Easter Archetype in the Novella “The Old Woman” by Daniil Kharms

This article distinguishes the avant-garde group OBERIU and its predecessors, led by the poets Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky, and Nikolai Zabolotsky and performing openly in Leningrad between 1925 and 1930, from the informal circle of the 1930s, which also included the poet Nikolai Oleinikov and the philosophers Leonid Lipavsky and Yakov Druskin. Prevented from making their writings public, in 1933–1934 members of this underground circle of friends documented their interactions in Lipavsky’s Conversations. A history of the two overlapping groups, emphasizing their social aspects, is followed by a synopsis of the philosophy of the circle. The article argues that the montage-based composition paradigms of the avant-garde, replacing determinism, causality, and rationality with contiguity and the non sequitur, are reflected in Kharmsian play with numbers and in his concept of the “real,” as well as in the phenomenological methods of Druskin and Lipavsky, which seek perspectival, qualitative, and embodied knowledge that science cannot grant.

Download Full-text

Zabolotsky, Nikolai Alexeevich (1903–1958)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem700-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Kristina Syvarth

Keyword(s):

Life Writing ◽

Socialist Realism ◽

State University ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Pedagogical Institute ◽

Poetry Reading ◽

Daniil Kharms

Nikolai Alexeevich Zabolotsky was a Russian poet and translator, and a member of the avant-garde absurdist group Oberiu (a modified acronym for Obedinenie Realnogo Iskusstva [Association for Real Art]). He was born in Kizicheskaya Sloboda on 7 May 1903, and died in Moscow on 14 October 1958. Zabolotsky is best known for his work with the late avant-garde, alongside Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky in their absurdist group, Oberiu. In 1920 Zabolotsky moved away from his family in Urzhum to Moscow to study medicine and philology at Moscow University. Only a year later he moved to Petrograd (now St Petersburg) and enrolled in the Pedagogical Institute of St Petersburg State University. After graduating in 1925, Zabolotsky met Kharms and Vvedensky at a poetry reading and in 1928 they formed Oberiu, a group that gained notoriety for their nonsensical verse and absurdist theatrical productions. By 1931 Oberiu’s activity began to decline under the pressure of the Stalinist purges and the officially sanctioned Socialist Realism. In 1938 Zabolotsky was arrested in one of Stalin’s purges for his anti-Leninist philosophic views and sent to Siberia. He spent much of his time in Siberia working on his translation of the Kievian Rus’ epic, The Lay of Igor’s Host. Twelve years later he was released, and he moved to Moscow where he spent the remainder of his life writing translations and poetry.

Download Full-text