Photo by Olga Alexeenko
I went into art of Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov at 14 years old, as we made a performance “Our purpose is care of man (not-a-play)” at our lyceum’s theater “ArMsNIK” (a Russian abbreviation for “Artistic bear with a low IQ”). One of the three sketches was based on folk tongue-twisters and Prigov’s poems from the book “Personal File”, that we handed one to another. In this performance I declaimed poems about a metalworker in a summer yard and about Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin with a girl.
Drawings and typewritten graphic poems by Dmitri Aleksandrovich were included into his poetry collections that began to be published just in nineties, and I was buying and reading them all.
In 2001 I saw Prigov eating a tasteless chicken on the stage of Cultural Centre “DOM”. In 2007 he was buried at the New Donskoy Cemetery, so I come sometimes to his grave just to stand in silence, while his poems sound in my head.
The dedication to Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov is inspired by his cycle of drawings on soviet newspapers, specifically by his work “Memory” made in 1987.
And as a material basis I took an excerpt from an article “Great men are not forgotten”, dedicated to Musa Cälil, in the newspaper “Southern horizons” № 32 (712) from the week from August, 26th to September, 1st, 2016.