Rate this book

Pussy Riot (2014)

by Masha Gessen(Favorite Author)

3.85 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

9173375616 (ISBN13: 9789173375610)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Brombergs

review 1: Truly inspiring. It astounds me to read about people who have such conviction, such purpose, such singular focus and ambition and belief in the value of their own perspective despite how different it may be from the norm of the society in which they were raised at such a young age. These women are a force to be reckoned with. I did not rate it a 5 because the journalist does not take a fresh approach to the medium -- it is a pretty straight-forward journalistic account of what happened. And large sections of the book are reprinted letters and speeches by the members of Pussy Riot that have appeared elsewhere. I may be critiquing the book for not being something it is not trying to be, but still I would have appreciated a bit more from it -- whatever that more ma... morey be.
review 2: Enlightening words on the life and background of members of Pussy Riot.Russians say of their country since the times of Stalin: Half the population is behind bars and the other half is guarding themNorlilsk = world’s northernmost large city (large defined as population over 100,000)Norlag, the mining and metallurgy arm of the gulagAndrei’s father had been a prison guard, landing in Norilsk after WWII as a Party workerBydlo = cattle (the epithet for compatriots = white trash/redneck)Andrei met Katya (pianist) at the Arts Institute in KrasnoyarskNadya arrived on Revolution Day, November 7, 1989, one of the most vodka-soaked days of the yearAlcoholism was epidemic in the Soviet Union, more drunks and drinks with every passing yearNadya lived with Andrei’s mother, VeraNot unusual - young Russian couples often placed their children with grandparentsNOrilsk was a dark place. 45 days of the year in pitch-blackness of polar night; another 6 mos the blackness turns with a gray haze; in May, when the polar day arrived, exposed snowbanks hardened by the winter and blackened by the fine particles with which the metal plants showered the city year-round.Katya’s new husband = Misha asked what Andrei had done to the child:a wallflower had been transformed into a rebel“The trick is to awaken the sleeping volcano -- that is where true creativity begins.”Nadya: My education began the moment I came home from school.She actively fought to impress upon the school administration the primacy of the critical impulse in education -- the importance of “crisis, watershed moments” in the development of young people“I have devoted myself to creating such critical moments, and I do this solely out of concern for the school, so it may develop faster and better.”Russian existentialist philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov, as well as Sartre, Schopenhauer and KierkegaardThe books or Andrei or both -- and something else, too -- gave Nadya the idea, rarely expressed in Russian, especially in Norilsk, that things could be different -- and she demanded that they be so.The mining giant Norilsk Nickel was privatized by a pair of emerging oligarch in the mid-1990s. The junior partner, Mikhail Prokhorov decided to modernize not only the production but the very lives of workers. He was unusually close to his older sister, Irina, whose publishing enterprise he had started funding with some of the money he made. Irina started and ran the country’s best and biggest intellectual publishing house, put out books, a scholarly journal, and a more-popular intellectual magazine. In 2004, Mikhail launched a culture foundation and asked Irina to run it -- to bring the intellectual wealth of her publishing house to Norilsk. When light started dawning in Norilsk, she would put together a large group of Moscow writers, artists, and photographs and airlift them to Norilsk for weeks of performances, lectures and seminars. This is how Nadya saw Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov, a visual artist, a performance artist, a Conceptual poet, and he looked, sounded and moved like noone Nadya had ever seen before. He once explained, “I don’t produce text, I produce artistic behavior.”Marco Roth: Part of what Theory promised was an idea that another world was still possible, not in some mythical afterlife, but on this earth, now, that the life around me did not have to be the only one. There was no fixed human nature except to take in and shape what was around us. And almost everything around us was now the result of some sort of human endeavor, like the soy formula I’d been nursed on. We were culture and artificiality and engineering all the way down. What was made could thus be unmade.”Jeffrey Eugenide’s novel: The Marriage Plot“Semiotics is