Sound image as a tool of representation of difficult heritage

Novikova Valeriya Sergeevna Postgraduate student; Department of History of Philosophy and Logic; National Research Tomsk State University Lecturer; Tomsk College of Economics and Industry 175 Irkutsk Tract, Tomsk, 634040, Russia val_novikova97@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

Sound can be an expression of the mentality of an epoch, a guide to the sphere of supra-individual forms of cultural expression and socio-political projection. The auditory channel is an important symbolic informant, along with visual, through which social and artistic meanings are transmitted. Soundscapes are powerful tools for remembering, recognizing, and critically reflecting on the invisible and ineffable. Where access to visual or verbal information storage channels is limited for us, auditory helps us pay attention to aspects of reality that are not captured by other mediums. Through the dissection of soundscapes, we can see the appearance of a certain space, the nature of the processes taking place in it, fragments of the local life color that do not lie on the surface, the sound is charged with spatiality. Sound itself often appears as an affective and ideological tool for encoding reality, forming and modifying semantic matrices. Acoustic patterns geographically and culturally "map" our reality, crystallize places and events for us. A person masters the living space, weaving it with sound networks, delineating both geographical and symbolic areas. Through sound, a person territorializes cultural landscapes, arranges and marks boundaries, making them understandable, familiar and, consequently, safe for themselves. Deleuze and Guattari have repeatedly expressed the idea of the territorializing meaning of sounds that "domesticate" an uninhabited space: "The role of the ritornel is often emphasized: the latter is territorial, it is a territorial assembly. Bird song — a bird sings in order to mark its territory in this way... Greek frets and Hindu rhythms are themselves territorial, provincial, and regional. The ritornelle can also assume other functions — loving, professional, social, liturgical or cosmic — it always takes the earth with it, it possesses the earth, even the spiritual earth as what accompanies it, it remains in an essential relationship with Birth, with the Native" ^{[1, p. 519]}. Moreva expresses a similar idea about the verbal development of an uninhabited living space.: "They say a man entered this world inaudibly. Inhabiting the silent, intimidating and at the same time attracting space with its immensity, he tamed it, caught it with a trap. Man seemed to "nest" in the word, in its sacred depths, delineating with the word the "circles" of his being, as well as the inevitability of an eternal return "to his own circles"" ^{[2, p. 9]}. The need to verbally tame space comes from a metaphysical fear of the alien, never seen before, incomprehensible, in which there is no sense of "home", and therefore the territorial functions of sound are primarily aimed at delineating the boundaries of the native, soothing: "the original ontos of language is associated with a saving, healing, conjuring ritual word that protects a person from misfortune. and fear" ^{[3, p. 44]}. The primary sound environment as a whole acts as one of the determinants that determine the formation of a person as a subject of listening: the mother's voice as the initial sound reality in which the child is immersed, a kind of acoustic first substance, creates a sense of security: "This voice called us outside when we were resting in the placenta, it invited us to a meal, gave comfort and he instructed them on the heroic path with the words of a lullaby" ^{[4, p. 281]}. The tonality of the mother's voice as a container of peace and protection determines which sounds a person will subsequently pick out from the general noise, which will determine how melodic compositions are close to his spirit, and what to leave beyond the boundaries of auditory perception.

Thus, the territorial work of listening reveals itself in the plane of symbolic signification of socio-cultural processes. Sounds mark historical facts and events as positive and negative, desirable and undesirable, reliable and dangerous. Thanks to sounds, we navigate the world of value categories, automatically distributing the acoustic material entering our auditory field into structural blocks of harmonious, unmusical consonances or chaotic, disorganizing noises in each act of listening, and according to the characteristics attributed to these dichotomous groups, endowing the sources of these sounds or related objects, events and processes with symmetrical assessments. Brandon Labelle notes a similar characteristic of sounds, pointing to the embeddedness of auditory experience in the processes of social and political design of space.: "With these acoustic shapes and frames, the soundscape and concepts of acoustic design are recycled as territorial and deterritorial processes shaped by the social and political tensions that lie at the very heart of listening. Acoustics as such ... should be understood as a division of the audible, in the practice of which one can find a number of contests and imaginations, each of which determines the form of listening in a special way" ^{[5, p. 11]}. In addition, sounds play an important role in the formation of cultural memory, influencing human consciousness through the mechanisms of associations and emotional reinforcement. The body of memory is formed by the forms of representation through which an event is presented to us, including sound sources that give voice to the recorded experience. Just like individual memory, collective memory is lined and organized, among other things, by auditory objects. Thus, the world is a map drawn by organized acoustic arrays, structured by sound artifacts.

But how can we reveal the sound patterns and mechanisms of auditory-symbolic marking of the territory, if we are talking about those layers of the social, sealed in collective memory, the echoes of which are considered inconvenient and undesirable in the current context, deliberately suppressed in modern discourse, displaced from the dominant cultural narrative, predicted by the official political vector. Such forms of cultural memory displacement occur when we talk about working with difficult heritage. Difficult legacy is a well–established term that is used to refer to tragic events of the past associated with cultural trauma and affecting the structure of group identity. Sharon MacDonald, in her book on difficult legacy, defines this concept based on the relationship that builds between the desired image and the real image: a difficult legacy is "a past that is recognized as significant in the present, but which is also challenged and does not tolerate public reconciliation with a positive, self–affirming modern identity" ^{[6, p. 10]}. Since heritage is traditionally understood as something that is associated with greatness, dignity, confidence and acts as a source of pride, the dissonance of emotions caused by objects associated with tragic events and phenomena provokes a discussion about the fate of such heritage and the sustainability of collective identity ^[7]. Neil Smelser gives a detailed definition of what a difficult legacy is.: This is "a memory that has been recognized and publicly trusted by a relevant group, and the recall of an event or situation that (a) is loaded with negative affect, (b) is presented as indelible, (c) is considered threatening the existence of society or violating one or more of its fundamental cultural assumptions" ^{[8, p. 44]}. Thus, in the concept of "difficult heritage", the aspect of the presence of the past in the present, its painful influence on the modern cultural landscape, is primarily important to us. The second important point, as mentioned earlier, concerns the concealment of the facts of the past as too traumatic and not fitting into the desired image, threatening collective self-determination. This omission is often accompanied by the deliberate forgetting of inconvenient facts, the achievement of cultural "amnesia" by concealing or destroying the remains of remembrance of the event.

