The inspiration for this pitch invasion was a poem by Dmitri Prigov, the foremost conceptual writer to come out of the Soviet underground. It describes a heavenly police officer who, despite having a direct line with God, debases his divine nature by persecuting political offenders.
And from the heavenly walkie-talkiePrigov, who died in 2007, was a shape-shifter and a master of appropriating the lofty rhetoric of Soviet authority in whatever form it took. Translators Simon Schuchat and Ainsley Morse use the phoneticized “Offissa” to address the Moscow beat cop (militsaner) at the center of “Apotheosis of the Offissa,” Prigov’s sardonic vision of late-Soviet law and order. The translation choice pays homage to the Offissa Pupp character from the comic strip Krazy Kat, and demonstrates how Prigov could veer wildly between caricature and high lyricism. Soviet Texts, the first career-spanning collection of Prigov’s writing to make its way into English, is chock full of such exquisite tonal collisions.
Comes a voice truly unearthly:
Oh you, beautiful Offissa!
Be upstanding and forever young
Like a flowering cypress
Kiriil Medvedev, a radical leftist poet of the first generation to come into its own after the fall of the Soviet Union, recognizes Prigov as “one of the great postwar poets” alongside Joseph Brodsky and Vladimir Vysotsky (Russia’s Bob Dylan). Prigov himself was a reluctant dissident, his subversion more Holy Fool-ish than overtly political. He paid for it anyway. In 1986 he was picked up by the KGB and detained in a psych ward for going around posting little notices on trees with Soviet-esque sayings, like: “Citizens, The faces of children and kittens remind us of eternity. Dmitri Aleksandrovich.” (Writer friends in better standing with the Kremlin lobbied to have him released after a few days.)
Denied entry into the cushy Writers’ Union until late in his career (by which time the benefits of membership had ceased to exist), Prigov’s writings circulated widely in narrow underground circles throughout the 1970s and 1980s. He thrived among a community of artists, performers, samizdat writers, and theorists that coalesced under the banner of Moscow Conceptualism. “Our position was to deconstruct any attempt to create a myth or a grand theory,” he told David Remnick in a 1994 meeting. “We were out to deconstruct the figure of Lenin and also the figure of Solzhenitsyn. They can both be responded to as pop figures.” The Moscow Conceptualists were known for their self-consciously antipoetic methods and comic performances that scrambled the codes of Soviet mythology and official language. Prigov was their hyperventilating emcee, a Roberto Bolaño-like mischief-maker who wrote like Nicanor Parra.
In Dead Again, a history of the Russian intelligentsia after communism, Masha Gessen observes that the more imaginative and rebellious writers of Prigov’s generation, finding themselves with no publishing prospects, turned inward: “They wrote explicitly for themselves and their friends. Their language was insular, their work filled with friendly references and private jokes.” The poems gathered in Soviet Texts are indeed peppered with nods to literary friends and political foes. But Gessen’s analysis only explains some of the difficulty in translating Prigov’s reference-heavy work, and says nothing about its quality or significance. His writing was always in critical dialogue with larger historical forces. Underneath various masks, his poems, actions, and visual art radiated a heartfelt idealism.
Prigov achieved mainstream success in Russia during the publishing bonanza of the 1990s and exhibited his visual art widely in Europe, but his writing has been slower to catch on in the anglophone literary world. Ugly Duckling Presse has sought to rectify this situation. Prigov’s first American publication took place with the small Brooklyn-based press in 2004. They’ve since published several poets associated with Moscow Conceptualism—most notably Vsevolod Nekrasov and Lev Rubinstein—along with avant garde forerunners like the influential absurdist Daniil Kharms. Thanks to Ugly Duckling’s efforts to transplant this ecology of writers into the English-speaking world, Prigov and the alternative publishing history that nourished him should begin to make more sense to readers outside of Eastern Europe. Please, someone give these people a large tax-deductible donation, so they can keep doing this.
Like his counterparts in the West, Prigov absorbed the post-structuralist rejection of the “text” as sole site of meaning. The Moscow Conceptualists had sought to shift the center of gravity from the text to somewhere between the author, the text, and the reader. Prigov’s approach was especially decentered and anarchic, alive to wordplay and rhythm, his apparent critical distance always a performance in half-drag. He frequently derails himself, with the “Advisory Notes” that accompany most of the texts often making things less, rather than more, clear. Of the polarizing effect of these poetics, Medvedev blogged in 2007:
For some [Prigov] was the soulless product of mechanical conceptualist evil, in response to which it felt so good to be a divinely inspired poet! For others he was a symbol of the fact that for all the pathos, heartaches, historical searching of his poems, one could in the end just relax and receive ‘pleasure’ (or torture) from the ‘text.’
The latter were, we can surmise, the kind of readers who appreciated Prigov’s humor. Even without knowing much about the style of Stalin hagiographies, I found the historical revisionisms of “Twenty Stories About Stalin” quite funny. In one instant, Stalin overthrows the Tsar. In the next, he fixes a kid’s bike:
Stalin looked straight at him, smiled wearily, and repaired the bicycle. The kid said, “Come here tomorrow, I’ll introduce you to my mother, she’s really nice.” Stalin looked straight at him, became very serious, and replied: “I can’t, kiddo, it’s about time for me to go.” And the next day he died.Nowhere is the influence of Kharms’s terminal deadpan felt more than in these pieces. (Spoiler: Stalin comes back to life.)
