The category of emptiness in Soviet texts by Dmitry Prigov

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to identify the most important and fundamentally significant, representative feature of D. Prigov’s conceptual poetry, due to its orientation towards a sociologized, Soviet perspective. The article examines not only the formal and substantive features of Prigov’s poetry in the context of the laws of conceptualist practices, but also examines the creative principle of the poet, constantly applied by him – the creation of intentionally empty (emptied) poetry. Special attention is paid to the relationship between the author and the hero – D. Prigov and Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov, the personality image with its own worldview, artistic talent and poetic style. The scientific novelty of the work consists in the fact that the author for the first time offers an examination of Prigov’s poetic heritage not from the point of view of the uniqueness and artistic originality of his verse, the peculiarities of poetics, but from the standpoint of the conceptual and constitutive principles of text creation. Thus, one of the leading principles turns out to be emptiness – semantic and meaningful, committed and ideological. As a result of the study, it was found that emptiness in Prigov’s poetry is the only significant quantity, it is fundamental and constant. It is precisely this emptiness that is a circumstance of the specificity of the plan of expression and the plan of the content of Prigov’s poetry. The concept “emptiness”, which is the basis of Prigov’s Sovvitalism, turns out to be a conceptual way of profanation of the Soviet world and the Soviet myth.

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Funding

The study was supported by the Russian Science Foundation, grant No. 23-18-01007, https://rscf.ru/project/23-18-01007/; F. M. Dostoevsky Russian Christian Humanitarian Academy.

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Publication history

• Received: October 4, 2024.
• Published: November 21, 2024.

Keywords

• литература русского концептуализма
• поэт Дмитрий Пригов
• Дмитрий Александрович Пригов как имидж-личность
• книга стихов «Советские стихи» (1979-1984)
• принцип пустотности
• literature of Russian conceptualism
• poet Dmitry Prigov
• Dmitry Prigov as image-personality
• book of poems “Soviet Poems” (1979-1984)
• principle of emptiness

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