My Story

Short About Me

I live in Paris, where I work at a university as a research engineer after completing a PhD in Physics. My professional life belongs to science, but my private obsessions are elsewhere: cinema, literature, fashion, theory, and the strange emotional weather of contemporary culture.

Cinema, Books, and the Intimate Scene

My writing moves through film, literature, philosophy, fashion, and queer sensibility, treating them not as separate fields but as ways of reading the present. A gesture, a face, a room, a line from a film, or a cheap fabric can become the beginning of a larger reflection on taste, poverty, beauty, exclusion, and survival.

Thinking Without Distance

I try to avoid both academic detachment and confessional softness. I think from within experience without turning experience into spectacle. My essays return to figures who are too young, too late, too poor, too exposed, or too out of place — and who, precisely because of that, begin to see the world with uncomfortable clarity.

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May 26, 2026

Watching Won’t Wash You Clean

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes about the distance of the spectator. Today, that distance becomes a Russian question: can one look at Ukrainian pain and still remain a bystander?
written by
Lesha Travoveda
May 5, 2026

Late Youth as a Political Condition: On Didier Eribon, Unfinished Adulthood, and the Life One Never Quite Manages to Enter Fully

In Return to Reims, Eribon writes about an adulthood that does not arrive with success. One can acquire language, status, and a name, and still continue assembling oneself out of shame, rupture, and other people’s expectations.
written by
Lesha Travoveda
April 29, 2026

Disappear, My Russia

Russia is once again learning to see itself through someone else’s eyes — through the eyes of Merezhkovsky’s Vasyuta: “some milk, maybe… but I don’t feel like it”. And that “I don’t feel like it” is enough to describe today’s reaction and the war.
written by
Lesha Travoveda