Anna Alchuk (28 March 195521 March 2008) was a Russian poet and visual artist. An admirer summarized her work as "a free-spirited romp across complex and significant ideas about personhood, identity, representation, linguistic performance, and political action." She was married for 33 years to the philosopher Michail Ryklin. At the time of her death the couple were living in Berlin where Ryklin was employed as a visiting professor at the university. The assessment that Alchuk's death had been a suicide was generally accepted, but did not go entirely unquestioned. Anna Alchuk was the name under which she worked as an artist, and by which she is identified in many English language sources. However, fuller variants of her name are also used in some sources. Life Anna Alchuk Mikhalchuk (А́нна Алекса́ндровна Михальчу́к) was born into a Jewish family in in the Sakhalin Oblast in the Soviet Far East. Her parents were working on Sakhalin as geologists. Anna grew up in another rich mining region, in Vorkuta in the North Urals. She identified with her grandmother whom she never met, since the old lady spent the last thirty years of her life locked away in a psychiatric institution. In 1973 she met Michail Ryklin whom she married in 1975. While Ryklin worked for his doctorate which focused on Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, between 1973 and 1978 Alchuk studied History at Lomonosov University (as Moscow's principal university was known at that time). During the build-up to the Dissolution of the Soviet Union, in 1987 and 1988 she was a co-publisher of the samizdat publications "Paradigma" ("Парадигма") and "MDP" ("МДП"). In 1983 Alchuk's mother, Maja Koljada, had been denounced and accused of "spreading untrue facts, contrary to better knowledge, which denigrate the Soviet state and social system". Koljada had been sent away to a labour camp hundreds of kilometers away from her family. Towards the end of the 1980s she got together with a group of Moscow artists and conceptualist poets, to take part in the exhibitions of the new conceptual art movement. Later she participated in music and poetry stage performances, for instance with the cult musician Sergey Letov and the . Her own first volume of poetry was published in 1994. During this period she was the organiser of numerous exhibitions and performances in which music and poetry were combined. Anna Alchuk was a member of the Russian section of PEN