Skidan then attended the Free University from (1989- 1992). Skidan later chose to neglect soviet higher education, in protest. Skidan currently resides in Russia's capital, St.Petersburg where he was born and raised. Skidan has travelled a lot for his work and to collaborate with other artists. His current marital status is unknown. "Red Shifting" is Skidan's collection of poems and written essays which begs the question: what lines are blurred between philosophy and literature, as well as modes of discourse. This work has been described as vigorously avant-garde and experimental, verbally disruptive, and intellectually anchoring all at once. This piece was published by ugly duckling press in January 2008, Translated by  Genya Turovskaya. Skidan's mentor, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, describes Skidan's work "Red Shifting" as “[s]omnambulistic.” Dragomoshchenko also says " Indeed, Skidan creates dream-poems. What is at play in the dream-poem? Incest and GAS!". The collection has been expressed in Skidan's critical writing and in his organizations with other writers, philosophers, and critics in part with "Chto Delat". Such writers who are also known for having shifted their persepctive to entertain to Marxism in the 2000s and 2010s. "To read a book this fierce, this honest, to disappear into these beautiful, wrecked songs—and to disappear 'more fully' precisely because they question 'the idea of the wrecked song'—is a singular, moving experience. The poems in Red Shifting, translated beautifully by Genya Turovskaya, display a near-physical, wounding intelligence, an intelligence unflinchingly aware of what it means to think history's recklessness."- Christian Hawkey  "The quote mosaic in Skidan’s poems is a temptation for the sophisticated reader. The temptation to find your own unique subjectivity in the zone of its fundamental impossibility, in the zone of unconditional triumph of impersonal foreign speech, gleaned from a high cultural archive or from a low household vocabulary ... Moreover, the collage principle of writing practiced by him excludes the presence of an authorial lyrical voice. That is why the inevitable explosive effect arises, caused by the uncertainty and decay of the subject of the utterance."- Dmitry Golynko-Wolfson  "Alexander Skidan is a unique phenomenon for modern Russian literature.