/lit/ - Literature

my thoughts on why some of us (especially those living there) find commieblocks appealing. blz rate, i'll rate some prev writings in my next post

> those commieblock and abhorrent sctructures are objectively ugly, there's no argument to be had. but we grew to love them, feel their unspoken homeliness, we even found some perversed beauty in their inborn decay.
most ancient buildings, as you know, were built with their decomposition in mind, making sure the ruins will be pretty. call it vainly confident or inhumanly clever, with care reaching beyond the lifespan of those constructing and using those structures, even beyond the age of a nation that birthed them, but it's romantic nonetheless, almost out of the reach of our modern thinking.
> these commieblocks on the contrary were stillborn, looking ruinous before the final brick was laid, depressing before time started its inevitable touch-up. in this a commieblock inhabitant may see a ground for pity, one always pities a newborn cripple, and out of that sorry empathy our curious affection stems.
> i doubt my truthfulness here. knowing how an average person is, they likely despise their dwelling in silence, or more probably don't even think in such terms - the dullness of such life beats the sacred sense of beauty out of most people, no fertile ground for it to thrive, no motivation to even be present. appeal, especially so in soviet times, was dictated not by that mysterious sense of beauty but by megalomania and artificial sets of aspects. it's curious how things were built to be built, not to please the inhabitants, an opposite - and in that opposition identical - end of the horseshoe with capitalist notion for producing wares to be sold, not used.
> but those who do have a tender spot for concrete anthills so scarring to one's eye, i think i know their reasoning, me being one of them.
it's not a stockholm syndrome, not a prisoner growing to love his confinement - why, we don't regard those wordless blocks as sided with opressors! they never asked to be built, to be built ugly and unwelcome, nor did the builders indend any malice, and misdeed with no malice is but a sorry mishap.
> this pity somehow makes you think of blocks as yet another victim, just like you, they never reap the fruit of their disfigurement, they make no profit of your misery, it's almost as if they, too, have a melancholy of their own, suffering alongside us, sharing our bread and mirth, tears and laugher as cliche as it is, a fellow inmate in this grey concrete sansara bestowed upon all things living and not.