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 the course of that year, she came to know nascent songwriter Mike Naumenko, who by the early 1980s as the founder of Zoopark would gain recognition as a key figure in Russian rock and blues music. In one of his late interviews, Mike revealed that "all [his] songs are dedicated to her."

In 1998, in the building of the Twelve Colleges, the St. Petersburg State University's Center for Contemporary Art held a retrospective exhibit of Apraksina's paintings. 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 was among many laureates of the international poetry competition held by the Russian Foreign Ministry in partnership with Literary Gazette.