Thus, a difficult legacy is a form of cultural memory inspired by trauma, which acts as one of the constitutive foundations of human identity. There is a wide range of opinions in the research community on the question of what cultural trauma is. In this article, we will adhere to a constructivist approach that differentiates a traumatic event as the root cause and trauma as a subsequent fact of collective meaning. This approach reveals the symbolic mechanisms behind the transformation of a particular life episode into a universal complex experience, loaded with cultural meanings and involving strong emotional involvement. This approach to cultural trauma was developed by Jeffrey Alexander as part of the "strong program" of cultural sociology ^[9]. Roy Ierman adheres to a similar approach, pointing out the primary role of representation in the formation of memories: how an event is reproduced in memory is closely related to how it is presented, with the help of what means and tools: "Unlike psychological or physical trauma, when there is a wound and the experience of intense emotional suffering of an individual cultural trauma means a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the fabric of society that affects a group of people who have achieved a certain degree of cohesion. In this sense, it is not necessary for all members of the community to feel the trauma or for any of them to experience it directly. However, an event is necessary that would become a significant "cause", and its traumatic meaning must be confirmed and perceived; this process takes time and requires mediation and representation" ^[10]. Thus, trauma is not a negative event itself, but a conscious process that connects the past and the present through a system of images. The traumatic experience for us is mediated by a number of mediums, which creates a gap, a space-time distance between the event itself and its affective experience, selectively reconstructing the event-the root cause. Ierman, like McDonald, assigns a significant role to trauma reflected in speech and works of art in laying the foundation for the formation of collective identity. P. Shtompka concludes that cultural trauma is a dynamically developing process in which several successive stages can be distinguished: from the formation of a disorganized, unstable environment conducive to the occurrence of trauma, before overcoming the trauma as the final phase. Trauma, according to Shtompka, is both objective and subjective: its root is in real phenomena, but it does not manifest itself until it is noticed and interpreted. Trauma is formed where the core of the collective order is disrupted, where there is a gap between the familiar, structured environment and some previously unfamiliar state of affairs, perceived negatively, painfully, repulsively, creating tension and dissonance ^[11]. One of the most famous researchers of cultural memory, Jan Assman, clarifies that in the case when the memory space comes into conflict with the social and political reality of modernity, we are dealing with "intensified, artificial forms of cultural memory, with cultural mnemonics, the purpose of which is to generate and maintain non–modernity" ^{[12, p. 23]}. And Aleida Assman, pointing to the inevitable presence of a temporal gap between a traumatic event and the publication of this event as the content of cultural memory expressed through symbolic intermediaries, discovers that the victim's position does not imply tools for its organic inclusion in the semantic core of individual or collective identity: "The traumatic experience of suffering and shame only finds it difficult to access memory, for this experience is not integrated into the positive self-image of an individual or a nation. There are no culturally proven forms of reception and memorial traditions for victimized subjects. <...> Therefore, it happens that a traumatic experience receives public recognition, acquires symbolic articulation only after several decades or even centuries after the historical event itself. Only then does it become an integral part of the collective or cultural memory. There is a long way to go before the traumatized memory of the victims is recognized, accepted as historical knowledge and becomes part of the collective memory" ^{[13, p. 77]}. According to M. Hirsch's concept, representatives of subsequent generations can incorporate cultural traumas into the system of their own memories, giving rise to the phenomenon of "post-memory" ^[14]. Thus, post–memory is not just ancestral memories passed down to representatives of the current era, but the memory of the past consciously preserved by descendants, the connection with which is of particular importance for those who did not witness these events: "The acceptance of the performative nature of post-memory commemoration as an active and proactive component of identity adds to its original context, associated with with inherited trauma, an element of conscious self-determination, turning it into one of the basic elements of collective identity, integrating several generations of a family, social group, into a single memorial fabric" ^[15]. Thus, we repeat once again that for the emergence of such a configuration of memory and its release into an open social space, a system of representative intermediaries is necessary, i.e. various forms of objectification given through a number of cultural entities: art, museum, everyday practices of commemoration, media, etc. ^[16]. Accordingly, since memory is constructed in social interaction as a symbolic reality, modern conditions will determine exactly how the past is seen, how it is constructed, remembered or forgotten, and a change in the cultural and political context will entail a transformation of cultural memory, developing new ways of interpreting history. In order for the memory of a traumatic event to be fixed in the public consciousness and become a component of collective identity, its preservation must meet the urgent needs of the social group: "Victims of the tragedy maintain the memory of it so that in future generations it becomes an integral part of the collective self" ^{[17, p. 831]}. That is, the consolidating nature of trauma is, among other things, due to the need of a certain community to remember in order to prevent a repeat of this event in the future ^[18].

The purpose of this article is to try to understand how we can interact with difficult legacies not through visual means, as is most often the case, but through auditory artifacts. The specifics of the goal set also determine the expected novelty of the research. In general, the problems of collective memory in most works are developed based on the primacy of the visual, conceptualizing mainly visible, directly observable forms of representation of historical experience in the cultural field. Classical memorial discourse is based on the analysis of visual artifacts and their inclusion in the understanding of the constructed whole. However, the rehabilitation of hearing and the inclusion of sound sources in research discourse can provide the study of collective memory with the necessary optics, avoiding the errors and shortcomings of visually-centered epistemology and focusing on the search for new ways of talking about the past, culture and trauma. This study is another attempt to overcome the paradigm of gaining knowledge set by vision and build a sound topology of trauma. To begin with, we must do archaeological work in the field of listening: in some way "excavate" sound objects, extract them from under the layer of time that once absorbed them, and catalog them in order to draw attention to historical events and processes in a new light. Then we must bring to the fore the thoughts of how these sound objects are revealed to us in the present in memorial discourse. Thus, we should examine the listener's relationship with the social environment that dictates what we hear and how we hear it.

