Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov (, 5 November 1940 in
Moscow
Moscow is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Russia by population, largest city of Russia, standing on the Moskva (river), Moskva River in Central Russia. It has a population estimated at over 13 million residents with ...
Soviet Union
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
and was briefly sent to a
psychiatric hospital
A psychiatric hospital, also known as a mental health hospital, a behavioral health hospital, or an asylum is a specialized medical facility that focuses on the treatment of severe Mental disorder, mental disorders. These institutions cater t ...
Russian SFSR
The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (Russian SFSR or RSFSR), previously known as the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and the Russian Soviet Republic, and unofficially as Soviet Russia,Declaration of Rights of the labo ...
, Prigov started writing poetry as a teenager. He was trained as a sculptor, however, at the Stroganov Art Institute in Moscow and later worked as an architect as well as designing sculptures for municipal parks.
Artistic career
Prigov and his friend
Lev Rubinstein
Lev Semyonovich Rubinstein (; 19 February 1947 – 14 January 2024) was a Russian essayist, journalist, poet, and social activist. He was a founder and member of Moscow Conceptualism.conceptual art school started in the 1960s viewing performance as a form of art. He was also known for writing verse on tin cans.
He was a prolific poet having written nearly 36,000 poems by 2005.
For most of the Soviet Era, his poetry was circulated underground as
Samizdat
Samizdat (, , ) was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader. The practice of manual rep ...
. It was not officially published until the end of the Communist era. His work was widely published in émigré publications and
Slavic studies
Slavic (American English) or Slavonic (British English) studies, also known as Slavistics, is the academic field of area studies concerned with Slavic peoples, Slavic peoples, languages, literature, history, and culture. Originally, a Slavist or ...
journals well before it was officially distributed.
In 1986, the
K.G.B
The Committee for State Security (, ), abbreviated as KGB (, ; ) was the main security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 to 1991. It was the direct successor of preceding Soviet secret police agencies including the Cheka, Joint State Polit ...
arrested Prigov, who performed a street action by handing poetic texts to passers-by, and sent him to a psychiatric institution before he was freed after protests by poets such as
Bella Akhmadulina
Izabella Akhatovna Akhmadulina (, ; 10 April 1937 – 29 November 2010) was a Soviet Union, Soviet and Russian poet, short story writer, and translator, known for her apolitical writing stance. She was part of the Russian New Wave literary movem ...
.
From 1987 he started to be published and exhibited officially, and in 1991 he joined the Writers' Union. He had been a member of the Artists' Union from 1975.
Prigov took part in an exhibition in the USSR in 1987: his works were presented in the framework of the Moscow projects "Unofficial Art" and "Modern Art". In 1988 his personal exhibition took place in the USA, in Struve's Gallery in Chicago. Afterwards his works were many times exhibited in Russia and abroad.
Prigov also wrote the novels ''Live in Moscow'' and ''Only My Japan'', and was an artist with works at the
Moscow Museum of Modern Art
The Moscow Museum of Modern Art () is a museum of modern and contemporary art located in Moscow, Russia. It was opened to public in December 1999. The project of the museum was initiated and executed by Zurab Tsereteli, president of the Russia ...
. He had many strings to his bow writing plays and essays, creating drawings, video art and installations and even performing music.
Prigov, together with philosopher
Mikhail Epstein
Mikhail Naumovich Epstein (also transliterated Epshtein; ; born 21 April 1950) is a Russian-American literary scholar, essayist, and cultural theorist best known for his contributions to the study of Russian postmodernism. He is the Emeritus ...
, is credited with introducing the concept of " new sincerity" (''novaia iskrennost' '') as a response to the dominant sense of absurdity in late Soviet and
post-Soviet
The post-Soviet states, also referred to as the former Soviet Union or the former Soviet republics, are the independent sovereign states that emerged/re-emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Prior to their independence, they ...
culture.
