During his lifetime, Alexander Vvedensky was known primarily as a children's writer. Over thirty of his books were published by Detgiz, illustrated by many outstanding artists who were students of Malevich, Filonov, and Matyushin (including Lev Yudin, Vera Ermolaeva, Alisa Poret, Elena Safonova, Tatiana Glebova, and others).
At the same time, the main body of his poetry only became accessible to a wide readership in the 1990s. Unlike the bright, extravagant figure of Daniil Kharms, who quickly gained popularity after his works were published, the true discovery of Vvedensky is happening only in our time. He was a poet, a philosopher who—by his own admission—was interested in only three things: "God, death, and time."
Vvedensky's poetics are based on the discoveries of the first Russian avant-garde—the poetry of Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexei Kruchenykh, as well as their successors Alexander Tufanov and Igor Terentyev. At the same time, he developed his own "transrational" language (zaum), based on semantic experiments that made it possible to transcend reason towards absurdity and paradox, with their mesmerizing, shimmering meaning.
In the mid-1920s, Kharms, Vvedensky, Lipavsky, Druskin, and Oleinikov formed a friendly group called the "Chinari," which in 1928 transformed into OBERIU, also including Zabolotsky, Vaginov, and Bakhterev.
What is the significance of Vvedensky's figure in the context of the development of Russian and world literature? What is his role as a pioneer of the poetics of the absurd and nonsense? And why are his poems important to us now? These and other questions about the poet's work are discussed in the podcast.