The object of the research is a difficult legacy imprinted in cultural memory. As an example of dealing with a difficult legacy, in this article we will focus on the topic of Stalinist repression. Despite the fact that a lot of time has passed since then, the spirit of the past emerges through Russian everyday life, "full of Soviet reminiscences" ^{[15, p. 75]}. The topic of repression remains acute and dramatic, since "the consequences of the GULAG have not yet been eliminated by Russian society, they persist in culture and science, in relations between people and the state" ^{[19, p. 183]}. At the same time, these issues still remain little discussed both in everyday and academic environments, and their representation in cultural works is practically not understood by modern theorists. From Nikolai Epple's point of view, despite the apparent obsession with the past, modern Russia has failed to properly work out the trauma of the Soviet terror, the memory of which remains an alien and inaccessible experience for many: "The reason for being caught up in the past is its incompleteness, the inability to properly bury and mourn the dead, to enter into inheritance rights, to draw conclusions from history and After completing one cycle, start the next one" ^{[20, p. 19]}. The lack of a systematic national reflection has led to the fact that there has not been a consistent assessment of this period in public discourse, which once again determines the relevance of addressing this issue.

As sources to which one can appeal in studies of the acoustic representation of cultural trauma, we will take the sound sequence in films that problematize the theme of repression and analyze which sounds act as semantic accents lining the soundscape of constructed historical memory. Accordingly, the subject of the study will be the sound image as a structural component of the cultural memory of the country's repressive past, clothed in film linguistic means.

A sound image in a movie

So, we need to analyze the features of the sound language that accompanies, frames and emphasizes the visual series in films reflecting on the repressive past. As a film material representing the treatment of sound patterns, the author selected the following films: "Coma" (1989), "Tomorrow was War" (1987), "Tired of the Sun" (1994), "Sofya Petrovna" (1989), "It's not scary to Die" (1991), "Defender Sedov" (1988), "Enemy of the People – Bukharin" (1990), "Lost in Siberia" (1991), "Captain Volkonogov Ran" (2021), "For You and Me" (2023), "Waves" (2022), "Ashes and Dolomite" (2023). The listed film works fall into two chronological groups, each of which has its own specifics of film linguistic (visual and sound) reflection on the indicated issues: paintings of the Perestroika period and the modern depiction of Stalinist repressions.

Based on comparative analysis and cultural and philosophical interpretation, we will try to answer the question: what audibly unites these paintings, and how they highlight the relationship between official, positive rhetoric, which displaces traumatic events from the self-identification of the people, and polar discourse, which seeks to preserve the memory of a negative, unpleasant phenomenon of the past and pointing out the danger of oblivion? In addition, since the changing vector of political development and the degree of public interest in accentuating and deploying a particular topic determines the content, texture and general tone of cultural memory, the ways of representing tragic events of the past are also changing. Models of recreating the past are reorganized by the "changing contextual framework of the moving forward present" ^{[12, p. 43]}. Therefore, one of the objectives of this study will be to try to trace the difference in the representation of traumatic experiences associated with the experience of repression in Perestroika cinema and modern filmography.

The first thing you should pay attention to in the paintings of the Perestroika period is the rich musical accompaniment. Each painting is marked by a wide range of sound images that reveal the semantic accents and dramatic tones and accents of the cinematic canvas, which allows us to easily trace the author's thought and his attitude to the topic of repression. The paintings of the modern stage are more restrained by sound expressive means, which is one of the characteristic features of the film language structure, reflecting changes in the socio-political situation of the state, as will be discussed later. In general, analyzing the sound matter of artistic utterances of both periods, we can note some representative features and common auditory-semantic patterns found in the sound fabric of these films.

One of these features is the juxtaposition of musical harmonic organization, which embodies order and the sanctioned political and ideological way of life of the highest ranks, noise destruction, which expresses a threatening gap in the holistic cultural and value fabric and the exclusion of oppositional views from the acceptable ideological landscape.

This technique is often used by the authors in films representing camp life, where footage from the lives of warders, colony workers and bosses are intertwined with melodic compositions or popular pop songs of those years, while the sound fabric of prisoners' lives is built on polyphony, dissonance, cacophony.

In the film Coma, sound images representing the lives of women in the colony come to the surface in the form of swearing and overlapping conversations, weaving a dense web of noise around the visible space. In "Lost in Siberia", similarly, the auditory field of barrack life is lined with discordant hubbub, shouts and guffaws. Musicologist Inna Klause, collecting and systematizing data on the sound life of GULAG prisoners, notes that in the memories of many prisoners there are observations about the incessant noise, consisting of swearing, shouting and educational agitation (Klause I. The sound of the Gulag. [Electronic resource] – URL: https://nkvd.tomsk.ru/media_news/inna-klauze-zvuchanie-gulaga / (date of access: 05.12.2024)).

In addition to the polyphony, the noise palette of camp life consists of the sounds of construction tools striking as the embodiment of monotonous labor. This sound image is reflected in another form of representation of memorial culture: on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression, a symbolic Bell of Memory sounds – a rail suspended on a chain, which was invariably beaten by the working life of prisoners in the camps.

In the judicial-political drama "Enemy of the People Bukharin", the trial is periodically interrupted by the sound of sawing boards – everyday life intrudes into the theater of the absurd, reminding of the absurdity and props of the present, in which everything is artificially put together on the move.

The auditory antithesis to this mode of organization of the film language space is formalized melodic motifs. In "Coma," these are complimentary songs about Stalin and the party at the refectory table after the toast of praise given by the guests. Such harmonic elements act as a unifying auditory symbol through which citizens identify with the authorities, reproducing the official ideological discourse and by the very act of reconciling the environment, cutting off opposition forces as an external, foreign chaos in relation to this environment.

