Sweeping censorship hit Russia’s book industry soon after the Kremlin launched its full-scale war against Ukraine. Fearing state persecution, publishers began blacking out entire pages — scrubbing any hints about the war or parallels with the current political situation, erasing scenes of queer relationships, and cutting out depictions of life in exile. It wasn’t just certain themes that were banned but authors themselves: books by writers and intellectuals labeled “foreign agents” or “extremists” for their anti-war stance vanished from store shelves.
Meduza asked nine artists to reflect on the phenomenon of publisher self-censorship in wartime Russia.
Michael Cunningham. Day
Russian translation published by АСТ, Corpus, 2025
Day is the latest novel by Michael Cunningham, one of the leading American writers of his generation and the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours. In Day, Cunningham explores how the coronavirus pandemic upended the daily life of a Brooklyn family, exposed rifts in their relationships, and pushed them to rethink what it means to take care of one another.
In the Russian edition, passages dealing with homosexuality — a central theme in Cunningham’s work — were censored. Several pages cut material from the romantic storyline involving the characters Robbie, Adam, and Oliver. In the original, these scenes describe how, in conditions of isolation, the characters seek support and new forms of connection through emotional and physical intimacy.
Artist Leto:
All those black marks in books are obstacles the reader encounters. Publishers, too, are forced to maneuver around censorship. The whole process of making a book and engaging with it turns into a kind of game, where you have to twist and dodge just to survive. That’s how my series Pendulum, Classics, and Tetris came about.
Keith Recker. Deep Color: The Shades That Shape Our Souls
Russian translation published by Bombora, 2025
Keith Recker is an American designer and scholar of visual culture. In Deep Color, he explores the cultural and social meanings of various hues. Pink, purple, and blue, in his telling, are bound up with art history, politics, mass movements, and cultural turning points — from ancient poetry and myth to denim advertising and feminist campaigns of the late 20th century. These very connections — between color and politics, the body, and struggles for rights — were censored in the Russian edition.
Entire sections are now blacked out, including pages on the pink triangles once used by the Nazis to mark homosexuals, a symbol that by the late 20th century had been reclaimed by the equality movement. Recker’s discussion of pink as the color of public campaigns against breast cancer is also missing. In the chapter on purple, readers cannot see the passages about its place in the ancient tradition of homoerotic poetry, or about its role in 20th-century feminist and queer movements.
Maria Stepanova. The Disappearing Act
Novoe Izdatelstvo, 2024
Maria Stepanova is a poet, essayist, and author of In Memory of Memory, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Her 2024 novel The Disappearing Act tells the story of an an émigré writer named M. who watches from abroad as her homeland wages war on a neighboring country. Stepanova deliberately avoids naming Russia or Ukraine: her warring sides are simply “the one that attacked” and “the one that was attacked.” In the novel, the war becomes the backdrop for reflections on language, memory, and personal fate.
In the edition of The Disappearing Act available in Russian bookstores, censors removed lines suggesting that the heroine had left Russia, along with passages explaining why her neighbors in her new country view her with suspicion.
Artist Elena Novikova:
In the print edition of Maria Stepanova’s The Disappearing Act, there’s a censored paragraph: black bars blot out the text but leave fragments of letters hanging — a diacritic over an й, the tails of a у and a б. Yet in the narrative, emigration, the loss of trust in one’s native language, and watching the war from afar lay bare the fragility of expression itself. What matters to me is not illustrating the plot, but extending its work in images: showing how words disappear and fragment; how the landscape flickering before the eyes of someone always on the move slips out of focus; how attention lingers on those broken-off letters and diacritical marks. Censorship turns reading into deciphering, and vision into the labor of restoring what’s been erased.
Max Falk. Shattered
Eksmo, 2022
The earliest works by writer and playwright Max Falk appeared on Ficbook and Patreon. In October 2022, Falk published his first full-length novel, Shattered. The book gained popularity on Ficbook before being released in print as part of Eksmo’s LikeBook series. He later published a sequel, 52 Hz.
After Eksmo carried out a “linguistic review,” about three percent of the text of Shattered was removed. The publisher deleted entire scenes of physical and emotional intimacy between two young men: a first sexual experience, detailed descriptions of sex, and acknowledgement and discussion of sexual identity. Eksmo explained the decision as a matter of complying with Russia’s law banning so-called “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations.” In addition, information about the book was deleted from Eksmo’s website.
