Istoriya staroy kvartiry

A large-scale, bright work by artist Anya Desnitskaya and writer Alexandra Litvina, “The History of an Old Apartment,” reveals the history of everyday life in the Soviet and, to some extent, pre-revolutionary periods. The reader is presented with a panorama of events in a large Moscow apartment from 1902 to 2002. At the beginning of the century, it was, as usual, a single-family home, in the middle – a typical communal apartment, and a hundred years later – a cozy cafe.

The book contains many little things and details; it seems that the authors set themselves the goal of finding and showing all the more or less significant objects from each period of time, and they almost achieved it. On the spreads of the book, panoramas with images of that very apartment at different points in time unfold sequentially, a kind of “family postcards” that show the everyday life and holidays of the residents of different rooms, for example, an episode from the life of a communal kitchen or one Christmas in 1914, and collages consisting of things and objects. For the latter, the artist first searched for, then drew many, many authentic objects of the time, and then composed complex compositions from them, where coins, tin soldiers, army boots, dishes, furniture and dozens of other things were arranged in a museum order.

The book is made in mixed media. Bright drawings with an outline outlined in ink alternate with collages, complemented by yellowed newspaper clippings, photographs, scans of letters and other rarities, such as 1973 tickets to the Taganka Theater or a typewritten copy of a poem by Joseph Brodsky.

Work on the book lasted a year and a half, the authors sought advice from museum and library specialists, as well as from numerous friends and acquaintances who could suggest design features of a stove in an old apartment or a 1973 Saturn vacuum cleaner.