Schlögel gives due space to intercity train journeys, when on overnight trips you shared a small compartment with strangers with whom, convention dictated, you often had long midnight conversations. One of my favorite sections deals with the stores uncompromisingly labeled “Food” ( Produkty), “Meat,” “Bread,” and “Fish” (leaving out “Milk,” for some reason), with their skimpy array of goods, surly salespeople, and, of course, the usual elaborate system of queuing.
Schlögel variously calls his book an archaeology, an exhibition, and a museum of the Soviet “lifeworld.” Its focus on the things of everyday life makes it, in his view, not an “encyclopedia of banalities” (a phrase used by the Russian historian Natalia Lebina about her own history of everyday life) but rather “an encyclopedia of fundamentals.” Just about everything memorable and (to a Westerner) odd about Soviet everyday life is there: the endless queues, the communal apartments and the horrors of the shared kitchens and lavatory, the flea markets, the missing telephone directories, the kitchen table around which friends would sit late into the night talking about what Russians saw as fundamentals (not things, but the deep questions of life). The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World, Karl Schlögel, Princeton University Press, 928 pp., $39.95, March 2023.
The book cover for The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World by Karl Schlögel.
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