THE CATEGORY OF EMPTINESS IN DMITRY PRIGOV’S SOVIET TEXTS

The purpose of the work is to identify the main creative principle of the conceptual poet Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov, who was a member of the Moscow Romantic conceptualism group in the late 1970s — mid-1980s. The article shows that the main object of Prigov’s poetic searches was Soviet reality and the literature of socialist realism. Using the material of pseudo-Soviet texts, the poet demonstrated that the Soviet man was surrounded by a universal emptiness, that all the ideas and ideals of Soviet life were empty and aimless. It is shown that Prigov totally devastated all the components of the literature of socialist realism — from the idea, composition, plot, imaginative system to the style and language that had lost their individual origin. Prigov typified the Soviet in order to reveal its substantial and aesthetic primitivism.