ABSTRACT
The last three decades have seen a surge of interest in the extraordinary Russian literary group OBERIU, often referred to as the “last” Soviet avant-garde circle. Scholars universally agree that there are many affinities between OBERIU’s works and European literary experiments of the 1920s and 1930s (Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, etc.), and that in many ways, Oberiuty went further than their European contemporaries, prefiguring much of what would happen in European letters after the war. At the same time, little attempt has been made to date to consider works of key OBERIU members in the light of their own theoretical positions. The essay gives an overview of OBERIU’s key departure points, while focussing on Aleksandr Vvedensky’s and Daniil Kharm’s overarching preoccupation with time as set against the Kant’s critique of human rationality. According to his own assertion, time was one of only three things Vvednsky was interested in (the other two being death and God), while seeking to overstep reason through his poetics of non-sense [bessmyslitsa]. The chapter argues that OBERIU’s poetic experiments radicalize a certain particularity of the Russian modernist strain that sets it aside from any of its European counterparts.
