Childhood Homes in Lidia Vianu’s Novel Kaleidoscope

About “Kaleidoscope”, Lidia Vianu said that “what happens there is my life, everyone's life, it is the communism and post-communism of an intellectual who has been studying English” (TVR Cultural, Jurnal cultural 2023). Several narrations in the novel focus around two houses in Bucharest where the author spent her childhood. During the 1950s, the scarcity of homes and the running of an intensive housing policy led to the nationalisation of the largest houses in Bucharest. Previous owners had to live in smaller quarters in their own houses and had to share the habitable space with tenants who paid rent to the state (Mihail and Voinea, 22–26). The narratives related to the author’s childhood homes issue from the author’s recollections and relate the years before the author’s coming of age alongside descriptions of places, environments, people, and moments in Bucharest under the communist regime.