Deleuze and Guattari point out that music, as a harmonic formation, performs the function of organizing and stabilizing chaotic energy of the center: "A child overcome with fear in the dark sings to calm down. <..Lost, to the best of his ability, he defends himself and, with a sin in half, orients himself thanks to the song. Such a song resembles a rough sketch of a lulling and stabilizing center within chaos.<...> the song itself is already a leap: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and every moment risks falling apart. There is always some kind of sound in Ariadne's thread. Or in the singing of Orpheus" ^{[1, p. 517]}. And one more representative fragment: "And vice versa, now we are at home. But your home is not given in advance — first you need to draw a circle outlining such a dubious and fragile center, you need to organize a limited space. <...> And the forces of chaos — as much as possible — are kept outside, and the inner space protects the terminal forces for the sake of completing the task or for the sake of a structure that still needs to be created. <...> So, voice or sound components are very important — a wall of sound, or in any case a wall, at least some of the bricks of which consist of sound. The child hums to accumulate strength for homework required at school. A housewife hums or listens to the radio when she organizes the anti-chaotic forces of her work. A radio or TV is like a sound wall around every home, they mark the territories (and the neighbor protests when it's too loud). For the sake of lofty structures, like founding a city or making a Golem, we draw a circle, but mostly we walk in circles as if in a children's dance, combining consonants and rhythmic vowels corresponding to the inner forces of creation as different parts of the body. A mistake in speed, rhythm, or harmony would be a disaster, for it would destroy both the creator and creation, bringing back the forces of chaos" ^{[1, p. 517]}. Thus, organized sound material, i.e. music, serves to mark out the territory and form an internal, "ringed" space of the native and familiar, leaving the forces of chaos beyond the threshold.

The territorial functions of radio are widely represented in many of these films. Radio acts as the main translator of the ideological position of power, forming a thick auditory veil that penetrates into the life field of the household, hanging over their daily routine as a suffocating phonetic dome and hermetically enclosing the interior of the house to a uniform mode of perception. In this context, radio ideologically invades the boundaries of the household environment, occupies the territory of formerly autonomous regions, and unifies the sound landscape of intra-house discreteness within the framework of the state whole. In the film Sofya Petrovna, the radio broadcasts the all-encompassing and persistent voice of Soviet propaganda, flooding the immanent plan of the house. Sofia Petrovna's son and his friend, being staunch supporters of the established government and exponents of the ideas of the new order at the beginning of the film, assemble the very radio that will be a constant background throughout the subsequent narrative.

In "Lost in Siberia," the radio carries speeches about Stalin and the achievements of the Soviet regime around the barracks, creating a parallel reality of the utopian system. And in the film Enemy of the People Bukharin, Gorky states with dignity in one of his dialogues with Bukharin that Stalin himself gave him a radio to listen to music and remember the leader. The penetration of state-inspired music into the household and the system of everyday practices here is associated with a demanding invasion of the government itself into the personal home, which is a space of peace and security.

Thus, the invisible eye of power seeps into houses and apartments through the auditory organ. The panopticon as a system of disciplinary supervision, production of "obedient bodies" and their management turns into the power of hearing. The invisible body of power, which weaves its voice around the living space and is located simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, provides total mechanisms of social manipulation and omnipresent control based on fear of being caught.

But the musical function of organizing chaos and searching for acquaintances and relatives is not only the sound capture of domestic territory by ideological forces, it is also embedded in the lives of the victims of this auditory appropriation. In "Lost in Siberia," prisoners envelop their living space with musical components available to them, outlined in such simple forms as ditties and dances. In "Tired of the Sun," melody is the thread connecting the characters to the world of idyllic serenity in search of peace and spiritual salvation: their whole lives are filled with music as a form of remembrance of the missed paradise of the bourgeois past. And even Commander Kotov, detained by law enforcement officers and aware of his fate, sings on the way to the place of execution. A song is a way to protect yourself from the threatening outside world, to encircle your inner habitat with a harmonious sphere.

However, there are also examples of films in which musicality itself is split into the expression of true art and various forms of imaginary art: genuine musicality as the embodiment of loyalty to cultural patterns and moral purity is attributed to suppressed groups, while the manifestations of the musical life of the ruling elite occupy a place among the tinsel buffoonery and are identified with noise matter.

For example, in the same "Coma", the bravura pop music performed by officials and security forces is contrasted with the reading of Marina Tsvetaeva's forbidden novel by the main character, for which, according to denunciation, she receives a sentence. In "Tomorrow was the War," the lyrical idealist Yesenin is contrasted with the apologist for revolution and classism, Mayakovsky. And in "Tired of the Sun", the auditory gap between the old noble world, destroyed by the socialist machine, and the new, proletarian world, emerging on the remains of a bygone aristocracy, is presented through the conflict of two key dramatic figures – a representative of the era thrown into oblivion, musician Mitya and commander Kotov. The scene of Mitya playing the piano with the accompanying dances of the household draws a completely tangible ideological boundary between the creative vivacity, musical fullness of the former nobles and the artistic immunity of Kotov, an alien element knocked out of the idyllic kingdom. The sound here acts as a marker dividing the world of one house and one country in two.

In the cinematic elegy "It's Not Scary to Die," the main character, being a violinist, is herself the personification of musical harmony, coupled with the lost world of the intellectual past. In almost all dramaturgically significant scenes, the theme of the "Sad Waltz" by J. Sibelius is used, intonationally referring to the times of balls that have irrevocably passed into the past, which the father of the main character sometimes recalls with nostalgia.

In general, in all films, scenes of the highest emotional intensity, such as episodes of arrest or disturbing news, are sonically marked by dissonance, polyphony, or a rolling tragic melody reflecting the affectively unbalanced state of the hero. Such sensually mobile sound matter is audibly opposed by rhythmically monotonous, routine sounds as an attempt to normalize catastrophic events through the optics of a monolithic collective whole. For example, in Sofya Petrovna, the scene of the main character receiving a message about her son's arrest is accompanied by a growing hum, on top of which radio sounds are layered, mixing a mottled sound canvas into a mushy noise substance. An antagonistic pair to this acoustic intensity is the sound of clattering typewriters, giving the tragedy a modus operandi. This monotonous, totalizing sound removes from the public consciousness everything private, personal, intimate, connected with the sensory-emotional sphere, leaving only a schematic, structurally ordered sound pattern on the surface of the auditory field.

