yurchak-critical aesthetics at the time of empire collapse - prigovs surgeon and kuryokhins parasite

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Id like to trace the origins of a particular

method of textual aesthetics that was developed

in the work of Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov, a

remarkable postmodernist poet and artists of

the late Soviet--early post-Soviet period. This

method is related to the well-known approach

of over-identi! cation with the dominant ideo-

logical discourse, which was practiced during the

late-socialist period in di" erent ways by a number

of informal artists in Eastern Europe and the Soviet

Union.1 I am interested in tracing not the artistic

genealogy of this method (something that has

been done before), but its socio-cultural genealogy

i.e. the changes in the socio-cultural dynamic

of the Soviet system that became re# ected in this

method. To put it di" erently, I want to investigate

what Prigovs work, and the work of others that I

discuss, tells us about the socio-political context in

which it emerged.

We know that Prigovs texts, like the art of

the whole Moscow Conceptualism movement to

which they belonged, were formed as a reaction

to the Soviet political context of the 1970s-80s.

Speaking about Moscow Conceptualism artist Ilya

Kabakov stressed:

In the Soviet Union written text ! lled every

gap, in the 1970s becoming ubiquitous.

[Printed word] censored (puri! ed), eternal,

divine was the main event of life. That word

was impersonal and anonymous; it belonged

to everyone. It was to that word that our group

of conceptualists reacted: Bulatov focused

on Soviet posters, Komar and Melamid on

Soviet paintings, Kosolapov on slogans

And Prigov focused on the central form of

that word the Soviet newspaper.2

This description is doubtless correct, but it runs

the risk of being misinterpreted. The reaction to

the text of the Soviet system, which Kabakov calls

a central practice of Conceptualism, should not be

read to suggest that Soviet ideological language

was a closed, immutable, isolated system, to which

Conceptualists reacted from a position external to

it.3 In fact, the Conceptualists reaction to Soviet

ideological discourse consisted of entering this

discourse and making visible its internal structure

from within, rather than standing outside of it. This

engagement was not a form of external critique,

but a form of internal exposure. As such it did not

require one to make a critical assessment of the

ideologys lies and falsities. This point becomes

particularly important when we considered that in

the ! nal decades of Soviet history many common

Soviet people, who were by no means dissidents,

developed jocular ways of engaging with Soviet

ideological symbols that were reminiscent of the

Conceptualist practice.

In what follows I will compare a few short texts

written by Prigov in the early 1980s with the texts

that were produced at the same time as jokes by

common Soviet citizens who did not self-identify

as artists, poets or dissidents and did not see their

own texts as a critique of the Soviet system. In the

! nal section of the paper I will also compare Prig-

ovs texts with the approach to ideology that was

developed at about that time by Sergei Kuryokhin.

By comparing these di" erent works we may better

understand the di" erent nuances of each method

and the ideological principles of the late-Soviet

period more broadly.

***

As Kabakov perceptively stated, Soviet dis-

cursive space of the late-socialist period (1960s-

1980s) was indeed dominated by the ideological

discourse of the Party. That discourse was distin-

guished not only by its ubiquity and unavoidabili-

ty, but also by a particular ! xed, immutable linguis-

tic form in which it was written form that had

become cumbersome and full of unwieldy gram-

matical structures and ideological neologisms.4 In

the late Soviet period that ideological language

experienced an important transformation: the

literal meanings to which its utterances suppos-

edly referred had become relatively unimportant;

at the same time, it became more important than

ever before to reproduce the precise linguistic

Alexei Yurchak Critical aesthetics at the time of empire collapse: Prigovs surgeon and Kuryokhins parasite

1. See chaper 7 in Yurchak 207 and 2014.

2. Ilya Kabakov. D. A. Prigov i ego bezumnaia iskren-nost, May 24, 2008, see: http://os.colta.ru/art/events/details/962/?attempt=1

3. To be sure, Kabakov himself does not say this.

4. I analyze this linguistic form in detail in Chapter 2 of Yurchak, Alexei. 2006. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. See also an updated and expanded Russian version of this book: Chapter 2 of Yurchak, Alexei, 2014. Eto bylo navsegda, poka ne konchilos: poslednee sovetskoe pokolenie. Moscow: NLO, Biblioteka NZ.

