Two participatory mapping workshops will be held at Pushkin House in February as part of the project with LivingMaps network, Every Dog is a Lion in its Home, which provides a platform for Ukrainian communities in London and beyond to discover and establish personal geographies of place, identity and belonging.

Writing a letter, especially a love letter, begins from a vulnerable place of sensing the recipient but never completely knowing how the letter will be received on the other side – especially when the relationship is complex and fraught. In this session with artist and writer Taey Iohe, we will read two letters by Ocean Vuong and Hak Kyung Cha, both written by children to their mothers, who emigrated to the States with very young families as the first generation of precarious migrants. We will also have a chance to write letters of our own, and possibly to post them.

Text messages, shopping lists, emails, cover letters and online product reviews all offer rich starting points for a fictional story. Join us for a workshop led by Ania Bas, an artist and writer who uses in her work forms of writing that are part of everyday life. This workshop will offer guided exercises to encourage you to experiment and unlock your imagination – ideal if you want to write but need help getting started. It is suitable for beginners and for writers with more experience.

Join us for REVERB, a site-specific writing workshop which will explore concepts related to collective memory, historicity and personal archives. Together, we will engage with the unique story of Pushkin House as well as the surrounding area of Bloomsbury, an area of social and literary significance. We will consider poetics and politics, narratives marginal to the historical record, and the ways in which the event is made manifest by different techniques and styles of writing. The session will be led by Bella Marrin & Elaine Tam from Fieldnotes. In-person event.

Join Pushkin House for a workshop with acclaimed memoirist and the Sunday Times bestselling author of Write It All Down (2022) Cathy Rentzenbrink. The workshop will build on Rentzenbrink’s latest book which offers a wise and practical toolkit for new and seasoned writers. Its aim is simple: to get you writing and help you overcome some of the typical psychological obstacles to expressing yourself freely on a page and enjoying the end result.

In-person and online event.

Our upcoming workshop Queer Maze invites reflection on queer (in the broadest sense of the word) experiences of London to locate personal memories, stories, feelings and itineraries on the map of the city.

The workshop will start by introducing a mapping approach to explore the mundane and everyday practices.

Alissa Timoshkina shares three of her favourite Russian winter recipes, in Pushkin House's first online culinary event.

Back by popular demand, this workshop will focus on some of the key principles in the technique of renowned actor and director, Mikhail Chekhov (1891-1955). As well as exploring his radical psycho-physical tools of preparation, we will investigate one of his important characterisation tools: imaginary body. Through full-bodied movement, free improvisation and work on text and visualisation, we will explore how developing the imagination can revolutionise the actor’s power to transform.

Explore the fascinating world of Russian art from nineteenth century academicians and rebels to the art of the avant-garde at Pushkin House. Discover the links with art of the west and the emergence of a uniquely Russian aesthetic. Offered in partnership with City Lit.

Due to popular request, following a lively afternoon Learn + Participate workshop with David Nice on Soviet music in the 1920s, we move forward into a darker era. The move to bring rancourous Proletarian musicians’ organisations under the aegis of the Union of Soviet Composers in 1932 seemed like a good thing at the time, not least to Prokofiev, who was then living in Paris and visiting Russia for short periods.

Artist and pigment maker, Lucy Mayes will explore the colour theory of Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Icon master Andrei Rublev (1360-1430) through a hands-on workshop.

How does architecture interact with people's everyday lives; and how does is it deployed (and manipulated) by political and economic power brokers? This workshop with anthropologist of architecture Michal Murawski will explore these questions, focusing in particular on the relationship between politics and architecture in Eastern Europe (especially Russia and Poland) during and after the socialist period.

What turn did Russian music take after the 1917? With Stravinsky already in the west, its more experimental side had shifted to Paris and the Ballets Russes, not least with the premiere of The Rite of Spring in 1913. The new Soviet scene was quick to catch up after its own fashion.

Drawing on decades’ worth of vivid, alarming, and rarely-seen anti-religious propaganda illustrations directed against what Karl Marx had once called “the opium of the people”, author Roland Elliott Brown will unfold the strange tale of Soviet atheist ideology, from its origins in 19th-century radical thought to its implosion along with the USSR and its legacy in Putin’s Russia.