OBERIU (Russian: ОБэРИу - Объединение реального искусства; English: the Union of Real Art or the Association for Real Art) was a short-lived avant-garde collective of Russian Futurist writers, musicians, and artists in the 1920s and 1930s. The group coalesced in the context of the "intense centralization of Soviet Culture" and the decline of the avant garde culture of Leningrad, as "leftist" groups were becoming increasingly marginalized.[1]
Founded in 1928 by Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky, OBERIU became notorious for provocative performances which included circus-like stunts, readings of what was perceived as nonsensical verse, and theatrical presentations, such as Kharms's Elizabeth Bam, that foreshadowed the European Theatre of the Absurd. The presentations took place in venues ranging from theaters and university auditoriums to dormitories and prisons. The group's actions were derided as "literary hooliganism" in the ever-more conservative press of the late 1920s. It was chastised even more in the early 1930s, and many of its associates were arrested. The OBERIU has often been called "the last Soviet avant-garde."[2]
The Russian artist Kazimir Malevich gave the OBERIU shelter in his newly created arts institute, letting them rehearse in one of the auditoriums. It is reported that he said to the young "Oberiuty" (as they are called in Russian): "You are young trouble makers, and I am an old one. Let's see what we can do."[citation needed] Malevich also gifted a book of his own ("God Is Not Cast Down") to founder Daniil Kharms with the relevant inscription "Go and stop progress!"
Decline
In the 1930s, Socialist Realism and Stalin's purges precluded the formation of any such "leftist" or "radical" public artistic groupings. After about 1931, The OBERIU held no more public performances, and most of those involved showed their writing only to a small circle of friends, though Zabolotsky went on to become a marginally accepted Soviet poet.
Though the group was held together for a while by common interest, some split away. Zabolotsky seems to have had a falling out with Vvedensky. In the 1930s Kharms and Vvedensky became more closely involved with a group of friends who met semi-regularly for what they called "conversations."[citation needed]Yakov Druskin, a Christian philosopher and music-theorist (he wrote on Bach, Schoenberg and Webern), was a key member of this group. Druskin and his friend Leonid Lipavsky (a children's writer under the name of Leonid Savelyev, and an amateur mathematician and author of philosophical tracts) had known Alexander Vvedensky in high-school, and had become friends with Kharms and Zabolotsky as well. Lipavsky actually wrote down a number of the "conversations." Nikolay Oleynikov, an editor at the children's publishing house which had long employed the young poets of the OBERIU as writers and translators of children's literature, became part of this group by the mid-thirties.
This later grouping, which had no public outlet, is generally called the "chinari" (i.e. "the titled ones") group in Russian literary scholarship, though it is uncertain that they ever formalized a name for the group, nor that they called themselves "chinari" with any consistency. Thus, the names "OBERIU" and "chinari" are somewhat interchangeable in the scholarship. The borders between the two groups are (and were) permeable, and the only basic continuity is the presence of Kharms and Vvedensky.
Influence
Though short-lived, the OBERIU seems to have had lasting effects on Russian culture. Since the late 1980s a kind of cult fervor has grown in Russia around these long-forgotten writers. And, in fact, the ideas and art of the OBERIU had been influential even in the 1960s and 1970s, in what is called the "unofficial" art world of the Soviet Union. Some writers and artists of that period would proudly admit the influence of the OBERIU, in others it is clear enough. The OBERIU was seen as something of a missing link from the old Russian avant-garde to the new one. Poets like Genrikh Sapgir, Alexei Khvostenko, Anri Volokhonsky, Lev Rubinstein, Dmitri Prigov, Timur Kibirov, Eduard Limonov were certainly familiar with the OBERIU writers through "samizdat" publications circulating in the underground art scene, and their writing reflects that knowledge, though in very different ways for all of them. Leningrad avant garde musical group N.O.M. borrows heavily from OBERIU movement citing Kharms and Oleynikov as lyrical influences. They paid homage to Kharms, Oleynikov by releasing An Album Of Real Art with songs based on their lyrics. Novosibirsk punk rock musician Egor Letov cited Vvedensky as an influence for his lyrics.
In English
An anglophone edition of OBERIU writings translated by Eugene Ostashevsky, Matvei Yankelevich, Genya Turovskaya, Thomas Epstein and Ilya Bernstein was published by the Northwestern University Press in 2006. Several translations of Kharms's short stories, notebooks, letters, poems and diaries have been published over the years, for instance by George Gibian (Norton Library, 1974), Matvei Yankelevich (Overlook Press, 2007), Anthony Anemone and Peter Scotto (Academic Studies Press, 2013) and most recently Alex Cigale (Northwestern University Press, 2017). Kharms's poems were also translated by Roman Turovsky.[3] Poems by Kharms (8), Vvedensky (1) and Zabolotsky (6) are included in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry edited by Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski published 2015.