110 | [ Translit ] in translation | trans-lit.info

forms of these utterances their ! xed grammati-

cal structure, cliche phraseology, special lexicon,

etc. The performative function of this language (the

need to repeat ! xed and ritualized linguistic forms)

had become more important that its constative

function (the literal meanings that these formulas

supposedly conveyed).5

Another important transformation that marked

the late-Soviet period was the advent of what

many observers later called an epoch of geren-

tocracy. This evocative neologism referred to the

historical situation in which the Party leadership

had grown so extremely old, with very few new

members joining its ranks, that it soon started

dying en masse. Between 1982 and 1985, on

average one Politburo member or candidate to

the Politburo was dying every six months.6 These

events revealed a peculiar paradox at the basis of

the Soviet system on the one hand, that system

continued to be experienced by most Soviet

citizens as stable, immutable and eternal, on the

other hand, the central symbols of that stable

and eternal system were becoming decrepit or

dying. The Soviet system more and more existed

as a contradiction it appeared both strong and

feeble, eternal and debilitating, full of life and full

of death. This paradox was re# ected, for example,

in how Soviet people experienced the death of

Brezhnev in 1982. Although everyone had been

aware that Brezhnev was unwell and unsteady,

and his televised speeched were hard to decipher,

Brezhnevs actual death stunned great numbers of

people because Brezhnev as a symbol was experi-

enced as eternal, as somehtng that cannot possibly

change. Poet and musician Andrei Makarevich later

described his reaction to Brezhnevs in 1982:

I dont know what others felt, but I was

completely certain that the detestable Soviet

power would stand for another hundred years.

Even the death of Brezhnev made quite an im-

pression [on me]. It had always seemed to me

that Brezhnev, like a Biblical hero, would live for

eight hundred years. 7

Prigovs texts of the late Soviet period re# ected

this paradox of the systems eternity and fragil-

ity, and the particular condition of gerontocracy

through which that paradox became manifested

by that time. Consider a series of texts called Obit-

uaries, which Prigov wrote in 1980. Although the

epidemic of high-ranking deaths of the Soviet Party

leadership began two years later, in 1982, Prigovs

Obituaries, like his other work, should be still seen

as a reaction to that epidemic. As Andrei Zorins

acutely observed, Prigov always reacted not to

concrete isolated events but to deeper shifts in the

socio-cultural context of the country.8 The period

of gerontocracy was without a doubt one of such

internal shifts that started well before Brezhnevs

death in 1982 . Many other artists reacted to the

same internal shift. The Leningrad group of Necro-

realists, for example, even developed a particular

aeshtetic style as a reference to that shift, calling it

necroaesthetics.9

In the Obituaries Prigov draws on the prin-

ciple of over-identi! cation with the ideological

discourse of the Party (reproducing the precise

form of the o$ cial utterance), and the principle

of its decontextualization (shifting the context in

which the this ideological utterance appears by

populating the text with di" erent temporalities,

inconsistencies genres, and ! gures from other

unmatching contexts). Using these two principles

Prigov introduced unexpected shifts and ruptures

into the ideological message that he immitated.

The main goal of this procedure, as mentioned

earlier, was not to critique or oppose Soviet ideol-

ogy, but to make visible its internal paradoxes and

inconsistences.

In the familiar ideological language of Soviet

newspapers Prigovs Obituaries report the

deaths of classical Russian writers and poets of the

19th century, as if they were Soviet bureaucrats

and Party functionaries. The obituary for Comrade

Pushkin reads:

The Central Committee of CPSU, the Supreme

Soviet of the USSR and the Soviet government

with deep regret report that on February 10

(January 2910), 1837, the life of the great Rus-

sian poet Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, aged

38, was cut short as a result of a tragic duel.

Comrade Pushkin A.S. always distinguished

himself by his adherence to principles, sense

of responsibility and exacting attitude towards

5. I draw on the terminology introduced by John Austin in How to Do Things with Words. Harvard University Press, 1975.

6. Between January 1982 and March 1985 the following mem-bers and candidates of the Politburo died: Suslov (January 1982, age 80), Brezhnev (November 1982, age 72), Kiselev (January 1983, age 66), Pelshe (May 1983, age 85), Andropov (February 1984, age 70), Ustinov (December 1984, age 76), Chernenko (March 1985, age 74).

7. Makarevich, Andrei. 2002. Sam ovtsa. Moscow: 14.

8. Zorin, A. Chtoby zhizn vnizu tekla (Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov i sovetskaia deistvitelnost), Prigov D. A. Sovetskie teksty. SPb, 1997: 10-23.

9. The term was coined by Necrorealists, a group of provoca-teurs, artists and ! lmmakers from St Petersburg, who started their artistic experiments at the same time as Prigov. See Yurchak, Alexei. 2008. Necro-Utopia: The Politics of Indistinction and the Aesthetics of the Non-Soviet. Current Anthropology, Vol. 49, N. 2.

