A communal kitchen in action: in the kitchen of a large communal apartment, Ilya makes an Italian dish for his friends who live there.

Ilya: Do you by any chance have an apron?

Sonya: An apron?

Sonya: Let's have a cigarette first, okay?

Ilya: Okay, we'll have a cigarette first, and then I'll show you how to make a real saltimbocca.

Sonya: A real what?

Ilya: "Bocca" means "mouth." Saltimbocca is something that jumps into your mouth by itself.

Sonya: I see. Great. Is this the right size frying pan?

Ilya: That's the right size. It's a good frying pan.

Sonya: So we won't even have to wash it.

Ilya: We'll just wipe it off.

Ilya: Sonya, can we put things on this table? This one, next to us?

Sonya: I think so. This table belongs to the new tenants, students who moved in pretty recently.

Slawomir: Do you know whose table is whose?

Sonya: No, I don't know about everybody. I know only my table and the one next to me. And I know Nina Vasilievna's.

Nina Vasilievna: This one here is mine.

Slawomir: Where? Show me.

Nina Vasilievna: Straight ahead, where the soap dish is.

Slawomir: And hers? What about your table?

Iraida Yakovlevna: Mine? This is mine.

Slawomir: Was it always here?

Iraida Yakovlevna: Yes, our tables were you know right up to the, over there, almost. Now for some reason there aren't as many. But it used to be, they went almost to the door.

Ilya: The light here, it doesn't seem that anyone has done anything about it.

Ilya: I'm going to lower the flame under this person's teakettle. Would it be okay to knock at her door and say that her water is boiling?

Sonya: Yes, a lot of people do that, but I don't, because I don't know who lives in which room and whose teakettle is whose.

Ilya: So, you kind of...

Sonya: You know why? It's all because of the telephone. The point is that everybody else, you know, uses the same communal telephone, so everybody knows where everybody's room is.

Anya: What do you have here?

Slawomir: This is a microphone.

Anya: Oh!

Slawomir: Do you want to see yourself?

Ilya: Oh, it's coming to a boil.

Tatyana: Let's go vaporize your nose.

Sonya: A plate?

Ilya: No, not for a while... when it comes to a boil, we'll add some macaroni.

Tatyana: Let's go vaporize your nose.

Anya: Goodbye.

Slawomir: Goodbye. See you.

Ilya: Macaroni with calamari, that's very good, we'll have to make it some time. But we don't have any calamari, friends. Why didn't they say how many minutes… Are we in your way?

Ira: No.

Ilya: In three minutes, in three minutes…

Savva: Hi. Mama.

Sonya: Hello!

Ilya: Say hi to Grandma!

Sonya: Hi!

Ilya: Everything will be ready in six minutes, and in the meantime I'll put in the macaroni...

Ilya: They cook until a certain point that is called al dente, that is "to the tooth." When you try it, you can feel it.

Ilya: This young man who wrote about Dostoevsky, he wrote me a letter that I just didn't have time to answer, but he raised so many issues. There's still macaroni left, but if we serve it now...

Savva: They recommend Marquez's "Chronicle..."

Ilya: "... of a Death Foretold."

Savva: Right.

Ilya: "Crónica..."

Savva: That's it. I found it in the House of Books, it was very expensive.

Ilya: Yeah.

