Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on April 21, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Anna Narinskaya. Moderated by Mark Lipovetsky.
On April 10, 2023, experimental director Zhenya Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petrichuk were arrested in Russia on charges of “justifying terrorism.” Russian authorities accused them of spreading terrorist propaganda through their play “Finist, the Bright Falcon,” which, through a documentary-style performance, attempts to understand what motivated the choices of Russian women, who met ISIS militants online and traveled to Syria to marry them.
Despite the play’s success and numerous awards, Berkovich and Petrichuk were sentenced to six years in a penal colony. While still in pretrial detention, Berkovich wrote a cheerful children’s book called “Pets,” in which the characters are animals that inhabit the prison: cows, rats, and even cockroaches. From the penal colony, she continues to send poems and texts filled with observations and hope to the outside world.
In this lecture, journalist and playwright Anna Narinskaya will talk about what Zhenya Berkovich’s voice means in today’s Russia and beyond.
Anna Narinskaya is a Russian journalist, playwright, art curator, and activist. In Russia, she worked for newspapers Kommersant and Novaya Gazeta, curated exhibitions at the Pushkin Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Jewish Museum, and collaborated with the Gogol Center. In 2018, she was one of the organizers of the “March of Mothers” protesting against the persecution of teenagers in Putin’s Russia. In 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she emigrated to Germany, where she writes for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and collaborates with the Gorki Theater. Her latest projects include the play “My Beloved Country,” based on the bestselling book by Elena Kostyuchenko, and the exhibition “No Such People Here,” which tells the story of the oppression of LGBTQ+ people in Chechnya.
Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.
Image: Anna Shmitko (Анна Шмитько), CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