One problem with summing up Prigov is that he wrote prodigiously. He once claimed to have as his goal the completion of forty-two thousand poems over a period of four thousand years. He came close to the mark, and in only one human lifespan, having produced by his own estimate somewhere between twenty-four thousand and thirty-six thousand poems. Similarly to the way Warhol embraced and ironized the American obsession with productivity, Prigov liked to frame his role as poet as that of a good Soviet worker.
About a third of Soviet Texts is comprised of purposely repetitive parodies of typical Soviet-era schlock, with its syncretic worship of Pushkin and social realism, and the overall effect can feel tedious. That this was a major preoccupation of Prigov’s is understandable: the writers who churned out cheap hagiographies of Soviet leaders helped legitimate an odious regime in exchange for better food and nicer apartments. How tacky is that? Prigov’s contemporary Vladimir Sorokin also reworked the Soviet social realist “classics” to comic effect. “Literature for me was pop material, the way a Brillo box or a soup can was for Warhol,” Sorokin has said.
As Sovietism yielded to unhinged capitalism, the targets of Prigov’s satire changed. “Unbelievable Stories” takes aim at the media, which had pivoted from serving the State’s propaganda needs to serving up sensationalism. Prigov’s “stories” reverse the sensationalist’s cheap formula: they are utterly predictable, though no less tragic.
A completely unfathomable story: A child falls from the fourteenth floor and dies rather than survives, as was expected.In the 1990s Prigov ramped up the intensity of his performances as his focus shifted to existential and metaphysical concerns. “On Emptiness,” written in 1999, would seem to interrogate the slippery figure of the guru, one of the many entrepreneurs that sprang up to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of Soviet institutions and ideology:
Or another other totally unbelievable story: A man was comatose for two months, but did not recover, as was expected, and died instead. Really, rather unbelievable.
Does emptiness begin with anything, or does anything end in emptiness?
This question is answered: Yes
Or it is answered: Maybe
Or a third answer: Everything will work out
. . .
Are you silent because you are emptiness or because you have nothing to say about emptiness?
This question is answered with charged silence.
At least one member of Prigov’s circle, the poet and conceptual artist Andrei Monastyrski, embraced a poetics informed more by Buddhist philosophy (via John Cage) than by the Russo-centric literary and political discourse typically associated with Moscow Conceptualism. Boris Groys, a leading theorist of the movement, anointed Monastyrski “a guru of the new Russian art.” It’s possible that “On Emptiness” is in cheeky dialogue with Monastyrski’s enigmatic work and ideas, which, according to Groys, provoked intense debate within the group. Prigov remained spiritually rooted, albeit obliquely, in the Abrahamic prophetic tradition. But it’s easy to imagine him, if he were around today, appropriating the shtick of the corporate mindfulness trainer to mock affluent Westerners’ selective embrace of Eastern spiritual practices.
It seems Prigov never got over the linguistic gaslighting of his formative years. Or perhaps he was simply having too much fun ransacking the haunted prop store of the Soviet collective unconscious, which by no means dissolved overnight with the collapse of the USSR. “Verdicts,” written in 1998, imagines various Soviet-era crimes and their punishments carried over to the animal kingdom:
The Hare, for petty theft, shall be sentenced to administrative discipline at his place of permanent residence; who objects to what? No one and to nothing.
The Rat, for antisocial behavior and insulting accepted norms and the political system, shall be sentenced to 5 years hard labor, followed by a 10-year suspension of civil rights! Too little? But our judicial system is not punitive! It is humanist and instructional! We aren’t Fascists, after all.
The Cockroach shall simply be sentenced to be shot; this needs no explanation.
These acidly funny judicial proceedings have a precedent in “Address to the Crocodiles,” a prose piece written in the ninth century by the Confucian poet Han Yu. For rivaling the authority of the governor, the official orders the “bubble-eyed crocodiles” to vacate the bounds of the Tang empire or face imminent death. Borges conceived of Han Yu’s irony-haunted tone as foretelling the work of Kafka, in the sense that Kafka created his own precursors: “His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”
With Prigov, too, time moves in both directions. His work at the very least modifies our notions of what conceptual writing has historically accomplished, and how it might endure as a mode of resistance. Readers familiar with Kenneth Goldsmith’s recent fall from grace may associate the label “conceptual writing” with a rigid antipoetic posture and the theoretical license to appropriate anything, regardless of the power differential at play between appropriator and appropriated. In the wake of fierce backlash to his reading of a poem that appropriated the autopsy report of Michael Brown, a young Black resident of Ferguson, Missouri, who was gunned down by a white police officer, Goldsmith proved incapable of defending himself against charges of callous detachment born of privilege. The conceptual writing Goldsmith helped establish as a vanguard movement came to be seen by many as ill-equipped to respond to the demands of the moment.
By contrast, Prigov’s big-hearted, politically-engaged conceptualism continues to inspire a new generation of artists confronting abuses of power in Russia. This may not be what he set out to do, but it seems fitting for one who spoke through a chorus of voices and left it to others to decide what his varied and prodigious output meant. As for his detractors:
I love them too, and no less
I love them, shall we say, historically
Because everything against the people
Becomes, with time, of the people
And, even now, as we speak, is of the people
And that right there is what I love
