Scripted Spaces: The Geopoetics of the Newspaper from Tret’iakov to Prigov

AbstractThis essay examines Sergei Tret’iakov’s and Dmitrii Prigov’s turn to the newspaper in their search for a symbolic form adequate to the geopolitical flux at the beginning and endpoints of Soviet history. Fusing the epic and the sublime with the modernist montage principle, both present the newspaper as embodying simultaneously totalizing and disintegrative imaginings of space. Reflecting his avant-gardist and statist commitments, Tret’iakov’s newspaper-epic andocherkjournalism figure the tension between socialist internationalism and socialism in one country and between federal and centralist models of the state. Prigov’s newspaper art embodies the contrary pressures of resurgent nationalisms and globalization in perestroika-era and post-Soviet Russia. Having linked the decline of print culture to the Soviet Union’s demise, Prigov addresses the return of an imperial Russian spatial imaginary by highlighting how the tension between spatial boundlessness and totality in the print newspaper anticipates and complicates the information sublime of the digital age.