Soviet “Political Unconscious” in Dmitrii A. Prigov's Poetry of the 1970s-1980s

The article discusses early political lyrics by Dmitrii A. Prigov, the most famous literary representative of Moscow Conceptualism. Prigov's mock “reenactments” of Soviet ideological discourse are analyzed through the prism of Fredric Jameson's concept of political unconscious. Prigov's cycles such as Istoricheskie i geroicheskie pesni (Historical and Heroic Songs, 1974), Kul'turnye pesni (Cultural Songs, 1974), as well as his 1970s-1980s poems about the Militsaner, the center of a quasi-mythological representation of Soviet symbolic landscape, reveal, in resonance with Jameson's theory, (1) the text's functioning as a symbolic act; (2) the collision in its discursive field of different ideologemes; and (3) the shaping of the new, countercultural, ideology of form.