SOVIET TEXTS by Dmitri Prigov

$ 19.80 $ 22.00

* For an additional $5, you can order Soviet Texts together with Aleksandr Skidan's pamphlet essay "Golem Soveticus" on Prigov, Brecht, and Warhol. Simply select the dropdown option.

Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov (1940-2007) was a leading writer of the late Soviet and early post-Soviet era. Almost until the collapse of the Soviet Union, his writing circulated solely in unofficial samizdat editions and 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 a prolific writer, in all genres, as well as an accomplished visual artist.

With almost 300 pages of prose and poetry, Soviet Texts is the first representative selected volume of Prigov’s poetry and experimental prose texts to appear in English. It includes short stories about amazing heroes of the revolution and after, and poetic sequences that expose literature, history, and culture to the stark light of a post-modern Gogolian laughter, some of which became cult-classics for his generation — such as the cycle “Image of Reagan in Soviet Literature.” A selection of post-Soviet writings, concerned with human mortality and human sinfulness, is also included. While Prigov’s writing is very definitely of the Soviet and post-Soviet world, it is consonant with contemporaneous avant-garde writing elsewhere.

Described by some critics as Russia’s ultimate post-modern trickster, Prigov mastered many personas all of which come together in what is finally an enigmatic, Warhol-esque artistic mask. Indeed, during the late Soviet period he mounted a critique of ideological culture in a similar manner to western Pop Art’s engagement with consumer culture. His performative work lay the seeds for much contemporary Russian socially-engaged art. Indeed, the performance art groups Voina [War] and Pussy Riot claim him as a direct precedent and inspiration, and even collaborated closely with Prigov in the ’90s and ’00s. (Prigov died at the age of 66, en route to one such collaborative performance.)

Translated by Simon Schuchat with Ainsley Morse.

The publication of this book was made possible, in part, by a grant from the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation TRANSCRIPT Programme to Support Translations of Russian Literature, and by the continued support of the New York State Council on the Arts.