Publications by Anastasiya Osipova
The Russian Review, 2024
This paper explores media strategies used by the four former editors of the Russian independent s... more This paper explores media strategies used by the four former editors of the Russian independent student-run journal DOXA during their year of pre-trial domestic confinement between April 2021 and April 2022. This high-profile case ended only two months after the beginning of Russia’s full- scale war in Ukraine and the intensification of repressions against the internal political opposition. It also concludes a decade-long phase in the conflict between the Russian state and its increasingly politicized youth. By maintaining a public presence during their house arrest despite the official prohibition, the DOXA Four entered into a media competition with police: Both groups were trying to reach an audience of Russian youth and shape the public image of oppositional students. While the state strove to intimidate, infantilize, and isolate the young people, the DOXA editors promoted col- lectivist forms of feeling and imagination to encourage political mobilization. In doing so, they aimed to break with the prevailing culture of ironic aestheticization of state violence and to re-articulate political aesthetics for its generation.
Internationale Zeitschrift für Kulturkomparatistik, 2023
In this article, I analyze the character of hyper-naturalism and exaggerated tactility in drama... more In this article, I analyze the character of hyper-naturalism and exaggerated tactility in dramatic poems by contemporary Russian-Georgian philosopher and writer Keti Chukhrov. I argue that, while descriptions of violence, physiological func-tions, and abject poverty are common for post-Soviet art, in Chukhrov’s work these elements perform radically different task than in the pessimistic and de-ideologized chernukha, or the style of grim realism. Her approach to matter is also distinct from the historic Russian avant-garde tradition, which relished intensified sensations but did not offer constructive ways of inscribing their immediacy into coherent cultural continuity. Instead, her dramatic poems bear pedagogical, even rehabilitative stakes for recuperating the individual sensations of alienated people into meaningful and shared cultural experiences. In this article, I discuss her ap-proach to drama as mobilizing the tradition of Soviet Marxist defectology, a spe-cial educational method of socializing disabled, cognitively impaired, or other-wise disadvantaged people. Pioneered in the Soviet Union in the 1920s by Lev Vygotsky and suppressed in the 1930s, defectology found further application in the 1960s and 1970s in the work of the Zagorsk boarding school for the deafblind, led by Vygotsky’s student Alexander Mescheriakov and Evald Ilyenkov, a Marx-ist -Hegelian philosopher who is a central figure for Chukhrov’s philosophical re-search. One of the key tasks of Meshcheriakov and Ilyenkov was to help their deafblind students to overcome isolation through learning to translate their purely tactile sensations into deliberate communicative acts. While Zagorsk offered Ilyenkov an opportunity to test and apply his theory of the collectivist formation of personality, for Chukhrov it is theater that has become the sphere for experi-mental, practical extension of her scholarly research into Soviet Marxist thought and socialist culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Her dramatic texts offer models of alternative subjectivization for post-Soviet people to allow themselves once again to recognize the presence of universal values and greater cultural commons be-hind individual, alienated sensations and experiences.
The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture:, 2021
The Gorozhane (The Urbanites) was the first independent literary association to seek official rec... more The Gorozhane (The Urbanites) was the first independent literary association to seek official recognition since the early 1930s. As such, the group represents the emergence of a transitional social sphere in the Soviet Union. While insisting on their autonomy and non-engagement with Soviet cultural and political life, the Urbanites nevertheless were not content to remain underground and sought recognition from official Soviet institutions. The group is also an example of the simultaneous adaptation and depoliticization of early revolutionary culture in the 1960s. Actively modeling themselves on the literary collectives of the early post-revolutionary period and drawing on the arsenal of literary tools developed by Russian and Soviet modernists (Andrey Platonov, Isaac Babel, Yuri Olesha, and others), the Urbanites nevertheless viewed literature as a radically autonomous sphere, existing outside of politics, history, and ideology, and adopted modernist literary devices without regard for the historical circumstances and ideological conflicts that shaped them.
