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