It’s a shame sometimes - having lived for a long time, I know so little! So I met Dmitry Prigov only now, or rather, not with a person, but with his legacy left to us.
Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov was born on November 5, 1949 into a family of intellectuals: his father is an engineer, his mother is a pianist. After graduating from high school, he worked at a factory as a mechanic, then studied at the Moscow Higher Art and Industrial School. Stroganov, in the sculpture department. in the 60s - 70s of the last century he became close to the artists of the Moscow underground and in 1975 was accepted as a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR, but until 1987 he did not exhibit anywhere. Since 1989, Prigov became a member of the Moscow Avant-Garde Club (KLAVA). Prigov wrote poetry since 1956, but was not published in his homeland. In 1986, after one of the street protests, he was forcibly sent for treatment to a psychiatric clinic and was released only after the protest of famous cultural figures in the country and abroad.
Prigov is the author of a huge number of poems and prose, graphic works, collages, installations, and performances. He had exhibitions, acted in films, participated in musical projects (a parody group organized from Moscow avant-garde artists “Central Russian Upland”). In 1993-1998, Dmitry Prigov performed with the rock group "NTO Recipe", which used the poet's poems in its work.
Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov died on July 16, 2007 from a heart attack. He was buried at the Donskoye Cemetery in Moscow.
So, the Marble Palace is one of the branches of the Russian Museum of St. Petersburg.
He left a lot because he was very multifaceted - he wrote poetry:
There's a living cup of tears over the city
Some angel rushed by.
And he dropped it like hundreds of years ago
One, and the wind blew it into the garden.
And the white leaves flew around,
And living creatures crawled.
So, apparently, the tear was not about us.
It’s kind of light, but look how heavy it is.
It is difficult to imagine how all our greats would actually meet at one table, and what our contemporary Dmitry Prigov would say to them.
No matter what you look at from Prigov, there is a philosophical view of life and our existence everywhere; here we are leafing through a book with transparent pages and only one word on the last one.
The same is true in the artist’s paintings, he does not argue or condemn, the very title of the exhibition suggests that this is only his concept, his view of painting. Thus, Prigov expresses his attitude towards this or that artist by simply putting their names on reproductions of landscapes
Another favorite topic of Dmitry Prigov is monsters; he considered them our neighbors in life. In fact, each of us can discern a monster in ourselves - here we offended by accident, there we passed by someone else’s misfortune and did not help... Portraits of artists and writers, including ourselves, are made precisely in the form of strange monsters, strange, but not scary. This is how he sees Andrei Bely. 
And so Bosch. 
Kandinsky. 
Shakespeare. 
An exhibition is an exhibition and photography is not allowed here, so all illustrations are taken from the Internet, mainly from the artist’s website. 
The materials with which Dmitry Prigov worked are very simple - newspapers, paper, ink, watercolor, ballpoint or gel pens.
I’ll end with poems by Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov.
The whole area seemed to be in smoke.
He saw how, cutting through the darkness,
In place of the forest, an ovary flared up....
And the stray dog fawned on him.
He stood on the hill against the fence,
How fenced off by an uncontrollable gift.
The stray dog breathed the midnight heat
And he whispered something secret without intent.
He suddenly felt the cold nearby with his back,
how the days fell, or the wings spread
And they revealed a crowded feat.
And from this motionless height
He saw everything up to the chalk line.
And the stray dog was a stray dog.
1963
Sources - http://prigov.ru/biogr/index.php, https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/
On November 5, 1940, the famous Soviet and Russian poet Dmitry Prigov was born into the family of a pianist and engineer. After graduating from school, he entered the sculpture department, and upon graduation he worked in the Moscow architecture department. Since 1975, Dmitry Prigov was a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR, and in 1985 he became a member of the avant-garde club. He published poems mainly abroad in emigrant magazines in the USA, France and Germany, as well as in uncensored (samizdat) publications in Russia. There was no great fame, but many knew that there was such a person as Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov.
Poetry
The texts of his poems consisted mainly of buffoonery, the manner of presentation was exalted, a little akin to hysteria, which caused healthy bewilderment among the majority of readers. As a result, 1986 was marked by forced treatment in a psychiatric clinic, from which he was quickly driven to protests, led both domestically and internationally. Naturally, during perestroika, Dmitry Prigov became an extremely popular poet, and since 1989, his works have been published in incredible quantities in almost all media where the format allowed, and it has changed almost everywhere.
In 1990, Prigov joined the Union of Writers of the USSR, and in 1992 - a member of the PEN Club. Since the late 80s, he has been an indispensable participant in television programs, published collections of poetry and prose, even a large book of his interviews was published in 2001. Dmitry Prigov was awarded various awards and grants. Mostly the patrons were German - the Alfred Tepfer Foundation, the German Academy of Arts and others. But Russia suddenly noticed what good poetry Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov writes.
Paintings
Literary activity did not immediately become fundamental in the work of Dmitry Prigov. He was the author of a huge number of all kinds of performances, installations, collages and graphic works. He was an active participant in underground events in the field of literature and fine arts.
Since 1980, his sculptures have participated in exhibitions abroad, and in 1988 he had a personal exhibition in Chicago. Theatrical and musical projects were also often accompanied by the participation of Prigov. Since 1999, Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov has led various festivals and sat on the jury of various competitions.
