from TERRORISM WITH A HUMAN FACE (1981)
*
Here is bronze Pushkin standing stupidly
Quite sly was he, like you
But I’m alive, as a matter of fact
And I’m on Gorky Street
Meeting people and thinking: Look!
He climbed up on the granite plinth
He is the leader of Poetry
And then a terrible bomb
Drops on the city of Moscow
Killing every single person
And there is nobody to lead
I have no choice but to read this book again, until someone translates some more.
Bob Holman
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 nearly 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, and Prigov directly encouraged and inspired the next generation of conceptual dissident artists, such as the well-known Voina (War) group and, later, Pussy Riot, who dedicated their intervention at the 2018 World Cup in Moscow to Prigov’s memory. Prigov died in Moscow in 2007, at the age of 66; a lifespan longer than average for a Russian male of his generation. En route to a performance with the Voina group—for which he planned to read poems inside a wardrobe while being carried up the stairs of Moscow University—he collapsed in the subway after a heart attack.
* 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 at checkout.
The publication of Soviet Texts 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.
Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov (1940-2007) is one of the most important figures in the literary history of the late Soviet and early post-Soviet era, and is considered one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism. Prigov was a prolific writer, in all genres, as well as an accomplished visual artist. However, almost until the collapse of the Soviet Union, his writing circulated solely in unofficial samizdat editions and overseas publications. In 1986, he was briefly detained in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, but was released after protests from establishment literary figures. With the onset of glasnost and perestroika, he was able to publish and show his visual art in “official” venues, and also exhibited his art outside of Russia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, his work was acknowledged with several awards, including, in 2002, the Boris Pasternak prize. He acted in films, traveled widely with performances, readings, and exhibits of his work, and often collaborated with younger artists. Prigov died, in Moscow, of a heart attack in 2007. His collected works, edited by Mark Lipovetsky, are published in Russia by Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie.
This Prigov cocktail is a knockout: one part Brecht, one part Jarry, one part OBERIU, a twist of bitters; shaken, not stirred. Prigov is the unparalleled debunker of the Soviet unconscious. His conceptual audacity, verbal pyrotechnics, and hilarious political satire have made him one of the premiere innovative poets and parabolists of the postwar generation. Simon Schuchat brings to life, in English, this essential Russian artist.
Charles Bernstein
Dammit! I’d never read Prigov before, and I’m close enough to the end of things that I almost made it out without having to say now I’ll never forget him! It’s all Simon Schuchat’s fault, his sharp, no-nonsense translations and insightful footnotes that set Prigov up just right, as if he were a one-man arts movement, somewhere between Klebnikov and Oulipo. From this book I learned that the actual existence of the egg, among numerous other things, is unlikely, and the history of the universe might have happened during Prigov's reign. In “Image of Reagan in Soviet Literature” the Cold War emerges as a Trojan horse (“So here he is, in scabs and shit/Pus, blood, mange/…He wants to completely defeat us”), and “The Battle Across the Ocean,” a fable, tells the tale of why hockey is no longer played in the US. In “Recalculating Time” Prigov postulates that “our accelerated pace of life…27 years…(for) Pushkin, is a reduction factor of 1.3 (45-26):1.3+26=15+26=41)." In a “A List of My Own Deaths” he verifies most convincingly that he "might have died at one year of age from chickenpox, but didn’t.” Prigov is a conceptionalist of irony, a tongue in cheek needing no cheek, a writer who makes you shake your head and say, Oh dear, now I must recalculate world literature. No one needs to have written these poems. But some one did: Prigov. Now I have no choice but to read this book again, until someone translates some more. More Prigov. Or maybe I learn Russian.
Bob Holman
It’s hard to believe that this book of Dmitri Prigov’s poetry and prose appears 10 years after his untimely death. It should have appeared decades earlier, when he was still alive! But a silver lining is also apparent: throughout this decade, Prigov has finally received the recognition that he deserved – not as one of the “weird” experimental authors from the 1970s underground, but as a radical reformer of Russian literature, who has performed a real cultural revolution, after which it is impossible to keep writing in Russian as if nothing has happened. Prigov was not shocked when his colleagues compared him to a vulture, indeed, he created innovative neo-avant-gardist, conceptualist, and postmodernist textual performances from the material borrowed from various discourses – Soviet, post-Soviet, political, metaphysical, mystical, etc. But the strategies and concepts revealed in his texts remain to influence and feed contemporary Russian culture, in a range from experimental poetry to Pussy Riot’s actions. Simon Schuchat’s work as a translator is especially significant because he did not limit his selection of texts to Prigov’s classical early poems mocking Soviet official rhetoric, but included his lesser-known (even in Russia) late texts that deconstruct a capitalist logic of “quantification” and “monetization”, along with his mock-existentialist meditation and grotesque fantasies. I hope very much that this book will trigger the long-standing interest of true poetry lovers to Prigov who has yet a lot to offer – thousands of poems (literary!), four novels, dozens of plays and performances as well as numerous texts in genres that have no analogs elsewhere.
Mark Lipovetsky
A retired American diplomat with over twenty-five years of service, Simon Schuchat worked on U.S.-Russian affairs at the State Department in Washington, and in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. His poetry can be found in several rare books, including Svelte (published by Richard Hell when Schuchat was 16), Blue Skies (Some Of Us Press), Light and Shadow (Vehicle Editions), All Shook Up (Fido Productions), and At Baoshan (Coffee House Press), as well as the anthologies None of the Above (edited by Michael Lally) and Up Late (edited by Andrei Codrescu). A native of Washington DC, he attended the University of Chicago and published the journal Buffalo Stamps before moving to New York in 1975 and becoming part of the St. Mark’s downtown writing scene. Schuchat was also active in small press publishing; he edited the 432 Review and founded Caveman. In addition to the University of Chicago, he has degrees from Yale, Harvard, and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces at the National Defense University. He taught at Fudan University in Shanghai, and led workshops at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. In 2016, his translation of Chinese poet Hai Zi’s lyric drama Regicide was published in Hong Kong.
Ainsley Morse has been translating 20th- and 21st-century Russian and (former-) Yugoslav literature since 2006. She teaches Russian language and literature at Dartmouth College. Previous UDP publications include the co-translation of Vsevolod Nekrasov (with Bela Shayevich, UDP 2013) and Kholin 66: Diaries and Poems (also with Shayevich, 2017). Other recent translations include the farcical Soviet pastoral Beyond Tula, by Andrey Egunov, and a collection of theoretical essays by the brilliant Formalist Yuri Tynianov. Coming up is the macabre modernist prose of Konstantin Vaginov and a number of contemporary Russian women poets.
Prigov’s artist profile on Moscow Art
Prigov’s artist profile on Saatchi Gallery
Article on Prigov on Open Democracy
Article on Prigov on Post Colonial Europe
Article on Prigov on Calvert Journal
Article on Prigov on The New York Times
Prigov’s performance at Dickinson College
Prigov’s performance of 49th Alphabet with Vladimir Tarasov
Pussy Riot cites Prigov in their protest at the World Cup Final 2018
Panel Discussion on Prigov from the Harriman Institute at Columbia University
Dmitri Prigov & his Soviet Texts: A Bilingual Bacchanal presented by Globus Books
ISBN: 978-1-946433-07-7
Trade Paperback
296 pp, 5.25 x 8 in
Publication Date: February 01 2020
Distribution: Inpress Books (UK), SPD
Series: Eastern European Poets Series #45