One thing I am especially pleased with that I managed to catch the "working class" in its truly proletarian stage. Marx would recognize them instantly. They -- or rather "we" -- all lived in communal apartments, four or more people in one room, often with three generations all together, sleeping in shifts, drinking like sharks, brawling with each other or with neighbours in the communal kitchen or in the morning line for the communal john, beating their women with the moribund determination, crying openly when Stalin dropped dead, or at the movies, and cursing with such frequency that a normal word like "airplane", would strike a passer by as something elaborately obscene ....
from Less Then One by Joseph Brodsky
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