Conceptualist
Vsevolod Nekrasov, Ilya Kabakov, Lev Rubinstein, Vladimir Sorokin, Francisco Infante and Dmitry Prigov plowed and ideologically sowed the field of Russian conceptualism - a direction in art where priority belongs not to quality, but to semantic expression and a new concept (concept).
The poetic image is the main point on which the entire individual system of the creator of imperishable art is concentrated. Prigov has developed a whole strategy for constructing an image, where every gesture is thought out and equipped with a concept.
Image maker
It took many years to try on various images that were exceptionally useful: a leader and so on. One of the interesting elements is the mandatory use of a patronymic, it can be like “Aleksanych”, or without a surname, but with traditional pronunciation. The intonation is something like this: “And who will do this for you? Dmitry Aleksanych, or what?” - with a hint of “our everything,” that is, Alexander Sergeich Pushkin.
Increased attention to image in itself is not a characteristic feature of conceptualism, but nevertheless, the times have passed when in order to be a poet it was enough to write good poetry. Over time, sophistication in creating one's own image began to dominate creativity as such. And this phenomenon began beautifully - Lermontov, Akhmatova... Conceptualists brought this minor tradition almost to the point of absurdity.
Life as an experiment
Prigov's reflexive efforts brought this strange pseudo-philosophical platform under the poetic structures, as in Mayakovsky - in small places. “Militsaner” comprehends the sacred role of the state in human existence; in “Cockroachomachy” an attempt is visible to reveal the ancient base principle that the presence of domestic insects brings to life.
Any innovative writer experiments with material, styles, techniques, genres, and language. The trend in Prigov’s work is the combination of any artistic practice with mass culture, everyday life, and often with kitsch. The effect, of course, shocks the reader.
Envy of the “public favorites”?
Here we can also mention the transformation of the works of many other authors - from classics to nameless graphomaniacs, in which not so much an aesthetic as an ideological goal is pursued. The “samizdat” version of “Eugene Onegin” became an example of this, and Prigov tried to make Lermontov out of Pushkin by replacing the adjectives.
The most common performance among adherents of Prigov’s muse is the reading of classical works aloud, with howling, chanting, in the style of Muslim and Buddhist chants, which are named after the poet (“Prigov’s mantras”). Dmitry Prigov, whose biography is extremely rich in events, wrote a huge number of poetic works - more than thirty-five thousand. He died in July 2007 in hospital after a heart attack at the age of sixty-seven. He was buried where he was often visited by his compatriots and foreign guests, impressed by his works and way of life.
Born on November 5, 1940 in Moscow, in the family of an engineer and a pianist. After leaving school, he worked as a mechanic at a factory for two years. In 1959–1966 he studied at the Moscow Higher Art and Industrial School (formerly Stroganov School) in the sculpture department. From 1966 to 1974 he worked in the architectural department of Moscow. Since 1975 - member of the Union of Artists of the USSR. Since 1989 - member of the Moscow Avangardists Club (KLAVA).
He began writing poetry in 1956. In the 1970s–1980s, his works were published abroad in emigrant magazines in the USA (almanac “Catalog”), France (magazine “A-Z”) and Germany, as well as in domestic uncensored publications. He performed his texts mainly in a buffoonish and exalted manner, almost hysterical. In 1986, he was sent for compulsory treatment to a psychiatric clinic, from where he was soon released thanks to protests by cultural figures within the country (B. Akhmadulina) and abroad. In his homeland he began to publish only during perestroika, from 1989. Published in the magazines “Znamya”, “Ogonyok”, “Mitin Journal”, “Moskovsky Vestnik”, “Bulletin of New Literature”, “New Literary Review”, etc. Since 1990 - member of the USSR Writers' Union; since 1992 – member of the Pen-Club. Since the late 1980s, he has been periodically invited to perform literary and musical performances in various television programs. Since 1990, more than a dozen collections of poetry have been published, several books of prose - novels , 2000, Only my Japan, 2001; interview book D.A.Prigov speaks (2001).
Laureate of the Pushkin Prize of the Alfred Tepfer Foundation, which is awarded in Germany in Hamburg (1993), scholarship holder of the German Academy of Arts (DAAD, German Academic Exchange Service).
In addition to purely literary activities, Prigov wrote a large number of graphic works, collages, installations, and performances. Member of the Union of Artists of the USSR since 1975. Since about the same time, he has been a participant in visual and literary underground events, and since 1980 his sculptural works have been exhibited abroad. The first personal exhibition was in 1988 at the Struve Gallery (Chicago). He also participated in various musical (group “Central Russian Upland”, joint work with composer Sergei Letov, etc.) and theatrical projects. Since 1999 (all-Russian festival-competition “Cultural Hero”), he has been actively involved in participating in the management and jury of various festival projects.
CONCEPTUALISM
He is, along with Ilya Kabakov, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Lev Rubinstein, Francisco Infante and Vladimir Sorokin, one of the founders and ideologists of Russian conceptual art, or Moscow romantic conceptualism(both in its literary and visual branches). Conceptualism is a direction in art that gives priority not to the quality of execution of a work, but to the semantic equipment and novelty of its concept, or concept.
IMAGES
In this regard, Prigov focuses on the moment of formation and maintenance by the writer of his “poetic image”, which is elevated to the rank of a fundamental element of the individual creative system. He often talks about strategies, gestures, image construction, etc.
