Communal apartment (kommunalka) in the reference field of modern fiction for children and adolescents
Authors:   Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University named after K.D. Ushinsky, Gaponova Zhanna K. , Nikkareva Elena V. ,   Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University named after K.D. Ushinsky
Published: October 2024

Representation in the modern culture of the Soviet past is associated with such a phenomenon as a communal apartment, which is also in demand in modern literature for children and adolescents. In the article, based on the material of the Corpus of Russian Prose for Children and Youth, as well as the most representative examples from the works of the last decade for children and adolescents, an attempt is made to determine the specifics of the topos of a communal apartment, which has become a “system sign” (referent) of Soviet childhood. The vectors of interpretation of a communal apartment set the ideological and spatial “us vs them” and “individual vs common” oppositions and their assessment. At the same time, various attributes of a communal apartment are significant for artistic modeling, defining the subject organization (neighbor, family member, etc.), the organization of space (room, corridor, kitchen, etc.), subject realities (bell, door, etc.). Modern writers’ work with the topos of a communal apartment is based on the tradition that developed in children’s literature of the Soviet period. The child hero, reproducing the stable components of the associative field of the concept “communal apartment” necessary for the objectification of the attribute, translates a potentially conflict situation associated with the concept of neighbor and determined by a stable set of plot situations and motifs into a comic one. In children’s and adolescent literature, the process of blurring the boundaries between anomaly and norm under the influence of communal life is reflected (the character type “crazy old woman”, zoomorphic images of neighbors, the acquisition of supernatural significance by things, the process of segmentation of “our” space, etc.). The transformation of the binary opposition “us vs them” can occur due to the inclusion of the element “nobody’s”, fixed in the definition of a unique type of character - “nobody’s grandmother”. In modern children’s literature, the situation associated with the marginal position of “nobody’s” old people in communal apartments, due to inclusion in the context of children’s play, loses its negative assessment, due to the functional connection of the types of “nobody’s grandmother” and “nanny”, which leads to the correlation of “nobody’s” and “common” in the picture of the communal world. The semantics of the “common” is more often manifested in relation to referents defining the spatial organization. The allocation of certain loci in a communal apartment that transmit ideas about one’s own and someone else’s or about one’s own and common, returns us to the description of relations with neighbors in the apartment, more precisely, to the predominance of emotive characteristics of the topos in question, objectified through the motif of quarrels and conflicts over the use of common places and property. “Common” loci (kitchen, corridor, restroom), being a boundary space, can, depending on the plot situation, actualize the “own” or “alien” semes. For example, a corridor, in accordance with the strategy of mastering and appropriating someone else’s space during the game, can also act as “own” space. The representation of the topos of a communal apartment in children’s literature, of course, reflects the realities of the Soviet era and the everyday life of the “inhabitants” of the communal apartment, with its “conflict zones”, but the child’s consciousness, acting as a focalizer of the narrative, allows emphasizing the semantics of the common. We can talk about the transformation of the opposition “us vs them” according to the laws of dialectics. The realities of the time, seen through the eyes of a child, allow us to consider the topos of a communal apartment/kommunalka as a “system sign” (referent) of Soviet childhood, as a dialectical image expressing the collectivist pathos of Soviet culture and metaphorically reflecting Iosif Vareikis’ idea of a communal apartment as the USSR. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.