Esoteric juggling and the poetry of the class enemy

The performance on April 1, 1930, at the dormitory of Leningrad State University at Mytninskaya Embankment 5/2, which, ironically, is now the address of the apartment of Gazprom’s head Miller, was the last one. The performers were Kharms, Levin, Yuri Vladimirov, and the magician Pastukhov. The walls were decorated with Oberiu slogans such as “Kolya went to the sea,” “Steps passed by kvass,” “We are not pies,” and so on; Kharms read poems like “Flight into the Heavens,” “Liar,” and others. The audience booed the Oberius, with demands to send them to Solovki. A week later, a scathing article by Lev Nilvich (Nikolskiy) appeared in the newspaper “Smena,” characterizing Oberiu poetry as “zaum juggling,” “a protest against the dictatorship of the proletariat,” and “the poetry of a class enemy.” A month later, the magazine “Leningrad” declared their work “hostile to our socialist construction” in its publication and equated the evening at the university dormitory to a raid by a reactionary group. In one of the articles published following that evening, their work was directly called “hostile to socialist construction and Soviet revolutionary literature.” The result of these events was a ban on Oberiu from performing anywhere. And already in the following year, 1931, Kharms and Vvedensky were arrested on charges of “sabotage in the field of children’s literature.”

Sources: Collective anthologies of writers of the Oberiu group A.A. Grishin

https://arzamas.academy/materials/1492