Million alykh roz

Before it was Russian, this was a Latvian song. Raimonds Pauls wrote the melody for "Dāvāja Māriņa", with words by Leons Briedis, and it was performed in Latvia in 1981. Its lyric was a gentle, domestic one about a mother's comfort and the hardships of life. When Alla Pugacheva recorded the tune in 1982, the poet Andrei Voznesensky gave it an entirely different story. Voznesensky drew on a legend about the Georgian painter Niko Pirosmani, who is said to have filled the square outside a hotel with flowers for a French actress he adored. In the song, a poor artist sells everything he owns to buy a sea of roses for an actress, who glances at them and moves on, while he keeps the memory for the rest of his life. Pugacheva, remarkably, did not like it. She argued with Voznesensky over the words during recording and later admitted that the more she hated the song, the more popular it became. And it became very popular indeed. It was a hit across Europe and Asia and the most popular single in Finland, Japan and Mongolia, where it also opened an album released under its name in 1983. Singers in Finland, Hungary, Sweden, both Koreas, Vietnam, Japan and many other countries recorded their own versions, nearly all based on Voznesensky's Russian story rather than the Latvian original. A tale of a grand, hopeless gesture of love turned out to need no translation.