More than a poet, who is more than a poet in Russia

Via e-mail, Eugene Ostashevsky has informed us that Russian conceptualist poet, performance, and visual artist Dmitry Prigov died Sunday night in Moscow. He had been in a coma after suffering a massive heart attack on July 6. Eugene provides this obit:


Born in 1940, Prigov was one of the two poles of Russian poetry of his generation, the other being his cultural antipode Joseph Brodsky, born the same year. As a twentieth-century avant-gardist, Prigov was a figure on the level of Kurt Schwitters, with similar inventiveness, humor, interdisciplinarity, astonishing performance skills and the ability to find beauty and truth in garbage.

Prigov became a major fixture in the Moscow art underground in the 1970s, and is recognized under the ironic title of “The Father of Moscow Conceptualism.” A faint taste of his performance style might be had at http://www.soldatkuepper.de/musik/mantra2.mp3, where he recites the first lines of “Eugene Onegin.”

Although not a dissident, Prigov managed to get himself interned in a psychiatric institution for handing out his poems to passersby on the street in 1986. His first book to be published in Russia came out in 1990; it was followed by international fame and numerous awards.

Poems here http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/texts/reagan.htm and
http://www.cccp-online.org/archive/cccp11/page_13.html

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