Abstract
The chapter traces the focal points in the artistic method of OBERIU (Ob’edinenie realnogo iskusstva, Union of Real Art) member Alexander Vvedensky. Written in the most ruthless years of Stalin’s regime, when the OBERIU group was totally marginalized and constantly under the risk of arrests and executions, Vvedensky’s poetry and dramaturgy achieve the heights of rigorous humor. In them eschatology and catastrophe evolve into anarchic play, which paradoxically, instead of depression, articulates almost athletic energy. Vvedensky’s poetics undermines not only the semiological coherence of language, but also the conventional anthropology of enunciation, inventing a fantastic nonsensical semantics, which is not simply an absurdity, but a philosophic discovery of excessive being and added time of performance despite and after death. It is exactly in the mode of dying and the proximity of death that the tropes of humor and laughter emerge to their utmost. If for Beckett the temporality of the catastrophe causes a complete anemia of action and proposition, and its protagonists remain stuck in this negative empty blankness of being, hence “theatre” there becomes the utmost minimum of language, being, landscape, movement, Vvedensky’s catastrophe conversely becomes a form of paradoxical and joyous after-life, surpassing the end of the world; it is the temporality and ontology of idiots who leap out of the dead world and arrest time due to their rigorous incapacity to comply with the apocalyptic mood. The chapter divines in Vvedensky’s writing crucial methods enabling to exert such an effect by means of poetic and performative language.
Alexander Vvedensky (1904–1941) was a poet and dramatist, a legendary figure of Leningrad culture, a principal member of the OBERIU group, Union of Real Art, founded in 1928. Together with Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Andrey Platonov, Vvedensky is one of the most radical innovators of the Russian language. He considered his own poetry a more powerful critique of reason than Kant’s. Vvedensky wrote several books for children. He was arrested in 1931 for belonging to the anti-Soviet faction of children’s writers and was sent into exile until he was released in 1936. In 1941 he was arrested again after being unable to board a crowded evacuation train. With other prisoners he was evacuated from Kharkov to Kazan and either died of pleuritis on the way or was accidentally shot by the guard. A substantial bulk of Vvedensky’s writing was lost. An important part of it was preserved due to the invaluable efforts of another member of the OBERIU group, Yakov Druskin. His complete works were published in 1993, edited by Michail Meilach (Vvedensky 1993). His first translation into English appeared in 2013, edited and translated by Eugene Ostashevsky (Vvedensky 2013).
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Notes
- 1.
OBERIU—Objedinenie Realnogo Iskusstva—Union of Real Art, founded in 1928 by Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky. An avant-garde collective of artists, poets, philosophers, theorists, musicians; many of its associates were arrested in the 1930s. They positioned themselves as the radical left. OBERIU became known for provocative performances and readings in the poetics of nonsense and the absurd. The group’s actions were treated as extreme even by some members of the avant-garde, such as Nickolay Zabolotsky. Moscow conceptualists considered OBERIU’s activity and its agents as their predecessors. The documentations of the group’s meeting can be traced in the diaries of Jacob Druskin (1999) and Leonid Lipavsky (1993).
- 2.
Leonid Fedorov, Vladimir Volkov. Besonders. Released 2005, Ulitka Records, Moscow.
- 3.
Yakov Druskin (1902–1980), Russian philosopher, art theorist, mathematician, theologist, pianist, musicologist, an informal member of the OBERIU group in the 1920s and 1930s. A disciple of N. O. Lossky, he was an ideologist of the OBERIU group, its theorist and biographer. Druskin outlived all other members of the group and, despite the harshest years of the Leningrad blockade, managed to save the archive and most of the manuscripts of the OBERIU members. Although he was isolated from European colleagues, when philosophic research was attacked in the post-revolutionary years of repression, Druskin developed his own philosophic edifice close to Kierkegaard and Husserl. As his principal gnoseological premise he claimed abstaining from judgment and provided a new approach to the issues of free will and predetermination. His philosophic oeuvres are gathered in his Diaries (Druskin 1999).
- 4.
Druskin defines an instant as the only opportunity of interrupting time with eternity. The task of an artist is, in searching for the instants, to prevent falling into time.
- 5.
In dodecaphony the hierarchic construction of tonality (tonic, dominant, subdominant) is cancelled, as long as in a 12-tone series each sound functionally equals the other. The dodecaphonic series becomes the formant of composition instead of the previous tonality, and forms within itself the logic of inter-serial gravity. Yet, the system of gravities in the 12-tone series is newly formed in each concrete composition and not preliminarily as in the tonal system.
- 6.
“Let the mouse run over the stone. Count only its every step. Only forget the word every, only forget the word step. Then each step will seem to be a new movement. Then, since you rightfully will have lost your ability to perceive a series of movements as something whole, which you had wrongly called step (you were confusing movement and time with space, you erred in superimposing them one over the other), movement as you see it will begin to break apart, it will arrive almost at zero. The shimmering will begin. The mouse will start to shimmer. Look around you: the world is shimmering (like a mouse)” (Vvedensky 2013, 74).
- 7.
Leonid Lipavsky (1904–1941), Soviet writer, philosopher and poet. Member of the OBERIU group. Together with Yakov Druskin, he is considered to be a theorist of the OBERIU movement; in the 1920s and 1930s OBERIU members gathered in his apartment. Like Kharms and Vvedensky, he wrote for children in the 1920s. His most well-known philosophic oeuvre is Investigation of Horror. He went missing at the Leningrad front in 1941.
- 8.
In his text “Zero and Zeero” (Nol’ i Nul’), Daniil Kharms compares the circle with the ideal form, with zero as the ideal number. He writes: “The symbol of a zeero is 0, whereas the symbol of a zero is a circle. In other words, zero is a circle. Our imaginary solar row can only be adequate to reality if it stops to be a straight line, but has to bend and curl. Ideally curling procedure should be constant and in case of incessant continuation the solar row will then turn in a circle. […] Try to see in a zero an entire numeric circle” (Kharms 1993, 116–117).
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Chukhrov, K. (2019). After Death Comes Humor: On the Poetics of Alexander Vvedensky. In: Mascat, J., Moder, G. (eds) The Object of Comedy. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_14
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