Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia

by Svetlana Boym

What is the “real Russia”? What is the relationship between national dreams and kitsch, between political and artistic utopia and everyday existence? Commonplaces of daily living would be perfect clues for those seeking to understand a culture. But all who write big books on Russian life confess their failure to get properly inside Russia, to understand its “doublespeak.”

Svetlana Boym is a unique guide. A member of the last Soviet Generation, the Russian equivalent of our Generation X, she grew up in Leningrad and has lived in the West for the past thirteen years. Her book provides a view of Russia that is historically informed, replete with unexpected detail, and everywhere stamped with authority. Alternating analysis with personal accounts of Russian life, Boym conveys the foreignness of Russia and examines its peculiar conceptions of private life and common good, of Culture and Trash, of sincerity and banality. Armed with a Dictionary of Untranslatable Terms, we step around Uncle Fedia asleep in the hall, surrounded by a puddle of urine, and enter the Communal Apartment, the central exhibit of the book. It is the ruin of the communal utopia and a unique institution of Soviet daily life; a model Soviet home and a breeding ground for grassroots informants. Here, privacy is forbidden; here the inhabitants defiantly treasure their bits of “domestic trash,” targets of ideological campaigns for the transformation ( perestroika ) of everyday life.

Against the Russian and Soviet myths of national destiny, the trivial, the ordinary, even the trashy, take on a utopian dimension. Boym studies Russian culture in a broad sense of the word; she ranges from nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual thought to art and popular culture. With her we go walking in Moscow and Leningrad, eavesdrop on domestic life, and discover jokes, films, and TV programs. Boym then reflects on the 1991 coup that marked the end of the Soviet Union and evoked fin-de-siècle apocalyptic visions. The book ends with a poignant reflection on the nature of communal utopia and nostalgia, on homesickness and the sickness of being home.

Genres: Russia, Nonfiction, History, Anthropology, Philosophy, Cultural, Theory

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 23, 1995

About the author

Svetlana Boym is the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Harvard University, and a media artist, playwright, and novelist. She is also an associate of the Graduate School of Design and Architecture at Harvard University.

Boym's written work explores relationships between utopia and kitsch, between memory and modernity, and between homesickness and sickness of home. Her research interests generally include 20th century Russian literature, cultural studies, comparative literature and literary studies.

Source: Wikipedia
Obit
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...

Reviews

[Dafna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Boym's book is both nostalgic and ironic about her nostalgia. It is a poetic journey into Soviet everyday life. Building on Russian and Soviet literature and films, Boym writes history of the everyday life and history of ideas at the same time. Being simultaneously an outsider (she left the USSR in 1980s) and an insider (she spent her first thirty years of life in a communal apartment in Leningrad), she presents a nice overview of the Soviet epoch and of its legacy. I would very much recommend this book to those interested in Soviet and post-Soviet space and time.

[Eric Byrd · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subject matter is completely absorbing, but the prose is academic--academic as in unshapely and over-argued.

[Valentina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Feel like I would’ve liked this more had I not had to read it for an essay that is long overdue

[Kait · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazingly relevant. Perhaps even more interesting to me now than when I first picked it up. Will be looking for The Future of Nostalgia.....


Intriguing, but denser than I am able to work on right now.
p.17

Making progress p. 124
12/222

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love this theorist. Love this book. Love the pun in the title. So many interesting ideas in this book, on Communist Russia, but on everyday life and banality in general.