the first thing that smacked of revolution. It drew a line; it created an elect; it was sophisticated and Continental; it dealt with provocative subjects, with torture, sadism, hermaphroditism -- with sex and power.”Semiotics is the study of meaning-making. This includes the study of signs and sign processes, indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communicationThe world was becoming clearer and infinitely more complicated at the same time. It was exhilarating.The world outside Moscow State University at the start of 2007 was just as stultifying as the world inside it. Vladimir Putin, once a low-level KGB staffer, was in his 8th year of running the country. The price of oil, which had grown nearly 4-fold since 2000, had begun its steepest climb yet; it would nearly double in a year. Russia was flooded with money. Luxury boutiques could not keep goods in stock. Nor could the Bentley dealership that had opened a block from the Kremlin. Street protests called the Marches of the Disagreeable dissipated in 2008 after police started detaining known activists in the days prior to the scheduled protests.In Dec 2006, at the end of Nadya’s first semester in Moscow, more than 5000 people showed up for a March of the Disagreeable. A hundred were detained. Four months later, 1000 activists were detained as they left home to go to another banned march. Still about 5000 showed up and several hundred managed to break through a police cordon and march for a ½-mile before the protest was broken up by police. To Petya and Nadya, who took part in some of the protests, it was clear they were not the only people in Russian who would speak out against the suffocating political uniformity, the overwhelming mediocrity, and the obsessive consumption of Putin’s Russia.Petya’s best friend, Oleg Vorotnikov, a philosophy graduateOleg’s spouse, Natalia Sokol, physicist turned photographerOleg and Natalia plus Petya and Nadya formed a new art groupIn Feb 2007, they settled on a name: Voina or “War”In all societies, public rhetoric involves some measure of lying, and history -- political and art history -- is made when someone effectively confronts the lie. But in really scary societies all public conversation is an exercise in using words to mean their opposites, and confronting these lies is the most scary and lonely thing a person can do. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s WeAldous Huxley’s Brave New Worldreal words corresponded to actual facts and feelings broke through in a sudden, catastrophic flood and brought down the Soviet Union. On 29 Feb 2008, 5 couples had sex in the Biology Museum and videotaped it. The action was called Fuck for the Heir Puppy Bear, a play on Dmitry Medvedev’s last name, which derives from the Russian word for bearIn May, Voina staged The Humiliation of a Cop in His Home, pretending to be students delegated by local high schoolsIn June, Cop in a Priest’s Cassock demonstrated that both priests and cops were robbersIn September, In Memory of the Decembrists, an action referenced Russia’s 19th century would-be revolutionaries -- 5 Decembrists had been hanged.In November, Storming of the White House - a powerful laser projector projected an enormous skull-and-crossbones across the Moscow River onto the White House, seat of the Russian government28 Dec 2008 - welded shut the doors of Oprichnik, one of Moscow’s most ridiculously expensive restaurants, whose name referred to members of Ivan the Terrible’s shock troopsThe art group proved to be talented recruits. They would go to established artists for counsel and involve them as well. Shoplifting was an essential part of the Voina ethos. They rejected consumption; more to the point, they had no money but liked to eat well and often -- so they raised stealing food to an art form.On 6 Jul 2007, Prigov was in the hospital, intensive care16 Jul 2007 Prigov, age 66, died in the hospitalThe Wake or The Feast installation wa about 12 people at red plastic picnic tables in the Moscow Metro. With white tablecloths, bottles of wine and vodka, and traditional Russian bitter and sweet wake fare. Oleg recited an early Prigov poem. They looked shaken, small, and alone -- exactly the way people feel when someone they love has died. They succeeded in capturing the very essence of a Russian wake, a party of maudlin abandon. I love you come what may…Kat - Yekaterina“My childhood was not particularly ordinary before it became ordinary.”Once she was home, Yekaterina had an ordinary childhood. She was a lonely girl growing up in a lonely family of lonely people, a late-Soviet version of any American novel of suburban desolation.Her mother was brought up conservatively -- that the woman’s place was in the kitchen. Kat looked at it all in horror. She lived at the dacha with her