Коммунальная квартира как гетеротопия
Communal Аpartment as Heterotopy

Summary/Abstract: In her book Stories of the Soviet Experience. Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (2009), Irina Paperno writes that “communal apartment has become one of the master metaphors of Soviet society” (Paperno 2009), as well as “a self-conscious emblem of the Soviet experience” (ibid.). Tracing its roots back from the well-known writings of M. Bulgakov, E. Zamiatin, Y. Olesha, D. Kharms, M.Zoshchenko and many others, representations of living experience under communal conditions appear so frequently in the XX and XXI century Soviet and Russian literature and culture, that it is justified to talk about the “communal text” of Russian, i.e. Soviet literature. In this paper, our aim is to throw a new light on this intriguing part of Soviet lifestyle by analysing it in the theoretical framework of Foucault’s concept of heterotopy. Communal apartment was a powerful disciplinary force of lifestyle in Soviet society, and its main aim was to re-build a new Soviet society from its bottom. In literature, however, communal apartments were represented as undisciplined spaces of deviation, and of extreme „otherness“. In respect to the aforementioned hypothesis, we pose two intriguing questions. 1. Did communal experiences, according to the representations of communal places, that is articulated in selected works of contemporary Russian writers, such as Y. Mamleev, L. Rubinstein, and N. Sadur, created “docile bodies” (Foucault 1975)? 2. If spaces of heterotopy are experienced bodily, i.e. through bodily sensations (accordingly, they shouldn’t be understood only as spatial, but also as temporal phenomenon), to which extent aspects of temporality structure heterotopian, and communal spaces respectively?

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