A Close Family

There are three sisters and one older brother: Sasha, Zhenya, Varya, and Lyonka. It’s not an easy task to get along with such noisy company in a single room. They have a bunk bed, children’s furniture, a castle-tent, a map of the starry sky, and toys. Despite the apparent disorder, all of these things are in their rightful place: on the floor for playing.

The room is located in a freshly built house in one of the new districts of Moscow. The concrete high-rise building is five minutes away from the middle of nature, with fields and a forest, a unique village of writers, and stables. And in the apartment the old and new are harmonized wonderfully, like a miniature copy of the eternally changing and growing city of Moscow. Hanging on the walls are portraits of their ancestors, sternly looking at the younger generation, as the younger generation grows up in an atmosphere of books, an antique piano, stuffed animals of characters from old Soviet cartoons, and their noisy, restless (like their young owners) house pets.

Translated by Mackenzie Stricklin & Anna Lebedeva