The Tapes
Tanya Landau
Northwestern University
Somewhere in Saint Petersburg, Russia in a communal housing building, inside a small apartment, there is a box of tapes. Resisting time and space, they lay dormant, undisturbed for decades. As the dust collects and years go by, the music stored within them begins to fade into memories, moments, and absent experiences that continue to constitute my sense of self.
The apartment is my grandfather’s, the one in which my mother grew up, one that was once filled with the scent of home-cooked food and the sounds of tears and laughter. Her life seems like an alien world, doubly separated from my own experiences and yet very much alive. As she tells me the stories of her upbringing, the memories are recovered, reimagined, and retold. Thus, the apartment in Russia and the box of tapes become a part of me.
Figure 1. Interior and exterior of a communal apartment building in Russia.
In the middle of this liminality lies a very real box of tapes, one that has never been fully recovered in the present. As the tape ages, its ephemeral quality grows, degrading and aging along with its owner. With no way to confirm their physical form, would these objects cease to exist if they were undocumented? Their contents becoming unrecoverable music, unavailable to be analyzed or interpreted? (Abbate 2017, 88) I think not. This object has agency, it connects me to my past and what was once physical now exists in a sonic afterlife through what remains of my mother’s archival memory.
Figure 2. My mother is the woman in the middle of the back row of three.
The only glimpse I could get of the space in which the tapes resided was through video calling with my grandfather, an event that only took place once or twice a year. I gazed at the computer screen, seeing old couches, dusty bookshelves, and abandoned china cabinets. It was exactly as my mother left it back in 1995. Was it her I see laying on the couch listening to Vladimir Vysotsky or was it me? Laying back against the rough fabric, the smell of my grandmother’s cooking permeated the room as Vysotsky’s rough, emotion laden voice filled my ears with nostalgia.
To me, my mother’s memories and retellings are remarkably vivid and yet, for her, they have all but collapsed. I didn’t live these experiences and still they exist in my mind: the noise, the smells, the sound of the guitar, the white nights beyond the dusty window; this imagined reality is a liminal space that feels more real to me than the actual reality, a history of a place brought to life through memory and inherited culture. Is it my mother or me in the black and white photograph?
A temporal gap exists within my mother’s memories before they were so richly passed on to me, and throughout my upbringing I’ve been saturated with her recollections. I’ve never been to Russia, I’ve never been in my grandfather’s apartment, I’ve never seen the box of tapes, yet, somehow I feel that I was there. My consciousness is being yoked to the musical notes reverberating from an auditory imagination, moving through time at a pace dictated by the unfolding of bardic tones and timbres (Daughtry 2021, 145).
Walking a dangerous line between official and underground, the Russian bards spoke directly to the listener, and each individual who borrowed, copied, or stole a tape had an intimate relationship with each song and singer. My mother must’ve gotten her magnitizdat from a friend, one who may or may not have shared her same ambivalent feelings towards Russia and its government. The voices themselves are rough, harsh, and brimming with emotion. They speak in metaphors, parodies, and hidden meanings, all designed specifically for my mother’s generation and their idiomatic understanding of Russian culture and literature. She may have passed the tape on to another friend, who may have copied it in turn and passed it on again. The tapes spread amongst the youth, carrying with them the knowledge that they were not alone; they were present and they were listening. As expression became hidden in subtleties and implied meanings, the messages still came through to those who had the knowledge to understand them.
Figure 3. A man sits at the head of the table with a guitar, ready to play for the gathering.
The few pictures my mother brought with her from Russia tell an evocative story of community, perseverance and the power of collective memory. I feel connected to so much of this life, one I’ve never personally lived. As I sit at a house party around a wooden table, with food brought by those who can and plentiful libations to be had, I hear Vystosky’s voice playing on a small stereo in the corner of the kitchen, I imagine the improvised guitar playing of my friends and I recite Pushkin’s poetry as I drive home. I’ve lived these experiences through the culture and stories that my mother has passed down to me.
When I initially wrote this narrative, I was grappling with endless questions surrounding the mysterious tapes. I wondered, what would become of them, did they still exist or were they already discarded? Did my grandfather throw them away years ago like we suspect he did with my grandmother’s letters? And what would become of them when he passed on? Today I am left with more questions than answers, the tapes dematerialized and yet faithfully remembered. I’m left with insouciance towards them, at peace with their ephemerality.
A rich history has been passed down through time, with the collective memories and voices of a generation continuing to reverberate through the present and onwards to the future. As I begin new ethnographic fieldwork in the Ukrainian community of Chicago, I’m left wondering what my context is. Through multiple layers of separation, disillusion, and grief, what is the true property of these memories? How do I fit in amongst their complicated, interwoven temporal threads? Perhaps the tapes are really gone now, fully dematerialized from this world; much like, in the present, so has my grandfather.
REFERENCES
Abbate, Carolyn. 2017. “Overlooking the Ephemeral.” New Literary History 48 (1): 75–102.
Daughtry, J. Martin. 2021. “Listening Beyond Sound and Life: Reflections on Imagined Music.” In Harris M. Berger, Friedlind Riedel, and David VanderHamm (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures. Oxford Handbooks (2024; online edn, Oxford Academic, 14 Apr. 2021): 137-172.