The Last Soviet Avant-Garde
OBERIU - Fact, Fiction, Metafiction

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

Graham Roberts (Author)

9780521482837, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 June 1997

292 pages
21.6 x 14 x 2.1 cm, 0.52 kg

'This book reveals perhaps for the first time the significance and achievement of a number of writers more of less closely connected with the OBERIU group centred in Leningrad in the late 1920s and the 1930s.' New Theatre Quarterly

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.

Acknowledgements
Notes on transliteration and convention
Introduction: OBERIU - the last Soviet avant-garde
1. Authors and authority
2. Rereading reading
3. Language and representation
Conclusion: OBERIU - between modernism and postmodernism?
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]