References and sources
References
↑ Kharms, Daniil. Today I Wrote Nothing. 2009, p21-23
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was a Ukrainian avant-garde artist and art theorist, whose pioneering work and writing had a profound influence on the development of non-objective art in the 20th century. Born in Kyiv to an ethnic Polish family, his concept of Suprematism sought to develop a form of expression that moved as far as possible from the world of natural forms (objectivity) and subject matter in order to access "the supremacy of pure feeling" and spirituality. Malevich is considered to be part of the Ukrainian avant-garde that was shaped by Ukrainian-born artists who worked first in Ukraine and later over a geographical span between Europe and America.
Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia and its émigrés and to Russian-language literature. The roots of Russian literature can be traced to the Middle Ages, when epics and chronicles in Old East Slavic were composed. By the Age of Enlightenment, literature had grown in importance, and from the early 1830s, Russian literature underwent an astounding golden age in poetry, prose and drama. Romanticism permitted a flowering of poetic talent: Vasily Zhukovsky and later his protégé Alexander Pushkin came to the fore. Prose was flourishing as well. Mikhail Lermontov was one of the most important poets and novelists. The first great Russian novelist was Nikolai Gogol. Then came Ivan Turgenev, who mastered both short stories and novels. Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy soon became internationally renowned. Other important figures of Russian realism were Ivan Goncharov, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin and Nikolai Leskov. In the second half of the century Anton Chekhov excelled in short stories and became a leading dramatist. The beginning of the 20th century ranks as the Silver Age of Russian poetry. The poets most often associated with the "Silver Age" are Konstantin Balmont, Valery Bryusov, Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolay Gumilyov, Sergei Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Marina Tsvetaeva. This era produced some first-rate novelists and short-story writers, such as Aleksandr Kuprin, Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin, Leonid Andreyev, Fyodor Sologub, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Alexander Belyaev, Andrei Bely and Maxim Gorky.
Daniil Ivanovich Kharms was an early Soviet-era Russian avant-gardist and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist.
The Russian avant-garde was a large, influential wave of avant-garde modern art that flourished in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, approximately from 1890 to 1930—although some have placed its beginning as early as 1850 and its end as late as 1960. The term covers many separate, but inextricably related, art movements that flourished at the time; including Suprematism, Constructivism, Russian Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, Zaum and Neo-primitivism. Many of the artists who were born, grew up or were active in what is now Belarus and Ukraine, are also classified in the Ukrainian avant-garde.
Cubo-Futurism was an art movement that arose in early 20th century Russia, defined by its amalgamation of the artistic elements found in Italian Futurism and French Analytical Cubism. Cubo-Futurism was the main school of painting and sculpture practiced by the Russian Futurists. In 1913, the term ‘Cubo-Futurism’ first came to describe works from members of the poetry group ‘Hylaeans,’ as they moved away from poetic Symbolism towards Futurism and zaum, the experimental “visual and sound poetry of Kruchenykh and Khlebninkov”. Later in the same year the concept and style of ‘Cubo-Futurism’ became synonymous with the works of artists within Russian post-revolutionary avant-garde circles as they interrogated non-representational art through the fragmentation and displacement of traditional forms, lines, viewpoints, colours, and textures within their pieces. The impact of Cubo-Futurism was then felt within performance art societies, with Cubo-Futurist painters and poets collaborating on theatre, cinema, and ballet pieces that aimed to break theatre conventions through the use of nonsensical zaum poetry, emphasis on improvisation, and the encouragement of audience participation.
Nikolay Alekseyevich Zabolotsky was a Soviet and Russian poet and translator. He was a Modernist and one of the founders of the Russian avant-garde absurdist group Oberiu.
Productivism is an early twentieth-century art movement that, like Constructivism and Suprematism, is characterized by its spare geometry, limited color palette, and Cubist and Futurist influences. Aesthetically, it also looks similar to work by Kazimir Malevich and the Suprematists.
Russian Futurism is the broad term for a movement of Russian poets and artists who adopted the principles of Filippo Marinetti's "Manifesto of Futurism," which espoused the rejection of the past, and a celebration of speed, machinery, violence, youth, industry, destruction of academies, museums, and urbanism; it also advocated the modernization and cultural rejuvenation.
