Zhenya Chayka“Night is ahead. I have decided”: About Tanya and Me

V–A–C Sreda online magazine completes its three-month programme dedicated to the place, role, and transformation of sound in contemporary art and everyday life.

In this issue, we publish an essay about the pop singer Tatyana Bulanova by the researcher and curator Zhenya Chaika. Chaika delves into her memories associated with Bulanova’s songs and tries to understand the “secret power” of her lyrics: the essay interweaves the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Umberto Eco, the poet Paul Celan, and the author’s personal story of running away from home with lines from Bulanova’s songs. As a result, Bulanova’s work acquires a metaphysical meaning, in which “everything will be just as I imagine it to be”— and there is nothing superfluous.

When my eldest sister got married, I cried. I cried desperately. I was less than a year old, and I suspect my presence at the wedding made many people uncomfortable. But I didn’t care about their sideways glances.

When another older sister was preparing for her wedding, I helped the soon-to-be newlyweds learn to dance the waltz. I was twelve, and it was my first didactic success.

When I decided to get married, my sisters wanted to talk to me. I think they intended to say it was a futile endeavor, not worth starting. But sitting in the back seat of a car in a dark winter courtyard, all I heard was: don’t waste money on a banquet; no one needs it. That whole “women dancing, men dancing”—no one needs that. Images flashed before my eyes: screaming infants, awkward first dances, already prepared pearly invitations—and I agreed. Of course, I needed to be “carried in arms in white wedding clouds, ” not all this. It had to be like this:

And no other way.

“We’ll live together—you and I—we’re one family now”

Recently, I published a book with twelve chapters—one for each month—and recipes. An acquaintance, after reading it, said: “Zhenya, your book’s structure is like that novel by the Mexican writer and screenwriter Laura Esquivel: Twelve months—and a recipe for each.”

Her novel Como agua para chocolate, published in Spanish in 1989, is widely known in Russia under titles like Chocolate on Boiling Water or Champurrado for My Husband’s Wife. It’s a classic of magical realism; I adored this book in my youth. Perhaps I was drawn to how the story of impossible love was subtly and hopelessly laid out through recipes. Or maybe I was irresistibly attracted to the fact that at the center of the narrative was the tragedy of the youngest sister.

This text settled securely somewhere in the cloud of unshakable knowledge, like a non-burning sum of memories. Delving through its layers again, I agree with Plato’s formula that knowledge is recollection. Recently, I heard the phrase: “You imagined better than I forgot.” I think it’s also a bit about that—we constantly reinvent what we are too lazy to remember.

The book tells how traditions, customs, and misconceptions influence our lives, showing that, try as you might, you can’t escape their power. The setting is Mexico during the revolution (1910–1917). The mother of the main character, Tita, the youngest of three daughters, is convinced that she must care for her until death. In practice, this means: no marriage, no children.

Naturally, of all the sisters, Tita is the first to meet her love—Pedro. He asks for Tita’s hand, but the head of the family remains adamant, and—to be closer to his beloved—the hero decides to marry her older sister, Rosaura. “What are you doing, sister?”—a question Tita and Rosaura dare to ask each other only years later, midway through, between the deaths of the cook, the infant, the mother, and before the sister, then Pedro, and Tita herself die.

In short: in the world of magical realism, the wrong marriage of the older sister inevitably leads to a series of misfortunes and tragedies, which are also seasoned with rather conditionally tempered dishes. It’s good that life is a bit simpler. But yes, this book has always occupied me—and yes, I definitely know the recipe, selflessly remember and consistently forget what ingredients are in that dubious dish called “younger sister.”

“Mom, don’t judge, there’s no need, I already judge mysel”

Once, I left home. It was a time when people still had the habit of calling each other on landline phones. I always lived near the train station and, of course, knew by heart the train routes to distant cities. I took my backpack and went to the station. I got the last ticket on the train—of course, the upper side berth. Of course, the train was going to Petersburg. Right above my bunk, the radio played, from which Tanya Bulanova sang to me the entire way (36 hours).

