Breaking Bad

We are criminals. We are outlaws. We are poets.

There are many attractive characters who break the law: pirates, cunning thieves, hard-boiled villains straight out of a James Bond movie. But when freedom of speech is in truly bad shape in one’s country, even a creative writing teacher can become a bad guy and a real outlaw. This is a story about how I became a criminal, involving dozens of students in the illegal craft of making poetry.

Before 2022, I was a promising young scholar and creative writing teacher determined to build my career in my motherland, Russia. But due to the war and a wave of inhumane laws, I very quickly realized that I could not stick to this plan. Speaking and writing about the war—even using the word “war”—became illegal. It was difficult to follow these rules, so to keep my heart light, it felt easier to break the law. I continued writing and publishing my work in magazines that were banned in Russia. But that did not feel like enough. And, as often happens with promising young criminals, I found a gang I could join.

When freedom of speech is in truly bad shape in one’s country, even a creative writing teacher can become a bad guy and a real outlaw.

This gang consists of other displaced scholars who were determined to share their illegal knowledge with students. Some of these academics have fled Russia, while others continue to teach anonymously inside the country. These scholar-brigands, scattered across Moscow, Berlin, Riga, Paris, and other cities, run their operations entirely online. The gang proudly calls itself the Free University. When it was first founded, the Russian government was so enraged that it immediately declared their newborn university an “undesirable organization,” meaning that everyone who works there is subject to administrative and/or criminal liability. Some of our professors have even been declared terrorists for engaging in too much anti-war and peace talk. I am not so notorious, but I try to keep up. 

Empowered by this community of free minds, in 2025, with two of my colleagues, I created a program called Free Creative Writing. Currently it includes 25 volunteering professors and 100 students that study online for free. Certainly the main purpose of this program is to corrupt students’ brains with anti-state liberal ideas and to turn them into criminals as well. But in order not to shock philistines, this is how I describe it officially:

The Free Creative Writing Program provides a space for critical language awareness and creative expression under conditions of censorship. It enables students within and outside of the Russian Federation to exercise freedom of speech by safely engaging with restricted socio-political topics, including LGBTQ+ issues, feminism, and anti-militarism. By building academic and cultural bridges between nations, the program facilitates the integration of students into the global literary space, promoting peace and artistic unity.

Twice a year, in fall and winter, the university opens admissions for its semester-long courses. Our student body is truly global, split between those who have left Russia and those who remain inside the country. In my course, Poetry of Experiment, we meet online once a week for three hours. While I had 30 students last year, enrollment jumped to 50 this academic year. Running a course under these conditions requires a massive commitment to digital pedagogy. Because we cannot rely on a traditional classroom setting, much of our work happens asynchronously. I review every home assignment by recording detailed voice notes for each student, allowing for a close, personal dialogue despite the distance. At the same time, we keep our community alive through a shared chat, which serves as an active, round-the-clock forum. There students workshop their poems, share immediate feedback, and discuss how the course topics intersect with the language they encounter daily. 

Indeed our work doesn’t stop when the synchronous sessions end, but when we do meet, the screen itself reflects our fractured reality. It’s a mix of open, smiling faces of students logging in from safe havens abroad, and black tiles with turned-off cameras and pseudonyms protecting those who face severe legal risks back home. Together, across these different worlds, we dissect the mechanics of language. My course gives students the opportunity to experiment with unconventional poetic forms, leading them further away from the good old “traditional values” so beloved by the Russian government.

Our work doesn’t stop when the synchronous sessions end, but when we do meet, the screen itself reflects our fractured reality.

My students turn out to be perfect vessels for poetry. In the fall semester, we discussed blackout techniques, read Darkness by Yedda Morrison, and created our own blackout poems. Today it is common practice for many Russian publishing houses to use blackout to cover parts of texts that may violate Russian laws. One of the most vivid examples is a biography of Pier Paolo Pasolini in which blackout covers passages discussing his gay identity—so, hopefully, no one in Russia knows that this film director was gay.

