банька

a bath-hut

"Warm the bath-hut, my love, set it steaming,

I will lash myself glowing red,
On a shelf somewhere near the ceiling
I will squash all my doubts – kill them dead."
(из перевода "Баньки по-белому" В.Высоцкого, выполненного Kathryn Hamilton)
(интересное примечание к переводу:)
"A lengthy treatise would be needed to really explain the role of the bath-hut in the Russian way of life – or what used to be the way of life in peasant Russia. It was, and in some areas still is, an institution – much like the ancient Roman baths, the Turkish baths, the Japanese baths, or the Finnish saunas, the difference being that Russian bath-huts are family affairs, not public institutions, each farmstead having a bath-hut (endearingly referred to as ban'ka, not the formal banya) of its own. < … > With Russia's severe climate, warming oneself in the steam of the bath-hut, accompanied by ritual self-flagellation with a birch-twig besom, rolling naked in the snow or dipping in an ice-hole in a lake or river to cool off, is a real delight. Steaming oneself in the bath-hut was also a necessary prelude to a religious or any other kind of feast, a remedy for nearly all types of illnesses, and sometimes an act of preparation for death.– The hero of this song is apparently a Siberian peasant branded kulak during forced collectivisation who resisted arrest and was deported from his native village. Peasants from European Russia were taken to Siberia, while those in Siberia could naturally be taken merely to another part of Siberia (this explains verse seven). Many peasants had faith in Stalin even in the camps, they believed he knew nothing of his hirelings' atrocities; hence the widespread custom of tattooing his profile on the breast, described in the song – and the anguished soul-searching on finding out that Stalin hadn't been all that blameless, after all. Touching as it does on the raw nerves of society, this is probably the most important, and characteristic, of all of Vysotsky's poem-songs.– Tr."