Typographomania: On Prigov’s Typewritten Experiments NARIMAN SKAKOV “T he instruments we use for writing, among other things, define our thoughts.” 1 With this proposal, neatly printed on Rasmus Malling-Hansen’s writing ball—the world’s first commercially produced typewriter—the partially blind Friedrich Nietzsche postulated that it is media practices that have the most direct influence on the epistemic process. The material object registering the idea to some extent determines the semantic vector of every given statement. In the twentieth century, Marshall McLuhan repeated this thought more laconically and assertively: “The medium is the message.” 2 Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov’s cycle “Appeals to Citizens” (1985–87) is a distinct example of the late Soviet avant-garde, in which the problem of mediality reached a level nearing apotheosis: the content fades into the background as the medium through which it is presented evolves into the essential conceptual element of the project. 3 Typed on a typewriter and printed on copy paper, “Appeals to Citizens” challenged both traditional and underground writing practices that predominated in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The mediatic character of the project, which can be described as an extreme form of the process of the dramatization of the scene of writing, leads to the ultimate destruction and renegotiation of the signifying function of words. 4 In some sense, the theoretical core of the appeals lies wholly in their ambition to redefine communicative conventions as such. The project took the form of flimsy scraps of cheap paper printed with the compact texts of the artist’s one- to four-line appeals, or messages and recommendations addressed Translated by Alice E. M. Underwood With sincere thanks to Matteo Bertelé, Irina Bogomolova, Nadezhda Burova, Elizaveta Butakova, Monika Greenleaf, Mark Lipovetsky, Jesse Savage, Andre Seibel, Alice E. M. Underwood, and the anonymous readers for The Russian Review for their very helpful comments, corrections, and help with access to archival materials during the writing of this article. 1 Quoted in Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, 1999), 200. 2 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York, 1965), 7. 3 Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov, “Obrashcheniia k grazhdanam,” in his Obrashcheniia Dmitriia Aleksanycha (Moscow, 1996), 81, 82. Prigov also refers to the project as “Obrashcheniia Dmitriia Aleksanycha” and “Obrashcheniia Dmitriia Aleksandrovicha Prigova k narodu.” 4 See, in this issue, Mark Lipovetsky and Ilya Kukulin, “‘The Art of Penultimate Truth’: Dmitri Prigov’s Aesthetic Principles,” 190. The Russian Review 75 (April 2016): 241–63 Copyright 2016 The Russian Review