The Mitki are an art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

 group in St. Petersburg

Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...

, Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

.

The Mitki movement

The Mitki movement originally emerged from Vladimir Shinkarev’s literary work Mitki, which consists of eight chapters. The first five chapters were written between 1984 and 1985, though the book was not finished until four years later. The complete version was officially published in 1990. It encompasses a collection of ironic and absurd essays, anecdotes, conversations and opinions on different cultural subjects, which extend artistic sensibility and development into a comprehensive and cohesive life philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 that even includes a specifically developed language

Language

Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...

. Although Mitki is fictional it draws on the characteristics of real people, combining these to create Mityok, the archetypal member of the Mitki group who acts on the instructions provided by the Mitki script. The Mitki group consisted of a number of St. Petersburg friends and artists of which were the main members Vladimir Shinkarev, Alexander Florensky and Dmitri Shagin. Shinkarev's eponymous book supplied the group with the manifesto for their emergent movement.

The first collective exhibition of Mitki paintings in 1984 ended peacefully, but the second in St. Petersburg was raided by police. After Glasnost

Glasnost

Glasnost was the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s...

 the group's work became accepted and was soon shown beyond St. Petersburg. Mitki, written before and after Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991...

’s Perestroika

Perestroika

Perestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...

 in 1987, expresses the transitions and associated anxieties of its time. Shinkarev and Florensky both left the Mitki group to develop their own work in the new Russia.

The Mitki do not promote specific artistic principles, being instead united by a certain collective spirit: an optimistic and straightforward
world-view, representation of the wide breadth of the Russian soul

Russian soul

The term Russian soul has been used in literature to describe Russian spirituality. The writings of many Russian writers such as Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky offer descriptions of the Russian soul....

, respect for art, humour and freedom. Their official slogan is "The Mitki don't want to defeat anybody, which is why they will conquer the world."

Mitki-Mayer

In 1992, the group released a 54-minute animated film called Mitki-Mayer. Directed by A. Vassilyev, the film's plot focuses on a rich American named Mr. Mayer reading the Mitki book. After Mr. Mayer witnesses a Russian man who cannot swim jump from a ship in a futile attempt to rescue a woman, he visits his cabin to find out what kind of man he was, where he finds the Mitki book. Most of the rest of the film is spent illustrating each of the book's chapters. Finally, having finished the book, Mr. Mayer decides to go to Russia, gives up his riches, and joins the Mitki movement. The film was released on video.