5. You Can’t Go Home Again… Especially if You Have Never Had One

Starting from the premise that any childhood is existentially tragic, this fictionalized memory reflects on the last Soviet generation of children as a lost generation. This chapter is written as a memory stream based on free associations, and it dwells on the major leitmotifs and recurrent sensibilities that have shaped the author’s experience as a member of this generation. Following her personal trajectory, the memory stream refers to the symbol of the vertical, to the sense of being lost both literally and symbolically, to specific ways and strategies of hiding in her own world and rejecting the outside reality. These personal paths combine with more general patterns of double consciousness and redoubling of the world that generated a cynical framework in its late-Soviet children’s version: an urge to make their own escapist forms of alternative realities and internal emigration models in the decade just before perestroika. The chapter touches upon key late-Soviet oppositions that children of the 1970s learned to identify from early on in order to survive. It also considers the ethnic-racial and religious differences that affected the lost generation’s internal erosive processes.