Prigov and the Gesamtkunstwerk

This article discusses the relation of Prigov's cultural project to a concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art. It is not only notable that Prigov was simultaneously a poet, a painter, a sculptor, a performance artist, and a theoretician (and it is hard to say which of these roles he identified most strongly with), but that he also experimented with all possible materials, forms, genres, and types of art. Also remarkable is that openness and intersections are manifest in all his work: text in painting, a visual quality and theatricality in text, text as a score for performance (of the alphabet), philosophizing as an artistic text (premonitions), and so forth. The author traces the transformation of Wagner's concept from its reception in the Silver Age, to its appropriation by Socialist Realism, and finally to Prigov's ultimate vision of it. The article analyzes two main directions of transformations of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Prigov's oeuvre. Firstly, although Gesamtkunstwerk as an idea of shaped formlessness became irrelevant with the loss of traditional conventions and the crisis of modernist strategies of subversion, its practices, since it was itself the product of a modernist breakthrough, proved themselves to be extraordinarily fruitful. One can easily find those very same structural elements in Prigov's texts and visual works, where functionally they are completely reinvented and form part of a completely different–“de‐totalizing”–aesthetic strategy. Secondly, the transformations of Wagnerian mythology became the only possible realization of the totalitarian romantic utopia in contemporary mass society. Prigov took up the idea of the total work of art after the collapse of the utopia, completing the ruins and reconstructing them into an almost “intact” state. But the main thing is that he constructed his total work of art, not from different arts, but from a single subject–Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov. He did not create a synthesis of the arts, but rather a personality synthesis, by carrying out an experiment in the creation of a total work of art after the experience of modernism. Accordingly, we should regard Prigov's texts not only as an new ideological construct that both defamiliarizes and makes explicit (thereby exposing the totalitarian aspirations of language and ideology), but also as the product of a unique experiment on himself, laying the headstone for not only the totalitarian utopia but also for its creator, the artist‐visionary.