Stop Making Sense

"Art is a cupboard," writer Daniil Kharms declared on behalf of the riotous aesthetes known as OBERIU in late 1920s Leningrad, understatement hardly being a hallmark of a group whose acronym stood for "The Association of Real Art." With a penchant for commandeering student hostels, army barracks and the meeting rooms of classical music societies for their Absurdist productions, OBERIU in full-scale performance mode was not to be tussled with lightly: Russian literature was ripe to be remade, and woe to anyone in the Stalinist era who believed a Pushkin novel was enough to get them through the night any longer.

This performance, which has become central to OBERIU (pronounced O-burr-oo) lore, took place at Leningrad's Press Club in late January 1928. True to his word, Kharms was rolled out on stage perched atop an enormous cupboard, upon which he remained as he read his verse and declaimed some of the group's favorite sayings. "Poems aren't pies," he announced, to blank stares, dubious sloganeering counting for something of an OBERIU virtue. "We aren't herring!"

Next up was poet Nikolay Zabolotsky, who elected to recite while standing beside a trunk, dressed in grimy military attire. He then was upstaged by his rival, Aleksandr Vvedensky, who came bolting out of the wings on a tricycle, which he dismounted with an acrobatic flourish in order to more comfortably expound on the nature of death (his favorite topic). Kharms's relentlessly violent play Elizaveta Bam followed, and the evening was brought to a close with the screening of the not-so-subtle experimental movie Film No. I: Meatgrinder and a brief--very brief--question-and-answer session. Reaction was unfavorable, to say the least. Before long, press notes deriding OBERIU performances were commonplace in Leningrad, with one wag alleging that the group couldn't even throw a proper scandal.

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