Grigory Proskurin Rebuilds His Soviet Childhood in 3D

By Grace Kim

Russian 3D artist Grigory Proskurin rebuilt the hallway, wardrobe and television corner of his childhood home in Soviet Apartment, a three-dimensional digital reconstruction made from memory.

The project records a specific post-Soviet domestic interior (life after the Soviet era), rather than a generalized idea of the period. His father’s bicycle stood in the hallway, while an enormous wardrobe filled another room. In the living room, his family gathered around a television to watch him and his brother play Dendy video games.

Proskurin began with remembered objects and their placement, then modeled their surfaces, wear and surrounding light. His finished spaces can pass for photographs. Their force comes from the personal scale they retain: a bicycle linked to his father, an oversized wardrobe, and a screen at the center of family time.

The mechanism behind the realism

The profile identifies Blender, Unreal Engine, Substance Painter and Marmoset Toolbag as the tools behind the work. Together, they support detailed three-dimensional spaces finished with convincing materials, natural lighting and small imperfections. Those final details separate an inhabited room from an immaculate digital stage.

That is why the profile lingers on patterned carpets, lace curtains, battered wooden furniture and cluttered rooms full of objects nobody thought to discard. None needs to announce itself as history. Their arrangement builds a domestic environment through accumulated evidence rather than overt symbolism.

Proskurin’s method treats nostalgia as a record of relationships, not just an atmosphere. The father’s bicycle links one generation to the next; the Dendy games gather the siblings and family around the television. The room becomes a map of who used it, and with whom.

The wider visual language

His other digital environments move from intimate rooms to neglected residential buildings and concrete landscapes associated with post-Soviet life. The profile describes pale daylight in quiet rooms, faded carpets, empty chairs and old cassette players, with little glamour in these scenes. That restraint keeps attention on use, absence and the passage of time.

The profile argues that a faded carpet, an empty chair or an old cassette player can carry an entire generation’s memories. It says Proskurin’s work shows how digital art can preserve “not only the appearance of vanished places but also the strangely comforting feeling of having once belonged to them.” The claim matters because the work preserves sensation alongside surface.

The finished, atmospheric images can easily be mistaken for photographs, according to the profile. That resemblance gives them documentary force, but their subject is personal rather than civic. Soviet Apartment begins with one man’s childhood home and uses domestic memory to make a broader cultural atmosphere legible.

What does this change for digital art?

It widens what realism means in digital art. For Proskurin, realism starts with remembered objects, their placement and the light around them, then depends on controlled imperfection. A technically flawless room would miss the point. The worn carpet and battered furniture do more visual work than any single nostalgic symbol.

The practical question for viewers is whether digital reconstruction can preserve history without turning it into a historical exhibit. Because Soviet Apartment comes from one family’s memory, it does not claim the completeness of a historical survey. It offers a specific, emotional account of what the past felt like from inside a family home.

That makes the work less a record of architecture than an argument about memory’s material side. Walls, curtains, carpets and furniture hold the evidence; software supplies light, texture and depth. The profile directs readers to Proskurin’s Instagram account, @harneleon, where they can find more of his work.

Proskurin’s wider project now extends that method to neglected residential buildings, quiet rooms and pale urban daylight. Those spaces ask viewers to recognize how ordinary material can hold collective memory. As Soviet Apartment moves from private recollection toward broader digital environments, its significance will depend on whether viewers experience those details as evidence of lived time rather than as decoration.