The PEN Ten is PEN America’s weekly interview series. This week, PEN America’s Public Program Manager, Lily Philpott, speaks to Nadya Tolokonnikova, a conceptual artist and political activist from Russia and the founder of the art collective, Pussy Riot. Nadya’s new book, Read & Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism, was published this month by HarperOne.
1. How does your identity as an artist and writer shape your activism? How does your identity as an activist shape your art and writing?
In my art I’m trying to find truth about the world and critically reflect on the times in which I happen to live. That’s my main job in life. If you wish, as Lenin once wrote in “Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution,” art’s duty is to reflect reality. I’m not exactly a Leninist, but I’ve never dug art theories that claim that art world is self-referential. I believe that art is a device to get to know the world better and challenge it to become better.
“In my art I’m trying to find truth about the world and critically reflect on the times in which I happen to live.”
2. You write about the importance of bringing joy into the act of resistance. In today’s near constant onslaught of bad news and propaganda, how do you actively retain and project joy into your resistance?
It’s not really about bringing joy into the act of resistance. But: Reveal joy in resistance itself. Resistance is not always a carnival; sometimes you’re poisoned, jailed, murdered. I’m saying something more like that: Don’t treat political work as a boring duty; find a type of activism that fits your personality. If you hate calling officials, but would rather write a protest song, why would you frustrate yourself calling officials? At the moments when I’m able to find a type of protest act that does not drain me, but on the contrary, fills me in with inspiration, I see how you can obtain even more energy from difficulties and beatings.
3. Writers and artists are often influenced by the work of others, building up from the foundations others have laid. Where is the line between inspiration and appropriation?
I’m not sure that I can draw this line.
4. In Read & Riot you write about the ethos of punk music as a major influence for Pussy Riot and your activism. How important is music to the act of calling for lasting, institutional change? Is there a song that you feel brings people together to effect change?
Sham 69, “If the Kids are United.”
5. In your work you speak about ridiculing repressive power structures. In your mind, what is the importance of satire to resistance?
Mostly it’s a question of self-preservation and emotional hygiene. If you’re deadly serious all the time, you have little chance to overcome repressive structures. Being deadly serious is reserved for those structures. They can afford it, you can’t.
6. What’s the most daring thing you’ve ever put into words?
“I love you” written in a letter to my daughter from Mordovian GULAG.
7. In Read & Riot you touch on the worldwide uprisings in 1968 and the hope they brought to the world. Do you feel that there have been collective, international actions in recent years that will be remembered in the same way as 1968? The Womens’ March in 2017, or the Arab Spring in 2010, for example?
Spanish M-15 and then Podemos, American Occupy Wall Street, Russian Occupy movement, Bernie Sanders’s political campaign. I think it’s all part of one chain: anti-authoritarian, anti-corruption, and anti-austerity; pro-equality; alter-globalist.
8. Pussy Riot’s actions were under surveillance before and after you were imprisoned. How does that affect your art? Is art created under surveillance different than art that is not surveilled? Why or why not?
It creates additional risks, say, you don’t discuss your art via telephone and gmail, you do it via personal meetings. So in that sense it brings people closer and encourages you to build a community of comrades who you can trust as yourself, because trust is the most important currency here.
9. In your book, you write movingly about receiving enormous bags of letters from supporters across the globe while in prison. What did it mean to know that so many people were fighting for your release while you were imprisoned? What can those of us on the outside do for currently incarcerated political prisoners like Oleg Sentsov, or Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo?
Write letters to political prisoners. It lifts their spirit and, which is not less important, shows the prison wardens that those prisoners are not alone; they’re supported. So it makes the overall situation a bit safer for a prisoner.
10. In Read & Riot you quote many revolutionary thinkers and include a ‘Pussy Riot Reading List.’ If you could narrow that list down, and require the current administrations of the United States and Russia to read any book, what would it be?
For Putin it’d be the Constitution of the Russian Federation, because he violates it all the time, and, I think, forgot what’s written in it. For Trump it’d be the Bible, since he’s a dirty liar and claims that he’s a religious person though he’s never opened the Bible.