Another feature of the sound representation of the repressive system is the use of silence as a sign of non-presence, emotional numbness. The use of silence is more typical for modern films that reflect on the problems of difficult heritage. The change in the auditory texture of the film language space is associated with a change in the mode of existence of the political and cultural environment and speaking practice, with a change in the attitude of the authorities or the intellectual elite towards the events of the past: from glasnost of the perestroika era to silence, ignoring, neutralizing, hiding or even denial as mechanisms of oblivion in the present, including the "normalization of Soviet terror" ^{[20, p. 87]}. That is, traumatic memory as a phenomenon determined by the contextual situation is characterized by heterogeneity ^[21]. In the modern film reflection on the figure of the functionalist executioner and repentance, "Captain Volkonogov ran" there is practically no musical accompaniment, leaving room for questions addressed simultaneously to nowhere and to everyone specifically. Silence here indicates a certain meaningful void in the space of formalized consonances, the inability to find musical expressions commensurate with the scale of a historical event, to complete all the complexity of the phenomenon and the variety of semantic shades into understandable euphonious schemes. Therefore, silence acts as a strict factual basis.: there is nothing to say, because, on the one hand, everything is clear, and, on the other hand, nothing is clear; this is a rejection of the musical word, firmly and persistently stating the real state of affairs, leaving no room for composer's allegory and romanticized metaphor. This is an attempt to give a word to space itself, which is not sealed by formalized intelligible schemes and generalizing articulations. Dumbness is the only appropriate reaction here. In the conditions of this apparent emptiness, when the bright hopes of perestroika were replaced by a new round of denial and concealment of the difficult past, silence as a figure of representation of this process opens up space for searching for new answers that had not been noticed or spoken before: "When the present is silent, the past can sound in an amazing way" ^{[22, p. 779]}.

One of the few moments of breaking the musical silence in the drama "Captain Volkonogov Escaped" is torture, accompanied by the performance of the song "Polyushko–Polye". Here, visual and sound contrasts, or otherwise audiovisual counterpoints, make the internal tension between the horror of what is happening and its ordinariness more pronounced for law enforcement officers, affecting the viewer's affective background with maximum force (this technique is also used in perestroika paintings: in the film "Enemy of the People Bukharin", when the main character, lying in the camera, recalls the past, a cheerful Soviet song about the motherland sounds in the background, and shots of Stalin waving to the applauding crowd are interspersed with shots of prisoners sailing past Bukharin in wagons).

Another striking distinguishing feature of the modern utterance about cultural trauma is the change in the mode of questioning and making sense: this is no longer a hermeneutical movement in the spirit of Dilthey, a penetration into the life of the spirit, but a view from the current contextual horizon, an attempt to comprehend the past in its own language, organic to the current moment. In this sense, "Waves" and "Ashes and Dolomite" enter into a dialogical connection, forming a space for searching for a language in which the voice of the dead and the landscapes in which they are buried will break through the resulting auditory void. The director and performer of the main role in the film "Ashes and Dolomite" articulates through the mouth of her heroine the cornerstone task of modern understanding of a problematic story: we need to find a way to talk about the past not in borrowed official language, provoking rather indifference, but from ourselves, through personal living, personal contact with the world. Grieving should become a tangible process, a form of living the loss through not only spiritual, but also physical practices of growing together with the place. The sound here does not belong to the anthropological dimension of being, but to a superhuman whole, diffused in nature, matter, and the elements. It is no longer enclosed in artificial compositional assemblies, this realm of common places, but breaks through from the objects themselves, which have left traces of collective history, the voices of other people's lives. Sound is released from human-dimensional coordinates, from alienated, artificial speaking, since the experience itself is higher than intellectual comprehension, cannot be comprehended by speech explications. Therefore, the sound fabric of both films is lined with ambient roars, organic noises, and low-frequency hum. Human speech appears here rarely and rather as something foreign, clumsy and unnatural, imbued with false expressiveness, a literary intention to curb and decorate reality. Listening to the world by itself is a key motif of both paintings. In "Waves," one of the characters, addressing both his friend and the audience, says "Do you hear?", urging them to abandon redundant, inappropriate words every time and pay attention to space. And a little later he postulates: "In the beginning, there was a word, but it was unlikely that this word was "man." And our words are nothing but trouble." This postulation of the need to turn to silence as listening to being correlates with Heidegger's ontology: "the lightning of being comes from silence: true being cannot speak except through silence, speak with the voice of silence" ^{[23, p. 274]}. Silence here is a symbol of a person's presence in existence, of a person's openness to that hidden, inaccessible to the surface eye, which requires special, almost impossible attention. This is a return to the very essence of being, the semantic point through which a person's individual being comes into contact with the integrity of the world ^[24].

In both films, there is a scene where the hero dives his head under water in order to hear the call of the past, to contact those who are at rest in the depths. In "Ashes and Dolomite," the heroine pronounces the names of the dead under the water column, thereby restoring their subjectivity. Such underwater gurgling is an inarticulate, semi–articulate language that articulates the human and the natural, the autochthonous, and is what modern cinema is trying to find in terms of talking about trauma.

Mechanisms of socio-cultural semantics of sound in the structure of collective memory

So, based on the analysis carried out, we can identify, firstly, a number of common sounds passing from one picture to another, and, secondly, the antagonistic nature of the organization of the sound field in films representing the problems of difficult heritage. Accordingly, a logical question arises: why does the auditory whole break up into dichotomous sound-noise components and how is the connection formed between a certain sound subjectivity and the semantic nodes that crystallize around these subjectivities, deriving the sound image as a structural element of cultural memory.

