“The everyday routes go past houses which have been bombed in different ways. There are sections of houses which keep reminding you of Meyerhold’s theatre sets. There are sections of small multi-coloured rooms with the little round stove still intact, painted the same colour as the wall, or an intact door, sometimes ajar. Grim stage-set doors, carefully made and leading nowhere. The house sections illustrate the storeys, the thin layers of floor and ceiling. You begin to realise with astonishment that as you sit at home in your room you are suspended in space, with other people similarly suspended above your head and below your feet. You know about this of course, you’ve heard furniture being moved about upstairs, even wood being chopped. But all that is abstract, unpicturable, like the way we are borne along through space on a sphere rotating about its axis. Everybody feels as if their floor rests on some kind of soil, covered over with planking. Now the truth had been revealed in a dizzyingly graphic fashion. There were skeletal houses with preserved façades, shot through with darkness and depth. And the sky can be seen through the empty window sockets of the upper storeys. There were houses, especially small ones, whose beams and flooring had collapsed under their crumbling roofs. They hung at an angle and looked as if they were still sliding down, perpetually falling, like a waterfall.

A new attitude to houses developed. People began to talk about houses, think about houses. The accepted unit of the city became the apartment house, just as previously it had been the street, with its merged undifferentiated façades. Unobservant people suddenly saw what constituted their city. It was made up of discrete areas of incomparable Leningrad beauty, out of astonishing complexes of stone and sky, water and foliage, and for the rest, apartment houses of the second half of the nineteenth century, with a certain trace of pre-revolutionary modern and boxes dating from the first years of the revolution. The wretched architecture of the second half of the last century, with its fear of line and plane, the flat surface and the unfilled space, which prompted it to cram every unoccupied space with some sort of stucco nonsense. Now we saw those houses, shabby and bare, standing in damp and rusty streams of poor-quality paint. In grim autumn days it seemed that the rusty dankness was oozing out from inside them. They presaged nothing good.”

– Lydia Ginzburg, Notes of a Blockade Person ¹