On the Female and the Feminine in Soviet Texts of Dmitri Prigov

The article deals with the problem of the female and the feminine in Dmitri Prigov's works. An emphasis is made on the collection Soviet Texts (2016). The material used for the argumentation of a number of provisions of the article are texts on the topic from the eightvolume collection of the poet's verses published in Germany. It is shown that one of the reasons of the undying interest to Prigov's works consists in the stability of the aesthetics of postmodernism. The culture labeled as “post-” loses its relevance, has no bright alternative; the counter-aesthetics is not created. This causes a return to the play-claim for non-systemic thinking as a criticism of systems. The value of Prigov's statement lies in the culturological space rather than in the poetic one. The author's works mark a shift in humanitarian discourse, which is shaped figuratively, not scientifically, which gives full scope to philological exercises in deconstruction and cultural associations. The topic of the female is not a random choice; it is a certain moral core of the Russian classical literature. Its deconstruction is the most important sign of the curtailing of the humanistic paradigm. In the article, the sacral and demonized spectra connected with the female topic are determined. Prigov's turn from social cultural symbols to unconscious ones (images of the Soviet female heroine, woman as an object of compassion and grief, images of woman-mother as an incarnate wisdom, motherland; images of the beloved and the femme fatale) is shown. The analysis of the female and the feminine showed the ambiguity of solutions on the topic. The woman acts in various, often mutually exclusive forms. She is interpreted as a by-product of social, cultural, economic, and political systems which, however, glitch and produce a defective, incomprehensible result. Hence, the woman is recognized as a “highly doubtful” subject (the “Description of a Subject” cycle). Soviet Texts captured the process when official culture turned into a world of lost stories that is marked by self-parody. This world has everything previously recognized as insignificant (femininity, sex, erotica), permits the previously banned (deviant behavior). However, Prigov emphasizes the fictitious nature of the depicted feelings, experiences: in their description, the poet plays with stereotypes of the Soviet era. In his late works, Prigov prefers zoomorphs, to which women are closer than men, so the image of the female and the feminine is used as a research tool of the monstrous. The poet justifies this by the completion of the “enlightenment” imperative of an individual's integrity.

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