A birthday, when it comes at some astronomical, inconceivable time, is perceived differently than in the first or even in the second quarter of a century of life. On the one hand, the age figure is scary, but on the other, it’s still a holiday. Because, after all, life is a gift. I treat this gift differently from the beloved poet Alexander Pushkin, who wrote the immortal pessimistic lines: “A gift in vain, an accidental gift, / Life, why are you given to me? (…) I have no goal in front of me: / My heart is empty, my mind is idle, / And the monotonous noise of life torments me with longing.”
When I was 14, I loved these poems very much. Youth generally has an exaggeratedly tragic sense of reality. Although Pushkin wrote them at the age of 29, that is, no longer in his youth, even by modern standards. But there comes a time when you’re far from 29. And you discover that the gift of life is not accidental or in vain, that the passion in the soul, no matter who fills it, is happiness, and the doubt of the mind is a reward, no matter who excites it. Moreover, usually by the age of 50, the answer to the question of who is responsible for all these cataclysms that occur in your inner emotional and intellectual world is quite obvious. And then the final quatrain of Pushkin’s masterpiece becomes a guide to action. No goal? Hear the call for help. Is your heart empty? Love me. Is the mind idle? Read a book. Is the noise of life monotonous? Fill it with divine sounds.
My family knows that I don’t really like to order gifts. I’m waiting for surprises and flowers. But this time, my husband began to persistently ask the question: what should I give you? And suddenly, I clearly understood what I needed. The realization came from somewhere outside. Having felt a point of contact with someone who filled my soul with passion, remembering the “monotonous noise of life,” I, just like Bulgakov’s Margarita, literally blurted out my desire.: “I want a turntable for vinyl!” Well, and everything else that is necessary to equip an ideal acoustic space in which listening to analog recordings would be as perfect as possible.
You should have seen your husband’s reaction. It seemed that I had ordered a gift not for myself, but for him. Shaking his hands triumphantly, he muttered something like: “Down with the number! Long live analog recording! The lamp is forever!”
In 1935, my family – my grandmother, grandfather and their four children – moved to Moscow. On Chekhov Street (now this street has regained its historical name Malaya Dmitrovka), they settled in an apartment building built in the early twentieth century. A huge apartment with a bay window, with five-meter ceilings, with preserved luxurious parquet, with a closet, a maid’s room, and a back door was turned into a communal apartment. Where once there lived one very wealthy family, now there were several families of not at all rich Soviet citizens. My family settled down in one of the rooms. And then the war. My grandfather died in September 1941. Grandma agreed to leave for evacuation, somewhere in the Chelyabinsk region. In 1943, they decided to return. They sent the eldest, my mother, who was 17 years old, to organize the return.
And now – a happy homecoming. They entered the apartment, opened the door of the room… However, they opened it – it was said loudly: the lock on the door was torn off. Once inside, they froze: there was nothing in the room. No furniture, no belongings, no dishes – everything was looted. Mom recalled that everyone laughed together.
Mom got a job at a military enterprise. Grandma went to the scullery to work in the canteen to be able to feed the children. What the ration cards provided, of course, was insufficient for the growing children’s organisms. My mother’s first paycheck was a huge event. The family gathered to decide what the first purchase would be. Everything seemed unconvincing. After all, something has already appeared in the house – relatives and friends have shared it. And a strange decision was made – to buy a gramophone. And he appeared in our empty room, a 78–rpm shellac gramophone. The first records appeared: they were classics – Chopin, Beethoven. And also folk songs – Russian and Ukrainian. My grandmother was a simple peasant from Kuban, she sang very well.
The gramophone has been in our house for a long time, even I found it. Now I blame myself for being thrown away when more modern equipment began to appear in the house. But we don’t live in a museum and we don’t turn our lives into exhibitions. It’s not the subject that matters, but the family norm that I’ve learned since birth: constantly listening to music, buying and receiving new records as gifts, showing them to guests, collecting.
By the end of the 90s, I had about 500 CDs in my collection. For a long time, tape recordings have been competing with vinyl – on reels, reels, and cassettes. And then there was the digital revolution. There were recordings on CD, DVD, Blue-ray, some mini-discs, then the Internet treacherously attacked.
The fashion for vinyl turntables did not go away even at that time. On the contrary, like everything vintage and antique, it has become an elite entertainment for the rich. But I didn’t participate in it. My old Vega record player has fallen into disrepair. And with it, some part of my soul has become unusable. The one who fills the soul with passion obviously shrugged his shoulders, moved over and made room for digital content. For, as stated in the already mentioned novel by Bulgakov, everyone is given according to his faith.
My collection is sitting on the shelves, forgotten, useless to anyone. Until the moment when I wanted to shake off the “monotonous noise of life,” which, translated into modern language, should be read as “dead digital sound.”
And so it happened – a brand-new record player reigned in vinyl paradise. I went through my collection and found enchanting rarities in it. Many of the records seemed to be shouting joyfully, making me remember their origin. Episodes from childhood and youth came with them. For example, Beethoven’s First Concert performed by Svyatoslav Richter. I played this concert at the final exam in music school. And, in preparation for it, she constantly wound up this particular record in order to play synchronously with Richter. In any case, all the pace has been met. And here is the CD “On the wave of my memory” by David Tukhmanov. This is already a college. Someone came running and shouted: “They brought “On the wave of my memory” to the 100th!” And we ran out of the Ippolitovka (Music College named after M.M. Ippolitov-Ivanov) and rushed to the so-called 100th department store on Proletarskaya to the fourth floor, where there was a department of records. The queue went down the stairs to the first floor. And here it is, in my hands, for 1 ruble 45 kopecks.
From now on, we’re listening to records again with the whole family, most importantly, with our 14-year-old granddaughter. She chooses the disc she wants, and every time I see the excitement with which she carefully picks it up. There is some kind of magic, a ritual, in the very process of vinyl reproduction. We revel in sound, which is fundamentally different from digital. On marketplaces, we find rarities that people who get rid of unnecessary “junk” inherited from their “old-fashioned” ancestors sell for pennies.
Perhaps if there had been vinyl records in Pushkin’s time, he would not have complained about the monotonous noise of life. I would have listened to Mozart’s “Don Juan,” whom I loved so much, and even the loneliness of Mikhailovsky’s exile would not have been so painful.
