Victoria Lomasko | The Last Soviet Artist

Victoria Lomasko’s (b. 1978) practice of graphic reportage synthesizes image and text, taking the form of novels, journalism, comics, paintings and monumental murals. A renowned dissident voice in the highly censored environment of contemporary Russia, Lomasko’s seminal graphic novels, including Other Russias and Forbidden Art, have an honest style exposing the country’s inequalities and injustices whilst amplifying and defending the plight of Russia’s many voiceless and unseen communities. Travelling across Russia and neighbouring countries, often at huge personal risk, her work often embraces a magical realist sensibility as a method of processing subjective and visceral experiences. Lomasko’s most recent novel, The Last Soviet Artist, finished three weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is a timely work anticipating the region’s seismic political changes that won the 2022 Free Voice award from PEN Catalan and Prix Couilles au Cul pour le Courage Artistique, Festival de BD d’Angoulême. In 2024, a movie titled Tree of Violence about work the artist on the eve of the war has been distributed by TV-ARTE.

The Last Soviet Artist is a collection of graphic reportages published by n+1, 2025. The book was created during trips across the former Soviet republics. The first part describes society in Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Georgia and the North Caucasus: gender rights, grassroots initiatives, fragments of the Soviet heritage and new trends. The book's second part focuses on the Belarusian Revolution of 2022 and the last major protests in Russia on the eve of the full invasion of Ukraine: what happens with the lives of ordinary people in times of historical change. The third part of the book was written in exile. All three parts are united by the main subject: generational conflict in the post-Soviet space. The book won the 2022 Free Voice award from PEN Catalan and Prix Couilles au Cul pour le Courage Artistique, Festival de BD d’Angoulême.

Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (OWNER)

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