Overview

Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov was a leading writer of the late Soviet and early post-Soviet era. Born in 1940 and died in 2007; a lifespan longer than usual for a Russian male of his generation. Almost until the collapse of the Soviet Union, his writing circulated solely in samizdat, or else in overseas publications. He was briefly detained in a Soviet psychiatric hospital in 1986 but released after protests from establishment literary figures. A founder of Moscow Conceptualism, Prigov was an amazingly prolific writer, in all genres, as well as an accomplished visual artist. This collection, the first to appear in English, covers the Soviet era, with work which make serious fun of the Soviet version of reality. Short stories about amazing heroes of the revolution and after, poetic sequences that expose literature, history and culture to the stark light of laughter. It also includes a generous selection of post-Soviet writings, concerned with human mortality and human sinfulness – concerns he shares with Dostoevsky. He shares his humor, which is always present, with Gogol. Lists of deaths avoided, punishments for the menagerie, and the cosmic balance of existence. While Prigov’s writing is very definitely of the Soviet and post-Soviet world, it also is consonant with contemporaneous avant-garde writing elsewhere. He was a “Pop Artist” in a land without consumer culture.

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Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov was born in Moscow in 1940. Trained as a sculptor at the Stroganov Institute, he worked as an architect and made sculptures for public parks during the Soviet era. A prolific writer (in 2005 he estimated that he had already written 35,000 poems), he was a founder of the “Moscow Conceptual art” school. He wrote in almost all conceivable genres (including two novels), was an active performance artist, produced videos, and drawings and installations. He also acted in films, including Taxi Blues. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Prigov published in underground and émigré journals, and was briefly sent to a psychiatric hospital after being arrested by the KGB. With the onset of glasnost and perestroika, he was able to publish and show his visual art in “official” venues, and also exhibited his art outside of Russia. During the Soviet period his work fiercely satirized official language and culture; after the collapse his writing became more philosophic – but both before and after it energetically explored all the possibilities that language and literature offered. He won several prizes, including, in 2002, the Boris Pasternak prize. Prigov died, in Moscow, of a heart attack in 2007. His collected works are being published in Russia, edited by Mark Lipovetsky.

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