Description

A literary club opened by the United Humanitarian Publishers (OGI) in 1998 in the apartment of Dmitrii Ol'shanskii, Proekt OGI represented one of the more successful attempts to reclaim the late-Soviet underground in the new post-Soviet, capitalist world.

Era

Post-Soviet

Date

1998

Annotation

The United Humanities Press, or Ob”edinennoe gumanitarnoe izdatel’stvo, known as OGI, published more than 50 collections of poetry along with several works in the humanities by serious scholars, but the name is associated more than anything with Project OGI, a legendary club started in 1998 by Dmitry Itskovich, Nikolai Okhotin, Mikhail Riabchikov and a handful of important and influential poets, writers, and critics. The food was bad, the service was worse, but the atmosphere couldn’t be beat. As one regular put it, the club had already existed around everyone’s kitchen tables for a long time. It had just never had a place of its own. It was no surprise that Project OGI’s first location—the first place where that intellectual public gathered—was in a remodeled apartment on Trekhprudnyi lane. Though the club had to move locations it quickly became a center of Moscow intellectual and artistic life. Regular poetry readings, book launches, and concerts punctuated the atmosphere of intellectual inebriation that flowed freely from the bar into the adjoining bookstore and back.

In the first months of the club’s existence, it managed to attract two major acts, Auktsyon and Leningrad, who—in their press-conference before the concert, broke into a spontaneous jam session in the club. A music video by the band Korabl’ filmed in the club captures the same energy. The place had that effect on artists, musicians, and creators of all stripes, perhaps because it was something new on the Moscow scene. As music critic Maksim Semeliak remembered when the club finally closed in 2012:

Project OGI effected a definitive revolution in Moscow. Early it was understood that of course any successful club had to be in one way or another about fashion, sex, and drugs. Project OGI wasn’t about the first, the second, or the third (exceptions, of course, were made, but they just proved the rule). […] In short — in the first years of its existence Project OGI gave a sensation of unbelievable freedom from everything. Including from such burdensome things as fashion, sex, and drugs.

Even oligarchs, apparently, felt the same. Mikhail Khodorkovsky dropped by from time to time, to effect his own temporary escape. The club’s popularity, in this way, was perhaps a symptom of a new exhaustion with the nineties, a hope for something new, more intellectually exciting, that would provide an escape from the glitz and glamour everyone seemed to be chasing in the new Russia.

Associated People

Rubinstein (Rubinshteyn), Lev, Prigov, Dmitry, Snurov, Sergei, Khodorkovsky, Mikhail, and Gronas, Mikhail

Geography: Place Of Focus

Moscow

Bibliographic Reference

Photos from: Grigorii Okhotin, "'Proekt OGI' protiv 'Proekt rukkola'," OpenSpace.ru, 25 Dec 2012: http://os.colta.ru/society/russia/details/7164/