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In this lullaby, well-known to all Russian children, a mother is singing to her son. She is using the gentlest and sweetest words : Spi, malioutka, boud' spakoien... Spi moï angel, tikho, sladko... Spi, ditia moié radnoié... She wishes to keep him close to her but also she wishes him to grow and become a brave man like his father. She would like to send him into battle whilst, at the same time, protecting him. This conflict between two strong and contradictory desires, I imagine is felt by all mothers and I understood this when, having become an adult, I read the text by the poet Lermontov. As a child, I understood nothing of it, I allowed myself be lulled, this is why one sings lullabies.

About ten years ago, I was making a documentary film in a small Russian town which, having started as a rather vague chronicle, became a sort of tragedy without my meaning it to be. A young mother and her child die, brutally assassinated. For them and also for me, it became obvious that the music for this film should be a lullaby. It also became obvious to me that Nicolas should write it – well, to write it, to adapt it, to compose variations on its very simple theme.  When I asked him about this, he replied: "I have already done it, you know". And he reminded me of something I knew and had forgotten, which was that the theme of the lullaby had been slipped into a symphonic work called Souzdal, as a request from his sons, François and Alexandre. This is a sort of dream, solemn and hieratic, about a Russian town of the same name, or rather –  as Nicolas, when he composed it, had not been there –  is about the name of this Russian town, a name which brings to mind the domes of Russian churches, the metal of the iconostases, the high walls of a fort which one defends against invisible invaders, as in The Tartar Steppe. Also in Souzdalthere is an entrancing trumpet solo conceived as a homage to Miles Davis. I used it as it was, in a rather strange, but I hope convincing way, at a particular moment in the film Retour à Kotelnitch. Moreover Nicolas agreed to do what I had asked: to compose a dozen variations on the lullaby, all of which found a place in the film, this happening naturally as if the images were calling to them. The conversation between Nicolas and myself – about music, books and life – has lasted for at least forty years, it is precious to me and, I think, also to him. It was essential to me that the film had this imprint. If, on closing my eyes, I think of it, what comes to mind is always the long fixed plan where Galina Sergueievna tells us, with shrieking laughter more painful than any shedding of tears, a story which, sitting facing her and nodding my head from time to time, I only understood half of and which I listened to, petrified, in a sort of stuporous hebetude. Souzdal takes care of this. Souzdal,  here, is the equivalent of a voice off and I find it normal, in harmony with that which binds us, that the most intimate of my inner monologues should be irrigated by Nicolas' music.