The Russian poet has been releasing his work free of ownership since 2004, insisting that publishers can only make editions without contracts and without his consent. He explains how opening his poems up to piracy is both a political protest and a liberating step towards intellectual sovereignty
I gave up copyright in my own work in 2004. I had become increasingly disgusted by the situation in my country. But my interpretation of the problem ran counter to the anti-Soviet, dissident one favoured by most of the Russian intelligentsia. I believed that the problem we were facing wasn’t a return to the Soviet Union, but rather the fact that Russia was once again finding its place in the capitalist world system, adapting, in its semi-peripheral way, the main tendencies of that system. Without reflecting on and criticising these tendencies, it seemed impossible to have a genuine position on Putin’s Russia; it seemed impossible to be a political or civic artist.
The international movements that interested me at that time, with which I felt solidarity – the alterna-globalisation movement and the movement against the invasion of Iraq – were simply nonsense to the liberal intellectual circles to which I belonged. I saw in this our extreme provincialism, one that I wanted to break out of even as I maintained my ties to the Russian revolutionary-democratic and Soviet underground traditions which I felt were my inheritance. Osip Mandelstam once defined acmeism, the poetic movement to which he belonged, as a “yearning for world culture”. I think my rejection of copyright at that moment, my decision to release my work on to the internet without any claim of ownership, was a similar gesture of yearning for the international progressive intellectual, artistic and political movement that seeks a way out of neoliberal capitalism.
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