It seems the train conductor (or conductress?) had only one cassette, and they liked it very much. And after all, no one judged the train conductor, and certainly not in those times when they could have a Tanya Bulanova cassette at hand. Their choice was inevitable and accepted without question. I don’t remember which songs were on that album—quite melancholic. In them, sadness desperately flowed from emptiness to infinity, from poignancy to monotony—and there it merged with the clatter of wheels.

Now it’s hard to say whether I was truly running from something or to someone, or if it was just another journey, slightly more sudden and that’s all. But I clearly remember one SMS I sent—now it’s absolutely clear to me—that I wrote under the unrelenting influence of the songs that enveloped my wakefulness, my sleep, my thoughts, and their absence—everything that was with me on that train.

I wrote—and back then, there were still button phones, and everyone knew how much extra characters cost, words were thrown to the wind less often—so, I wrote:

“If you don’t meet me, I’ll get off in Vologda.”

Probably, at such a young age (I think I was 19), an ultimatum is normal, but what about logic? Where’s the logic?

First, you need to meet me in Petersburg; Vologda is along the route—before Petersburg, so meeting me in Petersburg earlier than I can get off in Vologda is impossible. That is, in my ultimatum, I appealed to inherently unfulfillable conditions. It worked.

I got off in Vologda only on the way back, joined a familiar theater troupe, and went by bus to Nizhny—under the much more familiar and close Spanish Caravan. However, it’s possible that this was a completely different time. But if I believe in anything, it’s in the logic of the path and the logic of coincidences that develop only where all memories exist simultaneously.

“You blame the trains, only it’s in vain”

Until recently, that incident on the train was my only unequivocal encounter with Tatiana Bulanova’s work. There were no other circumstances in my life when I listened to her songs. What can I say: I didn’t even dance slow dances to “Don’t Cry.” But recently, I was looking for songs about trains and came across a 2022 single. Wandering around the city, I listened to the song “Trains” for hours, trying to understand the hidden power of this text.It amazed me that every word in that song was about life—nothing redundant, nothing out of place. And I felt this creeping realization: I could never write something like that.

No, I can write a lot of things, in different ways. I’ve written all sorts of things! Once, I even had the bright idea to translate a Paul Celan poem. And I did. As if I composed poetry myself. I never admitted it, but I did. Still, listening to Trains again and again, I kept falling deeper into that feeling—I don’t know exactly what kind of feeling it is. Maybe it’s the sense of being denied a tool. A slippery, annoying feeling, because it can’t be that I both can and can’t at the same time. But maybe I can’t.

Although…

“Cities, airports, silhouettes, faces erased— On my path”

The next time I left home—an entirely different home—I bought another train ticket. Again, the last one available. This train was headed to Vladivostok. I travelled for days, across hills, ridges, bridges, and tunnels, getting closer to seas and oceans, getting stuck on islands, waiting for the snowstorm in Magadan to pass so my plane could take off. To the place where I would wade knee-deep into rivers to meet bears, fall asleep for an entire day at the foot of a volcano, dissolve all my doubts in thermal water straight from the tap—and once again, I’d be ready to fly. Westward. Because, as the song says:

Alone again, I wandered for hours through hills where pines mixed with chestnut trees, sunset burned through the canopy, the sea roared, and the fruit and needles underfoot formed patterns I could decipher endlessly. I kept walking, guessing, humming songs that didn’t exist. And it seemed to me that each of them was a hit, that I’d clearly taken the wrong path in life, that I was destined to write songs—simple, honest ones, where every line feels like your own life.

But maybe that was some other time. Maybe it didn’t happen at all. And even if it did, I still haven’t written a single song.

“Just imagine: it’s all make believe”

Ten years passed between my stories of running away. And now, as I write this—it’s been ten years again. I have no idea how these songs are made, but more than ever, I want to understand.

One of the best-known anecdotes in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s biography is that he loved musicals and westerns. I never bothered to verify this; Derek Jarman’s film Wittgenstein (1993) was enough for me. In one scene, after fierce theoretical debates, the very serious philosopher silently watches a lighthearted movie, and we watch his face lit by the screen. I always thought this was a joke: even very smart people need to rest. But I don’t think that anymore. Now I believe Wittgenstein just wanted to understand.

I won’t claim to remember his work well—it’s all long stored in the same cloud of fireproof memories, mixed with something much more important and, at the same time, painfully pointless. But I suspect he would’ve been intrigued by this drift from literalness—with its clarity and symmetry of meaning—toward a total breakdown of logic that knocks the ground from under your feet. This conviction in the world words create—each word carving out its path toward reality, while that reality only makes sense through the heart.

There’s one day, two days, and you—or rather, you’re in one place, another place (everywhere else?), and at the same time, not there at all. So far, so good. But now, one day becomes two, and each of the two is identical to that original one day. Which means each of them equals two such days. Fine—hopefully not the same two. My heart understands the pain, but my brain collapses under the infinite recursion triggered by that line. It’s a simple logical error (clearly one day can’t be two), but within the song’s context, it shows how easily a day turns into an abyss when you’re not around. Terrifying to imagine what happens when you are there—a full-blown space-time collapse, no less.

This verse seems simpler, though the speaker still doesn’t clarify that the day feels longer—it is longer. And that’s understandable because every statement here is performative: by declaring the day longer, she creates a world in which that day can be longer than itself. But it’s a mistake to think she has any control over time. When she says she’ll leave at midnight after the rain, it doesn’t mean she knows the rain will end at midnight. She can’t know. In truth, she’s already left at midnight, having waited for the rain to end—because otherwise, she wouldn’t know it had ended then. Describing a past event using future-tense grammar puts us simultaneously into the realm of the possible, the impossible, and the unreal. In other words, when we hear these words, we can just as easily place them in the past, the future, what could have been, or what can never be.

And it all ends with an imperative. Referencing symmetrical conditions of can-and-can’t, the line takes us straight into manipulative modality. I know you can’t—but come on, just try. Because at this point, no day will ever be the same again.

And that’s how every day goes.

“But call me—you promised”

The randomness of symbolic coincidences seems to rest on an almost painfully precise connection to the real world. Or maybe that connection is better described as pointillistic: the words of a song, like hooks, snag bits of reality and pull them onboard. The song Call Me begins like this:

The heroine lays out a sense of certainty—one that, of course, turns out to be conditional at best. At first, you might think she really knows something:

Gradually, it becomes clear she’s just cycling through all the possible reasons why he hasn’t called. That’s how the emotional shift happens: from describing the details of someone else’s day to realizing that day might not have happened at all—that all these lines are just breadcrumbs. Hints. A trail that might somehow still lead him to dial her number.

And yes—it’s heartbreaking that he won’t call. But more importantly, it’s the shift from personal to universal that catches us: a barely noticeable rhetorical flick, a click that turns the song from a friend’s confession into your own despair. Your own pain.

There is a song where he does call. It’s called The Last Rain. Honestly, it would’ve been better if he hadn’t.

I think this might be one of the most piercing songs in Bulanova’s entire discography. A step-by-step recounting of events, just facts and clear motivation: he called, said he needed her, she wanted to—so she went. Reality only begins to crack when the heroine’s world collapses and she goes flying into a ditch. The song’s structure buckles under the simplest fact: the person telling us the story is no longer alive. We’re hearing a story we physically shouldn’t be able to hear. A tale told from the black box of her car. And she—a narrator who can both exist and not exist across time—is even more striking for her choice: to not exist. Because of him. And, of course, because of the rain.

In the song April, the rain plays a very different role: it doesn’t kill anyone; it simply marks the changing of seasons, as it usually does—though even that is suspect.

With today’s climate, such phrasing carries a serious margin of error. You might think rain and snowstorms are happening within the same April, and that if we just wait a little longer, the weather will improve, and we’ll finally meet. But it turns out, somewhere along the way, we’ve moved from describing actual weather to listing the seasons—April’s literal showers have turned into cyclical time, into the endlessness of waiting. Which, in turn, means the impossibility of a meeting.

Literal language relies on razor-sharp connections to time (“call me at seven, ” “midnight, after the rain”). But this literalness blends easily—or is sneakily swapped—with a declared atemporality. We realize that the speaker is now addressing all memories at once—maybe even all addressees at once. The back-and-forth between extreme specificity and abstract repetition transforms the narrative into something archetypal, nearly universal. It creates a pendulum of sincerity: we feel like we’re witnessing a real, deeply personal conversation, but the scattered inconsistencies—

—point us instead to all possible memories: the singer’s, the narrator’s, our own. Even if some of them are false.

