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stories,
Trushchobnye liudi
(Tenement people)
(1887), described with honesty and sympathy the
world of Moscow's slum dwellers. By order of the
czarist censorship, all copies of the topic were
burned before publication. Giliarovsky worked
extensively for various newspapers as a journalist
in prerevolutionary times, earning the nickname
“king of Moscow reporters.” After the revolution,
Giliarovsky wrote several volumes of well-
received memoirs that further cemented his rep-
utation with the Soviet reading public. Among
these are
Moi skitaniia
(My wanderings) (1928),
in which he recounted his early wanderings
across provincial Russia, and
Liudi teatra
(People
of the theater) (published posthumously, 1940),
in which he wrote of his many friends and
acquaintances in the world of culture, including
CHEKHOV
and
ERMOLOVA
. His most popular work,
however, was
Moskva i moskvichi
(Moscow and
Muscovites), first published in 1923 and revised
in 1935, which warmly captured for posterity his
old Moscow world of artists, beggars, thieves, and
ordinary people. Because few authors could
write as knowingly about both the high society
and the lower depths of prerevolutionary Mos-
cow, this work came to occupy a place of honor
among a reading public in the 1960s and 1970s
that was beginning to trade revolutionary enthu-
siasm for a nostalgia about the past.
(State Higher Art and Technical Studios) and the
Moscow Institute of Higher Technology, became
a founding member of the Society of Contempo-
rary Architects (OSA) in 1925, and edited the
journal of the Moscow Architectural Society,
Arkhitektura.
Ginsburg became known as the
leading theorist and practitioner of constructivist
architecture. In his work
Style and the Epoch
(1924) and the journal of the Society of Con-
temporary Architects,
Sovremennaia arkhitektura
(Contemporary architecture), which he founded
and edited (1926-30) with Aleksandr
VESNIN
,
Ginsburg strongly upheld what he called the
“mechanization of life”—the integration of sci-
entific and technological discoveries into the
process of rational, artistic creation. Like other
architects of the revolutionary period, Ginsburg
was concerned with the problems of mass hous-
ing in the context of the new socialist order. His
most important contribution, “a landmark of
constructivist architecture,” was the six-story
building block he built between 1927 and 1929
for the People's Commissariat of Finance (Nar-
komfin) in Moscow, an example of the
dom-kom-
muna
(house commune) that would provide
collective living quarters for its residents. As
Ginsburg's influence in Moscow waned with the
1930s backlash against constructivism and other
avant-garde styles, he returned to his theoretical
writings about standardization and mass hous-
ing. His final works were in distant places like
Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan (Administration Build-
ing of the Turkestan-Siberia Railroad, 1929-34)
and Kislovodsk in the Caucasus (Ordzhonikidze
Sanatorium, 1925-37).
Ginsburg, Moisei Yakovlevich
(1892-1946)
architect
Ginsburg was born in the Belarussian capital of
Minsk. His father was an architect, a family tra-
dition that Ginsburg's own son and grandson
would later continue. After graduating from the
Academy of Arts in Milan in 1914, he returned
to Russia, where he received an engineering
degree from the Rizhskii Polytechnic Institute in
Moscow in 1917. He spent the years of the civil
war (1918-21) in private practice in the Crimea.
Back in Moscow after the civil war, he worked
actively in his profession throughout the 1920s
as a teacher and editor. He taught at Vkhutemas
Ginzburg, Evgeniia Semyonovna
(1904-1977)
memoirist
Ginzburg first became known outside the Soviet
Union as the author of two poignant volumes of
memoirs of her 18 years in the
GULAG
labor
camps. She was born in Moscow and graduated
in history from Kazan State University, in the
Tatar Autonomous Republic of the Russian Fed-
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