Comparative Spatial Intimacies and the Affective Geography of Home: Imaginaries and Sense-Regimes in the Soviet-Era Baltics

This essay investigates Soviet-era homesites in the Baltic states as combinations of home imaginaries and people’s affective, sensorial relationship to the materiality of their home space. The aspect of relationality is foregrounded: the primary level of meaning-making as regards one’s quotidian home life, the article suggests, takes place at the level of comparative spatial intimacies—that is, in relation to one’s own bodily movement in space and the objects, locations, impressions, but also the ideas, norms, and values encountered and embedded in these movements. Home experience unfolds on the scene of comparative studies, where different homes form dialogues and chains of movement in space. Both intimacies and imaginaries emerge as multiscalar, being deeply personal and closely family related, but also generational and class related, and including also transnational and/or officially endorsed ideas and values. The scene of comparative intimacies is exemplified on the basis of three homesites: Soviet prefab apartment buildings, pre-Soviet farm homes, and Soviet-era summer homes. The common homing model in the Soviet-era Baltics included at least two, if not three homely sites: while most people lived in urban environments, summer vacations were typically spent in a pre-Soviet farm home or in a recently built summer home. Of these different homescapes, each supported their inhabitants’ identities in their own specific ways, each offered a different regime of spatial sensibilities, a different combination of sensations, relationscapes, and imaginaries. The essay accommodates methods of geopoetics and includes analysis of fictional texts, life writing, and the embodied presence of the author.