The artworks of Lenina Nikitina as a form of visualization of cultural memory

In modern cultural studies, there is an increased interest in biography as a phenomenon associated with
cultural memory. Subjective experience, the effect of getting used to someone else’s life allows the viewer to feel
the personality of another, not like him as a valuable cultural experience. Lenina Nikitina is a Leningrad artist,
a Petersburg artist whose work, unfortunately, is familiar to a small circle of viewers. The talent of the author was
able to turn the events of his personal life into a cultural, artistic event. The works of Lenina Nikitina are relevant
for the modern audience as a vivid example of the development of the ideas of figurative expressionism and as
an example of visualizing the cultural memory of an entire era through a creative understanding of the events
of her life and as documentary evidence of events of the history of the twentieth century, including the Siege of
Leningrad. The artist’s talent launches the mechanism of bodily assimilation into what is happening, empathy gives
the image credibility, makes it immerse into it as what is happening here-and-now. In this case, the painting is more
documentary than, for example, photography or video. The affectiveness of experience becomes not only a way of
bodily comprehension, sensation of the past, but it can become an experience influencing here-and-now, personal
cultural experience. Cultural memory in such a context can be seen as an interweaving of clumps of individual
stories and experiences, not all of which correspond to the usual appearance of the historical period or the image of
the event in the media, affecting our being here and now.