Tatyana Apraksina

Tatyana Apraksina is an artist and writer who also produces the magazine Apraksin Blues.

Career Apraksina settled in Leningrad in 1963 and started to live on Apraksin Lane (Apraksin pereulok) in 1972. The music-inflected unofficial culture of the time began to intersect actively with her life.

In 1974, "Apraksina" became her creative pseudonym. In one of his late interviews, Mike revealed that "all [his] songs are dedicated to her." Apraksina managed to establish herself as a graphic artist, employed by factories, stores and movie theaters. particularly nearby Apraksin Dvor. She received permission to attend rehearsals of what is now the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra and of other ensembles, doing so for four to six hours a day, As part of the observances of Shostakovich's 80th birthday, the artist donated the portrait to what is now the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, which hung the work in Room 36, where the composer taught his classes. In 1987, the Kurchatov Institute just prior to his death, would remain significant in later years as the artist took an active role in rehabilitating the slandered composer's reputation through her writing. The writing also embodied a first public statement of the risks to which painting and displaying the portrait had exposed her career.

Apraksina first exhibited in the United States as a Soviet artist through the Art League of Chicago and Soros Foundation support. The seven-month tour, featuring eleven exhibits from the East to the West Coast of the U.S., also included the artist's lectures.

In 1998, in the building of the Twelve Collegia, Saint Petersburg State University's Center for Contemporary Art held a retrospective exhibit drawn from Apraksina's body of work in parallel with her "March Solo" festival, organized in partnership with the Center for Cultural Studies at the university's department of philosophy. Her "brief segments" on creativity, Lessons for 'Orly, were published in the annual journal of the university's St. Petersburg Philosophical Society in 2000.

In 2008, Apraksina's California Psalms, written in Big Sur, was among the laureates of the international poetry competition held by the Russian Foreign Ministry in partnership with Literary Gazette. She has continued to produce "Apraksin Blues" while based in California. She is a member of the Prof. V.I. Startsev International Association of Historical Psychology.

In 2023, Apraksina received the Babel Prize for Literature from Mundus Artium Press.