Eight Russian-language books about the apartment question, without Bulgakov

Literary critic Liza Birger has selected eight Russian-language works exploring the relationship between people and the places they live in, prompted by the release of an updated edition of Maxim Trudolyubov's "People Behind the Fence", a study of how Russians' fraught relationship with private property and home has shaped the country for centuries. From a 1926 novella about magically expanding walls to a post-Soviet novel about deliberate homelessness, the list spans over a hundred years of literature on cramped communal flats, moral compromise, and the search for one's own space.

The release of an updated edition of Maxim Trudolyubov's "People Behind the Fence" by Meduza's publishing imprint has prompted literary critic Liza Birger to compile a reading list of eight Russian-language works that grapple with what Russian literature has long called the "apartment question", the deeply political, moral, and existential relationship between a person and the walls they inhabit.

The Housing Crisis as Literary Theme

The list opens with Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's 1926 novella "Quadraturin," written at the height of Moscow's post-revolutionary housing crisis. Krzhizhanovsky, a prolific author of Kafkaesque short fiction who never saw a single work published in his lifetime, spent years crammed into a tiny room on the Arbat. In "Quadraturin," a man living in a matchbox-sized room is offered a substance that expands the walls from within. The room grows uncontrollably, turning into a terrifying labyrinth. It is a perfect metaphor for both the desire for space and the horror of getting what you wished for.

From the same era comes Valentin Kataev's 1928 vaudeville "Squaring the Circle," arguably the most successful Soviet play of its time. Two newlywed couples attempt to share a single municipalised room. Konstantin Stanislavsky praised it for "bringing people joy, of which there is not much in life." The play ran for hundreds of performances and even reached Broadway, strikingly, at almost the same moment Bulgakov's "Zoya's Apartment" was being banned. Where Bulgakov's Zoya desperately clings to the old world, Kataev's characters joyfully build the new one, albeit "without philistinism."

Memory, Walls, and Closed Doors

A more recent entry is the graphic novel "Freedom of Dreams. The Story of One Locked Room" (2025, Individuum), with text by Sergei Bondarenko and illustrations by Yura Boguslavsky. Set during the early pandemic, the narrator inherits a Moscow apartment in Leontyevsky Lane and discovers photographs and papers belonging to his grandfather and great-grandfather, an ethnographer arrested in the Stalin era. For two years the grandfather lived beside the sealed door of his father's room. The book, Birger notes, contains many doors within it, each opening onto an entirely different story.

Yuri Trifonov's 1969 novella "The Exchange", the work that launched his celebrated Moscow cycle, follows an engineer named Dmitriev who, under pressure from his wife, arranges to swap two communal-flat rooms for a two-room apartment just as his mother is dying. The novella, Birger writes, exposes layers of moral decay: a man who has made peace with mediocrity goes from one monstrous compromise to the next. Trifonov famously bristled when readers called him a chronicler of everyday life: «I write about love, about death… and they tell me, everyday life. But everyday life is our whole life!»

Contemporary Voices

Dasha Pochekuyeva's debut novel revisits similar terrain but moves the moral question offstage. Set in a provincial Soviet town in the early 1970s, the apartment is here a shared dream holding together a loveless marriage. Yet for Pochekuyeva the central issue is not whether the housing obsession corrupts, it is how the inability to accept oneself and break free from internal constraints slowly destroys people.

Anton Sekisov's "Vaginov's Room," originally written as an audio series for the Bookmate platform, places a young philologist in a communal flat on the Griboyedov Canal embankment in St. Petersburg, a flat where the early 20th-century writer Konstantin Vaginov once rented a room. Behind every door lurks a surprise. For Sekisov, the communal flat becomes a comic device and a philosophical statement: it is impossible to fully seal yourself off from others.

The Underground as Freedom

The list closes with Vladimir Makanin's novel "Underground, or a Hero of Our Time." Makanin, one of the most significant yet underappreciated Russian authors of his generation, made homelessness his protagonist's deliberate choice. The writer Petrovich survives by caretaking other people's empty flats in a vast Soviet-era dormitory block. That dormitory expands, in Makanin's hands, to the scale of an entire country: post-Soviet Russia as one long corridor of other people's doors. Makanin later said the novel was a tribute to those who consciously chose to remain underground and preserved their integrity, even at the cost of their lives.

All eight works are featured alongside the newly published updated edition of Trudolyubov's "People Behind the Fence," which examines how private property in Russia has always ended up hostage to power, illustrated most recently, the author argues, by cases like that of singer Larisa Dolina.