On Thursday night, on the eve of Pussy Riot’s sentencing, I attended a reading in their honor at New York’s Ace Hotel, a free event organized on short notice by JD Samson, of MEN and Le Tigre, and historian Robert Lieber. Although I’m just a lowly archivist moonlighting for the Believer, I was given a press pass, whisked to the front of the line, and sequestered in a sort of VIP holding pen. This only heightened the contrast between the artisanal-boutique ambience of the Ace and the radical actions of the women whose words we’d come to hear. Once we were escorted to the Ace’s basement performance space and seated in our special section, the journalists seemed to take up half the room. Ironically, this privileged spot cut me off from a lot of the background action, which I heard about only later: the open bar, the confused tourists trying to make it past the event’s doorman, and the apparently hundreds of attendees who couldn’t get in. But I had a great view of the MTV newscaster and her cameraman reporting near the stage as we waited in the stifling heat. 

The event began without preface or introduction with Karen Finley’s reading of “Punk Prayer: Virgin Mary, Put Putin Away,” the very song whose performance at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior in February landed three members of the Pussy Riot collective in jail. The line “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist, become a feminist, become a feminist” elicited the first mass cheer from a largely young, white, female audience, as did all later references to feminism. While Finley’s readings sometimes verged on the parodic, those by Johanna Fateman, Mx Justin Vivian Bond, Eileen Myles, and Masha Gessen captured the earnest quality of much of the writings by the imprisoned Maria Alekhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich. K8 Hardy conveyed the rage and irony of the more-performative pieces, while the night’s most talked-about guest, Chloe Sevigny, limited herself to a single letter from prison.  Despite the heat and the length of the event, the crowd (many standing) was attentive. The texts, which included lyrics, opening statements, and each woman’s closing statement, were a sophisticated mash-up of ideas and ideologies: the most cited source was the Bible, but there were shout-outs to Debord, Montaigne, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and Foucault. 

The event’s power lay in its focus on the texts, which provided a corrective to the spectacular tendencies of the trial’s coverage. “Pussy Riot does not want to focus attention on girl’s appearances, but creates characters who express ideas,” read a line from Alekhina; and yet it has been hard not to be seduced...