Oberiu: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism

The three writers of OBERIU, a group active between 1927 and 1930, were all persecuted by Stalin: Alexander Vvedensky died on a prison train in 1941, Daniil Kharms died of starvation in a prison psychiatric hospital in 1942, and Nikolai Zabolotsky spent eight years in exile, despite having produced Stalinist verse ""of unprecedented quality."" Editor Ostashevsky, himself a poet (Iterature; Infinite Recursor, or the Bride of DJ Spinoza) introduces the three as ""sometimes described as Russia's last avant-garde""-since the pressure from Stalin was all-seeing and unrelenting. He includes three poets not part of the group but associated with it: Nikolai Oleinikov, Leonid Lipavsky and Yakov Druskin, and the result is a representative collection of a major movement (from which, as Ostashevsky points out, a great deal of work has been lost or destroyed), much of it translated for the first time by Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich (The Present Work). For anyone interested in Soviet literature, this book fills an enormous gap. It also presents some beautiful, heartbreaking poetry.