Posts by Sonakshi Srivastava

Nostalgia and Aesthetic Inertia: A Review of The Last Soviet Artist by Victoria Lomasko

The Last Soviet Artist compels readers to take note, to research, and to reflect. . .

The Last Soviet Artist by Victoria Lomasko, translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich, n+1 Books, 2025

The title of this review is part borrowed from, and part inspired by a subsection of Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia. A meditation that concerns itself with the capacious titular affect, Boym studies nostalgia through the revolutionary era of perestroika, the fall of the Soviet Union, and well into the present. While she categorizes two types of nostalgia, restorative and reflective—the former more active, seeking to reconstruct the past, and the latter passive, dwelling in yearning—she caveats that these are only “tendencies, ways of giving shape and meaning to longing.” While reading Victoria Lomasko’s The Last Soviet Artist, a third degree of nostalgia emerges: the residual. Nostalgia’s escape from the decay of romanticization towards a productive politic of collective and self-exploration feeds the heart of the text. 

Translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich, Lomasko’s latest—a graphic reportage that blends elements of memoir—was initially planned as a sequel to her Other Russias, which she mentions in her introduction. I hold a particular reverence for introductions; these precise portals often reveal more of the author’s motivations than is written on the surface, and Lomasko’s is particularly transparent. There is an urgency—we learn that Lomasko has self-exiled in response to Russia’s iron grip of heavy censorship and repression. In her home country, there is no room for imagination, no space for artists, and social activism has been systematically stifled. This realization dispels the awe Lomasko had held for “those fairytale pictures and stories” that she grew up reading about an everlasting friendship among the fifteen Soviet republics. Any remaining traces of nostalgia for “that period” soon erode away when Lomasko, seeking photocopies of her work clandestinely at a museum in Belarus, realizes that her body remembered what it “had really meant to be a Soviet person.” 

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Thinking through Labour: A Review of The Arcana of Reproduction by Leopoldina Fortunati 

Fortunati sweeps us into understanding the re/production economies of the housewives, the prostitutes, and the workers.

The Arcana of Reproduction by Leopoldina Fortunati, translated from the Italian by Arlen Austin and Sara Colantuono, Verso, 2025

Earlier this year, Indian Twitter spiralled into a full-blown meltdown after Mrs., the Hindi remake of the Malayalam film The Great Indian Kitchen, was released pan-India on the streaming platform Zee5. The film provides a picture of the world of Richa, a well-educated woman who recedes into the drudgery of housework; after marriage, her dreams and desires suffocated. I could not bring myself to watch the film, but I devoured the reviews. Many hailed the movie for its realistic rage against the patriarchy, but the bones of contention that the audience picked with the film were many. One Twitter user casually remarked that if the husband is the breadwinner, the least one may expect from the wife is to do the household chores. Reading these reviews and blithe takes, I was livid, and I could not quite put a finger on why.

I found the answer, cosmologically-willed, in Leopoldina Fortunati’s work L’arcano della riproduzione (first published in 1981), rendered into English by Arlen Austin and Sara Colantuono as The Arcana of Reproduction. Fortunati was a key member of Lotta Femminista, initially called Movimento di Lotta Femminile (Women’s Struggle Movement), and then finally Movimento dei Gruppi e Comitati per il Salario al Lavoro Domestico (Movement of Groups and Committees for Wages for Housework). English-speaking countries are more familiar with its alternative name: the network of Wages for Housework. As the name suggests, the international movement had a militant and anti-capitalist dimension, and its goal to secure pay for housework aligned much with the struggles for wages that were playing out in factories and universities at large. Together with companions Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, and Silvia Federici, she wrote texts that reflected the movement’s goals and ideology; her Arcana of Reproduction emerged from these reflections. READ MORE…