Communard in Petrogradka. Osminkin R., Vepreva A.

“My body smells of fried potatoes with onions, my hair smells of fried potatoes with onions, my thoughts smell of fried potatoes with onions.” The communal apartment has repeatedly become the main character and place of action in Soviet fiction. As it turned out, the very phenomenon of the communal apartment did not disappear with the fall of the old regime - it was amazingly adapted to new times. Roman Osminkin and Anastasia Veprev settled in a communal room in the center of St. Petersburg and took on the role of chroniclers of this amazing archaic reality. They recorded their impressions on the Facebook blog, from which this half-domestic narrative grew. The authors deliberately abandoned the detached position of anthropologists for the sake of a noble task - to describe the communal universe through the prism of their own experience. As a result, there was a paradoxical fifty of dystopia, literary voyerism and psychological drama.

Roman Osminkin is a poet, art critic and performer, author of the books “Comrade-Veshchi” and “Comrade-Slovo”, Anastasia Vepreva is an artist, curator and editor of the portal “K. R.A.P. I. V.A. ". The “communal apartment on Petrogradka” was first presented in the form of a play by the Fringe program of the festival of young drama “Lyubimovka-2019”. The authors express the gratitude of the Redelkino residence for the opportunity to complete the work on the book in August 2021.