First of all, it is worth noting that a difficult legacy is an expression of the relationship between the imposed desired and the suppressed undesirable, in which imperious dispositions are clearly embodied: "national or cultural trauma is always associated with a "battle of meanings", a struggle with an event" ^[10]. As a model for interpreting the functioning of society, we can take Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the continuous alternation of two polar modes in the life of a social system – organized and unorganized states: "Two poles are defined as follows: one is the enslavement of production and willing machines by herd systems created by these machines on a large scale with a certain form of power or selective sovereignty the other is inverted subordination and inversion of power; one is molar and structured systems that destroy singularities, select them and regulate those that remain in codes or axiomatics, the other is molecular multiplicities of singularities, which, on the contrary, treat large systems as a large amount of material suitable for their development" ^{[1, p. 195]}. The circulation of events and phenomena within the social field occurs through the permanent interaction of these two vectors of processality, two multidirectional flows: "one [goes] — the lines of integration and territorialization, which stop the flows, dam them, reverse them or reshape them in accordance with the internal limits of the system, so that they produce images that begin to fill The field of immanence inherent in this system or this set is represented by escape lines along which decoded and deterritorialized flows are directed, inventing their own non—figurative slices or schizos that produce new flows, always overcoming the wall of code or territorial limit that separates them from the desired production" ^{[1, p. 195]}. Thus, defining the nature of these modes of functioning of society, we can say that "the first stream is focused on the stable, self–identical, constant existence of an established structure, the establishment and conservation of the present, the reduction of singularities to a universal, invariant norm; the second - on the spontaneous, autochthonous and uncoded existence of the unique" ^{[3, p. 74]}.

If we outline the conceptual matrix of Deleuze and Guattari's theory in the field of cultural memory, then the official rhetoric of power is territorizing flows that seek, through universal codes and an integrative structure, to subordinate to their control, regulation and suppression everything that is qualitatively out of the centralized order. These streams bring to the fore only the facets of phenomena that are attractive at a given time, so the past changes its configurations: it falls silent, then it sounds again. In terms of sound, these territorializing flows correlate with musical listening, which determines what exactly we hear. The difficult legacy is the deterritorializing noise for a society of strict, law–abiding ways and "blind" prosperity: "Noise is deterritorializing streams that break through formalized musical harmonies; this is what they seek to uproot from the space of sound by authoritarian listening forces. Noise, entering the field of sound, changes the configuration of the latter, deterritorializes it, generates new flows, constituting an environment that rejects established macrosocial conglomerates and patterns" ^{[3, p. 75]}. These noise flows wrest the monopoly on memory from the hands of power structures, prevent its unification and blurring, persistently awaken traumatic experiences undesirable for the established order: "In conditions of oppression, the memory of the past can become one of the forms of resistance" ^{[12, p. 77]}. The mechanisms of injury formation as a distortion of a regulated principle and legal conformity are also analyzed by Shtompka: "There is probably something in human nature that tends to order, habit, repeatability, duration, standardization, predictability, and self-evident. This satisfies our desire for existential security. Trauma appears when there is a split, displacement, and disorganization in an orderly, self-evident world" ^{[11, p. 10]}. That is, the injury is associated with a violation of normality. Thus, the discursive field of social reality is permeated with antagonistic orientations, which are reflected in the sound mapping of cultural memory. Listening is embedded in the struggle for territory and belonging ^[5].

Thus, relations in the sphere of power are marked by certain sound characteristics that additionally differentiate hierarchically segregated social formations. These sound characteristics are polarized in the form of dichotomous pairs indicating the position of a certain social group within the system. For example, harmony is chaotic, sublimity is low, sacredness is undesirable, solidarity is fragmented, loudness is quiet. Thus, the living space is outlined by organized soundscapes that define an authoritarian mode for human relations.

The binary tandem "harmony-randomness" is reflected in the clearest form in the representation of power relations through polar sound and noise arrays. The preference for compositionally organized acoustic objects and the attraction to formalized sound models exists in us for a reason. Our inner intention for harmonic perception, structural listening, and tuning into a melodic line is initially built into our perceptual apparatus, implicitly soldered into every act of sound absorption. This mode of perception of heterogeneous soundscapes is rooted in the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres, which we unconsciously incorporated into our own conceptual scheme as a listener's guide. Our entire social experience constructs us as subjects of musical listening, aimed at recognizing harmonious/chaotic, rhythmic/disordered, appropriate/inappropriate and striving to structure and crystallize the acoustic material entering our listening field, since the concepts of musicality, intervals, and rhythms are embedded in our consciousness, through which the above cognitive operations are possible ^[25]. Sound is a danger to an ordered whole, because it is ephemeral, elusive, and intangible, which is why government structures seek to retain it, subordinate it to generalizing presuppositions and orientations, and to universalized codes. The government seeks to monopolize the sound field, strictly distinguishing between audible and inaudible, sound and noise, acceptable and undesirable. Maxims about the role of music in state building can be found in ancient authors, in particular Pythagoras and Plato. Pythagoras believed that the same harmony and proportionality should be observed in the social structure as in the harmonic harmonies produced by celestial bodies. And Plato, continuing his thought, insisted that musical art, strictly controlled and regulated by the state, is an effective means of forming and educating a personality. This is confirmed by concrete historical examples: from the very beginning of the existence of the Soviet camp system, music became an important part of the official "cultural and educational work", the dissemination of which was put forward as the slogan of the authoritarian ideological machine. Under the guise of harmony and euphony, the repressive system tried to obscure its violent nature: "Music here has the task of justifying the camp system in the eyes of "civil" society" ^[26]. In addition, the purpose of such work was the re-education of a person, i.e. an attempt to make a detail out of a loose, chaotic unit that fits into the overall picture, into a harmonious society of a single order. It was an attempt to counter everything deterritorializing and therefore dangerous with a certain projection of integrity.

