Yet the situation of these artists was quite different. Kabakov observed that in Russia, since the nineteenth century, "art" played the role of religion, philosophy, and a guide to life. "We always dreamed of making the projects that would say everything about everything," says the artist, laughing. "In the 1970s we lived like Robinsons, discovering the world through our art." What was the hybrid metaphysical-epic novel in the nineteenth century became a conceptual installation in the 1970s. The conceptualists also continued the twentieth-century tradition of art-making as a lifestyle and a form of resistance, as in the artist communes of the 1920s (like the "flying ship," the House of Arts which existed in Petrograd in 1918-1921), and as in the unofficial literary life of the 1930s, when the last surviving avant-garde group, OBERIU, engaged in the "domestic life of literature," writing album poetry, putting on house performances, and reading poems to one's best friends. The art of the conceptualists was fragmentary, but what made it significant was the context of kitchen conversations, discoveries, and dialogues in a private or semi-private, unofficial community. The conceptualists preferred collective action to written manifestoes, and did not mold themselves, like the avant-gardists, into small exclusive parties which frequently practiced excommunication. This was not a cult with a leader, but a group of eccentric individuals who partook in the same dangers of everyday life, shared a common conversation, and derived from it their sense of identity.