No abstract

The article discusses the corpus of Dmtri Prigov's manifestoes, articles, and programmatic interviews as a manifestation of a coherent theoretical concept. The author of the article argues that Prigov's theoretical ideas are structured in accordance with his own central artistic category–for which, oddly enough, he did not have a common name. The author refers to this category as performativity, although Prigov himself did not use this word, preferring to discuss the behavioral level, operational modes, characters, images (imidzhi), and so on. Performativity, in this interpretation, permeates the totality of an artistic practice, without exception. Texts, paintings, installations, actual performances, and any public utterance‐interviews, for example‐become “traces” of performative behavior. It is along these lines that one can speak about the performative life of the contemporary author, about the “behavior that is to be found within a non‐playful art form, in which the typical type of conventional professional language does not imply (or rather, until the relevant time period, did not imply) the appearance of the creator, who by his presence relativizes the very value, durability, uniqueness, and self‐sufficiency of the language of the objects he made.” It is from this perspective that the author discusses the overarching meaning of Prigov's oeuvre as the grandiose mockery of societal cultural practices rather than a collection of self‐sufficient works. This approach also elucidates Prigov's programmatic self‐modeling as the trickster who can only fulfill the performative as the central category of contemporary culture.

No abstract

new spiritual era but as the prelude to far greater violence, and so, Landa argues, he was prepared to respond immediately to the October Revolution not as a catastrophe that ruined his previous messianic dreams, but as part of the journey towards salvation. Yet, as Landa points out, Voloshin's poems on the Red Terror in Crimea show that he could not always find ways of endowing sustained acts of brutality and degradation with redemptive significance, preferring to give a voice to the victims rather than seek a purpose in their killers' actions.The first part of the book illustrates clearly the characteristics which might make Voloshin an appealing figure for those hoping to construct a twenty-first-century identity for Russia which would emphasize continuity while enabling a cathartic acknowledgement of the "painful complexity" (163) of the Soviet past. Voloshin avoided taking sides; his poems, as Landa shows, were read, published, and admired by those on both sides of the Civil War, offering a vision of at least some hope for a Russian nation in the future. A particularly interesting aspect explored in Chapter 2 of Part One is Voloshin's role as a "poet of Russia." It examines his engagement with readers in the Civil War years, from whom he solicited comments, to whom he both recited his poetry and provided commentary on it at public lectures, and who circulated his work in ways that, Landa argues, anticipated samizdat. The public comes to the fore once more in Part Two of the book, which includes material taken from online discussions of the religious significance of Voloshin's poetry from a forum for Orthodox believers, showing that the poet's nonconformism appealed not just to the educated urban population, but also to more conservative-minded people in small towns and villages.The second part of the book, dealing as it does with very recent developments in contemporary culture, suggests a possible travel direction rather than a destination description. Its conclusion points to a sharp distinction between the Russian President's view of Crimea as Russia's own Holy Land, and Voloshin's view of it as a place that represents a dream of the "spiritually enlightened, multinational, and cosmopolitan Russia" (190). Landa's study is to be welcomed for its careful engagement with a poet who modelled such inclusiveness in his own life and writing.Pisateli-"derevenshchiki": literatura i konservativnaia ideologiia 1970-kh godov.