“Maybe, tomorrow at 11, we’ll meet at the café on Nevsky?”

Believing in the literal meaning of songs is a dangerous trap. I expect that everything in the lyrics should reflect real life. So when I hear:

—the inner producer in me thinks: that level of brightness should probably be reported to the aviation authorities. Luckily, that thought dissolves into ordinary anxiety patterns, and I don’t call Civil Aviation. Instead, I climb to the roof and stare at the sun. Or more accurately: I climb onto the roof of Tatiana Bulanova’s restaurant and witness a solar eclipse.

Of course, it was pure coincidence that we ended up on that roof at the exact moment of the eclipse. Pure coincidence that the restaurant was directly across from the house I used to live in, in Petersburg. Pure coincidence that Radishchev once lived in that very building and wrote Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Pure coincidence that I was once again living near the train station.

When a place gives you so many symbols and coincidences, you can’t help but start to believe: maybe it’s life that’s really like a song.

“Everything will be just as I imagine it to be”

The day after the eclipse, I went to a Tatiana Bulanova concert. I liked her blue sequined dress. I liked how the audience reacted—how everyone got nervous before she came on stage, how they sang and danced. But the concert ended very quickly. It lasted exactly 50 minutes. We asked Tanya to come back for an encore, but she didn’t.

Outside, we got into conversation with a group of fairly young people who were smoking after the show. They speculated that maybe we’d upset her somehow, or maybe she didn’t like the crowd standing in the stalls because there wasn’t a proper dance floor. They said things like: “Didn’t you see? She kept rubbing her eyes, ” and “She kept bringing her hands up to her face.”

I wasn’t upset. I thought: maybe she had a swim scheduled that evening, or something else important. But still—usually, artists come back for an encore. And I really wanted to understand what was going on. In an interview, I quickly found the reason: 50 minutes is the standard length for a corporate gig. Simple and to the point. Fifty minutes is enough, because:

In that same interview, the singer says it plainly: concerts are work. Kids need to be fed, there’s a family to support. What image? What artistry? You just sing, and work, and sing, and work.

And that’s when it hit me: honestly, so much of what we do—well, we do it because it’s work. And we work because, somehow, we’ve got to feed our families. I thought this very basic thought—and remembered that only twice in my life had I seriously considered taking an office job: once to pay for a wedding, and once to pay for a divorce.

Wow.

Life, death, love, fear—we think about these things, we write about them, we make art about them, we sing. All while never forgetting that it’s just a job. That there is, in fact, such a job as speaking plainly, sincerely, and honestly. There’s a job where your task is to find the right words to say something that really matters.

But even here, we fall back into the trap of false literalism. Because the venue, the concert start time, the duration, the ticket price, the artist’s fee—those are all real, shared things. But the moment we return to the lyrics, we realize that each song belongs to the listener. Otherwise, how could it be that:

Otherwise, all the straightforward meanings of words wouldn’t explode into infinity the moment someone—anyone—hears or reads them, placing them into their own context, their own (perhaps long-lost) language game. No, that’s not quite right: the one who hears or reads is destined to feel the shards of that infinity pierce their heart. They don’t have to do a single thing.

“I don’t know who came up with the idea that love is a lie. If that’s so—why does everyone believe in it so deeply?”

According to legend, Umberto Eco once said that for an educated woman’s lover, it’s terrifying to speak openly—because he’s afraid that whatever he says, she’ll recognize some sophisticated quote. Using this simple little scenario, one of the twentieth century’s greatest scholars of signs and meaning supposedly explained the essence of postmodernism.

I sincerely hope Eco never actually said that. But even if he did—logic teaches us that any conclusion drawn from a false premise can still lead to truth. So let’s admit: of course, that very woman will never say “I love you.” Perhaps she’ll say something like:

And in place of a direct confession, she’ll choose something more like:

P.S. How lucky I am that this text is also—just work.