Alexander Ivanovich Vvedensky was a Russian poet and dramatist with formidable influence on "unofficial" and avant-garde art during and after the times of the Soviet Union. Vvedensky is widely considered as one of the most original and important authors to write in Russian in the early Soviet period. Vvedensky considered his own poetry "a critique of reason more powerful than Kant's."
Anna Gerasimova, also known by her nickname Umka, is a Russian rock singer-songwriter, the leader of the group Umka and Bronevik. She is also a poet, literary translator, literature researcher, traveler, and a significant person in the Russian hippie movement.
Michael Vasilyevich Matyushin was a Russian painter and composer, leading member of the Russian avant-garde. In 1910–1913 Matyushin and his wife Elena Guro (1877–1913) were key members of the Union of the Youth, an association of Russian Futurists. Matyushin, a professional musician and amateur painter, studied physiology of human senses and developed his own concept of the fourth dimension connecting visual and musical arts, a theory that he put to practice in the classrooms of Leningrad Workshop of Vkhutein and INHUK (1918–1934) and summarized in his 1932 Reference of Colour. Matyushin conducted experiments at his Visiology Center (Zorved) to demonstrate that expanding visual sensitivity from retinian optical centers would enable the discovery of "new organic substance and rhythm in the apprehension of space." He tried to teach himself and his students to see with both eyes, each independently, and to widen the field of their vision. He describes some of his work and ideas in a long essay titled "An Artist's Experience of the New Space."
Yuri Alexeyevich Ardashev is a Russian theatre director, actor, and professional drummer. Opera La voix humaine by Francis Poulenc, directed by Yuri Ardashev, became the nominee of the national award "Golden Mask" (2009) in the categories "Best Performance", "Best Actress".
Ukrainian avant-garde is a term widely used to refer the most innovative metamorphosises in Ukrainian art from the end of 1890s to the middle of the 1930s along with associated artists. Broadly speaking, it is Ukrainian art synchronized with the international avant-garde in sculpture, painting, literature, cinema, theater, stage design, graphics, music, architecture. Some well-known Ukrainian avant-garde artists include: Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Archipenko, Vladimir Tatlin, Sonia Delaunay, Vasyl Yermylov, Alexander Bogomazov, Aleksandra Ekster, David Burliuk, Vadym Meller, and Anatol Petrytsky. All were closely connected to the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, and Odessa by birth, education, language, national traditions or identity. The first formal artistic group to call itself "Avangarde" (Avant-garde) which was founded in Kharkiv in 1925. The term, "Ukrainian Avant-Garde", concerning painting and sculpture during Soviet censorship, was used during discussion at Tatlin's dream exhibition. Curated by Parisian art historian Andréi Nakov, in London, 1973, the exhibition showcased works of Ukrainian artists Vasyl Yermylov and Alexander Bogomazov. The first international avant-garde exhibitions in Ukraine, which included French, Italian, Ukrainian and Russian artists, were presented in Odessa and Kyiv at the Izdebsky Salon; the pieces were later exhibited in St. Petersburg and Riga. The cover of "Izdebsky Salon 2" (1910–11) contained abstract work by Wassily Kandinsky.
Nikolay Makarovich Oleynikov was a Russian editor, avant-garde poet and playwright who was arrested and executed by the Soviets for subversive writing. During his writing career, he also used the pen names Makar Svirepy, Nikolai Makarov, Sergey Kravtsov, NI chief engineer of the mausoleums, Kamensky and Peter Shortsighted.
Gennady Samoilovich Gor was a Russian writer and science fiction author of the Soviet Union.
Numbers is a novel by Victor Pelevin first published in 2003 in a collection of stories «Тhe Dialectics of the Transition Period ».
Vera Ermolaeva was a Russian painter, graphic artist and illustrator who participated in the Russian avant-garde movement.
Kharms is a Russian-Lithuanian-Macedonian biographical film about the Russian poet Daniil Kharms directed by Ivan Bolotnikov. Its planned release date was 2 November 2017. It received the awards for Best Cinematography and Best Screenplay at the Shanghai International Film Festival in 2017.
Aleksei Alekseevich Morgunov was a Russian Avant-Garde painter. His works were originally in the Neo-Primitivist style, but became influenced by Fauvism. Together with Kazimir Malevich and Ivan Kliun, he created a style known as "Februaryism". He later took up Neo-Classicism, then was forced to adopt the Socialist Realism model.
Eugene Ostashevsky is a Russian-American writer, poet, translator and professor at New York University.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