10. Date according to the new Soviet calendar.


himself and others. On all the posts to which he

was sent, he always displayed utter devotion to

the assigned tasks, military courage, heroism,

and high qualities of the patriot, citizen and

poet. He will forever remain in the hearts of

his friends and people who knew him closely

as a reveller, joker, philanderer and squirt. The

name of Pushkin will eternally live in peoples

memory as the torch of Russian poetry.

The Obituary place Pushkin in the fabric of

Soviet linguistic cliches (the ideological language

itself, the o$ cial cultural neologisms used to

describe Pushkin, such as the torch of Russian

poetry11 and the reveller and joker). Prigov

wrote analogous obituaries for Comrade Lermon-

tov, Comrade Dostoevsky, and Comrade Tolstoy.

Tolstoys obituary reads:

The Central Committee of CPSU, the Supreme

Soviet of the USSR and the Soviet government

with deep regret report that from this life has

departed Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. Com-

rade Tolstoy L. N. always distinguished himself

by his adherence to principles, sense of respon-

sibility and exacting attitude towards himself

and others. On all posts where he was sent, he

displayed utter devotion to the assigned tasks,

military courage, heroism, and high qualities

of the citizen, patriot, and poet. He will forever

remain in the hearts of his friends and people

who knew him closely as a great nobleman,

who was interested in Buddhism, the teachings

of Tolstoyism, and forgiveness. Tolstoys name

will live in peoples memory as the mirror of the

Russian revolution.12

The shortest last obituary Prigov wrote for

himself:

The Central Committee of the CPSU, Supreme

Soviet of the USSR, and Soviet government

with deep regret report that on June 30, 1980,

aged 40, Prigov Dmitrii Alekseevich is living in

Moscow.

Using Soviet ideological discourse as a frame

these texts insert in it references to multiple histor-

ical periods, linguistic genres, political systems and

subject positions, thereby introducing multiple

shifts in the fabric of Soviet discourse at the level

of temporality, subjectivity, and political meaning.

The subject of each text is presented as someone

who is part of the Soviet discursive universe and

who is simultaneously unhinged from it. Pushkin

is claimed to have died as a Soviet hero, but a cen-

tury before the Soviet Union was born. He is both

a Soviet and a non-Soviet subject. The goal of this

operation was neither to create a counter-narrative

that challenged Soviet ideological truths (as was

done by the discourse of the dissidents), nor to

ridicule Soviet ideological statements and symbols,

but rather to makes visible some hidden principles

according to which this discourse worked. The

logical, temporal, semantic, subjective and other

shifts that Prigovs texts created, in fact, pointed

to the actually existing inconsistences and shifts

in the fabric of the Soviet ideological language.

For example, as most Soviet people knew from

experience, leading articles in Pravda or speeches

of the General Secretary on the TV were so verbally

obfuscated that to interpret them as logical argu-

ments was challenging, to say the least. However,

these texts were not expected to be interpreted as

literal descriptions of reality. Instead, they func-

tioned performatively what mattered was that

their highly normalized, ! xed, cumbesome lin-

guistic form was repeated over and over, but what

they communicated semantically was relatively

unimportant. It was that principle of the ideologi-

cal discourse that Prigovs imitation texts made vis-

ible. To illustrate this point let me compare Prigovs

Obituaries with the texts that were produced in

great numbes in the late 1970s early 1980s by

common Soviet people in the conexts of daily life.

Most of these texts were composed as insider jokes

among groups of friends who never thought of

them artistic or subjversive and did not think

of themselves as artists or critics.

I analyze a document called Directive (Uka-

zanie) that was written in 1983, around the same

period as Prigovs Obituaries. The Directive was

authored collectively by a group of approximately

ten young engineers in an institute of Non-Ferrous

Metallurgy in Leningrad. All of them were mem-

bers of the Institutes Komsomol13 Committee.

They wrote this document as a gift to Andrei K.,

the Secretary of the Komsomol Committee (their

ideological boss) on the occasion of his thirtieth

birthday. On Andrei birthday Committee members

gathered in the Committees o$ ce to celebrate the

occasion; someone read the text of the Directive to

everyones laughter and then the framed docu-

ment was presented to Andrei. The Directive was

11. Svetoch russkoi poezii.

12. Mirror of the Russian revolution (Zerkalo russkoi revolutsii) this Soviet clich known to every high school student was taken from Lenins description of Tolstoy (in his 1908 article Leo Tolstoy as the mirror of the Russian revolution).