Over the course of a number of years, he tried on a wide variety of images, both traditional and “innovative” - poet-herald, poet-reasoner, poet-cliquish, poet-mystagogue (prophet, mystical leader), etc.
One of the constant individual elements of Prigov’s image is his literary name - Dmitry Alexandrovich (in some periods - Dmitry Aleksanych) Prigov, in which the use of a patronymic is mandatory “by definition”.
It is worth mentioning that attention to image and gesture alone cannot clearly serve as a characteristic of conceptualism. According to M.L. Gasparov, “only in the pre-Romantic era, in order to be a poet, it was enough to write good poetry. Beginning with romanticism - and especially in our century - “being a poet” became a special concern, and the efforts of writers to create their own image reached a jeweled sophistication. In the 19th century, Lermontov did this most skillfully, and in the 20th century, Anna Akhmatova did it even more skillfully.” However, Prigov makes this tradition absolutely valuable in itself, brings it to its logical conclusion, and in some cases to the point of absurdity.
UNDERSTANDING YOURSELF AND THE ERA
Prigov’s intellectual activity includes a hypertrophied element of reflection; he comprehends not only any of his artistic and even everyday gestures, but also their context, situational and historical. He sought to bring a sense of clarity, an understanding of what was happening. He argued: “We are present at a very complex complex of three projects. The first project is secular Renaissance art; the second project ending is the high and powerful art of enlightenment, and the third project ending is the personalist art of the avant-garde, born in the 20th century. The fact is that these three projects, which coincided and came together as if at the cutting edge at the end of our century, gave rise to precisely this strange feeling of crisis and at the same time of absolute freedom, i.e. – in the artist’s practice there is no such opposition to any of the projects, as, say, at the beginning of avant-garde art – to throw Pushkin off the end of modernity. Today such problems are hardly possible.”
The consequence of Prigov’s constant reflexive efforts is an almost obligatory philosophical background that he “lays” under his works. Thus, the poetic cycle about “Militsaner”, famous in the 1970s, implies, according to the author, an understanding of the origin of the state in human life, the state personified by law enforcement officers. In a cycle of poems Cockroachomachy allegedly reveals the “ancient chthonic, low-lying principle” brought into our lives by domestic insects.
AN ENDLESS EXPERIMENT
Prigov constantly experimented with styles, genres, individual artistic and simply technical techniques. An important feature of his work is his penchant for combining innovative artistic practices with everyday life, with mass culture, even kitsch, which sometimes produced a stunning effect.
In addition to writing his own original works, Prigov often transformed the texts of other authors - from dead classics to little-known modern graphomaniacs. The alteration of the text could take place at very different levels and was often not only aesthetic, but also ideological in nature. In the early 1990s, Prigov made a samizdat publication Pushkin's novel Evgenia Onegin, replacing all adjectives in it with the epithets “crazy” and “unearthly”; he claimed to have carried out a “Lermontization of Pushkin.” In the club environment, Prigov’s “mantras” were popular - chanting, with howling, works of Russian and world classics, in the style of Buddhist or Muslim chants.
Constant transitions from one type of art to another, from genre to genre, were interpreted by Prigov himself as a life trick: “mania for persecution, mania for changing images, type of activity, discovering new pieces of territory where you can escape, where is each next area in which you are seen and which can be identified with you is instantly abandoned. Therefore, when they tell me: you are an artist, I answer: no, no, I am a poet, and when they tell me: you are a poet, I say: well, yes, I am a poet, but actually I am an artist...”
Prigov’s experimentation and constant search for something new allowed him to add many mostly curious “innovations” to literary usage. So, in the 1970s, simultaneously or slightly earlier than the Uzhgorod poet Felix Krivin, he introduced the term “dystrophic” into the poetic vocabulary, i.e. a poem of two stanzas - oddly enough, in the history of literary criticism a special concept for this poetic form has not yet existed. Among Prigov’s “innovations” there is at least one important addition to the poet’s arsenal of artistic means. Philologist Andrei Zorin highlighted the so-called in Prigov’s poetic tools. Prigov's line- an over-scheme line, often shortened and with a distorted rhythm, added at the end of the poem after the text has achieved strophic, syntactic, rhythmic completeness - as if an “addendum” to the main text. Cases of the use of such a line had been encountered before, but it was Prigov who made it a stable artistic device. When read by the author, it usually stood out intonation - pronouncing it as if in decline, in a fallen or as if unexpectedly tired voice, or with an insinuating lowering of tone.
MEGALOMANIA
According to the Prigov artistic system, a separate work is not a poem, but rather a cycle of poems, an entire book; This partly explains one of the main features of Prigov’s work - the focus on the “gross poetic product.” In terms of quantitative characteristics, he is incredibly prolific; in the early 1990s, he was given a fantastic task - to write 24,000 poems by the year 2000: “24 thousand is a poem for each month of the previous two thousand years and, accordingly, for each month of the coming ones. Here is a project for four thousand years: there is an ideal poet, there is an ideal future, there is an ideal reader, there is an ideal publisher” (Prigov D.A. I'm the ideal poet of my time). He wrote poems every day, a significant part of them were published by the author in a microscopic edition of several copies on a typewriter, which he invariably preferred to a computer.
