|
Eugene Ostashevsky
OBERIU: Russian Absurdism of the 1930s
These translations aim to introduce readers of New American Writing
to the last, and least known, of the groups of the Russian avant-garde.
The writers of this group came of age with the Russian modernist impulse
already in its last throes, smothered by censorship both external and
self-imposed. Unlike their futurist predecessors, they had no chance and
they knew it. After the arrests that followed a burst of performance activity
around 1930, they worked in silence; by 1942 almost all were dead from
what might be characterized as unnatural causes.
In Russian,
they are called oberiuty, from the acronym OBERIU, standing for
The Union of Real Art: so they referred to themselves between 1927 and
1931. Western scholars sometimes speak of them as Russian absurdists,
because their work bears stylistic and existential similarities to what
later, with Beckett and Ionesco, became known as the Absurd. OBERIU
operated in Leningrad.
Its ringleaders were Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr
Vvedensky. Kharms (1905-1942) was tall. Vvedensky (1904-1941) was not.
Kharms cultivated the dress and manner of an English eccentric. Vvedensky
dressed modestly and had rotten teeth. There was nothing artistic in his
conduct save for a mania for cards. Kharms was into found objects, and
at one point assembled a huge metallic thingamajig in his room. “What
is this?” asked an astounded visitor. “A machine.” “What
kind of a machine?” “No kind. Just a machine.” “But
where did you get it?” “I put it together myself!” “But
what does it do?” “Nothing.” “Then why do you have
it?” “I just wanted a machine in my room.”1
Vvedensky, on the other hand, had almost no furniture. “Vvedensky
came over with a pint of vodka,” recorded a friend. “He drank
a half of it and sat quietly on the couch, saying only that he was saving
himself for the evening’s party.”2
Kharms wrote poetry, prose and plays. It
is his play Elizaveta Bam that, in the whole absurdist oeuvre,
is most reminiscent of Ionesco. Its plot consists of the arrest of a woman
for the murder of one of the people who have come to arrest her. The play
is full of non-sequiturs, circus acts, music and wild changes in tempo.
Both Elizaveta Bam and some of Kharms’s hilarious prose texts,
with their illogical action and grotesque, puppet-like violence and eroticism,
have appeared in English, in the translations of George Gibian and Neil
Cornwell.3 George Gibian has also translated Vvedensky’s
play Christmas at the Ivanovs’, but Vvedensky’s major
achievement—his poetry—has not been available for the English-speaking
reader until now.
Vvedensky once said that his writing has
only three themes: time, death, and God. On another occasion, he described
his intellectual project as follows:
I raised my hand against concepts, against initial generalizations
that no one previously had touched. Thereby I performed, you might say,
a poetic critique of reason – more fundamental than that other,
abstract [critique of Kant]. I doubted that, for instance, house, cottage
and tower come together under the concept of building. Perhaps, the
shoulder must be linked to the number four. I did it practically, in
my poems, as a kind of proof. And I convinced myself that the old relations
are false, but I don’t know what the new ones must be like. I don’t
even know whether they should form one system or many. And so my basic
sensation is that of disjointedness of time and fragmentation of space.
Since this contradicts reason, it means that reason does not comprehend
the world.4
His pieces are all long, several pages and
up, and often involve dialogue, or rather monologues of almost hallucinatory
intensity, by beings who have no essence save speech. Typical Vvedensky
anti-metaphors are “animals too are clocks” and “the sky
became empty and clean like the sky.” In Russian these illogical
combinations manage to be absolutely, unbearably tragic. He wrote poems
in one or just a few sittings and almost never corrected, using rhymes
and simple fast meters to aid the automatic-writing character of his process.
If another major oberiut poet, Nikolai
Zabolotsky (1903-1958), was an absurdist, it was despite his best intentions;
and his break with the group occurred, first and foremost, on theoretical
grounds. A son of an agricultural scientist, with an acute eye for detail,
in the 1920s Zabolotsky built a beautiful and ponderous style out of folkloric
and cubist elements. Around 1930 he embarked on poems in which animals
and people engage in profound philosophical discussions. His masterwork,
The Triumph of Agriculture, predicts that scientific communism
will liberate farm animals from mortality. Published in 1933, it encountered
a storm of vitriol: Zabolotsky, the critics claimed, is a counter-revolutionary,
cynically clearing his nostril upon everything that humanity holds dear!
In fact, it seems as if the poor poet did expect the Revolution to lead
to the liberation of nature from exploitation and death. He started moving
towards more traditional forms, a process greatly aided by six years of
hard labor (1938-1944).
Another member of the group, Nikolai Oleinikov
(1898-1937), specialized in “bad” poetry—in what may be
described, with Run DMC, as “not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning
good.” My favorite piece is about the vivisection of a cockroach
by heartless scientists, whose most pathetic moment is: “There, in
the shadow of a large cupboard, / abandoned by everyone, alone, / the
son babbles, Papa! Papa! / Poor son!” Oleinikov also left
a manuscript on number theory. He, Kharms and Vvedensky made a living
as children’s writers.
The group also included the philosophers
Leonid Lipavsky and Iakov Druskin; the talented and erudite poet / novelist
with the unfortunate pseudonym of Konstantin Vaginov; the poet Igor Bakhterev,
the director Doivber Levin and several others from the Radiks theater
company. Since Zabolotsky was the only poet to publish adult pieces, the
group made their work public in performances where poetry reading alternated
with circus acts, arguments, singing, screaming and general ruckus. After
one heated show, the newspapers took to accusing them, in increasingly
hysterical tones, of counter-revolutionary attitudes and activities. The
illogic of their work was seen as a deliberate attempt to confuse the
proletariat. At the end of 1931, Kharms and Vvedensky were arrested, incarcerated,
and sentenced to internal exile; however, they got out remarkably quickly,
serving only a year each.
When they returned, there were to be no
more performances. The oberiuty met informally, reading new work
to each other and conducting philosophical and not-so-philosophical conversations,
preserved for us by Lipavsky. In 1936, Vvedensky married and moved to
Kharkov, in the Ukraine. In 1937 the Great Purge started. Oleinikov, as
member of the Civil War generation that was the one of the targets of
the purge, was arrested and executed as Trotskyite terrorist and saboteur
of children’s literature. The publishing house where the oberiuty
worked got cleaned out. Zabolotsky was arrested as well.
In the summer of 1941, Germany invaded the
Soviet Union. There were fresh arrests of anyone deemed potentially subversive,
and Kharms and Vvedensky had political records. The Soviet police came
for Vvedensky during the evacuation of Kharkov. He died in December 1941,
apparently of dysentery in a cattle car headed for Siberia. Kharms, arrested
in Leningrad, feigned madness to escape the firing squad; instead, he
starved to death in a prison asylum during the first winter of the German
blockade. Lipavsky was killed in the trenches. The oberiut Iakov
Druskin, already in the state of dystrophy, walked across the mutilated
city to Kharms’s apartment. Kharms’s wife, Marina Malich, gave
Druskin a suitcase with Kharms’s and Vvedensky’s papers. He
tied the suitcase to a child’s sled and pulled it back home. This
is how the greater part of their surviving work came down to us.
1 V. Lifshitz, in Jean-Philippe Jaccard, Daniil Kharms
et la fin de l ’avant-garde russe (Bern: Peter Lang, 1991). Translated
into Russian by F. A. Perovskaia as Daniil Kharms i konets russkogo
avangarda, (Saint Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1995), p. 351.
2 Leonid Lipavskii. “Razgovory.” Logos,
vol. 4 (Moscow: Gnosis, 1993); pp. 7-75. Available online at http://www.ruthenia.ru/logos/number/1993-4.htm.
3 The Man with the Black Coat: Russia’s Lost Literature
of the Absurd. Ed. and trans. George Gibian. 2nd ed. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern UP, 1997. Daniil Kharms. Incidences. Trans. Neil Cornwell.
London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993.
4 Quoted in Lipavskii, p. 16.
Go
back
|
