Abstract

This archival feature serves to present the personality and philosophy of Elena Oznobkina (1959–2010), a key figure of late-Soviet and, later, Russian philosophy. Oznobkina pioneered the present-day reception of Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl in Russia, but also made substantial contributions to Nietzsche studies and political philosophy, which are detailed in Nelly Motrozhilova’s introduction. Her philosophical work was inseparable from her personal political engagement, to which the featured archival text (“Prison or Gulag?”, 2000) testifies. It gives a poignant and concise characterisation of the prison as an object of philosophical theory, while asking the question of where Soviet prison camps and the prisons of post-Soviet Russia are to be located within this field of thought.