“My task is to forget the written poem as quickly as possible, because with so much written, if it all sits in your head, you won’t get the next one,” the author admitted. As a justification for his wild productivity, the author also cited “the long-reigning Russian cultural mentality. This is a constant feeling of catastrophe, standing on the edge of an abyss, which gives rise to the desire to urgently fill this abyss with something, throw it in, it doesn’t matter what - household belongings, cast iron blanks (from production), - you need to continuously and monotonously throw something into this abyss . And it turns out that the reactive force of this throwing is the only thing that keeps you from falling down. Therefore, the main thing here is not the quality of what was done, not the accuracy of the blow, but continuous movement.”
Prigov wrote mainly in cycles, of which he created countless numbers: ABCs, Stratification, About the dead, Beauty and Hero, Children as victims of sexual harassment, The country of encounters with the bear and not only with him, Child and death, Dystrophics etc.
The desire for a systematic transfer of things and phenomena of the world into the text, given the virtually monstrous number of works created, led the author to the fact that it was difficult for him to find a topic that he had not previously touched upon. He always had one or two illustrative sonnets or poems for a round table on absolutely any topic. According to V. Kuritsyn, “Prigov realized the brilliant intuition of socialist realism - he made art completely planned. But since social realism imagines itself as the pinnacle of world art, the post-Soviet gesture easily becomes focused on eternity - on the myth of the Great Work, on responsibility for every month of the history of all mankind...”
The universality of Prigov’s creative personality forced critics and cultural experts to look for analogies and “pairs” for him among the pantheon of Russian and world literature. In the article A year without Brodsky the same V. Kuritsyn revealed the parallels and contrasts of Prigov and I. Brodsky - the most, in his opinion, large-scale, and in some ways mutually polar, poetic figures of the modern era.
DENIAL OF CONVICTION
The indomitable, even somewhat insane creative energy of Prigov’s creativity pushed critics to play up this quality of his as central and defining (at the round table “Rodents in Literature” on November 8, 2000, Prigov was presented, in association with the well-known property of rabbits, as “the most prolific Russian writer”) . In general, Prigov’s creativity provided rich food not only for artistic and art criticism interpretations, but also for varied and largely contradictory, due to its diversity and polysemy, criticism from other authors. He was probably the most criticized Russian writer.
In journalistic publications about Prigov one often encounters simplified, reductive interpretations of his poetics: “ironic play on Soviet cliches, absurdism, black humor.” This vision of Prigov’s work, the formally impeccable reduction of its multi-level structure to simple schemes, is often characteristic not only of publicists who are far from contemporary art, but also of colleagues in the literary workshop, famous and authoritative intellectuals.
So the poet Viktor Krivulin wrote: “In the late 80s, the fashion for conceptualism captured the Russian province. Prigov and Rubinstein are recognized as key cultural heroes of the era of the collapse of the Great Soviet Myth. Prigov came to poetry from fine art, transferring collage techniques and purely installation principles of working with ready-made things (“ready made”) into his texts. As such “ready-made things” he uses textbook texts, clichéd ideological formulas, and ritual verbal gestures. His poetry is absolutely devoid of a lyrical subject; it is a set of statements that supposedly go back to the average Soviet man, the microscopic heir of Gogol’s Akaki Akaki Bashmachkin. Prigov talks about everything, without stopping for a second, responding with parodic seriousness to any current situation and at the same time revealing the total emptyness of the very process of poetic speaking. (Half a century of Russian poetry. Preface to the Anthology of Contemporary Russian Poetry - Milan, 2000).
“The clever Prigov can clearly explain the meaning of his fundamentally meaningless works, setting a record for deception,” writes critic Stanislav Rassadin.
Literary critic O. Lekmanov speaks with great sympathy: “...D.A. Prigov, like Vladimir Sorokin, became a voluntary victim of his own experiments, aesthetic and ethical, having marked the edge beyond which one cannot go, beyond which one can only look.”
Meanwhile, an inexperienced reader can find in Prigov’s texts both a reflection of life and a sincere feeling (or, perhaps, a successful imitation of it).
Editions: Tears of the heraldic soul, 1990; Fifty drops of blood, 1993;The appearance of the verse after his death, 1995;Transcendent Lovers, 1995; A collection of warnings for various things, "Ad Marginem", 1995; Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov. Collection of poems, in two volumes, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Vienna, 1997; Written from 1975 to 1989, 1997; Soviet texts, 1997; Eugene Onegin, 1998; Live in Moscow. Manuscript as a novel, 2000; Only my Japan, 2001; Calculations and establishments. Stratification and conversion texts, 2001.
Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov(November 5, 1940, Moscow, USSR - July 16, 2007, ibid., Russia) - Russian poet, artist, sculptor. One of the founders of Moscow conceptualism in art and literary genre (poetry and prose).
Biography
Born on November 5, 1940 in a family of intellectuals: his father is an engineer, his mother is a pianist. His parents, of German origin, were forced in 1941 to change their national identity. Dmitry Prigov, who later lived for a long time in Germany, according to the remark of Igor Smirnov, who knew him closely, never spoke German.
After graduating from high school, he worked for some time at a factory as a mechanic. Then he studied at the Moscow Higher Art and Industrial School. Stroganov (1959-1966). A sculptor by training.
