Lynn Patyk

Lynn Patyk’s work focuses on the intersection and interaction of politics, the arts, and media in Russia from the 19th – 21st century. She is interested in the strategy and tactics of the democratic movement’s struggle against autocracy, as well as the tactics of state and police repression. Her focus has been the extreme modes of political communication deployed in this context and their symbiosis with various media forms. Her first book, Written in Blood: Revolutionary Terrorism and Russian Literary Culture, 1861-1881 (University of Wisconsin, 2017) examined the way in which Russian literature contributed to the emergence of modern terrorism in Russia by providing its moral justification and iconic image. Her second book, Dostoevsky’s Provocateurs (Northwestern University, 2023) argues that provocation is a key mechanism of Dostoevsky’s novelistic art and integral to Dostoevskian dialogue as conceived by Mikhail Bakhtin. Her third book, Funny Dostoevsky (forthcoming from Bloomsbury 2024) edited together with Irina Erman, places comedy and humor at the center of Dostoevsky’s artistic and spiritual vision. Currently, Patyk is working on Russian YouTube as an “alternative Russia,” a home to Russian independent journalism, progressive stand-up comedy, and resistance to Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine.