Jonathan Brooks Platt

Jonathan Brooks Platt writes on topics including Stalin-era culture, representations of reading in Russian Romanticism, and the actionist tradition in Russian contemporary art. His monograph, Greetings, Pushkin!: Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard appeared in 2017 through the University of Pittsburgh Press and, in Russian translation, the European University in St. Petersburg Press. He is a widely-published translator of new Russian Left poetry, particularly by the Omsk-born poet Galina Rymbu, and he has collaborated on artistic projects with Chto Delat, the Factory of Found Clothes, and the Texno-Poetry music cooperative. In 2014, as part of the Manifesta 10 Contemporary Art Biennial in St. Petersburg, he curated the four-day conference, “No radical art actions are going to help here…”: Political Violence and Militant Aesthetics after Socialism, including scholarly talks, literary readings, and performances. His current project, The Last Soviet Militant, engages the controversial legacy of Zoya Kosmodemianskaya, a female partisan who was tortured and executed by German forces in 1941, and who remains an icon of militant devotion in Russia to this day.

Pittsburgh, United States