Film Comment Magazine, 2022
Sergei Loznitsa's a new documentary about the execution of thousands of people, most of them Jews... more Sergei Loznitsa's a new documentary about the execution of thousands of people, most of them Jews, during the German occupation of Kyiv in World War II opened in American theaters on April 1. Exactly one month earlier, on March 1, 2022, a Russian bomb exploded at the site of the Babi Yar memorial in Kyiv, as the Russian army was trying to destroy a nearby TV tower. Looking at photographs of the aftermath of that explosion, or of the bodies of people executed more recently by Russian soldiers in the town of Bucha, it is difficult to resist the temptation to conflate the images of Ukraine now with those of the country during the Nazi invasion. Bearing witness to violence occurring in the same place again and again can create a potentially overwhelming feeling of anger and anguish. Recognizing and articulating the differences between historical circumstances-to better grapple with a traumatic legacy and defend the country's future not only from invaders, but also from blind vengeance or despair-takes enormous effort. This effort is something that Ukraine's Film Academy seems incapable of: on March 18, the Academy expelled Loznitsa, citing his insufficient commitment to "his national identity" and refusal to indiscriminately boycott all Russian films. Undoubtedly, Loznitsa also offended many in the Ukrainian film community by including scenes of Ukrainian collaboration with Nazi forces in Babi Yar. Context, which is composed entirely of archival footage of the massacre and the events around it. Any mention of this past collaboration seems to be unacceptable at a time when Vladimir Putin is citing "denazification" as one of the pretexts for Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Babi Yar. Context is not about present-day Ukraine, but it can still teach us how to look at the current war: how to process the images of suffering without being paralyzed by pain or consumed by uncritical hatred. Loznitsa's own hope, as he told me, is that the footage in his forthcoming film
n+1, 2022
This interview was recorded a few days after Nenasheva was released from the Sakharovo jail in Mo... more This interview was recorded a few days after Nenasheva was released from the Sakharovo jail in Moscow, were she had spent two weeks for organizing an antiwar support group. Through friends, she was able to report on conditions and everyday life in that jail, which she says is now packed with people arrested for opposing Russia’s war on Ukraine.
n+1, 2022
n+1 is publishing a series of interviews and transcripts that describe and illuminate the situati... more n+1 is publishing a series of interviews and transcripts that describe and illuminate the situation of antiwar protesters in Russia—with an emphasis on the experience of student protesters.
colta.ru, 2018
A long interview with Galina Rymbu and Marijeta Bozovic.
Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019
The term Soviet Baroque was coined by Viktor Shklovsky in 1929 to describe the aesthetic and theo... more The term Soviet Baroque was coined by Viktor Shklovsky in 1929 to describe the aesthetic and theoretical tendencies of the left art of the 1920s – a generation of revolutionary artists to which he himself belongs. Shklovsky understands Baroque not as a specific historical style, but as the aesthetics of " intensive detail " and nonsychronous conception of history. With the onset of the Stalinist ideology and of the Five-Year Plan era's optimism in the legibility of progress, Shklovsky becomes openly critical of the Soviet Baroque and his former artistic allies who espouse it. In this article I analyze the Soviet Baroque as an extension of a broader tendency that falls in line with the tradition of Historical Poetics and draw on several examples from Yuri Olesha's Envy and Yuri Tynianov's The Wax Person that I consider illustrative of this tendency.
The threat in the air is diffuse and complex: it’s not just the acute fear of an attack from Russ... more The threat in the air is diffuse and complex: it’s not just the acute fear of an attack from Russia. The war in the east has brought guns to the city, as well as men in camouflage who are not affiliated with the army, who may or may not be members of volunteer battalions, who may take orders from no one. While I was in Kyiv a strange shootout took place in the town of Mukachevo, in western Ukraine, not far from the border with Poland. It turned out that members of Right Sector, an ultranationalist group that emerged from Maidan, had clashed with corrupt local authorities over the control of contraband crossing the border. A few weeks later a hand-grenade explosion during a protest outside the Rada killed 4 soldiers and left 131 people wounded.
Residents of the capital prepare for the ground to split open while trying hard to maintain normalcy. Not many succeed in keeping hysteria at bay — in fact, most don’t.
A review of the "Specters of Communism: Contemporary Russian Art" show, curated by Boris Groys, t... more A review of the "Specters of Communism: Contemporary Russian Art" show, curated by Boris Groys, that took place at the James Gallery and e-flux gallery, NY in Spring 2015.
This text was published in the July 2015 issue of Texte Zur Kunst.
Circling the Square documents the landscape of the Maidan uprising and the political climate that... more Circling the Square documents the landscape of the Maidan uprising and the political climate that engendered it from many perspectives, ranging from an architectural analysis of Maidan, to documentation of an overtly criminal personal performance of solidarity in the Russian Federation, to an account of the occupation and attempted re-organization of the Ministry of Culture by a horizontal assembly of cultural workers. Despite the confusion in much of the world media and international left, these artists, writers and organizations are decidedly radical, negotiating a strange but critical position that recognizes the rising tide of jingoism that accompanies the threat of invasion as well as the opportunities opened up by Yanukovich’s collapse. The result has a decided lyricism that extends beyond a dry headline or inky propaganda.
