Quote from Timothy Fitzpatrick on November 23, 2021, 20:18

The stories about life in communal apartments often sound so incredible that they resemble scripts of grotesque comedies or scenes from the theater of the absurd. Mountains of other people's dishes in the kitchen, an eternally smoking neighbor in a wide-brimmed hat, a pimp neighbor who brings a couple of prostitutes to his place every evening, the hostess's son who sings Pugacheva's songs and walks around the house in a red wig and mother’s dress - it’s not clear how you can it was for years to live in such an environment and not go crazy. Moslenta continues to collect memories of Muscovites about life in Soviet communal apartments.

HISTORY /

Photo: Anatoly Kuzyarin / TASS

"It didn't come to stabbing"

Konstantin Gruss, choreographer, artist, 49 years old

It was all twenty years ago. I rented a room in a communal apartment on Malaya Molchanovka. In the house with lions - directly opposite the Belgian embassy. Now it has already been resettled and repaired. Now it is a super-elite residential property.

Before that, I rented an apartment on Ostozhenka, but in the late 1990s the street began to be repaired, the Moscow “Golden Mile” was built there, and I had to leave there. There was not much money, and I found a room.

I really liked this house - a beautiful apartment, huge windows, a wonderful room. Ceilings four meters. You go in - and first there are the owners' rooms: a living room, two or three bedrooms, a bathroom. Then the kitchen, the pantry and two more rooms, which were probably originally intended for servants, while also quite spacious. I took off one of them. And the first two rooms were occupied by a woman who had been registered there for a long time. She owned only three rooms out of twelve, but it was she who had all the keys, and it was she who occupied the tenants.

This landlady of ours was then 50 years old, but I associated her with the modern era. As if it had survived from pre-revolutionary times, it was mothballed and lived there like that.

 

Very mannered: she wore a wide-brimmed hat, high heels, a long dress or an exquisite robe. She constantly smoked a cigarette with a long mouthpiece, and the whole room was in smoke. Entering there, you found yourself as if half asleep: the heavy curtains were half-closed all the time, the lamp was on. The setting is incredible, a mix of modern and 1930s. Whether she had any profession, it's hard for me to say, maybe she never worked.

She lived without a husband, with a son, who was a great "gift". I didn't go to school, but the whole school went to him. And we couldn't do anything about it, because he was a ringleader, an incredibly artistic guy. Fan of Alla Pugacheva. He sang her songs all the time, wore his mother's dress and a red wig. Such a travesty boy of thirteen years old. Every day, classmates came to him, and he sang for them "Ferryman", "A Million Scarlet Roses" and so on. Full sur! It was loud, but nothing could be done about it.

Frame: the film "Simple Things"

Gradually I got used to this continuous concert. It was more difficult to come to terms with the fact that the kitchen was full of trash, because neither he nor his guests washed or cleaned after themselves. All the time I appealed to his artistry and tried to convince that everything in a person should be fine, and in such a beautiful dress it is necessary to wash the dishes behind you.

But nothing worked, and in order to wash my dishes, I had to unload a huge mountain of plates from the sink and stack somewhere nearby.

The apartment was very long: you enter - a large corridor ... All the time I associated with one scene from Dostoevsky's The Idiot. Pure Dostoyevshchina, only of the Moscow sense.

 

At some point, another man of about forty settled in this apartment. Medium height, bald, slightly puffy physiognomy, bright, shallow appearance.

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