from Soviet Texts

Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov

Unbelievable Stories

ADVISORY NOTE
Truly, we are surrounded by the most unbelievable stories of salvation, healing, and so forth. Of countless miraculous sorceresses, healers, yogis, and faith-healers who turn back the whole causal destructive process such that one no longer wishes to simply believe in the boring and disgusting nat­ural course of events. But then you just have to. Although it is unbelievable, alas, it is far more common and compulsory.


A completely unfathomable story: A child falls from the fourteenth floor and dies rather than survives, as was expected.

Or another other totally unbelievable story: A man was comatose for two months, but did not recover, as was expected, and died instead. Really, rather unbelievable.

And this story is no less peculiar: A man falls into the cage of a pred­atory beast, and says some magical words, but against all expectations is eaten down to the bones.

Or the one about how two people fell out of an airplane without parachutes and, against all expectations, fell to their deaths, although many justifiably hoped they would be saved.

Or another: How someone ill with an incurable disease decided he wouldn’t go see the appropriate doctors, but would treat himself in­stead; however, to everyone's surprise, he died soon after.

Also: This one person, trusting his inner voice, which is supposed to help us find a way out of just about any situation, went into the mountains and, against everyone's expectations, never came back.

Or this one: How, against all reasonable expectations, a man who’d lost his legs died before receiving the prostheses, with which he was meant to have learned to dance-everyone was unpleasantly sur­prised by that one.

Or the person caught in the thick of battle who, rather unexpect­edly, dies in the most ordinary way, rather than coming back safe and sound, as it ought to be, normally.

And here's a totally unbelievable one: A person has a noose put around his neck, the stool is knocked out from under him and! he hangs there dead as a doornail in the noose, rather than anything else that one might naturally expect from him.

And here's another one: A fire is built under someone, the flames are flaring up around him, everyone-nervously, but with great curiosity-watches to see how he will manage to avoid a tragic out­come, but instead he, screaming and wailing, fails to escape, much to the surprise of those gathered around.

Or, for example: A man is grabbed by his hair, thrust into water, held there without breathing for 20-25 minutes, and is then let go, and though all confidently expect him to emerge alive from the water, he slowly surfaces as a heavy and unwieldy corpse, which comes as a profound and unpleasant surprise to everyone.





A List of My Own Deaths

ADVISORY NOTE
I myself was surprised to discover, after the fact, that three of my recent major “inventory” texts are associated with the theme of mortality—those who died in my lime, the enumeration of graves, and this one here, too. I thought that I might just as well have listed, to no lesser effect, things that were lively and cheerful. But then it occurred to me that the principle of inventory itself is mortification par excellence. So, quite naturally, the most natural thematic addition to this would be something correspondingly mortal. It's simply a case of like being drawn to like.


I might have died at age 1 from chickenpox, but didn’t

At 2, I might have died from measles

At 3, I might have died from lupus, hunger, and war

In my 4th year, I could have died from measles, many did

Oh, and at 6 months I could have died from dyspepsia

I also might have died before my birth, from the unspeakable diffi­culties of the life to come

I could have died while being born, these things happen

I could have died at 5 from scarlet fever—a terrible thing

At 6, 7, 8, and 9, I could have died from polio

At 10, I could have died from fear—it was very scary

At 11 and 12, I could have died of boredom at school, but I prevailed

At 13 and 14, I could have died while crossing the street, in someone else’s garden stealing apples, or in one of those brutal alley fights

At 15, I could have died of encephalitis from a tick bite in a forest outside Moscow

At 16, I could have just died

I could have just died at 17

I could have just died at 18

I could have died at 19 or 20 when bathing in the Black or Baltic Seas

At 24, I could have died from the police

At 25 years of age, I could have died from food poisoning

I could have died at the ages of 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, or 41, in prisons, camps, from torture, on a pris­oners’ bunk, during interrogations, in the logging camps, by a crim­inal’s knife, at the North Pole, eaten up by gnats, in the desert, on a cross, thrust under the ice, thrown into the furnace, on the rack, from a bullet, in a dungeon, in manacles, from exhaustion in the cattle wagon, in a gas chamber, thrown from a cliff, doused in acid, from scurvy, without making it to the location of my second prison term, or from a heart attack in front of the camp gates as they were flung open in the days of rehabilitation

At 41, I could have also died from a twisted intestine

Or, at 40, for example, if I hadn't died before that in prison, I could have died from being bitten by a rabid dog—they were running around Moscow in those days

And at 39, I might have died from malaria in Asia

But at age 42, I could already die of tuberculosis

I could have died at 43 from a traumatic head injury, for example, from a blow with an ax

I could have died at 44, 45 and 46 from something or other, literally just some nonsense

I could have died at 47 from serious worries

I could have died at 48 from a possible cancer

At 49, 50, 51, I could have died from a heart attack, and indeed I did die, but I snapped out of it

At 52, I could still die from a heart attack

At 53, I could die from anything, for example, from an incorrect way of life

I could have died at 54 from just about anything

I could have died at 55 from anything

I could have died at 56 from anything

I could have died at 57 from anything

I could have died at 58 from anything

And at my present 59 years, I could die from anything, for example from these compositions

And in all the years, times, and sentences to come, I can, can, can die, die, die—from what, from what, from what?—from just about anything

translated from the Russian by Simon Schuchat

Moscow Conceptualism was one of several important nonconformist art and literary movements during the late Soviet and post-Soviet era; although well-known in the Anglosphere, it is beginning to be recognized as a leading avant-garde tendency on a global scale. Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov was one of its leading exemplars. The two works published here were written in the late 1990s, when Prigov increasingly played with catalogues and enumerations of all sorts, from the biographical (e.g., “A List of My Own Deaths”) to more cosmological or even theological themes (e.g., “Unbelievable Stories”). In these works, somewhere between verse and prose, Prigov moved slightly away from an earlier concentration on Soviet mythic and linguistic practices. His comedic perspective on existence remained unchanged, however.

Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov was born in Moscow in 1940. Trained as a sculptor, he made sculptures for public parks during the Soviet era. A prolific writer (in 2005 he estimated that he had already written 35,000 poems), he was a founder of the Moscow Conceptualist school. He wrote in almost all conceivable genres (including two novels), was an active performance artist, and produced videos, drawings, and installations. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Prigov published in underground and émigré journals, and was briefly sent to a psychiatric hospital by the KGB. With the onset of glasnost and perestroika, he was able to publish and show his visual art in “official” venues and outside Russia. Prigov died, in Moscow, of a heart attack in 2007. Ugly Duckling Presse is publishing Soviet Texts, a selection of his prose and poetry.

Simon Schuchat is a retired American diplomat with over twenty-five years of service, having worked in Beijing, Tokyo, Moscow, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Famous long ago, his poetry can be found in several rare books, including Svelte (published by Richard Hell when Schuchat was 16), Blue Skies (Some Of Us Press), Light and Shadow (Vehicle Editions), All Shook Up (Fido Productions), and At Baoshan (Coffee House Press). Also active in small press publishing, Schuchat coedited Buffalo Stamps, edited the 432 Review, and founded Caveman. Originally trained as a sinologist, he has been to all the finest schools, and taught at Fudan University in Shanghai in the late 1970s. In 2016, his translation of Chinese poet Hai Zi’s lyric drama Regicide was published in Hong Kong. Soviet Texts, his translations of Dmitri Prigov, is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse.