Moscow. An Apartment Symphony

Nothing lasts forever. People are born and disappear, wallpaper is changed, lanes get renamed, and where old houses stood, new ones grow. But there is something unchanging: the walls of the first apartment, the first courtyard you experience in your life, the squeak of old swings—like the melody of a distant childhood. Another flick of the conductor’s baton… and the neighbors of your communal youth become close people to you, stuck in memory forever. The heroine of the book is, in the past, a real estate agent. Through the stories of apartments—big and small, separate and communal, “destroyed” and not so much—Oksana Darovskaya manages to recreate genuine portraits of people whose sorrows and joys, falls and triumphs weave into a series of lives unlike one another, becoming the driving force of this book—its many-voiced leitmotif, sometimes sad, sometimes joyful, like life itself.