her face, and the soul — “a flicker of colour and line. A drawing of chance and love.”