ABOUT THIS BOOK

OBERIU is an anthology of short works by three leading Russian absurdists: Alexander Vvedensky, Daniil Kharms, and Nikolai Zabolotsky. Between 1927 and 1930, the three made up the core of an avant-garde literary group called OBERIU (from an acronym standing for The Union of Real Art). It was a movement so artfully anarchic, and so quickly suppressed, that readers only began to discover its strange and singular brilliance three decades after it was extinguished—and then only in samizdat and émigré publications.

Some called it the last of the Russian avant-garde, and others called it the first (and last) instance of Absurdism in Russia. Though difficulty to pigeon-hole, OBERIU and the pleasures of its poetry and prose are, with this volume, at long last fully open to English-speaking readers. Skillfully translated to preserve the weird charm of the originals, these poems and prose pieces display all the hilarity and tragedy, the illogical action and puppetlike violence and eroticism, and the hallucinatory intensity that brought down the wrath of the Soviet censors. Today they offer an uncanny reflection of the distorted reality they reject.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY is a master teacher of the humanities in the General Studies program at New York University. In 2003 he won the Wytter Bynner Foundation Translation Prize.

MATVEI YANKELEVICH is a doctoral student in comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the editor of the Eastern European Poets Series for Ugly Duckling Presse, where he also co-edits 6x6 magazine.

REVIEWS

"For anyone intersted in Soviet literature, this book fills an enormous gap. It also presents some beautiful, heartbreaking poetry." —Publishers Weekly

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"The work of Oberiu is as relevant to our moment as when it was written." —The Believer

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"Oberiu is as relevant today as ever." —BookForum

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
Acknowledgments 000
Editor's Introduction 000
Note to the Reader 000
Alexander Vvedensky 
Kuprianov and Natasha 000 
I Regret That I'm Not a Beast 000
Frother 000 
A Certain Quantity of Conversations, or The Completely Altered Nightbook 000 
Elegy 000 
Where. When. 000 
 
Daniil Kharms 
The Story of Sdygr Appr 000 
The Ewe 000 
Thing 000 
The Measure of Things 000 
The Saber 000 
Notnow 000 
To Ring To Fly (Third Cisfinite Logic) 000 
The Werld 000 
An Evening Song to She Who Exists by My Name 000 
The Daughter of Patruliov 000 
Before Coming to See You 000 
The Constancy of Dirt and Joy 000 
An American Story 000 
Fenorov in America 000
Kolpakov, Braggart 000
Anton Antonovich Shaved Off His Beard 000 
The Career of Ivan Yakovlevich Antonov 000 
Holiday 000 
The Street Incident 000 
On the Death of Kazimir Malevich 000 
One Fat Man 000
Death of a Little Old Man 000 
The New Mountain Climbers 000
The Blue Notebook 000 
One Man Fell Asleep 000 
A Magazine Article 000 
A Man Once Walked Out of His House 000
How I Was Visited by Messengers 000 
Passacaglia 1 000 
Maltonius Olbren 000 
The Four-Legged Crow 000 
The Adventure of Katerpillar 000
 
Nikolai Zabolotsky 
The Signs of the Zodiac Go Dark 000 
The Temptation 000 
The Triumph of Agriculture 000 
The Battle of Elephants 000 
The Test of the Will 000 
The Poem of Rain 000 
Time 000
 
Nikolai Oleinikov 
In Service of Science 000
Gluttony: A Ballad 000 
To a Lady Unwilling to Renounce Consumption of Meat from Cherkassy 000 
An Epistle to a Theatrical Actress 000 
For the Recovery of Heinrich 000 
Charles Darwin 000 
The Fly 000 
Zeros 000
 
Leonid Lipavsky 
Water Tractatus 000
 
Yakov Druskin 
Death 000 
Letter to Kharms 000 
The End of the World 000
 
Notes 000 
Works Cited 000

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