The pianist Pavel Kushnir died on July 27 at the age of 39 in a prison in Birobidzhan, Russian Federation, apparently of complications from a days-long dry hunger strike. In late May, Kushnir was arrested by FSB officers on charges of incitement to terrorism. On his YouTube channel, Kushnir, under the username Inoagent Mulder—he was a fan of “The X Files”—had posted four poetic monologues that included criticism of the Russian government and the war in Ukraine. In the final video he described the Bucha massacre as “the disgrace of our motherland,” called for resistance to the regime and the war, and demanded the release of all political prisoners. According to friends, this channel had five followers at the time of his arrest. Some of those close to Kushnir only learned of his detention and the subsequent hunger strike after his death.
After studies in Moscow and Yekaterinburg, Kushnir worked as pianist for 12 years in various provincial Russian cities. During his lifetime, his artistic activities never reached a wider audience. He remained largely unknown inside and outside Russia. Now, people are searching for the traces this idiosyncratic artist left behind.
A dazzling musical and literary oeuvre has begun to emerge. In 2014, the publisher Zaza Verlag in Dusseldorf brought out his anti-war novel Russian Cut; it was not reviewed at the time. In the summer of 2022, Kushnir finished another novel, Noel. He was apparently convinced that the book would never be published, and the manuscript is unaccounted for as yet. In an interview with local radio in Birobidzhan, he described working on the novel for eight years, creating a structure analogous to the one theorized by the astronomer Johannes Kepler in his Harmony of the World. Since his death, interviews with and readings by Kushnir have circulated on social media: an essay on the German painter Uwe Lausen and recordings from the 51-part radio series “Mazurka Wednesdays,” in which Kushnir analyzed all of Chopin’s pieces in that genre from January 2023 to the end of March 2024.
Who was Pavel Kushnir? “I grew up with him,” the pianist Olga Shkrygunova tells me. “I took his extraordinary qualities for granted.” She and Kushnir had been close friends since childhood. He continued sending her manuscripts and texts as they both grew up. Shkrygunova moved to Germany in 2012 and finished her master’s degree at the Rostock University of Music and Drama in 2014. The same year, she joined the chamber music ensemble Salut Salon, where she remained until the end of 2023. I reached Shkrygunova on a Monday morning through video call at her Berlin apartment. “The first days were filled with the organization of Pavel’s cremation,” she tells me. “Yesterday was the first day I was completely alone. The worst part is about to start.”
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