Historical and Cultural Features of Russian Home Interior in the Context of Daily Routine

Abstract

The article presents the analysis of the daily urban culture dynamics of the Russians and the interior design features of the urban Russian Home in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The interior, being the embodiment of the material and symbolic human environment represented by Home, is considered as a source of historical and cultural information about a person. The daily routine of a mainstream citizen was studied, reflecting the dynamics and contradictions of drastic historical changes and allowing to understand the cultural mentality at certain historical stages. In addition to photographic materials of the Russian housing interiors in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, media resources data, such as: mass media publications, Internet sites materials, the article also contains the results of the authors’ interviews of the residents of the city of Vladivostok. The peculiar features of the Soviet and modern Russian mentality of the average urban resident were highlighted, the trends in the development of Russian urban daily routine were identified. The history of the mainstream Russian interior dating from 1917 up to 2018, represented by the examples of typical housing for its time, clearly reflects the complex path of transforming Russian daily routine from asceticism and sacrifice of the 1920s to the apparently prosperous everyday life of the 1980s and its modern inconsistency. A comparative analysis of the mainstream and elite Russian home interiors reveals significant differences in their quality and, accordingly, the incomparability of daily household culture of different social layers of Russian society. These contradictions in society can be traced throughout the post-revolutionary period and are increasing in modern Russia.