Alexander Vvedensky, co-founder with the poet
Daniil Kharms of OBERIU, a small avant-garde collective
in late-1920s Soviet Leningrad, is the least known of
major Russian twentieth-century poets. He stands apart
like a dark star in a constellation that includes
Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky,
and Khlebnikov. Younger than these poets by a decade,
Vvedensky came of age under the Soviet system, when the
language used to describe reality appeared to have lost
all literal meaning. He saw his task to be “the poetic
critique of reason” and claimed “time, death, and God”
as his main themes. His poetry is suffused with a
philosophical lyricism that recalls the ending of
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It can
also get quite hilarious: the author had a day job as a
children’s writer. After incarceration from 1931 to 1933
for “literary sabotage,” Vvedensky kept his poetry
private, sharing it only with Kharms and others in their
tiny underground circle of writers and philosophers.
When war broke out in 1941, the authorities rearrested
the pair as potential subversives: Kharms died in a
prison asylum and Vvedensky in a prison transport. Both
were only thirty-seven years old. Their manuscripts were
published during the collapse of the Soviet Union, half
a century after the deaths of the authors; An Invitation
for Me to Think is Vvedensky’s first collection to
appear in English and includes the now celebrated poetry
of the 1930s in prizewinning translations by America’s
foremost OBERIU specialists.
|
|