Half a Room

A grown child raised by life behind a closet.

The phenomenon of “life behind the closet” is familiar to almost everyone who was born in the Soviet Union. I'm not an exception. What does life behind the closet mean?

Very often, and even more likely, as a rule, the child did not have his own room. The room was one for the whole family and thus the child was sharing with his parents. Very often while attempting to create a private space, a rearrangement was made in the room and usually it was the closet that divided it into two halves. Sometimes it was not a closet at all, but some kind of curtain, screen, etc., but the expression “life behind the closet” has become firmly established in everyday life.

I also spent most of my childhood literally behind a closet. There was my bed, a chair and a desk chair. And this space was covered with wallpaper. The ones I remember for the rest of my life. Green diamonds on a white background. That's probably all. Such a minimalistic, rather even Scandinavian design, completely atypical for Soviet life.

I will restore these wallpapers from my memory and paste them over my floor of the room.

Panel of matches

Why are crafts made in kindergarten and primary school? To develop imagination or motor skills? I really don't know why? And yet, a question that has long interested me: who comes up with the ideas of these crafts, because there are probably some manuals for teachers, but only after all, who writes them? In my childhood, we often made these same crafts from improvised materials. Those that were in every home and those that, apparently, were never in short supply. I recently found a panel made out of matches by my sister when she was a kid. It’s quite funny to realize that a child makes a panel of matches, since from childhood we were inspired by the invariable “matches are not a toy for children”. This is probably true, and matches are really not a toy, but a material designed to develop fine motor skills, imagination and accuracy, especially since these are not matches at all, because all their sulfur heads have been ground off in advance.

My sister was a kid when she made this panel of matches. I am an adult now and will make a large panel of matches. There's half a wall in half of my room that's just the right size to put it on.

This is not the first time I have worked with my children's archive. And every time I come to the conclusion that every child is an artist.