This uprooting of disordered, haphazard elements from a centralized whole was reflected in the development of the USSR music scene in the 1930s. The musical life of the 1920s is characterized by a general revolutionary trend, emerging under the banner of the emancipation of sound from any externally meaningful semantic layers. Before Lenin's death, the sound environment was a platform for experiments, where noise compositions were created, various electro-musical instruments and sound-noise machines appeared, research programs on innovative work with sound were conducted, utopian projects arose. Then, after the figure of Stalin came to power, a monopoly on sound expressions prevailed, characterized by authoritarian bureaucratic control and the dominance of socialist realism in all spheres of art.: "The fundamental distinction between official and unofficial, and the associated doublethink, is becoming the norm of culture. Recognition of a person as a musician, artist or artist becomes the prerogative of the state" ^{[27, p. 253]}.

Therefore, in the field of memorialization, we unconsciously attribute harmonic characteristics to what is associated with the imposition of order, the crystallization of familiar forms and the limitation of variability, that is, with power with appropriate intentions and resources. And everything that opposes the ultimatum norm is fixed in cultural memory as producing noise gaps and gaps.

Regarding the characteristics of "sacredness-undesirability", historically determined mechanisms for attaching specific socio-cultural meanings to certain sounds are also clearly traced. Murray Shafer, having introduced the concept of sacred noise (sound), attributed it to those auditory units, the right to produce which belonged to the bearers of power. These sounds were loud and dominant in the acoustic landscape of the area, but even this did not so much determine their belonging to agents of power as the ability to produce them without social censure. In the Christian world of the Middle Ages, such sounds include a church bell. This sound was attributed a sacred character, since it signaled the establishment of a connection with the divine: loud sounds were needed in order to force the deity to listen. Despite the fact of the uncontrolled intrusion of rolling auditory arrays into the social space, these loud sounds did not fall under the social ban on noise, were considered uncensored and, on the contrary, ordered the collective reality with their deafness: "One sound constantly rose above the noise of bustling life and lifted all things into the sphere of order and tranquility: the sound of bells. In everyday life, the bells were like kind spirits who, with their familiar voices, either called the townspeople to mourn, or to rejoice, or warned them of danger, or called them to piety" ^{[28, p. 54]}.

In the period of the 1930s and 50s, the radio (reproducer) became such an organ of sacred sound production, spreading the voice of power in the inner-house and urban space. The loudspeaker carried ideologically colored musical compositions or political messages through the streets, acting as a sound source that determines the course of life of the townspeople, inevitably setting their worldview a certain sensual and emotional mood. Therefore, the sounds of the radio became one of the structural components of the cultural memory of that time, representing the position of power in this system ^[29].

In modern Russian cultural memory, the sacred core that holds collective identity is no longer the figure of Lenin and the day of the October Revolution, which glorifies the "finest hour of humanity and the dawn of a new era," but the Stalinist myth, which shifts the center of gravity to the May 9 holiday, serving as a symbol of Stalin's victory over Nazi Germany. The modern historical narrative of Russian society is built around a commemoration of the military achievements of the Soviet era, which serve as an assemblage point of national identity ^[15]. Victory Day celebrations, with their noise, pomp, and deafness, break into the auditory fabric of the city, but they do not cause general discontent with their volume, do not encounter resistance from urban residents, but, on the contrary, form some necessary basis of social reality. The sounds of the parade are sacred noises, raising the cult of Stalin's triumph.

At the same time, the Stalinist myth glosses over the crimes of the regime, they have no place in the cultural memory of Russia. Cultivating the theme of military heroism associated with the victory over Nazism, the discourse of tragedy is replaced by the narrative of the victor, and the images of winners and losers are placed at the forefront of public discussion, overshadowing the images of victims and executioners ^[21]. Victims of crimes are consigned to oblivion, finding their place only in counter-memory ^[30]. In this sense, the memory of Victory Day, cultivated by the official rhetoric of the government, overlaps with other memories of Stalin-related repressive policies of the regime. Therefore, in terms of sound, the noisy solemn marches on May 9 are opposed by the mournful silence on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression. With its emphatic auditory pointlessness, it enters into an antagonistic relationship with the motley sound peals of the parade, focusing on what is on the other side of the festive solemnity. An acoustically empty space becomes a platform for unfolding meanings, a background on which one can hear hidden, once-buried sounds. Silence in this context manifests itself as a sign of death and mourning, as "the opening of the border between the sphere of life and the sphere of death, the danger of chaos for society" ^{[31, p. 124]}. In addition, trauma, due to its logically catastrophic nature, cannot be described in language, therefore, "rituals of symbolic blankness - for example, minutes of silence - turn out to be the most effective means of expressing memory of the irreparable" ^{[32, p. 16]}.

Accordingly, in the relations between the government and its subordinate groups, sounds that attempt to dominate the auditory landscape or remind of the fallacy of the totalitarian system are considered undesirable. Such sounds can include either disordered, polyphonic noises that are proportionately loud to sacred sounds, or, conversely, silence that opposes itself to the soundscape of power. Sound undesirability is always built as an oppositional category in relation to the auditory landscape of power, i.e., a derivative of sound that is recognized as legitimate and preferred.

Close to the categories of "sacredness-undesirability" is the binary pair "upland-lowlands". The sounds produced by suppressed groups are often brought to the cultural periphery, identifying them as marginal or inferior forms of sound creation. Examples can be camp ditties or "thug songs". Due to their sacred character, the sound compositions created by authorities and those who expressed their will were attributed to the features of sublimity, nobility, and pathos.

Next, it is necessary to mention the poles of "consistency-fragmentation". We have already said that the sounds recognized as sacred were attributed to the authorities. Sometimes they also performed a consolidating function: the bell united the community socially, since the parish is an acoustic space limited by the "range" of bell ringing ^[28]. As a rule, the authorities seek to show that they have unity, universal agreement, and consensus on fundamental issues of society on their side, while the opposition has fragmentation, internal disunity, and fragmentation. In terms of sound, this corresponds to integral musical canvases expressing recognition of the common principles of the organization of sound and social space, and fragmentary noises that are polar to them, kaleidoscopic auditory objects of heterogeneous origin, accompanying demonstrations of the life of a protest group. The musical sound here acts as a tool for building self-identification, integrating the subject into the system community. With the help of sound, you can recognize "your own" and identify yourself. This way of consolidating identity is also adopted by prisoners in the camp environment, for whom musical forms of creativity served as the basis of self-perception and the opportunity to comprehend their life situation. For example, the chants of religious prisoners or the songs of individual nationalities.

