The last Soviet avant-garde

by Graham Roberts

This is the first comprehensive study of the group of avant-garde Soviet writers active in Leningrad in the 1920s and 1930s who styled themselves OBERIU, 'The Association of Real Art'. Graham Roberts re-examines commonly held assumptions about OBERIU, its identity as a group, its aesthetics, and its place within the Russian and European literary traditions. He focuses on the prose and drama of group members Daniil Kharms, Aleksandr Vvedensky and Konstantin Vaginov; he also considers work by Nikolay Zabolotsky and lgor' Bakhterev, as well as the group's most important 'fellow-traveller', Nikolay Oleinikov, and he places OBERIU in the context of the aesthetic theories of the Russian Formalists and the Bakhtin Circle. Roberts concludes by showing how the self-conscious literature of OBERIU - its metafiction - occupies an important transitional space between modernism and postmodernism.