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The article deals with the history of prefabricated houses (panelaks) in the context of Czechoslovakian construction industry at the turn of the 50´s and 60´s. It focuses on the historical, ideological and material aspects of the development and seeks further influences in political and social issues of that time, including a short excursion to the Soviet Union. The article pays main attention to construction experiments (especially monoliths) and the invention of housing districts (estates) of the time.

Several plays by William Saroyan written in the mid-1930s reached the Soviet stage only during the Khrushchev Thaw, in the early 1960s. The paper focuses on the first Soviet productions of Saroyan’s play My Heart’s in the Highlands, premiered in Armenian (Yerevan) in 1961, and in 1962 staged in Russian by the Mayakovsky Moscow Theatre. The paper analyses the reasons for such a late appearance of Saroyan’s dramas on the Russian stage, traces how Saroyan’s trip to the USSR in 1960 prompted the staging of his work in Armenia’s capital, which thereon paved the way for its Moscow production. The theatrical history of Saroyan’s work in the USSR is viewed in a wide social, political and cultural Soviet-American macro-context during the Cold War. The paper based on the rare materials from the museum of the Mayakovsky Moscow Theatre, focuses on the reception of the play and its production in the Soviet Union. The director Ya.S. Tsitsinovski strove to transmit the elevated, poetic spirit of Saroyan’s work and find a vivid expressive form, which was not typical for the Mayakovsky Theatre of N.P. Okhlopkov’s time. Its appearance on the Moscow stage in 1962 marked the beginning of the scene history of the American author’s drama in our country. The paper is aimed at reconstructing the theatrical history of Saroyan’s plays in the USSR.

The development of a post-Stalinist modern kitchen in Poland was informed by the activities of different individual and institutional actors: experts in ‘professional’ home engineering, architects and designers and modernist taste-makers. The image of the model kitchen is surprisingly coherent: a rational laboratory kitchen, where the housewife’s work is orchestrated according to Taylorism-inspired rules that aim at reducing the burden of domestic chores and introducing modern and hygienic equipmentand attitudes. The discourse, inspired by similar discussions in Europe and United States, mainly by the works of Swedish Research Institute, reflects the prewar ideas of kitchen-laboratories and ‘home engineering’. What’s new and different is the temporal (limited to a short post-Thaw period) enthusiasm for open-plan kitchens presented as spaces where a housewife can seamlessly perform two duties at the same time: housework and care work. This phenomenon mirrors changing attitudes towards women’s roles in society which, in the post-Stalinist period, were marked by ongoing conservatism. Drawing on the concept of a ‘mediation junction’ and the historical production-consumption-mediation paradigm in design, the article traces changing attitudes towards women’s roles in society, reflected both in popular and professional discourses on kitchen design.

The process of “thaw”, developing in Poland after the death of Joseph Stalin, for a long time did not include the aspect of religious freedom. Demands to restore the possibility of free worship, teaching religious education, and, above all, the release of the Primate Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, were always present in the society, as evidenced by school strikes or slogans appearing during the Poznań events of June 1956. The changes of October 1956, initiated by the 8th plenary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, led to an improvement in state-Church relations and implementation of the most important postulates of the Church, including the return of the Primate to Warsaw, the reinstatement of religious education in schools, and the return of chaplains to prisons and hospitals. The authorities, however, did not treat the above as part of a binding agreement. As early as in the 1957 and 1958 activities restricting the functioning of the Church began. The symbolic markings of the process were the attack on the Primate’s Institute at Jasna Góra in 1958 and the withdrawal of consent for the construction of the church in Kraków’s Nowa Huta. Finally, in 1961, religious education was removed from schools, and in 1962 a separate department of the Security Service was established for the sole purpose of the fight against religion. Although the practices of the Stalinist period did not make their comeback, the 1956 thaw appeared to be only a short episode in a constant conflict between the communist state and the Roman Catholic Church.

The breakdown of the epic wholeness specific to the Thaw novel enables writers to undermine the politics of Stalinism. Influenced by Vincent Jouveʼs analysis of the mise-en-texte of values, the paper emphasizes on undermining rhetorical strategies such as ellipsis, narrative focus or sympathy towards certain characters. One of the first occurrences of the ephemeral genre known as “the novel of the obsessive decade”, Marin Predaʼs Risipitorii (1962) is used as a case study for the defending a poetics of subversion.