The apartment question: The avant-garde and the problem of the domestic interior in 1920s Russia.

摘要

Among Soviet literary works from the 1920s dealing with contemporary reality, many treat the domestic interior in a specific way: not merely as a passive backdrop, but as a problematic space that acts on its inhabitants. This particular treatment of domestic space extends to art forms including film, the visual arts, and architecture, and appears in both avant-garde and non-avant-garde works. This study looks at the questions of everyday life and housing from the viewpoint of cultural production (rather than social conditions), in order to trace the theoretical development of the problematic domestic interior within the postrevolutionary avant-garde. This is done by analyzing a series of works from the NEP period that articulate aspects of (and in a few cases propose solutions to) the problem of the domestic interior. These works include literature (novels, poems, plays), film, art (objects designed by visual artists), and architecture. Most were produced by members of the avant-garde; those that were not either address avant-garde ideas or show their influence. This study argues that avant-garde theorizing in the twenties gave rise to a conception of the domestic interior as structuring consciousness and human relations, an idea that would remain operative in cultural production through the Soviet period and beyond.