The Last Soviet Avant-Garde

A comprehensive study of the OBERIU group of avant-garde Soviet writers.

This is a comprehensive study of a group of avant-garde Soviet writers who styled themselves OBERIU, 'The Association for Real Art'. Graham Roberts examines the work of OBERIU members in relation to the theories of formalists and the Bakhtin circle, and the wider movements of modernism and postmodernism.This is a comprehensive study of a group of avant-garde Soviet writers active in Leningrad in the 1920s and 1930s who styled themselves OBERIU, 'The Association for 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 Igor Bakhterev, as well as the group's most important 'fellow-traveller', Nikolay Oleinikov. 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.