OBERIU

The group began to take shape in 1925 under the unofficial name of “ Chinari ”.

The core of the future association (D. Harms, A. Vvedensky, N. Zabolotsky, I. Bakhterev) was formed in 1926 , when the Left Flank group emerged, in 1927 it became the Academy of Left Classics , and then OBERIU. On January 24, 1928, the Leningrad Press House hosted the first public speech of the Oberiuts - “ Three Left Hours ” - consisting, as the name implies, of three parts:

• first hour - performance of poets A. Vvedensky, D. Harms, N. Zabolotsky, K. Vaginov, I. Bakhterev;
• the second hour - showing the play based on the play by D. Harms “ Elizabeth Bam ” (composition by D. Harms, I. Bakhterev and B. Levin, sets and costumes by I. Bakhterev, the roles were played by Green (A. Ya. Goldfarb), Pavel Manevich, Yuri Warsaw, E. Vigilyansky, Babaeva and Etinger);
• the third hour - the screening of the film "The Meat Grinder", created by Alexander Razumovsky and Klimenti Mints .

The evening was led by A. Vvedensky.

Subsequently, oral speeches, each time subjected to sharp criticism in the press, became the main form of public existence of OBERIU. Attempts to publish a collective collection ended in failure.

In addition to the existence of the public, there was private life, regular meetings and conversations, the nature and intensity of which can be judged by the work of L. Lipavsky “Conversations”. Inside the association, there was actually a home circle (D. Harms, A. Vvedensky, L. Lipavsky, Ya. Druskin), which largely determined the direction of the artistic and philosophical search for the Oberiuts.

On April 1, 1930, the last public performance of the Oberiuts took place. Harms, Levin, Vladimirov and magician Pastukhov participated. A week later, the devastating article by Leo Nilvich (Nikolsky) was published in the newspaper Smena, describing the poetry of the Oberiuts as “abstruse juggling”, “protest against the dictatorship of the proletariat” and “poetry of the class enemy”. A month later, Leningrad magazine in their publication declared their work “hostile to our socialist construction,” and evening in a university dormitory equated a sortie of a reactionary group.

The last year OBERIU existed was 1931 , when Vvedensky, Kharms and Bakhterev were arrested on political affairs and exiled. Later, former members of the group continued to maintain personal friendships.

Of the participants in the OBERIU and the writers close to them, only Zabolotsky and Vaginov were able to publish books in the 1920-1930s (except for the richly published works for children).

Repressions (Kharms and Vvedensky died in custody in 1941-1942, Oleinikov was executed in 1937, Vaginov’s parents were deported and died), the war (L. Lipavsky and D. Levin died at the front) and the Leningrad blockade , during which they were lost many archives, led to the fact that a significant number of works of the Oberiuts did not survive. So, from the adult works of the early deceased Yu. Vladimirov, only the story “Athlete” is known, all non-children's works of D. Levin, including the novel “The Origin of Theocritus,” are lost, and many poems, plays and prose works of Vvedensky, including the novel "Killers you are fools." At the same time, the archive of D. Harms, stored by his wife Marina Malich and saved from destruction by the efforts of Jacob Druskin, became an extremely important manuscript collection.

Until 1956 (the Khrushchev thaw ), there could be no talk of publishing works of the Oberiuts. The exceptions were Zabolotsky’s poems, after a five-year camp imprisonment abandoning the old poetry, and Bakhterev’s official plays (continuing to write avant-garde stories and poems “on the table”).

After 1956, children's poems by Kharms and Vvedensky began to be reprinted in the USSR , and their other works began to be published in the West, largely thanks to the work of Mikhail Meilakh and Vladimir Earl .

In 1960, the existence of OBERIU was recalled by Lidia Chukovskaya in her famous book “In the Editor’s Laboratory”.

Starting from the second half of the 1980s ( perestroika ), the works of the Oberiuts were widely published in the USSR and continue to be published in Russia.

Igor Bakhterev continued to write poems and prose in Oberi spirit that were not intended for publication. In the late 1970s, he became close friends with transfourist poets ( Ry Nikonova , Sergey Sigei , Boris Konstruktor ), in 1978 Bakhterev's poems were first published abroad, and since 1980 he began to be regularly published in the Samizdat magazine Transponance . The first publication of Bakhterev’s poems and prose in the official Soviet press took place only in 1987 in the Riga journal Rodnik . He died in St. Petersburg on February 20, 1996.

Oberiuts in their manifesto declared: "Who are we?" And why are we? .. We are poets of a new attitude and new art ... In our work we expand and deepen the meaning of the subject and the word, but we do not destroy it. A specific object, purified from literary and everyday husks, is made the property of art. In poetry, a clash of verbal meanings expresses this subject with the precision of mechanics. ” The main ways of building the text are linguistic and speech anomalies, spelling errors, “fifth meaning”, refutation of one’s own words, fragmentation, lack of logic and others.

Oberiuts claimed that along with the existing four meanings of the subject (descriptive, emotional, target, and aesthetic) that reinforce the relationship between the person and the subject, it is necessary to introduce a “fifth meaning”, which is determined by the very fact of the existence of the subject and provides it with complete freedom, freeing from conditional connections. That is, the word is considered as an object, and the object as a word (for example, "taking the tip of the letter, I raise the word cabinet").

The most important principle in the poetics of Oberiuts is relativity. This principle is that when a subsequent fragment of a text refutes a previous one, the refutable element is not removed from the text. As an example, we can cite the beginning of Harms' story “The Four-legged Crow”: “The crow, in fact, had five legs, but this is not worth talking about.” There are even whole stories built on this principle, for example, Harms' story “Blue Notebook No. 10”. The story begins like this: "There was one red-headed man ...". Then we find out that this person did not have hair, ears, mouth or viscera. The story ends with the words: “There was nothing! So it’s not clear who we are talking about. Better we won’t talk about him. ”

As the poet and culturologist, researcher of Russian poetry Aleksei Mashevsky writes in his article “ Chinari Oberiuts ”:

The creativity of the Oberiut Chinareas was not at all of the nature of a "game of nonsense", "of a mind", as was customary to consider quite recently. They were worried about deep existential questions: the relation to time, to death, to the possibility of utterance, to the language itself, its suitability for describing the world.

These problems are reflected in the works of the existential philosopher Jacob Druskin . At the heart of his work is a view of the world, of man as an embodied contradiction: unification, identification, in principle, of non-identical principles. Drawing, in particular, on the discoveries of Husserl's phenomenology , he formulates a number of irrationalized paradoxes that underlie being.

Many of the principles he formulated are closely related to important points of Christianity; thus, the definition of the “Divine-human”, dual nature of Christ is reflected in his universal principle of “non-identical identity”.

The literary experiments of Oberiut writers, differing in their approach, are similar to the collision of elements of a traditional literary form with unexpected alogism , the appearance of a certain deviation in the text, creating a gap in the perception stereotype that allows you to look at reality “through” it, destroy the predefined image of perception (“ gestalt ” ), which forces the inclusion of consciousness in the forced work to restore the semantic integrity of the picture. This deviation echoes another principle of Druskin’s philosophy - “a small error in some equilibrium”.

The poetry of Alexander Vvedensky is based on working with the very structure of the language. It uses the usual dimensions (Pushkin, Derzhavin), vocabulary, familiar logical and speech structures, recognizable allusions, traditional form elements that form for the reader some external sounding environment, and at the same time does not allow the final semantic expression to take place, constantly knocking it into a collision in something close, but completely not provided by the language of concepts, words, in the gap between which a certain sensible, but usually unformulated, meaning is born.

In one of the conversations, the poet himself says so about his experiments in the field of language :

I doubted that, for example, a house, a summer house and a tower are connected and united by the concept of a building. Maybe the shoulder should be connected with four ... And I was convinced of the falsity of the old ties, but I can’t say what should be new.

The early poetry of Nikolai Zabolotsky is somewhat similar to the poetry of Vvedensky, namely, experiments in the lexical and semantic field of language. Also, relying on the poetic context, in particular, on the odic tradition of the 18th century , the poet at the same time updates it, introducing lexical, plot and other moves that are completely not provided for by the tradition. However, unlike Vvedensky’s poetry, his internal lexical clashes are still aimed at formulating some complete, albeit unexpected, thought or image.

Zabolotsky’s poetry is characterized by the involvement of themes and images related to nature, animals, and especially insects, close to Oleinikov’s poetry. However, this happens from a completely different perspective, not creating a metaphorical image, but a real, personal relationship.

The poetry of Nikolai Oleinikov is perceived by many as a parody, a satire in the spirit of Kozma Prutkov . However, this satire, these conditional everyday masks, this “haberdashery” language is just a props through which the living intonation of the poet himself suddenly appears, and at such moments of revitalization of the everyday situation with his own presence, what seemed ridiculous and ridiculous from the side suddenly becomes hopeless tragic and even scary.

One of the main themes of Nikolai Oleinikov is the theme stated in the poem “Cockroach”. This theme - a creature living in a meaningless world and dying in the course of some meaningless experiments, a creature completely insignificant, but in its ability to survive the tragedy of its own life equalized to the heroes of "high" tragedies - surprisingly echoes the work of Franz Kafka .

The work of Daniel Harms has much in common with the work of other Oberiuts. In addition to semantic nonsense, Harms uses a “mind” to construct new words. In general, his poetry is close to the poetry of Vvedensky, Zabolotsky, Vaginov. The main thing, nevertheless, what the author focuses on in his work is household details, his nonsense is often situational in nature. Most clearly this is in his prose works.

In his prose work, Harms is rather a whistle-blower of established systems, genres, revealing the absurdity of a situation or a familiar literary form.

• Nothing
• Dada
• Literature of the absurd
• Sadistic rhymes
• Anarchy

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