ABSTRACT
For most writers in this anthology, the notion of home or dwelling is deeply affected by one’s relationship to a conception of homeland or home place. Yi-Fu Tuan contends that all people everywhere and in all periods have had a vital attachment to a home place, an attachment which cannot be dissolved except by a thoroughgoing destruction of that place. The experiences of inhabitants of the communal apartments created in St. Petersburg out of the luxury apartments of Imperial Russia as a Stalinist response to acute housing shortage seem to bear out Tuan’s argument (Figs. 81, 82). As described by Ilya Utekhin, ethnologist and long-term resident in one of these dwellings, these were cramped and difficult places, where inhabitants had to resort to complicated sharing and queuing regulations in order to make daily life tolerable. Yet as these communal apartments have been dismantled in the post-Stalinist era, many inhabitants have elected to remain in the older communal types of dwellings, viewing them as “home”.
