In the fall of 2025, Individuum Publishing House released a book — Eugene Onegin. Blackout by the artist Siniy Karandash. Armed with a black marker, the artist undertook meticulous work: he revealed a hidden layer within Alexander Pushkin's canonical text, making the novel resonate anew — starkly, disturbingly, and strikingly contemporary.

During the performance reading, the audience will hear familiar names — Eugene Onegin, Tatyana Larina, Lensky — but in unfamiliar contexts, encountering fragments of phrases, unexpected rhythms, and words of our time that have emerged through the thickness of the 19th century.

The book itself is a powerful statement on censorship, language, and freedom. The black stripe, reminiscent of censored passages in history and the present day, transforms here from an instrument of prohibition into an instrument of creation. It's a story about how art finds a way out even under conditions of restriction, turning a cage into a figure of silence. The reading is a way to peer into the mechanisms of power over the word, to feel how new meaning is born in dialogue with the classics, and to hear what a poet might say to us today, if allowed to say something else.

On February 13, you can come and cross out everything superfluous, highlighting all that is significant,
"In the circle of decent folk,
Without any malice or artful stroke."

Serafima Tomoshevskaya is a research director creating theater at the intersection of body, text, and technology. Author of the performances The Myth of Prometheus and Hamlet Machine.

Vladimir Karpov is an actor at the Masterskaya Theater, founder of the space Where's Grandma?, collaborates with the Invisible Theater and Etude Theater, and appears in films.