Collected Works, or Texts Selected and Discarded, or Under Сonstruction and Other Words by Boniface and German Lukomnikov as an Exercise in Authorial Self-Archiving

Ch. 5. P. 141–170.

Pavlovets M.

German Lukomnikov (who wrote under the pseudonym Boniface until 1994) is a poet whose work does not fit into any of the group poetics or movements in contemporary Russian literature. With equally good reasons, it has been studied in the context of conceptualism and the neo-avant-garde, minimalism and formal restrictive versification, of visual, auditory, performative and found poetry. His online Collected Works, or Texts Selected and Discarded, or Under Construction and Other Words are a rather unusual array of texts, some of which were not written by Lukomnikov but creatively appropriated by him in his framework of “plagi-art”. For a number of texts that emerged ad hoc or existed only in the oral form or in private communication, this appropriation means preservation. Together, the texts of varying genres, origin and genesis make up a hybrid corpus that is both an authorial collection, a diary—and an archive of uncensored contemporary culture.

Keywords: плагиат, plagiarism, Boniface, Герман Лукомников, Archive, исторический авангард, неоавангард, historical avant-garde, neo-avant-garde, self-archiving, самоархивирование, Collected works, German Lukomnikov, Readymade, Underground culture, Архив, Бонифаций, Собрание сочинений, культура андерграунда

In book

(Counter-)Archive: Memorial Practices of the Soviet Underground

Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.