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Dmitry Prigov writes of an universe where nothing is decided and everything is happening here and now.

By Victor Sonkin
Published: July 13, 2007

Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov, one of the most influential poets of the post-Soviet era, was hospitalized last weekend with a massive heart attack, and the doctors fear for his life. Hoping for the best, his faithful fans all over the world will be re-reading his poems and recalling the joy and laughter of their youth, when Prigov's poems first became widely known.

They are a strange mixture of classical meters, sometimes with direct quotes from the staple schoolbook poems, abrupt dissonances, non-rhyming lines and apparent non sequiturs. Especially characteristic of his poetry is a certain relativism of view. He writes of a universe where nothing is decided and everything is happening here and now. For example, a poem describing the famous Battle of Kulikovo Polye in 1380 changes view several times, first saying "the Russians will win," then saying "the Tatars will win," and vice versa. It ends with an ambivalent, "Well, we'll see tomorrow."

A permanent lyrical hero of Dmitry Alexandrovich's verse (he is one of the few celebrities of the last several decades who still insists on being addressed formally using his patronymic) is called a militsaner, or a badly misspelled policeman. He is a sage and an idiot at the same time. In a sense, that's a role that Prigov himself has tried to play from his first outings on the art scene.

A trained architect, Prigov began his career as an artist, not a writer, and soon became one of the leaders of the so-called conceptualist school. These were the first people in Russia to see performance as a form of art. Recently, Prigov was planning to return to the ideals of his youth and to participate in a performance where he would sit in a wardrobe hauled up the 22 flights of stairs of Moscow State University, reading poems all the way to the top. Unfortunately, illness prevented him from doing this.

Prigov is known for being prolific -- he started writing poems in the early 1960s and wrote several poems every day since, thus making the total number close to 30,000. He often spoke on political and ideological matters, but in such a way that it was impossible to determine whether he was joking. For example, his reaction to the anti-Georgian campaign of last fall was expressed in a short poem: "Georgians were like brothers to us/ Now it seems it's the other way round / Let's not embrace them any more / And find ourselves a new brother. / Who is that going to be? / Turns out we're all Brothers. / We can't escape / The Georgians."

When the times and politics are absurd, absurdity seems to be the only sensible option. And Prigov has provided plenty.

Dmitry Prigov passed away on Sunday, after this article was published.

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