“The Girl with the Hatbox (Devushka s korobkoi)” Interiors (1927)

Artist/Designer: Boris Barnet, Sergei Kozlovskii, Vadim Shershenevich, Valentin Turkin, Mezhrabpom-Russ

Project Location: Moscow, Russia

Style/Period(s):
No Style/Period Assigned.

Primary Material(s):
Glass, Fabric, Textile, Wood, Wall Paper, Paper, Light

Function(s):
Residential Structure, Entertainment, Film/TV Set

Related Website(s):

Significant Date(s):
20th Century, 1920, 1927

Additional Information:
Publications/Texts in Print:

Kirkham, Pat, Sarah A. Lichtman, and Eleanor Rees. “Comfort and the Domestic Interior in Soviet Fiction Cinema of the 1920s.” Essay. In Screen Interiors: From Country Houses to Cosmic Heterotopias, 36–40. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021.

Attwood, "The New Economic Policy," 47.

Devushka s korobkoi (The Girl with a Hatbox) papers, 1.2.1.288. Screenplay for film (1927), 13-42, Gosfil' mofond State Film Archive of the Russian Federation, Belye stolby, Moscow, Russia.

Devushka s korobkoi (The Girl with a Hatbox) papers, 1.2.1.288. Screenplay for film (1927), 92, Gosfil' mofond State Film Archive of the Russian Federation, Belye stolby, Moscow, Russia.

Emma Widdis, "Cinema and the Art of Being: Towards a History of Early Soviet Set Design," in Birgit Beumers (ed.), A Companion to Russian Cinema, 315 (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).

Sergei Kozlovskii, "Prava i obiazannosti kino-khudozhnika" ["The Rights and Responsibilities of the Set Designer"], Kino-zhurnal ARK [Cinema Journal ARK] 11-12 (1925): 16-17; Sergei Kozlovskii, "Tekhnika kinoatel'e" ["Film Studio Technology"], Kino i kul'tura [Cinema and Culture] 5 (1925):57-9.

Nikolai Kolin and Sergei Kozlovskii, "Khudozhnik-arkhitektor v kino" ["The Artist-Architect in Cinema"] (1930), reprinted in Kinovedcheskie zapiski [Film Scholars' Notes] 99 (2009): 389-92.

Osip Brik, "Fiksatsiia fakta" ["The Fixtion of the Fact"], Novyi lef [New Lef] 11-12 (1927): 44-50.

Aleksandr Rodchenko, "Khudozhnik i material' naia sreda v igrovom fil'me" ["The Artist and the Material Environment in Fiction Film"], Sovetskoe kino [Soviet Cinema] 5-6 (1927): 14.

Alina Payne, From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 197.

Payne, From Ornament to Object, 243, 257.

Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 35.

Buchli, Archaeology of Socialism, 44.

For Example, see Benjamin's notion of "destructive dwelling," in Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 104.

Emma Widdis, Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling and the Soviet Subject, 1917-1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 108-10.

Widdis, "Cinema and the Art of Being," 235

Widdis, "Cinema and the Art of Being," 238

Boris Arvatov,"Byt i kul'tura veshchi" ["Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing"] (1925), trans. Christina Kiaer, October 81 (Summer 1997): 123.

Boris Arvatov,"Byt i kul'tura veshchi," 125.

Boris Arvatov,"Byt i kul'tura veshchi," 126.

Boris Arvatov,"Byt i kul'tura veshchi," 127.

Boym, Common Places, 64.

Buchli, Archaeology of Socialism, 56-7.

Viktor Shklovskii, "Pogranichnaia liniia,"[1927], reprinted in Viktor Shklovskii, Za 60 let. Raboty o kino [Through 60 years. Works on Cinema] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1985), 110-13.

Devushka s korobkoi (The Girl with a Hatbox) papers, 1.2.1.288. Screenplay for film (1927), 13-14, Gosfil'mofond State Film Archive of the Russian Federation, Belye stolby, Moscow, Russia.

Arvatov,"Byt i kul'tura veshchi," 119-28.

Building Address: Moscow, Russia.

Significant Dates: Released on April 19, 1928

Supporting Staff/ Designers:Boris Barnet (director), Sergei Kozlovskii (set designer), Vadim Shershenevich (poet), Valentin Turkin (screenwriter).

Tags: Soviet cinema, contemporary Moscow, silent film, Soviet fiction film, aesthetic economy, NEP era, Cultural Revolution, material culture, logging right issues, Soviet "everyday style".

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