In 1966-1974 he worked at the Moscow Architectural Administration.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he became ideologically close to the artists of the Moscow underground. In 1975 he was accepted as a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR. However, he was not exhibited in the USSR until 1987.
Since 1989 - member of the Moscow Avangardists Club (KLAVA).
Prigov has been writing poetry since 1956. Until 1986 he was not published in his homeland. Until this time, he had been repeatedly published abroad since 1975 in Russian-language publications: in the newspaper “Russian Thought”, the magazine “A - Z”, the almanac “Catalogue”.
In 1986, after one of the street performances, he was forcibly sent for treatment to a psychiatric clinic, from where he was released thanks to the intervention of famous cultural figures inside and outside the country.
Prigov first participated in an exhibition in the USSR in 1987: his works were presented within the framework of the projects “Unofficial Art” (Exhibition Hall of the Krasnogvardeisky District, Moscow) and “Contemporary Art” (Exhibition Hall on Kuznetsky Most, Moscow). In 1988, he had his first solo exhibition in the United States - at the Struve Gallery in Chicago. Subsequently, his works were shown many times in Russia and abroad, in particular in Germany, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, Great Britain, and Austria.
Prigov's first collection of poetry, “Tears of the Heraldic Soul,” was published in 1990 by the Moscow Worker publishing house. Subsequently, Prigov published books of poetry “Fifty Drops of Blood”, “The Appearance of Verse after His Death” and prose books - “Only My Japan”, “Live in Moscow”.
Prigov is the author of a large number of texts, graphic works, collages, installations, and performances. His exhibitions were organized several times. He acted in films. He participated in musical projects, one of which, in particular, was the parody rock group “Central Russian Upland” “organized from Moscow avant-garde artists.” The band members, according to them, set out to prove that in Russian rock the musical component has no meaning and that listeners only react to key words in the text. From 1993 to 1998 Prigov repeatedly performed with the rock group “NTO Recipe”, which used his texts in their work.
The leading lyrical images of Prigov’s poetics are the “militiaman” and the abstract “he”. The lyrical heroes look at the world through the eyes of the Soviet man in the street. The inspiration for the series about a policeman was life in the Moscow residential area of Belyaevo, in a house near the Moscow State University of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In 2003, Prigov together with Sergei Nikitin held a walk-dialogue “Literary Belyaevo”, showing the views and content of this place for his work. Prigov’s main prose texts are the first two parts of an unfinished trilogy, in which the author tries three traditional genres of Western writing: autobiography in the novel “Live in Moscow”, notes of a traveler in the novel “Only My Japan”. The third novel was to introduce the confessional genre.
The total number of Prigov's poetic works is over 35 thousand. Since 2002, Dmitry Prigov, together with his son Andrei and his wife Natalia Mali, participated in the Prigov Family Group of action art.
He died on the night of July 16, 2007 in Moscow Hospital No. 23 due to complications after a heart attack. He was buried in Moscow, at the Donskoye Cemetery.
Photo: andyfreeberg.com
At the exhibition “Dmitry Prigov: from the Renaissance to Conceptualism” at the Tretyakov Gallery, perhaps for the first time, one can assess the scope of Prigov’s legacy. His world consisted of repeating plots, moving from decade to decade, and extremely recognizable characters: “the poor cleaning lady,” a huge eye, auras and a bestiary, as well as verse charts and work with newspapers. At the same time, Prigov left a colossal number of works, many of which he did not even sign, which created some problems in the work on the exhibition.
Art critic
“Prigov should be perceived not as a writer who still drew a little (well, as Pushkin dabbled in this), but as an artist who created works of art, including in words, in performance. Otherwise his literary practice will seem rather traditional. Now there is a certain “struggle for the soul” of Prigov, a canonical collection of his works is being published for Russia (the first volume of the five-volume collected works, “Monads,” was released in 2013. - Note ed.), about which it is known that it will not be complete. I'm very interested in how much of his legacy will be missed or pushed to the margins there and what his image will ultimately appear. Prigov is one of the greatest Russian writers and artists, and such figures (Mayakovsky is the most striking example) always have an interesting posthumous fate, sometimes with startling twists. Let's see".
Gallery owner
“We once did the Conversion project, one of the aspects of which was the artists’ use of technology. Prigov had a theory that Russians always use equipment for other purposes. For example, when Peter the Great first brought these wonderful lathes from Holland and distributed them to the boyars - they say, use them, improve your skills - they couldn’t throw them away, and they didn’t know how to use them. Therefore, they either stood in the very center of the hut as a kind of demonstration of closeness to the king, or they were used as a load when they fermented cabbage. So, Prigov created the project “Computer in the Russian Family”, it was a series of photographs where he showed how a Russian person uses a computer. Well, for example, a girl looks at the screen as if in a mirror; the computer is decorated with all sorts of frills; the man uses it as a stand to make it easier to tie his shoelaces. In general, a computer in a Russian family was almost like a pet or a stool.”
curator of the Prigov retrospective at the Tretyakov Gallery
“Everyone asks: why do we have an installation with a dinosaur? Prigov's story with a dinosaur is just one sketch. But it was important for me to show the dinosaur. There is such a series “For Georgie” - this is a series of stickers that he created for his grandson and wrote poems for it: the grandson loved dinosaurs very much and did not like anything else. I didn’t want to read Pushkin, Lermontov - and Prigov adapted Pushkin to dinosaurs. Instead of “my uncle has the most honest rules,” he wrote “my dinosaur has the most honest rules.” But for Prigov, a dinosaur is also a figure of the absolute, “Jurassic Park”, whatever. Here we see a creature that exists freely in a space that is not intended for it. It doesn’t fit in our heads, but it can freely pass through the wall. This is something that is bigger than us. Artists of the 20th century always avoided this topic; they, as a rule, had little interest in the classical beauty of religious art, but Prigov suddenly began to actively scroll through these themes. This dinosaur in many ways conveys the feeling of colliding with something that is larger than you and beyond the boundaries of your understanding.
