Моя жизнь - My Life

Great in its past, infinite in its future is my life.

Many centuries have slipped my memory. I remember only being bound in chains, tied to my prison - my work.

It was I who assaulted and broke down machines two hundred years ago. It was I, still fully human, who revolted against my cold enemies. I've given all my passion to this iron struggle. I have then plead to gods for help, and yet I've lost many a head in this fight. I despaired and threw myself onto the machines' sharpened chisels, I crushed them, but I also pounded myself against the metal clamp.

It was I who flooded the streets of the world with my blood a hundred years ago. I unfurled banners with words of rebellion and revenge.

It was I who later fought against myself on each side of the state borders and tore my own body against their barbed wire.

And today it is again I, but seemingly born again, marching ahead in a formation. Everything passes through my hands and tools. I create pipe bridges, roads, machines, microscopes. Through the pulse of my lathe, through the stroke of my saw I communicate the most intimate of thoughts.

I carry the merciless easel of knowledge.

I go everywhere equipped with my hammer, my chisel and my drill. All over the world... I step over borders, continents and oceans. I make the entire planet my homeland.

Here I stand before a workers' house in Berlin. I stand in adoration: here is my enormous, heavy, awkwardly strong home. Everything in it is mine: an arch at the entrance with a carved out hammer that tears itself from the stone wall and asks for a song, an anvil at the secretary's desk, ranks of workers coming and going.

I enter a workers' co-op building in Manchester and begin to tremble with joy: it is mine! It was born far away, but it resonates in me and feels close.

I am under the vaults of the Labour Exchange building in Paris. It is smoked black. Foreign at first, built with foreign money, not workers' money, it became ours, and its black walls became symbols of an overstrained tired force.

A sorrow... A pit, a grave... An explosion in Southern Africa. A thousand victims. It is a blow... it is... a blow... for me... right in the heart.

Smokeless shafts, covered with ashes. At the world's edge, a monument to my heart, enclosing the world.

My past has died away, my present rushes steadily along, and the lights of my tomorrow are already pulsating.

I do not miss my childhood, nor do I regret my youth, my only goal is far ahead.

My life does not measure in years.

I live for centuries and millenniums.

I have lived since the world was made.

I will live millions of years to come.

And my motion shall have no limits.