Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov
Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov was a prominent Russian poet, sculptor, and performance artist born on November 5, 1940, in Moscow. He studied sculpture at the Industrial Art Institute and later worked within the Soviet architectural scene. Prigov became a leading figure in the Moscow Conceptualist movement, specifically known as sots-art, which sought to creatively critique and subvert the language and ideology of the Soviet regime. Operating primarily in underground circles until the late 1980s, he employed humor and irony to challenge the prevailing socialist realist discourse, producing over twenty thousand poems that often featured whimsical titles.
His work emphasizes the idea that language is a construct rather than a definitive truth, advocating for a form of artistic freedom that transcends state-imposed narratives. After the Soviet Union's dissolution, Prigov gained wider recognition, contributing to major literary journals and earning accolades such as the Pushkin Prize in 1993. His influence has been significant in shaping post-Soviet literature and culture, as he explored the intersections of language, ideology, and artistic expression. Prigov's legacy continues to resonate within contemporary discussions of art and politics in Russia and beyond.
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Subject Terms
Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov
Writer
- Born: November 5, 1940
- Birthplace: Moscow, Russia
- Died: July 16, 2007
- Place of death: Moscow, Russia
Biography
Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov was born on November 5, 1940, in Moscow. His father, Alexander Prigov, was an engineer; his mother was a pianist. After studying sculpture and graduating from the Industrial Art Institute in 1966, Dmitri worked in the Central Architectural Administration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He joined the Soviet Artists’ Union (1975), the Union of Russian Writers (1990), and the Russian Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN) Club (1992).
Prigov quickly established himself as a leading exponent of the Moscow Conceptualist school, or, as the Soviet Russians called it from the 1970’s onward, sots-art. This movement’s goal was the artistic use of language to “escape the imprisonment of language.” Accordingly, they made a target of the Russian language as employed by the communist regime, which, as Prigov described it, “represented the [socialist realist] ideology and passed itself off as absolute truth.” With such an agenda, Prigov had to publish his works underground in the Soviet Union and abroad until 1988, his poems being translated into several European languages, including English. After 1988, near the end of the Soviet era, he began to publish his verse openly in major Soviet literary journals such as Novyi mir (new world), Iunost’ (youth), and Volga. A visual and performance artist as well as a poet, he has participated for twenty years in exhibits in Europe and the United States.
The prolific Prigov has produced more than twenty thousand poems, usually in cycles with evocative or whimsical titles that translate as “Verses for Every Day,” “Terrorism with a Human Face,” “Cockroachomachy,” “Forty Banal Arguments on Banal Topics,” and “Representatives of Beauty in Russian History and Culture”—all of them in the sots-art spirit.
Sots-art assumes that the ideological pronouncements that it subverts are known to all of its audience, as was the case in monolithic Soviet society. Indeed, the socialist realist ideology was so widely known, and its tenets so often repeated, that they had acquired a worn-out, cliché-like feel, making them easy to parody. In a broader sense, Prigov wanted to show that “[l]anguage is just language, not absolute truth, and once we understand that, we achieve freedom.”
Officially, the socialist-realist aesthetic was thought to be the point where life and social ideals coincided. Thus, as a state-sponsored movement, socialist realism was an affirmative artistic response to what the government saw as a fully realized political ideal. In the same vein, sots-art, though subversive, was an artistic response to the state-sponsored social realist ideology (as represented in the official language). Sots-art recreated, in a sense, the ideology it subverted, as any art recreates the life it portrays. Through his poems and his journalistic writings, Prigov has attempted to show that official language is nothing but a verbal construct, devoid of true correspondence to the real world.
Prigov’s work earned him the Pushkin Prize in 1993. After playing a vital role in the Soviet underground, he has become a key figure of post-Soviet literature. His explorations of freedom through, and beyond, language have exerted a major influence in the evolution of post-Soviet culture.