Mikhail Epstein
Mikhail Naumovich Epstein (also transliterated Epshtein; ; born 21 April 1950) is a Russian-American literary scholar, essayist, and cultural theorist best known for his contributions to the study of Russian postmodernism. He is the Emeritus ...
, "On the Place of Postmodernism in Postmodernity," in Mikhail Epstein, Aleksandr Genis, Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, eds., ''Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture'' (Berghahn Books, 1999), , p. 457, excerpt available at
Google Books
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.
Alexei Yurchak
Alexei Vladimirovich Yurchak (; born 21 July 1960) is a Russian-born American anthropologist and professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research concerns the history of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet transforma ...
, "Post-Post-Communist Sincerity: Pioneers, Cosmonauts, and Other Soviet Heroes Born Today," in Thomas Lahusen and Peter H. Solomon, eds., ''What Is Soviet Now?: Identities, Legacies, Memories'' (LIT Verlag Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 2008), , p.258-59 excerpt available at
Google Books
Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical charac ...
. Prigov referred to a "shimmering aesthetics" that (as explained by Epstein) "is defined not by the sincerity of the author or the quotedness of his style, but by the mutual interaction of the two."
In 1993 Prigov was awarded Pushkin Prize of Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S. and in 2002 he won Boris Pasternak Prize.
Dmitri Prigov died from a heart attack in 2007, aged 66, in Moscow. He had been planning an event where he would sit in a
wardrobe
A wardrobe, also called armoire or almirah, is a standing closet used for storing clothes. The earliest wardrobe was a chest, and it was not until some degree of luxury was attained in regal palaces and the castles of powerful nobles that sep ...
reading poetry while being carried up 22 flights of stairs at
Moscow State University
Moscow State University (MSU), officially M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University,. is a public university, public research university in Moscow, Russia. The university includes 15 research institutes, 43 faculties, more than 300 departments, a ...
by members of Voina Group.
In 2011
Hermitage Museum
The State Hermitage Museum ( rus, Государственный Эрмитаж, r=Gosudarstvennyj Ermitaž, p=ɡəsʊˈdarstvʲɪn(ː)ɨj ɪrmʲɪˈtaʂ, links=no) is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and holds the large ...
presented an important monographic exhibition of Prigov's art in Venice during 54th Biennale.
Spelling of his name
Prigov's name in his native Russian
Cyrillic
The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...
lettering, Дми́трий Алекса́ндрович При́гов, has been rendered in English in various ways, with variations in the spelling of his first and middle names:
* Dimitri Prigov –
Associated Press
The Associated Press (AP) is an American not-for-profit organization, not-for-profit news agency headquartered in New York City.
Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association, and produces news reports that are dist ...
, ''
The New York Times
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Encyclopædia Britannica
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* Dimitry Prigov – ''The St. Petersburg Times'' (English language, Russia) ''The Moscow Times''Peter, Thomas "Artists Mock Establishment With Sense of Absurd" Reuters article as printed in ''The Moscow Times'', 24 July 2008, retrieved 14 January 2009
Selected filmography
*''
Khrustalyov, My Car!
''Khrustalyov, My Car!'' () is a 1998 Russian comedy-drama film directed by Aleksei German and written by German and Svetlana Karmalita. It was produced by Canal+, CNC, Goskino, Lenfilm and VGTRK.
Plot
On the first day of the cold spring o ...
'' (1998)
*''
Taxi Blues
''Taxi Blues'' (, translit. Taksi-Blyuz) is a 1990 Soviet comedy-drama film directed by Pavel Lungin. It was entered into the 1990 Cannes Film Festival where Lungin won the award for Best Director. The film was selected as the Soviet en ...
Ron Silliman
Ron Silliman (born August 5, 1946) is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman w ...
provides a useful memento to Prigov, with links to pieces on Prigov, including Silliman's own blog-essay from 22 March 2006
Biography of Dmitri Prigov