Drawing on Agamben’s notion of zoe – the fact of something’s being alive – this study develops a theory of the zoegraphical to describe nonhuman life in autobiographical texts. The work focuses on the novels of the Russian poet, visual artist, and performer Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov (1940–2007), in whom zoegraphical narrative becomes a poetological strategy navigating between the avant-garde, totalitarianism, and posthumanism.