13. Youth Communist League. The Committee was a leading body of the large Komsomol organization of the Institute.


written in a language that mixed Soviet ideological

discourse with inconsistent and ironic references,

and it referred in style to o$ cial obituaries in

newspapers, which made it similar to Prigovs texts

we considered.

Such ironic texts should not be dismissed as in-

cosenquential jokes that were limited to privated

spaced and small groups of friends. What made

such texts important and consequential was that

they were produced by the very people who were

charged with the task of producing and dissemi-

nating the ideological messages of the state. They

types the Directve on the o$ cial paper form of

the Committee, bearing the Institutes letterhead,

using the o$ cial typewriter of the Committee. Ans

they assigned it a registration number like they

would to real ideological documents.

While the Committee members and Secretary

Andrei clearly through that the text of the Directive

was hillarious, this was not just a joke directed at

the Soviet system and its language. Like in the case

of Prigovs texts the document was designed not

to oppose the o$ cial ideology but to imitate it in

a particular ironic way, which resulted in exposing

some principles under which ideology functioned,

including the central principle according to which

reproducing precise forms of ideological state-

ments was far more important than attending

to their literal meanings. What made the text

hillarious was that it rendered explicitly visible

what usually remained hidden and unspoken

the paradoxical mechanisms of Soviet ideology

and the role of the Committee and its Secretary

in their reproduction, but also in their adaptation

to normal Soviet life, as a result of which ideology

changed its meanings. These people, the ironic

document suggested, managed to inhabit several

incongruent positions vis-a-vis ideology at once

reproducing it, avoiding it and changing it without

opposing it. The Directive read:

On August 13, 1953 the Non-Ferrous Metal-

lurgical Industry of the USSR su" ered a great

loss. To this life came an inspirational leader

and master of mystery, unwavering manager

of a pickling station, and the director of the

Vasilievskii Island ski lift, the father-in-law of

Estonian pop, and the hero of Mongolian epics,

Andriushenka [Last Name].

This date is inscribed in rosy letters into the

biography of the [Name]

Institute!

In commemoration of this outstanding event I

COMMAND to the working collectives and pri-

vate citizens to observe the industrial discipline

and silence after 23:00 hours. Proceed to con-

gratulate him by way of gift-o" ering, embrac-

ing, self-prostrating, back-patting, kissing, and

engaging in a tug of war.

Temporary replacement Secretary of the Com-

mittee: Signature.

The text of the Directive immediately reminds

us of Prigovs Obituaries in its form, genre and

main theme. This is why it is all the more importat

to stress that neither the authors of this Directive,

nor the overwhelming majority of Soviet people at

that time, knew about Prigovs existence, let alone

about his unpublished conceptualist texts. The

very fact that such texts as Prigovs Obituaries and

this Directive (as well as many other similar texts14)

emerged independently in di" erent contexts of

Soviet life at about the same time is an important

anthropological fact that points to a shared cultural

dynamics of that period. To put it di" erently, the

proliferation of such texts at that time can be

seen as a symptom of the Soviet systems ongoing

internal transformations, which remained invisible

to most of its citizens until much later.15

To make sense of this document we should

stress that Andrei, the Committee leader, and the

rest of the Committee members were not pure

cynics, who chose to be part of the Komsomol

leadership simply gain personal priveledge. Nor

were they pure idealists, who believed every word

of the Party leadership. Their position vis-a-vis the

communist project was more complex and para-

doxical. Andrei, for example, was devoted to the

Communist idea more than many of his contem-

poraries; but this did not prevent him from being

deeply suspicious of the Party bureaucrats among

his immediate superiors and the Partys top leader-

ship.16 Not surprisingly, the Komsomol work that

he and his Committee conducted was also full of

paradoxes. Some of this work they performed with

genuine interest and devotion, considering it truly

important, while many other types of work they

tried to avoid or minimize, considering it meaning-

less, tedious or a pure bureaucratic formality. The

former kind of work included organizing a system

of professional mentoring of young inexperi-

enced employees who came to the Institute after

graduating from the University, helping young

families to get a spot in the kindergarten or a sum-

mer camp for their children, organizing cultural

activities for the Insitutes youth (recreational

evenings, cultural festivals, sports competitions,

14. See Yurchak 2006 and 2014 for more examples.

15. Ibid.

16. See a detailed analysis of Andreis relation to di" erent ideals in chapters 3 and 6 in Yurchak 2006 and Yurchak 2014.


