I Love My Files

Nothing pulls me into time travel like the contents of my filing cabinets. Stemming from an era when teachers devoted significant effort to building files for every potential subject, my filing cabinets have been dragged from the music building of SMU, to our house in Alvord, to our office in Bowie, to our ranch in Bowie, to two different temporary houses in Dallas, and now to our home in North Carolina. Throughout the moves, little has been purged.

I love my files. I do not love the condition they are in, though. Many folders are out of order and the hanging files are wilting under the pressure of too much content. But the content is precious to me. A good deal of it arose from specific moments I recall with pleasure or panic. Take, for example, my file on the theremin, suspended in one of several drawers devoted to historical, artistic, and musical topics. A strange electronic instrument based on radio waves developed in the early 20th century by Russian genius Lev Theremin, the theremin was envisioned as a revolutionary type of orchestral instrument. It ended up finding its home as an eerie punctuator in musical scores of suspense films and as a source of countermelodies in Beach-Boy songs, including Good Vibrations.

I remember delving into the theremin during an especially trying time in my second semester of teaching at SMU. Charged with offering a class on 2oth-century music, I stayed in a panic the whole term. Beyond the works of Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Ives, I was not well-versed in 20-century repertoire. There were tons of pieces I needed to listen to, innovations in vocal and instrumental techniques to explore, and endless connections with modern art, literature, and politics to be mastered. Into my theremin file went lecture notes, articles from scholarly and popular journals, photos from a string of sources, and the New York Times obituary when Theremin died in 1993 at age 97.

Catty-cornered to this cabinet stands drawers filled with letters. Oh, my goodness, the letters! Hundreds, thousands of pages of letters, particularly from my mother whose single-spaced-typed or beautifully penned pages mirrored everything that happened once I left my childhood home and embarked on, well, the craziness of my life.

Along with letters from friends, and colleagues, there are letters from astonishing figures whose lives were crossed by my small path (e.g., the glorious pianist Shura Cherkassky). There is also a file for a letter from Peter Pan (not a joke)

Then there’s a special file of letters from former students. One of the dearest ones, surely the most succinct, was written by an undergrad whose younger brother sat in on our music-history class while visiting him at college. My student wrote:

I think I’ll let my brother think all professors are like you. He might decide to go to college.

But I found another letter today—a copy made by my dot-matrix printer of a letter to a “Professor Mickelson.” It was written in 1983 in Limburg, the historic West German town where I lived for two-and-a-half years after my research grant to Leningrad ended.

Apparently, Professor Mickelson and I were exchanging letters, and were friendly enough for me to confess my relief that the German language finally was settling in my tongue, even as I lamented the weakening of my hard-earned fluency in Russian. I gave Mickelson an update, too, about progress towards finishing up my dissertation. I asked if he knew of any cassettes or VHS recordings of Bulgakov plays, and sent greetings to a “Mrs. Holdsworth” in his department.

Scanning this multi-page letter, unable to recall how or where I had met Professor Mickelson, I was about to toss it into the “who needs this anymore” pile (i.e., the trash), when I spotted this paragraph:

I know people have said this before, but even though a person can leave the Soviet Union, something of one’s heart and mind stays behind, and life cannot be the same again. It seems as though something always aches inside a little, just a little. On days which have a certain smell in the air, or color to the sky, the ache is bigger. In corresponding with the small group of Westerners I met there, I know that the feeling is shared by most. I’m not sure I will ever understand what I saw, or felt . . . or feel, but as I work with the poetry or the music, the relationship between myself and the material is one of identity.

This paragraph threw me back into the period when I was still reeling from the searing experience of surviving the challenges of living in the USSR, and yet grieving that the extraordinary experience was over. The fact that I got a grant (IREX) to conduct research there was miraculous—few scholars gained permission to enter Soviet archives in those days. While years had been spent pursuing the possibility, I never was confident it would work out.

But it did. And I embarked upon one of those life-changing periods many of you know well, particularly if you studied abroad, served abroad in the military, worked as a missionary, or engaged in long-term circumstances radically different from your life hitherto.

That year of research marked not only my first opportunity to travel to another country, but it felt like stepping onto a different planet. Despite my academic preparation, I was as naïve about handling a new culture as anyone could be. Plus, my goal of gaining materials for completing my dissertation was continuously thwarted. There was no guarantee of getting a second shot at returning to Russia.

Certainly I could not have imagined, just a few years later, arriving in Moscow on an NEH grant. Nor could I have imagined the rich professional life awaiting me in Dallas as a professor of music history, a city rich in Russian immigrants with whom my language skills would blossom again. Sitting in Limburg, I could not have fathomed the era of post-Communist freedom that erupted six years later. Nor could I have foreseen myself joyfully organizing and leading tours to Russia for enthusiastic patrons of The Dallas Opera and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, or sailing the Russian Waterways on the Volga Dream as study leader for Smithsonian Journeys. Finally, in the hugest leap of all, my wildest imagination could never have envisioned adopting two children in Russia, as Hank and I did in the second half of the 1990s.

But when I wrote those lines to Professor Mickelson, I did know this much: my life had been altered. The hard road of acclimating to and, in tiny ways, triumphing over the difficulties of the Soviet system had changed me. The few, but vivid, draughts I had drunk of Russia’s forests and fields had posited a permanent scent of nostalgia in my nostrils. The grey skies above the Neva opened a new music in my ears. Most importantly, the incomparable gifts of friendship, offered at personal risk from new Soviet friends, changed my understanding of love. These people bravely, surreptitiously, led me into underground theater performances of plays by the often-banned author Mikhail Bulgakov; they found tickets for me to staggeringly powerful opera performances and concerts, including a mystical one of a Shostakovich symphony conducted by the legendary Eugene Mravinsky. An especially brave friend shuffled me into my first Russian Orthodox service, held in the sapphire jewel of St. Petersburg’s baroque St. Nicholas Cathedral on a cold March night where, in disbelief, I experienced a packed-to-the-roof Easter Vigil that was still going strong at 3 a.m. when my legs collapsed.

So, I’m not going to throw that letter out. I’m going to file it in a folder of Russian Memorabilia. Or maybe I’ll make a new tab—something like “Prophetic Utterances” or “Recollections of Profound Beauty.” And into the cabinets it will go, to join its many companions—paper records of a life that has been richly blessed.

Image: filing, supafly (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)