Prigov mocked the museum as a temple of art with its rigid, established laws - in particular, in the series “For the Poor Cleaning Lady.” It must be said that people who are little familiar with Prigov’s work always have one question: “Is this about religion or what?” As with “Black Square” people always ask whether it is art or not. Prigov constantly evokes religious associations. We must understand what the eye is that looks from everywhere from his works. This, on the one hand, is the divine eye, and on the other hand, it means power. This eye can also mean the viewer - this is what you are looking at and what is looking at you. To understand this situation, you need to realize that you are not a cleaning lady, but another participant in the artistic process.”
Performances
Prigov engaged in performance art throughout his life, and many of them were not documented. In 2002, the artist’s son Andrei and his wife Natalya Mali invited Prigov to work together. This is how the group “PMP” (Prigov-Mali-Prigov), or Prigov Family Group, was created - another important episode of the poet’s expansion into the space of contemporary art.
Gallery owner
“Prigov had such a performance. He took quotes from the Gospel and printed them himself in the form of advertisements: where telephone numbers are usually printed underneath like an accordion, he indicated where they were taken from - the Gospel of Matthew, such and such a page. So that a person, after reading this, can find the piece he likes from this reminder in the Gospel. He walked around and posted them at bus stops, among advertisements about lost dogs, job searches and apartment rentals. He was immediately taken away by the active authorities. After some time, it turned out that he was a famous artist, there could be problems with foreign diplomats, etc. about him. They decided to let him go, but before that they said: “We are letting you go, but we have a huge request from you: for the future, explain how we can distinguish an artist from a madman or a dissident?” Prigov said a very important thing: “You have no way, because an artist is both a madman and a dissident. The only thing you need is to know the names of the artists." And by and large, this applies not only to organs, but also to any person not included in the artistic context who encounters art for the first time.
As part of the media opera “Russia”, Dmitry Prigov teaches a cat to pronounce the name of our country
Artist
“Our creative acquaintance began with the fact that I wanted to make a video triptych “The Hidden Tear” (it included the films “Child and Death”, “Nabokov” and “The Last Kiss”). Due to Prigov’s frequent travels, the films were shot in parts at our home, over the course of two years. Prigov quickly adapted to the image, loved the camera and loved to fool around. He complemented my ideas with his own, and we learned everything from each other. It was always very intense. Then we decided to shoot the “Family Forever” photo project. We also worked on it for several years, and gradually we formed an archive of joint works. In 2004, we were invited to do a personal exhibition at the Moscow NCCA with some of our performances shown on monitors, the photo series “Family Forever” and the live performance “I am the third”. In recent years, Prigov has worked a lot with the color black, with the image of death, with theological symbolism. He adored Dadaism and admired Malevich. In general, he was interested in all geniuses. Even totalitarian leaders and serial killers.”
Poetry
At a time of stagnation, when it was impossible to publish poetry, home performances were a way out for the poet. Prigov often performed his poems in the workshop of Boris Orlov and participated in weekly meetings of poets, writers and critics, which took place in the second half of the 1970s in the apartment of Mikhail Eisenberg.
Poet
“One day in 1977, an artist friend of mine suggested: “Let’s go to a studio tomorrow. The poet Prigov will read there.”
There is no such poet,” I answered confidently.
Why isn't it?
Firstly, I already know all the poets, and secondly, there is no such surname.
So let's go and check it out.
Went. A lot of people, including friends. One also appeared who called himself the poet Prigov. He sat down at the table and laid out small typewritten books. The hum died down. The poet began: “Hello, comrades! (“Comrades” is normal, this is social art, everything is clear.) First, a little about myself. I was born in Moscow. I am thirty-seven years old, a fatal age for a poet...”
Exactly at this very moment (by God, I’m not lying!) a huge picture in a massive frame fell off the wall and crashed with an incredible roar right behind the speaker. There was general excitement, some people applauded. The painting was banished to another room out of harm's way.
That’s how we met, then became friends. And we were friends for exactly thirty years.”
Artist
“In 1967, Prigov graduated from Stroganov and parted with academic art. Until 1972, he worked as an official in the Moscow architectural department, and then came to my studio. I call this time “the period of Rogov Street.” For both of us these were years of intense plastic search. Even then, the visual sphere was important for Prigov the poet. In the mid-1970s, he began to create his “stichograms”, where word formation passed into a new plastic form. And since 1980, popularity gradually began to appear. It all started with the publication of his poems in the American almanac “Catalogue”. From this moment on, he becomes the subject of attention from the authorities. Before the start of perestroika, he was persecuted - we lived next door, and Prigov hid his archive with me. The heyday of his poetic talent, in my opinion, dates from 1973, when he began work on the cycle “Historical and Heroic Songs,” and before perestroika. Starting from the second half of the 1980s, his poetry existed in the form of actions and performances - these texts need to be assessed on a completely different scale.”