Authors: Pavel Arsenev, Assembly for Culture in Ukraine, Larissa Babij, Oleksandr Burlaka, David Chichkan, Chto Delat?, Nikita Kadan, Volodymyr Kuznetsov, Mariana Matveichuk, Dimitry Mrachnik of the Autonomous Workers Union, Anastasiya Osipova, Petr Pavlensky, Marina Simakova, TanzLaboratorium Performance Group, Larisa Venediktova, Alexandr Wolodarskij, Serhiy Zhadan, and Anna Zvyagintseva.
Translations by Anastasiya Osipova
Stasis, 2018
The article is dedicated to the problem of negativity in modernist art. It ties together the subs... more The article is dedicated to the problem of negativity in modernist art. It ties together the substantive gloom of a modernist artwork with the catastrophes that happen at the level of its form. In this sense, there is a difference among the shock aesthetic of mass culture, the abstraction of avant-garde, and the ideological and figurative construction that is provided by a symbolist artwork. The article offers an apology of symbolism, primarily in plastic arts, and demonstrates its incessant influence.
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Publications by Anastasiya Osipova
Residents of the capital prepare for the ground to split open while trying hard to maintain normalcy. Not many succeed in keeping hysteria at bay — in fact, most don’t.
This text was published in the July 2015 issue of Texte Zur Kunst.
Authors: Pavel Arsenev, Assembly for Culture in Ukraine, Larissa Babij, Oleksandr Burlaka, David Chichkan, Chto Delat?, Nikita Kadan, Volodymyr Kuznetsov, Mariana Matveichuk, Dimitry Mrachnik of the Autonomous Workers Union, Anastasiya Osipova, Petr Pavlensky, Marina Simakova, TanzLaboratorium Performance Group, Larisa Venediktova, Alexandr Wolodarskij, Serhiy Zhadan, and Anna Zvyagintseva.
Translations by Anastasiya Osipova
http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/immortality-day/
Residents of the capital prepare for the ground to split open while trying hard to maintain normalcy. Not many succeed in keeping hysteria at bay — in fact, most don’t.
This text was published in the July 2015 issue of Texte Zur Kunst.
Authors: Pavel Arsenev, Assembly for Culture in Ukraine, Larissa Babij, Oleksandr Burlaka, David Chichkan, Chto Delat?, Nikita Kadan, Volodymyr Kuznetsov, Mariana Matveichuk, Dimitry Mrachnik of the Autonomous Workers Union, Anastasiya Osipova, Petr Pavlensky, Marina Simakova, TanzLaboratorium Performance Group, Larisa Venediktova, Alexandr Wolodarskij, Serhiy Zhadan, and Anna Zvyagintseva.
http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/immortality-day/
Translated by Anastasiya Osipova.
"Russian Revolution: A Contested Legacy" exhibition, curated by Masha Chlenova.
"Jews on the Land," the 1927 short film (18min) by Abram Room was made with the participation of notable avant-garde figures Viktor Shklovsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Lilia Brik, who were committed to the project of Jewish emancipation.
The funding for Jews on Land came from OZET (the Association for the Agricultural Settlement of Jewish Workers), which also commissioned many of the printed posters and ephemera on view in the exhibition. This agitprop film about Jewish agricultural communes in Crimea chronicles the extreme poverty of post-WWI shtetl life, and the idealistic drive to re-settle Soviet Jews into a self-governing, agricultural way of life.
Barricade is a platform for the publication of writing against fascism and authoritarianism and other forms of domination and control.
The inaugural edition features works translated into English for the first time by Walter Benjamin, Hisham Bustani, Georges Castera, Fruela Fernández, Werner Kofler, Jiři Kratochvil, and Yuriko Miyamoto, as well as an interview with Diane Rubenstein.
Produced in collaboration with NYU Comparative Literature Department and published by Cicada Press.
surveillance, as in today’s Russia or Belarus, there
is still space for individual freedom and for a
rather consistent resistance to power. This space
can be found by considering not only textbook
approaches to political agency of citizens, such
as participation in elections and protest demonstrations,
but also diverse opportunities of other,
more local and less spectacular ways of dissident
dealing with power. The choice of the topic for
our summer school reacts to the recently growing
number of studies dealing with the relationship
between power and people, state system and individual
in the context of political non-freedom.
In order to describe and explore multifaceted,
often non-confrontative practices and patterns
of resistance in the (post)Soviet world from the
late Soviet era to the present, we update and contextualize
the notion of Eigen-Sinn, a term coined
by the German historians Alf Lüdtke and Thomas
Lindenberger at the beginning of the 1990s. „Eigen-
Sinn“ draws on the polysemous meaning of
the German expression, meaning both stubbornness
or obstinacy and one’s own sense or meaning.
The concept allows for an interdisciplinary
approach to the issue of civil resistance in different
contexts and from different perspectives of
sociology, political science as well as cultural and
literary studies.