As for the characteristics of loudness and silence, here a certain pole of sound expression is attributed to one or another side of social interaction, depending on the contextual situation. On the one hand, loudness can be associated with "gibberish", disturbance of rest, initial order and, accordingly, attributed to a suppressed social group. On the other hand, volume can express strength, power, dominance. Volume is the capture of space, the imposition of its sound on the surrounding area. It declares itself as the penetration of the dominant auditory landscape into the field of our usual hearing. In this case, the voices of the suppressed social group are obscured, go into the auditory underground, and their existence is colored by enforced silence. Inna Klause, in her work on the sound of the Gulag, points out that the camp regulations imposed absolute silence among prisoners, under which even a whisper could be punished. Accordingly, the interruption of silence by singing served the function of expressing protest or violating the camp regime (Klause I. The sound of the Gulag. [Electronic resource] – URL: https://nkvd.tomsk.ru/media_news/inna-klauze-zvuchanie-gulaga / (date of access: 05.12.2024)).

The external silence stimulated intense attention to the surrounding sounds, which emerged from this shaky array of vague noise layers and formed into auditory discreteness: "Increasingly acute auditory attention begins to distinguish something slightly more noticeable from the whole mass of vague sound shadows, spots, hints. Gradually, a perspective emerges, differences in spatial plans are revealed, lines, contours appear, nearby rustles, rustles, rustles, sighs, ticks appear again and are noticed. Silence is filled with noises, pushed into the background, which becomes the background for a thin multi-layered web of sound objects" ^{[33, p. 218]}. That is, silence acted as a background against which previously hidden, impenetrable auditory figures were isolated: rustles, groans of the tortured in the next room, cries of seagulls, whispers, tapping. Thus, silence, being a measure of punishment and segregation of prisoners, awakened in them an emphasis on what is behind this monolithic silent space. In such conditions, any isolated noise begins to be perceived as musical, becomes a means of replenishing the melodic organization of the acoustic space in conditions of its acute shortage. For example, the sound of the wheels of a train carrying prisoners, or the sounds of construction tools. Thus, silence is actually resonant, its acoustic content is many and varied, thereby combining it with noise matter as a background reservoir of sounds that we do not listen to.

In general, silence has many functions in the cultural space. It can be an aspiration to the eternal, timeless, and a return to simplicity, and an expression of mourning, and a sign of reverence, respect, and rebellion against the established order. In modern realities, the silence of cultural trauma embodies what lies beyond the boundaries of linguistic articulation, something fundamentally inexpressible, ineffable. Silence is presented here as a genuine inner, opposed to a deceptive outer: an unlived trauma, opposed to manifested well-being. Such a rejection of speech manifestation comes into conflict with a smoothly functioning, relentless machine of public speaking, operating by the inertia of impersonal discourse and only multiplying the ambient noise. Silence acts as a saving island, in the field of which it is possible to preserve inner truth and living thought, despite the kingdom of "common places", crushing any uniqueness with codified totalities.

Conclusion

Thus, a sound image in the structure of cultural memory represents any phenomena and processes based on well-established semantic codes and semantic patterns with cultural and historical grounds. Sound focuses the researcher's gaze on fragments of reality, behind the conceptual perception of which there is a long process of sense-making, which may not lie on the surface and may not be explicitly revealed upon first acquaintance with the object. That is, the analysis of sound images composing the body of supra-individual memory helps to penetrate deep into the phenomenon under study, to discover its essential connections with other phenomena, their dialogical semantic intersections hidden from observation at the visual, material or verbal level. This specificity of the auditory disclosure of the object of research is due to the fact that sound expression, as a rule, is less specific and meaningful, certain cultural images and meanings in it can be recorded intuitively, unconsciously, unlike visual and written sources explicating events of the past, in which the figurative representation of these events and the processes of constructing memory phenomena are more verified, we have already passed the consciousness filter. Thus, a sound image may contain something for which there were no words, which remained beyond the boundary of rational articulation. The cultural space is an extremely lively, mobile environment, which, "like auditory phenomena, often surpasses conventional parameters and possibilities of representation" ^{[5, p. 13]}, and that is why sound, being sensitive to shifts and discontinuities, becomes an important model for understanding such states.

Since the difficult legacy, as we found out in the course of the study, represents as the content of collective memory a battlefield of two multidirectional forces: the sanctioning rhetoric of power, seeking to uproot traumatic historical episodes from modern positive self–determination and consign them to oblivion, and cultural discourse, recognizing these facts as a significant core of collective identity, the sound expression of events The past, belonging to this category of mindfulness, goes in the direction of splitting the auditory field into dichotomous facets. One of the lines of the sound assembly is aimed at structuring and formalizing raw acoustic material, symbolizing territorial power flows that directively crush chaotic, disordered elements that break out of the harmonious whole. The other line is focused on loosening the mechanisms of harmonization and is embodied in noisy, discordant, polyphonic arrays, illustrating the opposition to the politics of rigid frameworks and forms and the rejection of the universalization of the experience of the past, its blurring and oblivion. This approach to recording the events of the past and their perception at the level of a collective, meaning-modeling, identity-forming experience demonstrates the uniqueness of sound as a medium of cultural utterance. Sound streams create symbolic spaces of escape, where hearing brings to the fore thoughts and affective experiences that are not always so easy to see. Therefore, attempts to consider the role of sound components in the construction of objects of collective memory certainly deserve the attention of researchers and should be more widely used in memory studies and trauma studies. Then we will be able to understand and interpret historical events in all their complexity and completeness.