Everyday life of the Porshnev family in 1928 (by the correspondence of Ekaterina Porshneva with Mikhail Romm)

The article is based on the correspondence of Ekaterina Porshneva (the older sister of prominent Soviet historian Boris Porshnev) which she kept with eminent film director Mikhail Romm in 1928. The letters show a person of deep erudition, profound knowledge of literature, writing poems, playing with words, and smoking cigarettes. Her letters are full of irony and self-irony. The authors note that the universal models that emerged during the Civil War were greatly transformed in the time of the New Economic policy (NEP). In the 1920s, some rules of life were prescribed by the power, promoted by the media, introduced by political communication methods (various kinds of meetings and so on.). But the Soviet Russia was populated by different people with a very diverse pre-revolutionary experience. Besides, in the 1920s the Bolshevik Party leadership, where Stalin was not a completely dominant figure yet, did not fully define the mode of life. For different reasons and motives, the coinage "a new way of life" could be adjusted to, but in reality the "new way of life" did not become an everyday device of the time. Perhaps due to the scanty and fragmented data or the ambivalence between official declarations and everyday household practices, modern attempts to typologize the life of the Soviet people (to construct models) of the NEP epoch have not fully succeeded yet. The correspondence gives an idea about the Porshnev family's daily life, the family members, their economic standing, friends and acquaintances. The content of letters is grouped according to the specific subjects: "the financial situation of the family", "on imaginary and real diseases", "concerts, theater and movie entertainment", "about brother Ovka", "about celebrations and feasts", "order of life", "on Moscow weather and daily Moscow", "about the advancement of learning", "vacation, the sea". The letters provide insight into details of the Soviet intelligentsia's lifestyle in the late 1920s, their typical behavior, and the peculiarities of the Moscow life. Back then, the Bolshevik government was endeavoring to reshape the Soviet people's life, and the recently-coined phrase "the new way of life" became a key idea of the official discourse. However, there is no hint of it in Ekaterina Porshneva's letters. References to another way of life, undeclared and undecreed by the official power, are found there instead, for instance, queues and "communal apartments". Other than that, the letters abound in worries about the family and friends, stories about their ups and downs, illnesses and everyday problems. It is evident that the family members were not going to give up the lifestyle they had been used to since the pre-revolutionary times as far as they could afford it.

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