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https://doi.org/10.20339/PhS.6-18.057
Lipovetsky Mark N.,
Russian‑American literary scholar and critic,
Professor of Russian Studies at the Department of Germanic
and Slavic Languages and Literatures
University of Colorado‑Boulder, U.S.A.
e‑mail: mark.leiderman@Colorado.EDU
In this article, Dmitri Prigov’s dramaturgy for the first time becomes the subject of scholarly analysis. Lipovetsky interprets Prigov’s plays, which he wrote in the 1970s, as a specific version of the theatre of the absurd. Prigov’s absurdist drama, on the one hand, tends to become an action and happening (“Ia igraiu na garmoshke,” “Katarsis, ili Krakh vsego sviatogo”), and on the other, gravitates toward a postmodernist mysteria of total metamorphoses (“Chernyi pes”). Prigov’s plays, as well as his work in other genres, necessarily include the level of meta-reflection that transforms his plays into conceptual utterances about performativity and identity not only on stage, but also beyond it. Prigov equally undermines the idea of the “authentic self,” concealed behind performative selves, and the hope to actually “become the Other” in the performative process, experiencing the otherness as the liberation. In Prigov’s dramaturgy, performativity emerges as a form of “shimmering” between equally inaccessible poles of the Self and Other, and this understanding is significant both for Prigov’s artistic evolution and for the evolution of Russian postmodernism.
Keywords: Prigov, dramaturgy of the 1970s, theatre of the absurd, performativity.
References
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2. Iampol’skii M.B. Prigov. Ocherki khudozhestvennogo nominalizma. Moscow: Novoe lit. obozrenie, 2016.
3. Goldberg R. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. 3rd ed. London: Thames & Hudson World of Art, 2011.