The line «what will become of the Motherland, and of us» in the novel’s text is a direct quote from one of the best-known songs by the Russian rock band DDT – «Chto Takoye Osen» («What Is Autumn»), written by Yuri Shevchuk in late September 1991.
How it was written
The song was written by Yuri Shevchuk at a pivotal moment in Russian history – in late September 1991, shortly after the collapse of the USSR. The musician was living in a communal apartment on Sinopskaya Embankment in St. Petersburg, near the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. It was during a walk through the Lavra’s Nikolskoye Cemetery that Shevchuk wrote the song that would go on to become the band’s calling card.
Interestingly, not everyone in DDT embraced the song at first. Andrei Muratov, the band’s most radically minded member at the time, called it «pop trash» and refused to play it. But through a joint effort, the band members hammered out its final arrangement: Andrei Vasilyev suggested styling the melody after romantic 1960s music and wrote the electric guitar part, Alexander Brovko came up with the bass riff, Vadim Kurylyov worked out the chords, Igor Dotsenko added hard-rock drive, and Muratov, in the end, worked out the keyboard countermelody.
Meaning and content
The song is layered in its meaning. On the surface, it’s a lyrical piece about autumn as a season – «What is autumn – it’s the wind,» «a weeping sky underfoot,» «how much the leaves will tear away, autumn is forever right.» But a deeper layer touches on inner anguish and existential questions: «autumn has once again reminded the soul of what matters most / autumn, I’m robbed of peace again.»
The key line – «Autumn, will we crawl there, will we fly there, to the answer, what will become of the Motherland, and of us?» – captures the anxiety and uncertainty of the period when the USSR was collapsing and a new Russia was taking shape. Those words became a kind of slogan for an age of upheaval, giving voice to a collective bewilderment in the face of an unknown future.
The phenomenon of its popularity
By the mid-1990s the song had achieved extraordinary popularity, becoming one of the biggest hits in Russian rock music. It took second place on «Nashe Radio»’s «Vsyo Nashe Navsegda» countdown of the 100 best songs of the twentieth century, and the magazine «Ekspert» ranked it 7th on its list of the 100 most important Russian-language songs from 1917 to 2017.
The song’s popularity became a problem for the band itself. At every concert, audiences demanded «Osen’,» and at one point Shevchuk declared a temporary moratorium on playing it. He explained it this way: «A lot of good bands have been killed by a superhit. Think of the Eagles – ‘Hotel California.’ And that’s it, nobody knows anything else. DDT could easily have been buried by ‘Osen’.»
Cultural significance
By the time the novel is set, the song had already become part of the cultural code of the era. Vadim Kurylyov, DDT’s guitarist, later recalled: «At every concert, they’d clap politely, and then at the end demand ‘Osen’’ with such ferocity, as if to say: ‘You know, guys, we put up with your rock for two hours, now do us the favor of playing at least one decent song!’»
The song became the soundtrack to the era of change in the 1990s, giving voice to the mood of a generation that found itself in the «last general-seating car» of a rapidly changing country. The line «what will become of the Motherland, and of us» turned into the era’s rhetorical question, capturing the uncertainty and anxiety of a period of painful socioeconomic transformation.
In the context of the novel, this quote underscores the atmosphere of uncertainty in the mid-1990s, when the country had indeed «gone barreling off like a train with no engineer,» and many of its citizens felt like passengers on a train with an unknown route.