Artist Volya:
I imagined the extremes to which censorship might go. That’s how I came up with a dystopia about a state ruled by the “Ministry of Especially Dangerous Books.” It sends out “reading mentors” to monitor readers and eventually begins censoring every symbolic system in public space, from road markings to building signs.
Skye Cleary. How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment
Russian translation published by Alpina Non-Fiction, 2025
In the Russian edition of this book about one of feminism’s most important figures, dozens of paragraphs are blacked out. Removed are discussions of the fluidity of gender categories and the right to define oneself outside the rigid male-female binary. Also censored are passages on contraception and abortion, critiques of biological reductionism and social pressure on women, details of Simone de Beauvoir’s intimate life and her relationships with women, as well as reflections on non-monogamous relationships. Even the footnotes hide citations to quotes that touch on gender identity.
The book’s author is Australian philosopher Skye Cleary, a specialist in existentialism and a popularizer of Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas. In How to Be Authentic, she analyzes de Beauvoir’s philosophical texts through the lens of her biography and the lives of other women, showing how the thinker’s ideas can help make sense of identity, freedom, and equality. With the censored passages missing, parts of the text become illogical and disjointed.
Artist Natalia Nikolaeva:
When you see those black bars and know there’s text behind them, you feel a powerful urge to decipher it by any means. I tried using a macro lens, hoping to make out the outlines of the letters. But no text emerged — instead, I ended up with abstract images of paper and ink textures.
Natalia Klyuchareva. Diary of the End of the World
Ivan Limbakh Publishing House, 2024
Natalia Klyuchareva, author of the novels A Train Named Russia and The Girl with Three Passports, writes about everyday life in rural areas and about people struggling with isolation who seek support in close relationships. Her novel Diary of the End of the World is composed of fragmentary notes about encounters, conversations, and chance episodes that together convey an anxious sense of an era coming to an end. “Life seems to pass me by. The trams are still running. The everyday routine of Brest. I think: is this really life? But in fact, there is no future at all…” reflects the heroine. The entire novel carries this fatalistic tone.
The censors cut just two words from Diary of the End of the World: “war” and “Putin.” Black bars hiding them stretch across dozens of pages.
Mark Manson. Everything Is Fucked: A Book About Hope
Russian translation published by Alpina Publisher, 2024
Mark Manson’s first book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, a critique of the cult of success and modern society’s obsession with productivity, became an international bestseller and was hugely popular in Russia in the mid- to late 2010s.
Everything Is Fucked: A Book About Hope was first published in Russian in 2019, and its Russian-language audiobook quickly shot to the top of the Bookmate charts. In it, Manson asks why global anxiety has peaked precisely at a moment when our lives are more comfortable and secure than ever before. He writes about a crisis of values, challenges philosophers, questions religious dogmas, tells stories from pop culture, and concludes that the cult of positive thinking doesn’t save people but instead harms them, creating unhealthy illusions. Instead, he argues that the meaning of life should be sought in truth, honesty, and responsibility — not in the endless chase for dopamine.
In the 2024 Russian print edition of Everything Is Fucked, censors blacked out Manson’s discussions of religion, drugs, and sexuality, along with political commentary and profanity.
Roberto Carnero. Pasolini: Dying for Ideas
Russian translation published by AST, 2024
Roberto Carnero is an Italian literary scholar, associate professor of modern Italian literature at the University of Bologna, and a researcher of 20th-century literature and film. He is also a contributor of critical essays to Italian publications. One of his major works is Pasolini: Dying for Ideas, first published in 2010 and reissued in 2022. The book examines in detail the life of Pier Paolo Pasolini — poet, film director, and one of the most influential intellectuals of the 20th century. Carnero analyzes Pasolini’s literary works, the social and cultural context in which he worked, and also addresses his personality and the criminal charges brought against him.
In the 2024 Russian edition, much of this material is missing. Entire paragraphs and even pages were cut about Pasolini’s homosexuality, his coming of age, and his search for identity. Gone, too, are Carnero’s comments on the film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, in which he discusses the links between power, violence, and sexuality. Passages about Pasolini’s trials were also censored, as well as quotations from his texts that touched on homosexuality.
Artist ESKA:
Blackout is a technique of writing in which an existing text is redacted, with ”excess” words crossed out so that the remaining ones form a new, standalone text with its own meaning.
Pasolini: Dying for Ideas became one of the most striking publishing responses to the tightening of restrictions in the [Russian] book industry. The edition is filled with black bars that don’t just obscure stray references to subjects the state considers undesirable, but whole paragraphs and pages. I wanted to take the next step — to intensify this ”blackout mode” even further, leaving only scattered words to create new statements that speak to the present moment.
