Already since the middle of the 1970s, Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov enjoyed a star status in the circles of unofficial, alternative Soviet culture. During the late 1980s and 1990s he increasingly became better known to the general Russian public. One can safely say that Prigov was one of the central figures in the transition process from Soviet culture to the Russian post-socialist condition. During this time, he had a high degree of public presence, participated in many cultural events, and collaborated with the leading Russian authors and artists. But most importantly, Prigov made his own art into an arena of transition from “Sovietness” to “Post-Sovietness,” and his own public figure to a manifestation of this transition. Prigov was simultaneously active as poet, artist, performer, and writer, but also—and maybe even primarily—as a public persona incorporating the spirit of his time.
The list of publications dedicated to the different aspects of Prigov's art is long. However, Partisanskii logos by Mark Lipovetsky and Ilya Kukulin is the first book that has a claim to present the artistic activities of Prigov in all their aspects. The book is not a biography. The authors are not especially interested in the private side of Prigov's life—even if they mention some events in their hero's biography that were important for the formation of Prigov's public persona. Basically, it is this public persona that interests the authors in the first place, as well as the strategy that Prigov applied to construct this persona. As material for this work of construction, Prigov used the Soviet mythology that was full of heroes who were allegedly “near to the people” and “loved by the people”: Aleksandr Pushkin, Aleksandr Suvorov, Vladimir Lenin, and Vladimir Maiakovskii. By playing with this mythology and, directly or indirectly, applying it to himself, Prigov demonstrated its absurdity, its vacuity, and its purely textual, conventional character with no relationship to “reality.” In this sense, Prigov's poetic and artistic technique was characteristically post-modern: he played with different historical contexts and artistic forms by emptying them from any “original” content and, thus, made them available for the construction of his own, personal myth beyond the possibility to differentiate between the earnest and the parodistic. Now, the authors of the Partisan logos follow Prigov in this endeavor in so far as they discuss the contexts that were used by Prigov and the general post-modern context in which this endeavor emerged.
Just to mention some of the contexts discussed in the book: the Moscow Conceptualist circle; friends from the period of his study of sculpture such as Boris Orlov or Aleksandr Kossolapov; Moscow poets such as Igor Kholin or Eduard Limonov; Leningrader poets of the neo-classical school like Viktor Krivulin and Elena Shvarts; the context of official Soviet art and literature; the Russian literary tradition; Russian theater and opera; and western post-modern theories and their reception in Russia. These are only a few contexts among many others that the authors discuss. In many cases they go into small details and more closely analyze Prigov's texts; in some cases they take a more distant view. But on its whole, the book remains very informative and engaging, the choice of Prigov's texts that are quoted in the book are very precise and give a good overview over the trajectory of Prigov's poetic and artistic development. But maybe even more importantly, the method chosen by the authors—to analyze Prigov's poetry through elucidation of its different contexts—not only allows them but, in fact, requests of them to describe a greater panorama of Russian culture at the end of its Soviet and beginning of its post-Soviet period. In a very strange way this period—maybe because of its transitional, fluid character—escapes the gaze of many contemporary cultural historians who concentrate their attention either on the Soviet or post-Soviet cultural situations. However, the most interesting artistic phenomena of post-socialist Russian art start precisely in this transitional time. The authors have it right when they speak about the Russian actionism of 1990–2000s as a continuation of Prigov's earlier performances, especially, in the case of the groups “Voina” and “Pussy Riot.”
I know that at this point the reader would expect from the reviewer to make some critical remarks concerning the book. However, I have no inclination to do so. The authors have obviously undertaken a huge effort to collect all this heterogeneous material and bring it into book form. Their research was immense. So I am glad that this book about Prigov appeared in Russian and hope that it will be translated into English and other western languages to give better perspective on a crucial moment of Russian history—a moment that Prigov captured and embodied as nobody else.
