[2] In 1973 she started a religious-philosophical seminar with her then husband, Viktor Krivulin, which became a dissident religious group "37", publishing a samizdat journal under the same title.

[2] She collaborated with Tatiana Mamonova on the feminist samizdat journal Woman and Russia, which appeared in 1979.

After Mamonova's expulsion from the Soviet Union, she and Leningrad colleagues formed a women's group known as the Mariia club.

However, she sees this disinterest in the sacred as potentially itself akin to Christ's kenosis, allowing mundane things to be newly invested with spiritual meaning.

She contrasts this to the individual freedom and unconventionality of the ancient cynics, which points the way to the uncompromising radicalism of the 'holy fool': Holy fools, like cynics, are completely liberated from common sense and all of life's conventions [...] They are indecent to such a degree that they may be enlisted as Rabelaisian characters.