In 1978, a family of Russian ‘Old Believers’ living in a supposedly uninhabited part of the Siberian taiga were discovered by a team of geologists. They had fled Stalinist persecution, and for half a century had lived in isolation in a ‘low, soot-blackened log kennel’ with a floor made of potato peelings and crushed nutshells, one tiny window, a fire, a single rushlight, and one item of furniture — an axe-hewn table. Five adults lived without sanitation in a space seven steps long and five steps wide.
The geologists were horrified. What they failed to notice, Judith Flanders points out in her thought-provoking examination of the evolution of ‘home’, is that
what they were seeing were not conditions of unimaginable harshness, but the ordinary living conditions of their own history. And ours. A world where every aspect of life was lived in sight of others, where privacy was not only not desired, but almost unknown.
Both Flanders and Alison Light make intelligent and largely successful attempts at mental time travel, taking their readers with them.
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