Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Slavisches Seminar
Sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Excellence Strategy of Eberhard Karls University
Organized by Anne Lounsbery (NYU) and Schamma Schahadat (Tübingen)
Location: Wilhelmstr. 50, room 215
Private spaces and enclosed homes where the everyday is enacted are an especially intriguing topic in the Russian and Soviet case, since the borders between the private and the public have constantly shifted. This dynamic perception of private and public space began already in the 19th century, when private homes became the scene for collective debates on public topics (like the Bakunin home), or from the 1860s on, when experiments of communal living took place, often based on Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s novel Chto delat’? (What is to be done?) from 1863. Also in the 19th century religious sects experimented with communal forms of living and the religious community substituted the traditional family.
Research on living and housing in Russia focuses mainly on two periods: first, on experiments of the avantgarde, often in the context of avantgarde architecture in Russia, second, on living in prefabricated buildings (in the Soviet Union: khrushcheby), and, third, on communal apartments (kommunalka). Our conference wants to broaden the perspective by, first, also paying attention to earlier periods, like Anne Lounsbery does in her book on literary living in the provinces or John Randolph on the Bakunin family home as a place of origin for Russian idealism. And, second, the topic of living is a genuine object of cultural studies, so that we want to bring together scholars from literary studies as well as from history.
