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show was preceded by a series of collective soul-searching sessions during which each participant strove to identify what he believed in. Petya found this approach unnervingly and embarrassingly modernist. Here was another complication: these philosophy students (and one physicist) wanted to use their intellectual tools to deconstruct what they were confronting, but the shifty and shifting language resisted deconstruction. In the summer of 2007, they went to see Prigov.
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    P RIGOV LIKED THEM —of course he did—and happily agreed to perform with them. This was to be Voina’s first real action, after six months of talking all the time, and once throwing cats (actual live stray cats) over the counter at McDonald’s in a joint action with the art group Bombily (“Gypsy Cabs”), which was really just Kulik’s stepson Anton Nikolaev, a former student who emailed me links to footage of Voina’s actions. Voina called him the Crazy One.
    Prigov was going to get inside a fireproof metal safe and Voina members were to carry the safe with the poet up twenty-two floors in the main building in Moscow State University. The entire time, Prigov was to be in conversation with himself, presumably in his usual melodic, prayerlike manner. He wrote a piece to launch his monologue:
    The image of him who sits in the closet, in a shell, in a case, is long familiar. He has gone into hiding, he has gone underground, he is doing his work in secret; the work of his soul and of his spirit is concealed from outside view. He is like Saint Jerome in his cave when the ray of Providence enters to take him up to the heavens. So has the man in the closet waited long enough for the moment of his ascension, when he shall be taken up to the twenty-second floor and this shall be his reward for the pain and suffering inflicted by the world and for the feats of his spirit, as yet undisclosed. No plain worker of the ordinary physical world—no one whose job it is to transfer regular physical or fleshly burdens from one place to another—could be entrusted with the labors of this ascension. It would be a day’s work for them, whether their remuneration was miserly or generous. No, the higher power demanded the untrained hands of those for whom this labor would be a heroic feat, the work not of muscle but of soul and spirit.
    The piece was called
Ascension
and reflected the spirit of excessive symbolism with which Voina would imbue its first action. Moscow State University’s main building, one of seven Moscow skyscrapers modeled on the Manhattan Municipal Building in a blatant act of architectural plagiarism, is one of the city’s tallest buildings, sitting atop its highest hill. So the top of that building is truly as high as one could rise in the Russian capital. Several thousand gulag inmates were used in the construction of the building, and the twenty-second floor actually housed a temporary
lagpunkt
(labor camp unit) when work inside the building was under way. Although the philosophy department was located in a different building, the main building still symbolized all of the university—and all of Russian education, and all of Russian knowledge, and much of Russia’s ambition. And it would be by the tender, untrained hands of former and current Moscow State University students (not unlike the untrained hands of inmates who had built the university) that Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov would finally be installed at the pinnacle of Russian culture, albeit in a fireproof safe.
    They could not find a fireproof safe. They decided to make do with an oak wardrobe—homey and not as heavy as a safe, but a solidly symbolic enclosure still. On July 6, 2007, Voina waited for Prigov in a Moscow bookstore café. Prigov was two hours late.
    The he called, laughing: “I have somehow landed in a hospital. I’m in intensive care.” Voina went to see him. He seemed to think the whole thing was pretty funny, and so did the young people who crowded around his bed: