Egor Letov is one of those musicians who, through his work, exposed the harsh reality and illuminated the movement of the future. His songs live in our hearts, as well as his memory. One of his most powerful and famous compositions is the song “My Defense”. In it, Letov described the end of the Soviet era, the impasse of the whole universe and the country "which does not exist."
Reality turned into a kind of surrogate, cheap synthetics. “The last boat”, on which one could sail away from this endless madness, alas, is already too far away. The "last flashlight", illuminating the path to a brighter future, was dissolved in the emptiness and decay of being. Then only darkness, suspense and disappointment.
The lyrical hero of this text lives only good, pleasant memories of a clean and lost past. They cause tears of nostalgia in him:
And lumps of memories sniff in the throat ...
The “Glass Eye Sunny Bunny” is an indicative oxymoron. A synthetic, artificially created domestic political climate is an open and crude profanity over everything familiar and human.
In modern society, all living, real, pure value elements, such as contemplation, creation, and craving for beauty, have depreciated. Everything is aimed only at complete mechanization, deprivation of naturalness and individuality, absolute depersonalization and global degradation:
The plastic world won.
Rejoices the cardboard alarm
who needs a slice of july sky?
This whole picture of the current reality is false absurdity, devoid of meaning and life in its true representation. That is why even with a glass eye, the cheap world is blind. In the refrain, the author focuses on this, pushing foreheads into blindness and the biological ability to watch. Having an eye does not mean the ability to see. So the sheer visibility, the illusory nature of the world does not indicate that it is alive. On the contrary, everything that exists has long died and is only a shell. Only “my defense” helps the lyrical hero to remain a man in the storm of this madness and absurdity, without losing honor, soul and reason.
