| Popis: |
The rapid process of getting to grips with the literary heritage of the OBERIU group, which has marked scholarship in the field of modern Russian literature over the last two decades, caught researchers unawares. On the one hand, they have been confronted by a huge body of newly discovered texts of obvious originality, whose organic kinship with the poetic trends of the Russian avantgarde is plain to see. On the other hand, it was soon obvious that scholarly techniques (even those based on avantgarde poetics) were inapplicable when it came to describing a considerable part of OBERIU work. While the prose and dramatic pieces of Kharms and Vvedensky fitted comparatively easily into the classifications available to literary scholars and were immediately labelled a phenomenon analogous to the ‘literature of the absurd’ which had chronologically anticipated it,2 — the verse texts of the Oberiuty could not be handled, and still cannot be handled, with the tools at present available to the literary historian. Specific discussion of individual texts has, in OBERIU studies, been limited to prose works, whereas for the analysis of the recently published poems by Kharms and Vvedensky (and of Vaginov), commentators have invariably been faced with the absence of any ‘key’ which would unlock the meaning of these works. Hence the seemingly deep-rooted feeling that it is fruitless to search for a ‘key’ to the understanding of the works of the Oberiuty. |