discotheques, etc). The latter kind of work that

they tried to avoid or minimize included writing

endless ideological reports, ! lling out bureaucratic

forms, conducting inconsequential ideological

examinations, and trying to convince rank-and-! le

Komsomol members (practically all young people

in the Insitute) to perform Komsomol tasks that the

District Komsomol Committee required the Com-

mittee to distribute to the rank-and-! le but that

almost no one at that level wanted to perform.17

With this complexity in mind, it becomes clear

that for members of the Komsomol Committee the

Directive was neither simply a joke at the expense

of the Soviet system, nor simply a private state-

ment about what they really thought. Rather,

this document signaled that while the Committee

members were invested in many political goals

and ideals of the Soviet project they were also

alienated from bureaucratic tasks and meaningless

activities. Moreover, in its mixed, jocular style the

Directive made it clear that these people were well

aware that to achieve something truly important

and authentic one needed also to participate in

something formulaic, boring and empty. The para-

doxical simultaneity of these two types of actions,

in their opinion, was simultaneously productive18

and absurd.

How did the Directive convey this complex

contradictory message. The opening lines of the

text read: On August 13, 1953 the Non-Ferrous

Metallurgical Industry of the USSR su" ered a great

loss. This is a standard opening line of the Soviet

obituary. For example, on November 12, 1982

Pravda reported Brezhnevs death with the follow-

ing words: The Communist Party of the Soviet

Union and all Soviet people have su" ered a great

loss. The next phrase in Brezhnevs obituary reads:

From this life departed a devoted successor of

the great Lenins work, ardent patriot, outstanding

revolutionary, and combatant for peace and com-

munism, a great political and state ! gure of con-

temporary times, Leonid Ilich Brezhnev.19 But the

jocular Directive in its second phrase inverts the

clich formula, replacing From this life departed

with To this life came. The loss is su" ered by

the Soviet industry because of Andreis birth, not

death. This inversion is identical to the one in Prig-

ovs obituary for himself: The Communist Party and

the Soviet state with deep regret report that on

June 30, 1980, aged 40, Prigov Dmitrii Alekseevich

is living in Moscow. In the case of the Directive the

inversion is even more emphasized because here

the genres of obituary and a birthday address are

mixed. This inversion erases the boundary between

life and death, and between ideological discourse

and its ironic imitation. The main e" ect of this

procedure was to expose the in-between space

that transcended the binary division between

party ideology and anti-party counter-rhetoric

the space that Andrei and his colleagues from the

Committee inhabited.

In the following sentence the list of Andreis

titles is articulated in a familiar genre of the

formulaic ideological discourse that is mixed with

completely di" erent discursive genres. Andrei is

described as an inspirational leader (vdokhnovi-

tel) a ! xed ideological formula, and as a master

of mystery (misti! kator) an ironic reference to

other, non-ideological, meaningful activities that

Andrei managed to pull o" as a Komsomol Secre-

tary precisely because he knew how to mispresent

them in o$ cial reports as good ideological work.

This mixing of genres is also reminiscent of Prigovs

obituaries.

As with the o$ cial obituaries published in

Soviet newspapers, the long list of Andreis titles

and achievements is ended with his name. How-

ever, instead of using the authoritative formula

the name (Andrei), patronymic (Nikolaevich),

and surname, the list ends with the duminitive

name Andryushenka, underscoring the di" er-

ent meaning of this Komsomol Secretary while

he is an ideological boss, he is also one of us,

who understands that ideology is not to be take

too literally. This shift of styles underscores the

simultaneity of multiple occupations that Andrei

performs and subjectivities that he inhabits. He

quite sincerely and e$ ciently runs the ideological

work of the Institute, simultaneously helping his

friends and colleagues to avoid as much of the

senseless proforma of that work as possible. He is

also a serious fan and collector of Anglo-American

rock music, which the Party bureaucrats criticize,

and an organizer of discotheques to that music

in the dormitory of the Institute. His colleagues

in the Committee celebrate Andrei, with warm

irony, precisely for this complexity, for his ability to

live and create in-between spaces, for his lack of

dogmatism, ability to adapt, and at the same time,

his refusal to be a pure pragmatic cynic. The text of

the document, at every level creates a disjuncture

between o$ cial formulas and their inversions, out-

lining this liberating in-betweenness that creatively

rearticulates the forms and norms of the Soviet

system without directly opposing them.

As I mentioned this document, unlike Prigovs

texts, was not meant to be an artistic statement.

And for this reason it sheds additional light on

17. See Yurchak 2006, 2014.

18. Ibid.

19. Obrashchenie, Pravda, November 12, 1982, 1.


Prigovs aesthetic apporach. Like this text, Prigovs

irony spoke not from some external space of

authenticity and freedom, but from inside

this ideological language, from the position of its

producer, which made the internal operations of

this language visible.

The third point of comparison for Prigovs texts

is the work of Sergei Kuryokhin. Unlike Prigov,

Kuryokhin did not belong to the movement

of Moscow Conceptualists. He comes from the

milieu of Leningrd informal artists, many of whom

practiced overidenti! cation as a central element

of their aesthetics, but did it quite di" erently from

their Moscow Conceptialist counterparts. In his

own work Kuryokhin perfected overidenti! cation

to such an degree that it was often impossible to

understand when he was serious and when ironic

or whether making a distinction between these

two positions was possible at all. Kuryokhin himself

often found it hard to draw a line between these

two positions that he simultaneously inhabited.

While Prigov practiced ironic imitation of the

structure of ideological language, Kuryokhin also

manipulated the state-controlled institutions of

mass media where this language circulated. In his

most famous provocations he used state TV and

a central newspaper to make overidenti! cation

complete. He also practiced his method of overi-

denti! cation in music. For example, in the 1980s

he invited many representatives of the o$ cial

cultural insitutions from famous ballerinas and

opera singers to ! lms stars and state bureaucrats

to participate in his postmodern rock-orchestra

happennings known as Pop-Mechanics.

One of the most spectacular events, in which

Kuryokhin employed his method to the fullest was

the infamous Lenin-mushroom hoax that he

performed on national TV20 in May 1991. During

that program Kuryokhin gave a long expert com-

mentary, speaking in the most scholarly, earnest

and beleivable manner that signaled to the TV au-

dience of several million unsuspecting viewers that

he was serious and to be trusted. Kuryookhin man-

aged to convince them that Lenin and his Bolhse-

vik comrades consumed so many mushrooms that

they picked in Russian forests, with many of these

mushrooms being hallucinogenic, that the person-

alities of these people had become permanently

tranformed into those of mushrooms. I simply

want to say that Lenin was a mushroom, conclud-

ed Kuryokhin, adding that this fact explains why

the Bolshevik revolution took place. Again, for lack

of space I will not discuss this event any further,

since I have analyzed it at length elsewhere.21

The secod example is less known, but even

more important for our discussion, since it occured

earlier, in 1987, in the very beginning of Perestroi-

ka. On April 5, 1987, the newspaper Lenigradskaia

Pravda printed an article that attacked the music of

the so-called informal (uno$ cial) rock bands of

Leningrad.22 The author of the piece was journal-

ist Sergei Sholokhov, with Kuryokhin serving as a

musical expert whom he interviewed.23 At that

time, in 1987, most readers were not familiar with

either Sholokhov or Kuryokhin. But in the informal

musical milieu Kuryokhin was known as a rock and

jazz pianist prodigy, who performed and recorded

with many informal bands, composed music for

them, directed his Pop-Mekhanika orchestra and

so on. He was at the center of the informal rock

music culture. This is important when we consider

what opinion Kuryokhin expressed in the 1987

newspaper article. He said: todays so-called infor-

mal rock-musicians display complete lack of talent

and very little skill in playing musical instruments.

... [The] deafening noise [of their music] reveals

overall helplessness, the silliness of their texts

reveals banality, . . . their false pathos reveals social

inadequacy. Typical examples of this deprived

bourgeois product, continued the article, are such

bands as Alisa and Akvarium (in fact, Kuryokhin

frequently played with both bands). Kuryokhins

quote ended with the words: It is time that the

Komsomol took a very serious look at this prob-

lem.

The critique was read by most as the o$ cial

position of the Party bureaucrats towards bour-

geois manifestations of youth culture, including

informal rock bands of Leningrad. It looked like

another campaign of cracking down on such

bands ws about to start. However several days

later the leadership of the Leningrad Communist

Party organization were told that the author of

this critique was himself one of the most notorious

members of the rock community. The revelation

caused confusion and embarrassment among the

Party leadership. They were at a loss: did Kuryokhin

perform a jocular imitation of the Party rhetoric or

was he serious? And what should they do ac-

cuse him of ridiculing the Party or continue to

treat his text as a manifestation of their position?

Members of the informal musical milieu were also

20. This hoax was performed in the program Quite house on The 5th Channel of Leningrad TV that broadcast nationally.

21. Yurchak, Alexei. 2011. A Parasite from Outer Space: How Ser-gei Kuryokhin Proved that Lenin Was A Mushroom, Slavic Review, v. 70, n. 1, 2011.

22. Sholokhov, Sergei. Kaprizy roka i logika sudby, Leningrad-skaia Pravda, April 5, 1987.

23. It was that same duo, Sholokhov and Kuryokhin, that four years later pulled o" the Lenin-mushroom hoax (by that time journalist Sholokhov moved to Leningrad television).


confused. Some of them reacted to the revelation

with laughter, but others refused to see the article

as a joke and attacked Kuryokhin for conforming

with he Party or for overestimating his audience

doesnt he understand that many readers of a

party newspaper are not sophisticated enough

and will take his criticism at face value? one rock

musician asked.24

That the article elicited such confused and

con# icting reactions from both the Party o$ cials

and members of the informal artistic subculture

is crucial for the understanding of this event. The

articles mimicry of the form of the ideological

discourse introduced a curious paradox into the

sphere of that discourse. It became clear that a text

written in the Party language, and published in a

central Party paper, could be both an exemplary

ideological statement and an ironic imitation of

that statement. This revelation exposed to the

readers the hidden, internal structure of the Party

ideology: its most important aspect was not what

ones message meant but in what discursive forms

it was articulated. By quoting precise discursive

forms anyone could produce a perfectly appropri-

ate and approved ideological statement, without

having to engage in a reasoned argument. Moreo-

ver, Kuryokhins article revealed something else

the extent to which the informal artistic subculture

itself also acknowledged the power of form in the

partys authoritative discourse, taking it to be more

meaningful than literal meaning. Identi! cation

with the form of the party discourse could trump,

in their eyes, intended parodic messages (because

some readers are not sophisticated enough to see

beyond the form).

***

Kuryokhin engagement with ideological dis-

course depended on the use and manipulation of

the o$ cial mass media of the state (newspaper, TV

program). This use of the state-run and approved

media is the ! rst di" erence between Kuryokhins

and Prigovs methods. There is also another,

more substantial di" erence. For Kuryokhn it was

important not only to rely on state media and state

institutions for the circulatin of his message, but

also to in! ltrate them, becoming an element of

their internal structure, at least for a short period.

The position that he occupied vis-a-vis state insti-

tutions and their ideological discourse was that of

a parasite, as Kuryokhin himself once explained

to me.25 In one conversation in 1995 we tried to

! nd analytical language in which to speak about

the critical approach that he practciedin music,

! lm, performance, social provocations, etc. It bears

mentioning that to achieve such a clear under-

standing in a conversation with Kuryokhin was

next to impossible. His speech was never limited

to the frame of calm meta-re# ection on his own

activities. He always mixed his analytical comments

with an ironic imitation of such comments.

Nevertheless, in that conversation Kuryokhin

formulated something very important a de! ni-

tion of his method that seems both encompass-

ing and revealing. He focused on the biological

metaphor of a parasite. Much like philosopher

Michel Serres in his famous discussion of the cul-

tural ! gure of the parasite26 (of which Kuryokhin

was not aware), Kuryokhin stressed that a parasites

relation to the organism that it inhabits cannot be

captured in the language of binary oppositions. To

be a parasite vis--vis a biological organism is to

act simultaneously as its part and its alien intruder.

This is possible only if the relationship of the

parasite to the organism is symbiotic: the parasite

adapts to the organism and simultaneously makes

the organism change in order to accommodate the

parasite. The same goes for a parasite of a political

or cultural system: I would like to introduce the

word parasite as a new analytical term, said Kury-

okhin. A parasite is ambivalent. Being a parasite

vis-a-vis the system means, on the one hand, pos-

sessing a structure that is completely independent

of that system, but, on the other hand, being part

of the system, feeding o" it. This position, he con-

tinued, allows one to look deep into thingsnot

negating, ridiculing, or judging them, but making

visible their internal criteria. 27

This discussion helps us to contrast Kuryokhins

and Prigovs methods further. As we mentioned

earlier, Prigrovs approach was similar to that of a

surgeon: he cut through the surface, making vis-

ible the internal structures of the system with all

their inconsistencies and paradoxes. But he never

became part of that organism himself; he never

tried to fool any state isntitution into blieveing

that he was its internal element, that his act was

one of genuine support. He remained outside, as a

surgeon-observer. Kuryokhins approach was di" er-

ent. He acted as a parasite: by entering the system,

he began to exist within it symbiotically, making

the system recognize him as its part and letting it

adapt to his presence. When representatives of the

state later suspected that he was not part of the

system but an intruder, they were not quite sure

24. Authors interview with Sergei Kuryokhin, April 1995, Dom druzhby caf, St. Petersburg.

25. Authors interview with Kuryokhin, 1995.

26. Michel Serres. 2007 [1982]. The Parasite. University Of Min-nesota Press.

27. Authors interview, 1995.


of that fact and did not know how to react. Kury-

okhins hoaxes on the TV and in the newspaper

demonstrated this fact. Neither the editors of the

program and newspaper, nor their audiences real-

ized what they were unti it was too late (until the

program was aired and the article was published).

As the newspaper example suggests, even many

members of the informal subculture to which Kury-

okhin himself belonged were uncertain of his real

position whether he spoke as a conformist from

the position of Party supporter or he was deeply

ironic about that position.28

The di" erence between Kuryokhins parasite

and Prigovs surgeon can be also considered from a

di" erent angle. According to Boris Gorys, Moscow

Conceptualism focused not on creating artworks,

but on creating art documentation.29 Art documen-

tation amounts to the production of elaborate

documents, descriptions, recordings, accounts, and

other forms of evidence about real and imaginary

events.30 Groys associates this approach ! rst and

foremost with the Collective Action Group (Gruppa

kollektivnye deistviia), whose activities took place

outside Moscow with only the members of the

group and a few invited guests present, and were

later made accessible to a wider audience only

through documentation, in the form of photo-

graphs and texts.31 These documents never pro-

vided any explanation of what the events meant

or what the participants thought about them.

However, works of other artists of the Conceptual-

ist movement Viktor Pivovarov, Ilya Kabakov,

Dmitry Prigov, etc. were also examples of art

documentation, argues Groys.

Kuryokhin grew up and came of age in a di" er-

ent cultural environment in Leningrad, sur-

rounded by Leningrad music and art communities

that practiced a di" erent type of ovdridenti! caiton

that did Conceptualists. Among Leningrad groups

whose work was related to his style were the fa-

mous Mitki and Necrorealists. Unlike the Conceptu-

alists these groups did not substitute artwork with

art documentation, but instead problematized the

very distinction between the two. If the approach

of art documentation inhabits the perspective of

an outsider (someone who documents facts about

Soviet life, observes, records, collects evidence,

catalogues it), the approach practiced by these

Leningrad groups was based on in! ltrating the

Soviet system, becoming its strange but indivis-

ible part, inhabiting it symbiotically. Instead of

observing life from the lens of an artist they erased

any distinction between life and art. Their daily

existence became their art. Mitki art consisted of

cultivating themselves as the most Soviet of Soviet

people, with unhealthy bodies, friendly drunken

28. For a more elaborate discussion of the multiple positions that Kuryokhin occupied and for more examples of his provocations see Yurchak 2011.

29. Boris Groys. 2008. Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation. Art Power. Cambridge, Mass.

30. Groys, 54.

31. Groys, 58.

32. Kabakov is 21 years older that Kuryokhin, Pivovarov is 17 years older and Prigov is 14 years older. Other Leningrad artists who are close to this approach e.g. Dmitry Shagin (Mitki) and Evgenii Yu! t (Necrorealists) are even younger that Kuryokhin.

33. See more in Yurchak 2011.

language, simple unappetizing food, who exist-

ence in the most basic conditons. They did not act

out this role on a stage, returning to real life o"

stage, but practiced it all the time, never switch-

ing o" . Kuryokhin took this approach even further,

overidentifying with the systems form to such a

degree than even some members of the subcul-

tural milieu were uncertain where his art ended

and life began.

What were the reasons for this di" erence

between Kuryokhins method of a parasite and

Prigovs method of a surgeon? One reason prob-

ably lies in the di" erence of the historical periods

when the two approaches developed. Moscow

Conceptualism was formed earlier than the Lenin-

grad art of overidenti! cation. Most practitioners of

Conceptualism were older by ! fteen-twenty years

than the Leningrad artists.32 The Conceptualist

method was shaped in the late 1960s-70s, in the

epoch of high Brezhnevism, while the Leningrad

approach was the product of the late 1970s-1980s

- the end of the Brezhnev period and the period

of perestroika, when the parameters of the Soviet

system had already substantially changed (the ! rst

Pop-Mekhanika performance took place in 1984).

In the earlier Soviet periods it would be impossible

to in! ltrate the o$ cial state institutions and mass

media channels to perform a political hoax. It was

just before and during perestroika that Kuryokhins

method could really # ourish.33

***

Prigov and Kuryokhin admired each other,

even performing together on several occasions in

the late 1980s (Kuryokhin played the piano, Prigov

read poetry). But they sticked to their di" erent

methods, remaining a surgeon and a parasite who

in their di" erent ways forced the unsuspecting

Soviet system to recognize its own hidden nature.

yurchak-critical aesthetics at the time of empire collapse - prigovs surgeon and kuryokhins parasite

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