I am inexhaustibly fascinated by everyday life in the late Soviet Union. It probably has something to do with trying to locate a past that I lived but was too young to remember.

Imagine my excitement then at discovering the works of Boris Savelev, a rocket scientist-turned-photographer who spent the 1970s, 80s and 90s taking pictures of ordinary Soviet experience.

The Guardian describes his aesthetic this way:

His works of elegant observational realism are preoccupied with light and form – a constructivist aesthetic Savelev credits to his ‘methodical, scientific background’.

Both melancholic and playful, Savelev’s photographs capture the social and political upheaval of the former Soviet Union, by ‘simply having a gut feeling for that fleeting moment’.

I highly recommend visiting Savelev’s vast personal collection, all available online on his website.

Unlike Savelev, who, whether in 1970s USSR or today’s Russia (where he continues to shoot photos) is a chronicler of the contemporary, the young Rigan photographer Arnis Balcus is preoccupied with memory.

His blog is devoted to catching glimpses of the Soviet past amidst modern Latvia.

Balcus is a consummate flaneur with a keen eye for artifacts and the stories they tell about a country that has long disappeared but not without leaving an afterglow of faded streetsigns, painted-over murals and precariously-hanging sculptures.

The works of Savelev and Balcus trigger in me a powerful sense of familiarity, loss and remembrance, but without knowing whether these memories are collective, constructed or my own.

Giorgio Caproni captures this feeling well in his poem The Last Homecoming, reprinted in Svetlana Boym’s excellent study of Russian nostalgia:

I have returned there

where I had never been.

Nothing has changed from how it was not.

On the table (on the chequered

tablecloth) half full

I found again the glass

never filled. All

has remained just as

I had never left it