That is why I felt it was crucial to explain to my students that blackout is not necessarily about censorship. First and foremost, it encourages a reexamination of existing texts and the creation of new meanings. As seen in Yedda Morrison’s Darkness, erasure is a radical tool: by blacking out everything in Joseph Conrad’s novel except for descriptions of the natural world, she forces us to see the text’s hidden colonial dynamics. She uses blackout to expose what is missing. This active subversion stands in sharp contrast to its current use in the book market, where deliberately redacted passages in published books offer a striking example of the aestheticization of politics. A political phenomenon (censorship) is framed as a spectacle rather than an object for critical reflection. And I did not want my students to blindly reproduce this fearful practice of hiding words.     

In class, we did blackout poems using iconic passages from War and Peace and Crime and Punishment. In Russia, these texts are treated as sacred secular scriptures—institutional pillars that schools teach as untouchable monuments, completely isolated from today’s reality and closed off from critical reexamination. To strip away parts of these novels on a screen felt like literary blasphemy. At first the immense authority of these texts paralyzed my students.

It was crucial to break this spell and show them that no narrative is untouchable. “Don’t let the text defeat you,” I told them.

After this big battle with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, my students were ready to fight other canonized narratives and create their own.

This year, one student found a brilliant loophole to overcome this paralysis. Instead of just deleting words in a Word document, they treated Dostoevsky’s heavy prose as raw sonic material, hunting for hidden internal rhymes within his sentences. By isolating these musical echoes, they transformed a 19-century monolith into a sharp, contemporary poem. And after this big battle with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, my students were ready to fight other canonized narratives and create their own. 

I was delighted to see that blackout and other forms of found poetry became tools for my students to reflect on their identities, on immigration, and on their relationships with language. One student created a blackout of Putin’s New Year’s addresses—a satirical list of 25 addresses over 25 years—in which, aside from constant lies, readers can finally hear real senile delirium and laugh at it. 

The piece originally arrived as a homework assignment uploaded to our shared digital folder. But soon our chat lit up as the class began discussing the most memorable, absurd remnants of the dictator’s talk—phrases like “our life has become not just life.” The shared laughter was a form of collective relief. Just before the holidays, the poem went beyond our classroom and was published by the independent magazine, Discourse, allowing a wider public to see the regime’s linguistic monotony shattered. Instead of hiding dangerous texts behind blackout and victimizing ourselves, we reclaim poetic tools and turn them into weapons.

Teaching is about giving students tools of liberation because new ideas need new forms.

For me teaching is about giving students tools of liberation because new ideas need new forms. Blackout poetry is uniquely empowering because, paradoxically, it forces students to step out of their own heads and confront the world around them. It transforms how they see. Instead of staring at a terrifying blank page, they learn to read their environment as a canvas waiting to be redacted.

Once they master this technique, they no longer need literary monuments or state speeches; they begin to apply the blackout lens to reality. They start noticing the raw linguistic landscape of their daily lives—from contract-soldier recruitment ads on the streets of Moscow to graffiti written in a foreign language in a new city of exile. Blackout teaches them to engage directly with their surroundings, grounding their writing in a sharp, concrete texture. By learning to strip away the noise of the world, they find the exact materials needed to construct their own narratives.      

Unlike Dumbledore, I would never send my students to fight ultimate evil. I try to protect them by offering guidelines for publishing strategies: do not try to publish in Russia; do not publish under your real name; read your poetry only to people you trust. These safety measures are not excessive. In 2023 the poet Artem Kamardin was sentenced to seven years in prison for reading anti-war poetry aloud in the center of Moscow. His partner in crime, Egor Shtovba, received five and a half years for applauding the reading. I still cannot process the fact that, in my motherland, poetry is criminalized.

The world is full of grief and terror, and like many others, I often lose heart. But then I remember who we are. We are not just poets and writers. We are not just creative writing teachers. We are daredevils.

I cannot speak for my students or explain why they choose to take these risks. As for me—like with many criminals—it is a matter of environment and upbringing. I grew up believing that literature and language are as essential as air. This culture and this language are not the property of the state; they belong to the people who speak and write them. And if that is the case, I can use them as I see fit. Smuggling is not really smuggling when you are simply moving your own belongings across a border the state built overnight.

If tomorrow poetry and speaking up become illegal everywhere in the world, I know exactly what will happen. People will gather. Someone will start a class. Someone else will bring a text. Words will be crossed out. New meanings will appear. And once again, poetry will become a way of making a difference.