The pages of this book have been altered by Prigov with hand drawn, vertically elongated, letters overlying the original text. Upon his death in July 2007, Igor Satinovsky wrote the following to Richard Kostelanetz who sent a copy to the Sackners. Ye, Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov was a very interesting figure. Born in 1940, the same year as J.Brodsky, K.Kuzminsky and R.Kostelanetz, he truly came to spotlight only in the 80s, being a phenomenally gifted performer of his own writing. An artist by education, Prigov has been experimenting with various traditional and avant-garde poetic/artistic modes since the early 60s, including visual and typographic poetry (Sackners have some examples in their archive). By the late 70's, he settled into very disciplined conceptual work, which at its core had a performance persona of Prigov as a cross between a mad Soviet intellectual and a traditional Russian «holy schizo», yurodivyi. In reality, he was probably one of the most consistently brainy and able thinkers of contemporary Russian culture, transporting his visual obsessions and artistic strategies into the verbal arts. He was too productive for his own good, writing, according to various estimates, 36000 to 40000 short poems. Russian public never absorbed even one percent of that, content to hear Prigov perform his most popular poems about President Reagan, and Soviet policeman, «millitsaner», from the 80's. Prigov didn't seem to mind, and thought that the public at large was not ready to absorb his more challenging work anyway. Prigov's poetic signiture's always been secondary to his persona, but it's very persistent and recognizable. His poems usually start in a traditional poetic meter, but veer off to a prosaic final line. They are often satirical, sharply social and absurdist in nature, contrasting several social, literary or ideological contexts to a revealing result. One good example is this poem from _Reagan's Image in the Soviet Literature_ series: Reagan doesn't want to feed us - He makes a serious mistake - It's only over there that they believe - You've got to eat to live, But we don't need his bread - We'll live on our Idea It'll come to him quite suddenly: Hey, where are they? - But we've already settled in his heart. What we have here is a deconstruction of the late Soviet identity as that of the collapsing revolutionary empire begging its capitalist enemies to feed it, while shedding the dying revolutionary rethoric (We'll live on our Idea) for the newly appealing eastern-christian-orthodoxy makeup (_But we've already settled in his heart_). Prigov's one of the first to notice, but there is more to his work. He is another of my favorites, which reveals how the best of Prigov's work can be subtle, sly and seriously uncanny at the same time. When mad Jews - Call Russia their Motherland - And do better than a Russian - Where they are not even invited - And where invited, they do, too - And where they themselves invite -- She stands in all her beauty - Russia, the Motherland of Jews.The line _And where they themselves invite -- has a lot to do with _jewish invitations_ that is, refers to Israel, often called among Russians the sixteenth Soviet republic. Prigov's work is full of shifting and transporting identities, that's probably why his it has been so important to the post-Soviet cultural scene. His later writing often had a much darker tone. He would pick a theme from the media headlines, say, Sexual Harassment, and develop it into a book-length poetic cycle, approaching his topic from all imaginable angles. As a true performance artist, close in some ways to Situationists, Prigov had an uncanny ability to mimic and blend in any social context, adapting and compromising discourses left and right. In that sense, he never was a dissident in the Soviet period. That is, he distrusted any kind of direct heroic or romantic sentiment, and kept his distance from both the Traditionalist and the Traditional Russian Avantgard camps, declaring himself to be a classicist. He was one strange and fascinating classicist, I gotta tell you that. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner. https://aspace.lib.uiowa.edu/repositories/5/archival_objects/891531 Accessed February 13, 2025.