Alexey Polyarinov. Cadavers
Inspiria, 2024
Cadavers by Alexey Polyarinov is a post-apocalyptic story set in southern Russia. Its protagonist, a scientist, travels the region seeking out, photographing, and documenting “cadavers.” That’s the name given to the dead children who have begun appearing across the country — in forests, fields, even residential courtyards — for reasons no one can explain. Polyarinov writes about survival, memory, and language, blending prose with pseudo-documentary fragments: newspaper clippings, citations, and excerpts from research.
In the editions sold in Russian bookstores, only one scene is cut: a dispute over an Adyghe-language sign in a school, which leads to arrests and spontaneous uprisings. In place of the names, ethnic markers, place names, and the events themselves are the repeated words: ‘[data removed].’”
Artist Ada Kazantseva:
I wanted to imagine a new reality, one where the images are, on the one hand, familiar and recognizable, but at the same time something about them is off, creating a sense of unease. It seems like the figure of a woman — arms, legs, a head — but instead of eyes, the camera shows the back of her head. In this new pseudo-reality, it’s unclear what works and how. And when things are unclear, it’s always frightening. I live in a world invented by someone else, and right now someone is deciding for me whether or not I get to write this text.
Salman Rushdie. Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
Russian translation published by AST, Corpus, 2025
In August 2022, Booker Prize–winning author of The Satanic Verses Salman Rushdie survived an assassination attempt: he was attacked on stage in Chautauqua, New York, stabbed 15 times, and spent months recovering. That experience became the basis of his book Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, published in 2024. In it, Rushdie writes about the attack, his recovery, and a world where words can still cost lives.
In the Russian edition, black bars cover parts of his reflections on global politics and religious conflict, along with passages on the treatment of religious and ethnic minorities, threats to democracy, and wars and the ways states respond to them.
Artist Linda Auss:
All these black lines, squares, and rectangles across the pages of books are the physical embodiment of imposed ignorance. First it was one book and a few words blotted out. Then these black shapes grew into paragraphs, and later into entire pages. There’s already a long list of books covered by them. I wanted to work with this geometry and the sheer mass of blackness. I started by pasting one sheet to my wall, then another, until eventually the wall was covered and the darkness became palpable. Gradually, behind it, things that had once been obvious and familiar stopped being recognizable and disappeared.
Yumi Stynes, Melissa Kang. Welcome to Your Period!
Russian translation published by Albus Corvus, 2020
Yumi Stynes is an Australian television journalist and host of the women’s health podcast Ladies, We Need to Talk. Together with adolescent medicine specialist Dr. Melissa Kang, she co-authored a series of educational books on growing up — Welcome to Consent, Welcome to Sex, and Welcome to Your Period! The latter was translated into Russian.
This book is a lively, illustrated guide for teenagers, in which the authors tackle a wide range of topics relevant to modern girlhood — physiology, hygiene, and taboo questions — with humor and clarity. In the Russian print edition, an entire chapter on transgender people was removed. In its place are blank pages with a note citing restrictions under Russian law.
Agustina Bazterrica. The Unworthy
Russian translation published by Inspiria, 2024
Argentine writer Agustina Bazterrica rose to international fame with her 2017 novel Tender Is the Flesh, which has been translated into dozens of languages. Her new book, The Unworthy, published in Russian in 2024, is set inside a closed religious community where girls grow up under constant violence and control. Bazterrica explores themes of women’s bodies, freedom, and spiritual resistance in a world where faith is used as a tool of oppression.
In the Russian edition, censors blacked out paragraphs describing the heroines’ physical intimacy and sensual experiences, as well as passages where the body becomes part of mystical and religious experience.
Artist Marta Milao:
Censorship is nonexistence, a place where not only letters, words, and sentences disappear. It mutilates a text that no one but the author has the right to change. If the state encroaches on what we say and how we say it, does it take away part of our life in that moment? If it can erase from a text mentions of thoughts, feelings, actions, and people, do they still remain part of the story?
Thinking about this, I turned to the format of a photo diary. I imagined what would happen if I “hid” [the things that matter to me] in photographs — my cat, my friends, my home, my partner, holidays — as well as everyday moments. As in some censored sentences, sometimes the hidden object in a photo can still be partly discerned. But sometimes the black ink leaves nothing to hold on to. You can’t make out the object or reconstruct the scene in your mind. And then it becomes impossible to understand what’s in front of you — the person or the moment from my life is simply gone.
Our only hope is you. Support Meduza before it’s too late.
Text by Alexandra Amelina