Poet
“We met in the spring of 1975: I came to the workshop they shared with Boris Orlov on Dimino to read. Literary readings were held there regularly, and my appearance became regular. We gradually became friends. Some of his reviews of poetry struck with incredible subtlety and some kind of deep understanding of the essence of the matter. A couple of years later D.A. began to come to our Thursdays and, as a rule, brought a new typewritten book. After reading it, I kept it as a keepsake, and at some point I ended up with a fair collection of such books. But one day I gave them to my friends to read, and there just happened to be a search. And so the books disappeared.
It was not possible to have a drink with him even at the beginning of our acquaintance. Dima drank only beer - and then in limited quantities. Our unbridled morals of that time were curtailed even by his very presence - and by the half-disgustful bewilderment with which he treated people who drank. (This is how an ethnographer observes the customs of savages sideways.) But I think that this is also a consequence of his early illnesses - the absence of that surplus of health, which can be easily and unwisely spent.
But with the general slowdown and souring of life - what an amazing and alarming sight it was! Like a burning bush in a light rain.”
Writer
“It started when, probably in 1977, I read his poems in Erik Bulatov’s workshop. It was during the day, the workshop was flooded with such even sunlight, and the poems... they really touched me. They immediately made me feel that he was a strong poet who had something to say - and something fundamentally new to say. I re-read them, and, like any poems on paper, they seem to be miraculous - that is, they cannot say anything about the person who wrote them; and in a conversation with Bulatov, I could not understand from his descriptions who Prigov was. Moreover, he was somewhat wary of him. A couple of years later, I attended a reading in an underground salon and saw Prigov: he read his texts the whole evening, and it was a very strong, vivid impression. I saw an amazingly modern poet - a poet whose language and thinking are ahead of the flow of Soviet times, who with his appearance seems to tear apart the surrounding reality. He was wearing jeans and a white shirt. The light of the lamp fell on this shirt all evening - and there was an amazing echo with those white pages on which the light of the workshop then fell. These were poems come to life in the image of Prigov. He was the personification of these texts, he was literally responsible for them - both mentally and physically. It often happens that the author does not coincide at all with his own texts - you see him and do not understand where he wrote all this. There was a complete coincidence of the creator and the texts. This evening is one of the brightest in my life. This rarely happens."
Music
Something between an avant-rock band and a performance project, the Central Russian Upland group became the subject of a local cult in circles associated with unofficial art in the second half of the 80s. “Central Russian Upland” gave concerts infrequently, but at them one could always hear Prigov’s signature “cry of the kikimora.”
Artist
“Nikita Alekseev took part in one of the main concerts of the “Central Russian Upland” at the House of Doctors. Nikita played the saxophone, and then left and, like Derzhavin to Pushkin’s lyre, handed the saxophone to Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov, who immediately broke off the mouthpiece from the saxophone. That's all he kept for himself. But, I must say, he blew it furiously all the time and shouted with his kikimora. So the instrument fell into safe hands and lips. The cry of the kikimora became an alternative to Seryozha Anufriev’s entertainer, gradually turning into a separate and irreplaceable part of the show. Dmitry Alexandrovich's role did not end with kikimora - he had two more favorite things: a police cap and a wig, which he constantly pulled on himself during concerts. Sometimes separately, sometimes together. And Dmitry Alexandrovich also wrote and sent, as it seems to me, the largest number of notes “from the audience” to Alexander Rosenbaum, who spoke before us twice. The notes contained the following content: “Sasha, have a conscience,” “Sasha, it’s almost twelve,” “Sasha, keep in mind, we also need to go home after the concert.”
Musician
“We met in Andrei Monastyrsky’s apartment, there used to be meetings of conceptualists on Thursdays: Prigov, Rubinstein, Kabakov, Sorokin, Nekrasov, “Fly Agarics.” Prigov read his poems all the time, persistently - because he had a plan: to write several thousand poems by a certain date or ten thousand poems a year, in general, he had increased socialist obligations. And in 1983, we quickly discussed something and decided to perform together. Well, where could we perform then? Only in one place: the Embassy of the Republic of Malta. There was an ambassador there who graduated from the Peoples' Friendship University here, and since his wife was from the same institute, he remained an ambassador by appointment. He wore his hair long, hosted nonconformist exhibitions and readings, all accompanied by Maltese wines. Soon it was all over, the KGB officers came, and, despite the fact that he repented beforehand, even tonsured his hair, it still didn’t save him: he was expelled.”
Writer
“He was distinguished by his remarkable knowledge of classical operas: he knew them by heart, literally loved them, trembled and admired them - but was terribly embarrassed by the fact that he loved them. Therefore, he hid it virtually until the last days of his life; it was his secret passion - to love the classics. Being a person who, probably second after Pushkin, brought poetry closer to life - thanks to the conceptual act, his poetry about policemen and so on became close and understandable to everyone - he, nevertheless, at heart remained classically educated and well educated in terms of traditional culture "
Prose
Prigov's debut novel, Live in Moscow, was published in 2000. In subsequent years, three more novels were published: “Only My Japan”, “Renat and the Dragon” and “Katya of China”.