mother the summer after her first year of college. Her father split his time between Moscow and the countryside. She spent 6 years at the Moscow Institute of Power Engineering getting a master’s degree. The state just did not want to invest in attracting people to working in research. She got a job at the Ministry of Defense, the Agat Institute. She was completely disappointed. For all the same reasons: corruption, the state’s lack of desire to invest in quality military equipment. Programmers got very low pay, while project leaders, who weren’t doing anything, just watching security clearances, got a 100,000 rubles (~$3000) a month. People who never showed up were making $60,000. You went to work and didn’t know who you reported to or what you were supposed to do.Alexander Rodchenko, the Constructivist artistBoris Mikhailov, Ukrainian-born photographer living in BerlinIn a country where there was no political opposition, a few people discovered their commonality online because they produced similarly disaffected 140-character comments on the Russian government.They were ready. Sort of. Maybe. Almost.Vladimir Putin responded to a woman at a conference of his United Russia party by saying, Natasha, I have only one wish: please do not forget about fulfilling your obligations with regards to solving our demographic issues.Pisya Riot - wee wee: LGBT and feminismMartin Heidegger, German philosopherProbably the most important thing about my childhood is the absence of unmotivated prohibitions. If something was not allowed, the reason was always transparent. Independent opinions and actions were respected.Darren Arofsky, Requiem for a dreamAnnual poetry festival in MayLike many people who perpetually feel like outsiders, she had perfected the art of compartmentalizing her life. The floodgates opened after December 5. It was like everyone had found his long-lost family, like daylight had broken after years of polar night.________________________________________Try as those who put us here might, we are not going to commit the sin of gloom. - Nadya 11 April 2012Carole Cadwalladr, writer of the GuardianThey’re the daughters that any parent would be proud to have. Smart, funny, sensitive, not afraid to stand up for their beliefs.Nadya: We believe that art should be accessible to the public, and for this reason we perform in a variety of venues.We share our compatriots’ dislike for the perfidy (the act of betrayal), treachery, hypocrisy, and bribery of which the current authorities are guilty… Our action was not motivated by hatred for Russian Orthodoxy, which prizes the same qualities we do: charity, mercy, forgiveness.Anatoly (Natan) SharanskyRigidity is always the opposite of the search for truthTo be human is to err; humans are imperfect. Humans are always striving for wisdom, but it is always elusive. A philosopher is a person who loves wisdom and strives for it, but can never possess it.Pythagorus said that extensive knowledge does not breed wisdom.Our circumstances are desperate, but we do not despair. We are persecuted but we have not been abandoned.Solzhenitsyn: words will break cement. So the word is more sincere than concrete? So the word is not a trifle? Then may noble people begin to grow, and their word will break cement.Contemporary educational institutions teach people to live on autopilot from the time they are children. They never pose important questions, even taking age into consideration, and they impart cruelty and an intolerance for dissidence. A person learns to forget about his liberty starting at a young age.The result is a sort of ontological humility, resignation as a state of being in society. Maria: I came to think of inner freedom as the foundation for all actioncultural festival replaced protest or vigilMerab Mamardashvili (1930-90) Soviet Georgian philosopherMarina Tsvetaeva’s poetryHeidegger: Language is the house of beingAndrei Usachev, KharmsDura lex, sed lex "The law is harsh, but it is the law." The only true education possible in Russia is self-education - NadyaAndrei Sinyavsky - he said his disagreements with the Soviet regime were “purely stylistic in nature.”Joseph Brodsky: The more substantial an individual’s aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer -- though not necessarily the happier -- he is.Nadya: I am proud of everyone who is willing to make sacrifices for the sake of standing up for their principles. That is the only way to achieve large-scale change in politics, values or aesthetics.They were doing what Pussy Riot had always done: illuminating the issues and proposing a conceptual framework for discussing them. As is often the case with great art, most people did not understand what they were doing.Anatoly Marchenko: My Testimony less

Download links for: Pussy Riot

Advertising