Other Russias - Softcover

Lomasko, Victoria

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0997031840 ISBN 13: 9780997031843

Publisher: n+1 Research, 2017

Synopsis

Other Russias is the brilliant first collection of graphic journalism by artist and activist Victoria Lomasko. A fixture at Moscow's protests and political trials, Lomasko illuminates the inequality and injustice at the heart of contemporary Russian society and gives voice to Russia's many voiceless citizens. Not content to remain in the capital, she travels the country, visiting schools in dying villages; interviewing sex workers in foundering industrial towns; teaching children at juvenile prisons to draw, all while drawing their stories. Her portraits allow readers to see these people as more than words on paper and to see them as she does: with dignity, compassion, and love. Other Russias is an urgent and poignant work by a major talent.

About this title

Review:

Victoria Lomasko's gritty, street-level view of the great Russian people masterfully intertwines quiet desperation with open defiance. Her drawings have an on-the-spot immediacy that I envy. She is one of the brave ones (Joe Sacco, author of Palestine)

Disturbing, impressive and fascinating... Lomasko has created an unusual and compelling piece of documentary art that stays with you long after you've finished studying the cartoons (Viv Groskop Spectator)

Compassionate and compulsively readable... While Lomasko is a fierce and involved critic of the self-serving powers that be, Other Russias is propelled by the idea that everyone has a story worth telling, and she tells most of them straight. Interviews hit harder for being matter-of-fact and she follows homophobes as well as activists, nationalists as well as anti-fascists. There's a wonderful immediacy to her portraits (James Smythe Guardian)

While journalists and troublesome observers were shooed away from a Moscow polling booth, Victoria Lomasko was permitted to stay "as an amusing oddity" and sketch the scenes leading up to Putin's election in 2011. Her access to sensitive subjects is essential to Other Russias' up-close and raw depiction of Russians rendered either invisible or angry by the political situation from 2008 to 2016 (Layli Foroudi Financial Times)

Powerful... Though Victoria Lomasko's figures are rendered in broad, black-and-white strokes, her depictions of God-fearing old ladies, young skinheads, and striking truckers never fall into the traps of parody, contempt, or stereotype. Her focus on the daily lives of regular people offers a respite from the international fixation on Vladimir Putin -- who is, after all, only one of a hundred and forty-four million Russians (Sophie Pinkham New Yorker)

An album of images and impressions of ordinary, unconnected Russian citizens who have unexpectedly found themselves activists... Victoria Lomasko is the graphic artist equivalent of the great Svetlana Alexievich, the Nobel Prize winner whose work also records and vivifies the lives of the Invisible and the Angry (Bob Blaisdell Russian Life)

From the Back Cover:

'Victoria Lomasko's gritty, street-level view of the great Russian people masterfully intertwines quiet desperation with open defiance. Her drawings have an on-the-spot immediacy that I envy. She is one of the brave ones' Joe Sacco, author of Palestine

What does it feel like to live in Russia today? For the past eight years, graphic artist and activist Victoria Lomasko has been travelling around the country, and talking to people as she draws their stories. She spent time in dying villages where teachers outnumber students, stayed with sex workers in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, went to juvenile prisons and attended political rallies.

The result is an extraordinary mosaic of Russia in the Putin years - a people who have been left behind but are determined to fight. Lomasko's portraits show us a side of Russia that is hardly ever seen.

About this edition

• Publisher: n+1 Research
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0997031840
• ISBN 13: 9780997031843
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320