Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Native name | Дмитрий Александрович Пригов |
| Born | (1940-11-05)5 November 1940 |
| Died | 16 July 2007(2007-07-16) (aged 66) |
| Occupation | Writer, artist |
| Nationality | Russian |
| Citizenship |  Soviet Union (1940–1991) → Russian Federation (1991–2007) |
| Period | Contemporary |
| Literary movement | Russian postmodernism Moscow Conceptualists |
Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov (Russian:Дми́трий Алекса́ндрович При́гов, 5 November 1940 inMoscow – 16 July 2007 in Moscow[1]) was a Russian writer and artist. Prigov was part of the unofficialMoscow Conceptualists during the era of theSoviet Union and was briefly sent to apsychiatric hospital in 1986.[2]
Born in Moscow,Russian SFSR, Prigov started writing poetry as a teenager. He was trained as a sculptor, however, at theStroganov Art Institute in Moscow and later worked as an architect as well as designing sculptures for municipal parks.[2]
Prigov and his friendLev Rubinstein were leaders of theconceptual art school started in the 1960s viewing performance as a form of art. He was also known for writing verse on tin cans.[2]
He was a prolific poet having written nearly 36,000 poems by 2005.[2]For most of the Soviet Era, his poetry was circulated underground asSamizdat. It was not officially published until the end of the Communist era.[1] His work was widely published in émigré publications andSlavic studies journals well before it was officially distributed.
In 1986, theK.G.B arrested Prigov, who performed a street action by handing poetic texts to passers-by, and sent him to a psychiatric institution before he was freed after protests by poets such asBella Akhmadulina.[2]
From 1987 he started to be published and exhibited officially, and in 1991 he joined the Writers' Union. He had been a member of the Artists' Union from 1975.
Prigov took part in an exhibition in the USSR in 1987: his works were presented in the framework of the Moscow projects "Unofficial Art" and "Modern Art". In 1988 his personal exhibition took place in the US, in Struve's Gallery in Chicago. Afterwards his works were many times exhibited in Russia and abroad.
Prigov also wrote the novelsLive in Moscow andOnly My Japan, and was an artist with works at theMoscow Museum of Modern Art.[3] He had many strings to his bow writing plays and essays, creating drawings, video art and installations and even performing music.[2]
Prigov, together with philosopherMikhail Epstein, is credited with introducing the concept of "new sincerity" (novaia iskrennost') as a response to the dominant sense of absurdity in late Soviet andpost-Soviet culture.[4][5] Prigov referred to a "shimmering aesthetics" that (as explained by Epstein) "is defined not by the sincerity of the author or the quotedness of his style, but by the mutual interaction of the two."[4]
In 1993 Prigov was awarded Pushkin Prize of Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S. and in 2002 he won Boris Pasternak Prize.
Dmitri Prigov died from a heart attack in 2007, aged 66, in Moscow. He had been planning an event where he would sit in awardrobe reading poetry while being carried up 22 flights of stairs atMoscow State University by members of Voina Group.[1]
In 2011Hermitage Museum presented an important monographic exhibition of Prigov's art in Venice during 54th Biennale.
Prigov's name in his native RussianCyrillic lettering, Дми́трий Алекса́ндрович При́гов, has been rendered in English in various ways, with variations in the spelling of his first and middle names:
