I started writing a book in 2014 and since then “Sanatorium” has become a huge multidisciplinary project that exists as a zine and as a book, and is also being developed as a game. Parts of this multifaceted universe are also reflected through the soundtrack, selective fragrance, virtual clothing and video.

So I started to create my Sanatorium project in order to analyze all the experience I had gone through, fix it in a book and call a spade a spade. For several years I ran a Tumblr named Anna Karamazoff after the movie or Rustam Khamdamov, dedicated to insider Russia, where I sent all the images that gave me food for thought.These were the first materials that formed the basis of the comics.

The process of drawing connected me to the unconscious, and with the help of this I could tune in not to superficial images, but to the essence of what was happening to us.
The project turned out to be much more global than I could have imagined: I was able to study through the prism of three prisons the same mechanics of tyranny that lie at the base of any system from the state apparatus to the family community.


I started with an anthropological study of the Soviet Union and its ins and outs, since such were the clichés of those who raised me. I wanted to understand what was the basis of the lies and ambiguity in which I lived.

I was interested in the origins of ideology, its formation in the 30s and consolidation in the 50s. At this time, sanatoriums began to flourish along the south coast, and at the same time camps began to appear throughout the country. This contradiction, as well as the colossal tragedy of imprisonment within one's own country, in which many innocent people were involved, plunged me into horror. Reading the diaries of Gulag prisoners showed me the dark side that many did not want to know about, closing their eyes, preferring to see only the bright side of the system.

Sanatoriums were artificially created oases in the midst of a very difficult reality in which people lived in the Union. The camps were the reverse side of the sanatoriums, and the coexistence of these two phenomena on the same territory was a catastrophic absurdity.

Moscow was the focus of the visual style of the era. Underground Metro Palace; exemplary pavilions of VDNKh; sculptural groups of milkmaids and proletarians demonstrated that the country was colossal, prolific, happy.

There was something that kept slipping away, something that I couldn't comprehend. The second layer of meanings that stood behind all this diverse and lush culture. All this aesthetic was created as a distraction; the main goal was to create a nation of obedient slaves who believed in the myth, ready to endure and suffer endlessly. Hiding one meaning behind another was the basis of that system.

Having dealt with the socialist enclosure, it became clear to me that the prison situation is ubiquitous: governments create restrictions, people do not rebel against it and accept the order, justifying its injustice and forgiving its contradictions. The same pattern is widespread.

My comic has become a metaphor for an individual escape from these restrictive frameworks and paradigms, in which the Sanatorium has become a reflection of the system in which we exist (understood much more widely than a single country) and a kind of fusion between the paradise and the camp, doctors and staff are symbols of gatekeepers or an elite that does not let you leave this space, and the search and the path are the only stable vectors on which the personal journey continues. The journey of one who no longer accepts prison as a way of thinking and opens the bars of others' cells.

Isn't that supposed to be a historical lesson for all of us? If you have not had the experience of life in captivity, you will not be able to appreciate the beauty of freedom. But real freedom is inner freedom – so the first step is to get out of mind control.

While studying sanatoriums, I saw them as a kind of theme parks for people of the Soviet era. But in the USSR, having rest meant doing other kinds of labor, but the sanatoriums served as a kind of recharging stations, where the working class was sent for recovery, and having gained strength, they would return to their duties with even greater zeal.

In a similar vein, it is interesting to consider the psychological case that people in the USSR had to remain children. Children need to be led and they are easy to manage. Acquired helplessness has created generations unable to move on their own. A human being grew up, but their inner age stood still.

In a society that rejected faith, new mechanics of influencing the masses were needed. The religious structure has been preserved, but the scenery and symbols have changed. In order to paint a picture of a bright future for the people, it was necessary to start materializing it somewhere — and such sanatorium complexes began to appear, into which an ordinary person could step into like a paradise, as the Soviet era saw it.

In my comic, I view sanatorium as a micro-model of a system that took over the right to lead a person and make decisions for her. The result was a fear of going against the system, and an acquired inability to escape. Locked in this cycle, moving along the same route from location to location was what terrified me in sanatoriums.

I was greatly impressed by the stories of the escape of people from the USSR, who swam many miles and in general acted very inventively in order to leave their homeland.

In one of the versions of the finale of the story, I wanted to send my heroine to the sea, which everyone talks about, but no one knows where it is, since the sanatorium keeps its guests in the dark. The sea symbolized infinity and freedom.

Thus, in my story, post-Soviet reflection was mixed both with personal memories and with the culture of fairy tales and myths.

It is important to describe the world of the Sanatorium from the point of view of the Soviet medical system, and all that formed people’s perception of themselves as just a human body.

In the comic, I emphasize that the heroine undergoes medical procedures that look like a burial. This shows that many procedures were repulsive in form and only increased fear of life. Metaphorically, burial is her preparation not for death, but for transformation; death on the one level of Sanatorium means birth on another.

The desire to stay in the Sanatorium, to be on an endless vacation is a mistake of guests and it will be followed by retribution: their individual experience becomes a platform on which a new, more “advanced” illusion is created.

Termination of contract with this game means that in fact there was neither her character, nor a strange disease, nor the world as such.

There were only long-playing dreams.