Apartment II floor plan Floor plan of the apartment from Tour 3 (all clips), home to Sasha, Yulia, Tatyana, Iraida Yakovlevna, Anna Matveevna, Nina Vasilievna, Sonya, and Savva. 2006.
Sink with cold water faucet A corner of the kitchen in the large apartment from Tour 3, with a sink and a sewage pipe. To the right the door to the corridor is open. 2006.
Sonya with a cigarette, table, cabinet Sonya smokes a cigarette, standing next to her kitchen table and wall cabinet. 2006.
Wall cabinet, toothbrushes A kitchen cabinet over a table heaped with dishes. Both belong to the people featured in the clip "Cooking Saltimbocca" (Tour 3). 2006.
Half-cleaned stove In the clip "Cooking Saltimbocca," (Tour 3) we learn that two families use this stove; one of them cleans the stove less carefully. The bucket, broom, and dustpan are for cleaning the common areas. 2006.
Kitchen extension A passage from the main part of the kitchen to a small extension which was the room off the kitchen. This apartment is shown in Tour 3. 2006.
Passage to kitchen extension The kitchen from the clip "Cooking Saltimbocca," Tour 3. The passage leads to the extension shown in "Anna Matveevna," Tour 3. 2006.
Kitchen table at the window Slawomir put his video camera on a kitchen table which did not belong to his hosts, an act which could cause a ruckus. This kitchen appears in the clip "Cooking Saltimbocca," Tour 3. 2006.
Slawomir and girl in kitchen
Mother with a towel around her head Tatyana and her daughter Anya in the kitchen of the apartment from Tour 3 during the filming of the clip "Cooking Saltimbocca." 2006.
A child's toilet seat in the kitchen A child's toilet seat is kept in the kitchen, by the door to the hallway. 2006.
Part of a room The students Savva and Sonya live in this room (see the end of the clip "Cooking Saltimbocca," Tour 3); their parents now live in a different place, even though many of their things are still here. 2007.
Radio loudspeaker An old-fashioned cable radio loudspeaker; judging by the design, it has to be more than fifty years old. 2002.
A hanging lamp and the plaster ceiling molding In the room where Savva and Sonya live, (clip "Cooking Saltimbocca" from Tour 3), satyrs are depicted in the plaster moldings on the ceiling. 2007.
Chandelier and caissoned ceiling A chandelier and six-meter high caissoned ceiling of one of the rooms were Savva and Sonya live (see clip "Cooking Saltimbocca," Tour 3). 2007.
Brass window handles and latches Room in a large communal apartment from Tour 3. The window frames, handles, and latches have been preserved since the building was built in 1917. 2007.
Window, frame and latch In this room, part of the old brass window-latch was covered with oil paint during the last renovations, even though the current residents are very proud of the pre-revolutionary decor. This is the apartment from Tour 3. 2007.
A naked light bulb This light bulb is not in a common area, where naked bulbs are common, but in an area between two rooms where one family lives. Read about naked bulbs. 2006.

When: Summer 2006

Where: A room in a communal apartment in a building on Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt, in the prestigious historical center of St. Petersburg. Among the residents are friends and acquaintances of Ilya. The apartment is in the same entryway as the one in which Ilya lived for 30 years. Eleven families now (2006) live in the apartment. There was a time when 16 families lived there.

Who: 1) Ilya Utekhin. 2) Sonya, who has lived here all her life (she smokes and cooks with Ilya). 3) Anna Matveevna (born 1916), who has lived here since 1929 (she walks into the kitchen at the beginning of the clip). 4) Iraida Yakovlevna (in the red sweater), a former janitor, who has lived her for 40 years. 5) Nina Vasilievna (born 1924) who has lived her whole life (she walks into the kitchen when Sonya is washing dishes). 6) Denis, a young man in a black t-shirt, who opens a cabinet; he rents a room from Iraida Yakovlevna. 7) Tatyana, a young woman in a green shirt and grey pants; later she appears with a green towel on her head. She is the mother of the little girl Anya. 8) A little girl Anya (talks to Slawomir; later comes to get a toilet seat). 9) Yulya, who has lived in the apartment her whole life (in a black t-shirt; she comes in when Slawomir is talking to Anya). 10) Ira, a young woman in a flowered robe, cooking at the same stove as Ilya. 11) Savva, Sonya's brother, a student (gives Sonya the telephone and says that it is their mother who is calling.) 12) Slawomir, who is filming.

Savva and Sonya are brother and sister. They are the children of Ilya's friends and the same age as his oldest son, with whom they grew up. They played together, went to the dacha together, visited each other from the third floor to the fifth and back again. Savva is a student at the humanities division of the university where Ilya gives lectures and supervises student research. (Ilya mentions a young man who has written a paper about Dostoevsky; this is Savva's classmate.) Sonya is a student at a different university, where she studies art and design. For her own pleasure as well as to earn money she makes puppets, sometimes for the theater.

What: Sonya and Savva's family moved into this apartment before the war. When Savva and Sonya were small, they lived in a single 11 square-meter room together with their parents and their older brother. The children's beds were separated from the "grownup" half of the room by a cabinet. In the larger room, which we see, lived their grandparents.

A few years ago, Sonya and Savva's parents divorced and now live in their own apartments together with their new spouses and small children. Savva and Sonya live on their own in four small rooms. Their parents and grandmother help them out with money and periodically come to visit.

In the kitchen we see a child's yellow toilet seat, which Anya uses when she goes to the regular toilet. The adults put newspaper on top of the toilet seat. In some apartments even now each family has their own seat. Sometimes these family seats hang on the lavatory wall. Anya's seat is probably stored in the kitchen because there are two toilets and one of them might be occupied. In the clip "A New Shower," we see toilet seats stored in the bathroom.