Deconstruction of the Soviet aviation discourse in D.A. Prigov's poetry

D.A. Prigov’s work is the object of close attention of domestic and foreign philologists: the conceptual writer became one of the key figures in the literary process of the 1970–1990s. The artistic direction in which his works were created has a pronounced communicative orientation, the language of conceptualism is a ‘sign language’, which is why the analysis of discourse, as well as the mechanisms of its deconstruction in the author’s poetic texts, is at the center of this study. Aviation discourse is an important component of the Soviet worldview, one of the instruments of legitimizing power in the young Soviet state, and its deconstruction is a sign of a rethinking of the system of spiritual coordinates transmitted by socialist realism. The article talks about two strategies of the writer’s work with the ‘symbolic capital’ of official culture in the field of aviation discourse. The first involves dismantling an archaic myth, previously adapted by Soviet literature, and forming a territory of emptiness in its place. The second — ‘linguistic’ (working with the genres of the alphabet, catalog) — consists in leveling the sign to the state of inventory, hyper-ideologizing it, which leads to the creation of a simulacrum at the linguistic level. Both strategies are aimed at the symbolic ‘purification’ of the cultural space, the formation of a new language, a myth based on the sum of reassembled codes. 

Keywords: D.A. Prigov, Moscow conceptualism, aviation discourse, deconstruction

The study was supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (RNF, project No. 23-18-00408, https://rscf. en/project/23-18-00408/); Russian Christian Academy for Humanities  named after Fyodor Dostoevsky

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