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to
Zapolyarnaya Pravda
(“The Truth Beyond the Arctic Circle”), the local daily, and the paper published it under the headline WHAT IS THIS WORLD COMING TO? It was a poorly organized, cliché-ridden rant that condemned Nadya’s contemporaries for being shallow and unmotivated, blamed this on all sorts of factors including the popularity of a transvestite singer on television, attributed Marx’s maxim that “social being determines consciousness” to the wisdom of Nadya’s mother, but concluded, incongruously, with a call to dare effect change because, after all, “It’s a wonderful life.” When I found the article, I was reassured to learn that Nadya had not come out of the womb quoting Theory, as I had at times suspected, but had been a haphazardly informed and typically judgmental adolescent—just an unusually active one.
    The triumphant publication of the article—no Tolokonnikov had ever been in print before—gave either Nadya or Andrei or both the idea that she could be a journalist. Moscow State University’s journalism department preferred its applicants with a few publications to their name. Andrei and Nadya collaborated on several pieces they submitted to a Krasnoyarsk paper as Nadya’s. There might, however, have been more Andrei than Nadya in them, for the editor rejected them, saying that journalism dealt in fact, not fantasy—an assertion that still appeared to offend Andrei’s sensibilities when he recounted the story to me seven years later. Nadya would not be applying to the journalism department.
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    I N THE MID-1990S, the mining giant Norilsk Nickel, by far the city’s largest employer, was privatized by a pair of emerging oligarchs. In a few years, the junior partner, Mikhail Prokhorov, decided to become the hands-on manager of the plant and the man who would modernize not only production but the very lives of workers. He inserted himself into Norilsk housing construction, the planning of Norilsk leisure, and the city’s cultural life.
    As it happened, Prokhorov was unusually close to his older sister, Irina, whose publishing enterprise he had started funding with some of the first money he made years earlier. Irina Prokhorova started and ran the country’s best and biggest intellectual publishing house, putting out books, a scholarly journal, and a more-popular intellectual magazine. In 2004, when Mikhail (who generally left the reading of books and other lofty pursuits to his sister) launched a culture foundation, he asked Irina to run it—and to bring the intellectual wealth of her publishing house to Norilsk. For years, when light started dawning in Norilsk, Irina would put together a large group of Moscow writers, artists, and photographers and airlift them to Norilsk for weeks of performances, lectures, and seminars. This was how Nadya saw Prigov. Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov was a visual artist, a performance artist, and a Conceptualist poet, and he sounded, looked, and moved like no one Nadya had ever seen before. He once explained, “I don’t produce text, I produce artistic behavior.” He wrote poems like:
    I’ve spent my whole life doing the dishes
    And writing highfalutin poetry
    From this, my wisdom and judiciousness
    Therefore my character, so mild and steady
    I understand the water flowing from my faucet
    Outside my window, it’s the people and the state
    If I don’t like something, I just forget about it
    I keep my mind on things that I can tolerate. *
    He took turgid Soviet language, which Nadya had been unsuccessfully trying to use, and made it his own: he bent it, molded it, made it funny, and even more incredibly, made it poignant. This made Prigov and the Moscow Conceptualist school different from any writers Nadya had read or seen before: they did not turn up their noses or turn their faces away from official Soviet culture but, acknowledging its thoroughly false nature, made hay—that is, art—out of it. They reappropriated Soviet expressions