The Apartment: A Century of Russian History by Alexandra Litvina (illustrated by Anna Desnitskaya; Harry Abrams, 2017) illustrates 100 years of Russian history through the lives of the changing residents in a Moscow apartment and the lives they lead. With the Muromstev family as a connecting link, the reader learns of the dozens of children who lived in the apartment, along with key moments from their lives that were also defining moments for Russia. Informational paragraphs are interspersed on alternate pages in between the child-narrated event pages, labeled items and rooms clarify set-up during each era, and family trees bookend the volume, providing a reference for relationships among all the different people.
In addition to the generational connections in the stories, the illustrations capture so many details from the apartment, including furniture and entertainment and food, that a search-and-find option encourages the reader to delve even further into the apartment details on each spread. By doing so, the reader learns even more about Russian history by examining the changing purposes to the materials as well as the changing styles of life as captured in the illustrations. Although it’s a picture book, it’s a large-format book with so many details that I could examine it for hours, learning not just from the illustrations but also from the collage elements in the background on most pages. These collage elements include real newspaper clippings and other personal mementos from Russian history.
As can be expected, the century of Russian history shows the apartment deteriorating from a new, large personal family dwelling of luxury at the turn of the 1900s into a communal apartment setting during the years of communism and into the later eras of the USSR. There is an evolving conversation. There is a changing flexibility in life style. There is a growing restriction and then expansion of freedom as time passes. For example, in the dialogue boxes on the pages, we see a transformation from the nervous observations of people afraid of being reported to the authorities to young adults arguing about what is right and wrong in the government.
It is hard to describe The Apartment.
- The text includes dated narrations from children that lived in the apartment, thus providing a timeline of the century. These paragraphs best reach a child.
- There are also instructional paragraphs on some pages to clarify what is happening during the child’s time in the apartment in that year. These will put the children’s stories into a clearer context. T
- here are labels for some of the people and things in the apartment. This helps explains just what the people kept and treasured during different eras of history.
- There are dialogue boxes for some of the people depicted in the illustrations, thus showing different opinions and concerns in history.
- There are Russian letters on the pages to quote poems or quotes from leaders, as well as writing in the background collage images, which helps emphasize the Russian culture.
- The first pages and last pages include detailed genealogical trees to show the people mentioned in the pages, including what pages you can find them depicted or mentioned in the pages.
In short, there is so much text and such a variety of illustration and collage that it is hard to know where to begin in reading and enjoying this book! The best way, I believe, is to dive in.
My only complaint is that it only captured 1902 to 2002. How would the next 20 years have been depicted as freedoms have again become curtailed during Putin’s reign? How sad to consider, given all that the Russian people have already been through in the past century!