Literary critic
“Prigov began writing novels for several reasons. First, many poets, as they grow older, feel the need to express themselves in large prose form. Secondly, Prigov has always been interested in the phenomenon of fashion in culture. The novel became a fashionable genre at the turn of the 2000s. Before this, there was constant talk that literature was dead, and in the late nineties, novels by Shishkin and Ulitskaya, “Generation P” by Pelevin and “Blue Lard” by Sorokin were published one after another. The novel became prestigious, just like in Soviet times. In addition, for Prigov, novels were a kind of continuation of poetry: this is due to his program of expansion into different genres. The novel fits well into this paradigm. The last reason is a deeper thing that Prigov understood analytically and felt intuitively. This is an unfinished program of Russian modernity in culture: Prigov developed modernist problematics in postmodernism. Unfortunately, Prigov's novels are not adequately appreciated. Especially “Renat and the Dragon” and “Katya of China”. “Only My Japan” and “Live in Moscow” are easier for the reader. These are more hooligan novels, and therefore the public accepted them more warmly.”
Photo: Prigov Family Group
Publisher
“His uniqueness was determined by the fact that he was in many ways a character person. That is, he consciously built his literary biography as the biography of a certain literary character. He had a Militsaner, and he was such a character, Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov. This is a very ancient mythology - that there is no difference between literature and life, and life imitates literature rather than vice versa. Prigov was a typical bearer of this mythology, and this mythology dates back to the Silver Age - from all these stories with Blok, Andrei Bely in Vyacheslav Ivanov’s “Tower”. This idea, which they called differently - theurgy, the transformation of life with the help of literature. Prigov in many ways belongs to this tradition - the conscious confusion of life and literature. The voice that is heard in his poems is not the voice of Prigov himself, but the voice of a character: say, a policeman speaks - or, for example, some ... city speaks.”
Mark Lipovetsky philologist
“From Prigov’s archive, it is obvious that in the 1990s his textual productivity increased at least tenfold. And it was at this time that he went beyond the limits, becoming a “cultural figure,” as he ironically called himself. He does performances, opera, acts in films, writes a political column, exhibits a lot, travels all over the world... Since the late 1990s, he has been very fascinated by the idea of a “new anthropology.” How will culture change when the problem of the finitude of human existence is removed - as he believed (and, it seems, he was right), cloning, the creation of a virtual double of the human brain will practically remove this problem. In short, he thinks in a very powerful and varied way about how culture changes and what new subjectivities and symbolic languages it gives rise to. At the same time, he goes far beyond the boundaries of Soviet experience and Soviet languages, becoming on a par with the largest representatives of the modern neo-avant-garde.”
Philosopher
“I really remember Prigov’s performance in Las Vegas in 1999. He performed with his chants - he screamed “Eugene Onegin” like a kikimora, in a completely heart-rending voice that made you want to cover your ears. You know, there is such a classification - a poet of the path who is in constant development, constantly changing, like Lermontov, and a poet who is always in his own space, like Tyutchev. It seems to me that Dmitry Alexandrovich, despite the fact that he was very dynamic in his responses to current situations, is a poet of the second type. He sang in his own voice - topics changed, genres changed, but he himself did not change. He had a life project that he completed. Much more could have been added to this, but “Prigov’s” would still remain unchanged. I was always surprised that in public readings he read a very limited number of poems. Literally ten or fifteen - poems about policemen, the “Battle of Kulikovo” and so on. And this despite the fact that he wrote five poems every day and, it seems, he completed the task he set for himself - to write 30,000 poems. I never understood this. But perhaps this was his conceptual technique: repeating himself, thereby solidifying the memes and driving them as deeply as possible into the consciousness of the listeners.”
Death
Photo: from the Afisha archive
In the last year of his life, Prigov planned a joint action with the Voina group: activists were supposed to put him in a closet and drag him in their arms to the 22nd floor of the Student House on Vernadsky. The project of Prigov’s symbolic ascension to heaven was never realized: on July 16, 2007, he died from the consequences of a heart attack.
Poet
“Our last meeting happened the day before the day he was admitted to the hospital. I got there for the last time. I remember that we sat with him in some cafe and drank beer. I remember how he said that a group of young, attractive people had appeared in Moscow, making completely new art. And that these young people started an action with his participation. That is, they were going to put him, Dmitry Aleksanych, in a closet and lift him and the closet to the very top of the main building of Moscow State University. Not in the elevator, no. On the stairs. And that this action is planned just the other day. He promised to invite me as a spectator.
The next day I found out that D.A. in the hospital and that the chances are very low. That is, they are not there. I asked the doctor, who happened to be my friend: “Is it bad?” “It’s bad,” she said. “How bad is it?” - I asked. “So much,” she answered very briefly and very clearly. “How much longer?” - I asked just as briefly. “A day and a half or two,” she answered. “Ha, you don’t know him!” - I thought, but didn’t say.
He once explained to me the main reason for his excessive writing and inability to stop and rest. “The thing is,” he said, “I can’t shake the feeling that I’m riding a bicycle on the edge of an abyss. If I stop pedaling, I’ll fall into the abyss.”
He did not die after one and a half or two days. He lived another eight days. And I know why. He pressed the pedals with his last remaining strength.”
- Where Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val
- When until Sun 9 November
- To buy tickets 300 rub., preferential 150 rub.