Alexander Vvedensky (poet)
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6 December 1904
Alexander Vvedensky | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Alexander Ivanovich Vvedensky 6 December 1904 |
| Died | 19 December 1941 (aged 37) |
| Occupation | Poet, dramatist, writer |
| Period | Modernism |
| Literary movement | OBERIU |
Alexander Ivanovich Vvedensky (Russian: Алекса́ндр Ива́нович Введе́нский; 6 December 1904 – 19 December 1941) was a Russian poet and dramatist with formidable influence on "unofficial" and avant-garde art during and after the times of the Soviet Union. Vvedensky is widely considered (among contemporary Russian writers and literary scholars) as one of the most original and important authors to write in Russian in the early Soviet period. Vvedensky considered his own poetry "a critique of reason more powerful than Kant's."[1]
Vvedensky was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and took an interest in poetry at an early age. An admirer of Velemir Khlebnikov, Vvedensky sought apprenticeships with writers connected to Russian Futurism. In the early 1920s he studied with well-known avant-garde artists from Futurist circles such as Matiushin and Tufanov and Terentiev, at the newly formed GInHuK state arts school (headed up by Kazimir Malevich).
In Tufanov's sound-poetry circle he met Daniil Kharms, with whom he went on to found the OBERIU group (in 1928). Together Kharms and Vvedensky, along with several other young writers, actors, and artists, staged various readings, plays, and cabaret-style events in Leningrad in the late 1920s. Vvedensky, as written in the OBERIU manifesto, was considered the most radical poet of the group.
Vvedensky, like Kharms, worked in children's publishing to get by, and was also quite accomplished in the field. He wrote vignettes for children's magazines, translated books of children's literature, and wrote several children's books of his own.
He was arrested for a short while in 1931–1932 on charges of belonging to a faction of anti-Soviet children's writers. During interrogations, he was also accused of encoding anti-Soviet messages in "zaum" or sound poetry.
After the arrest and a short exile in Kursk, he returned to Leningrad. In the mid-1930s he moved to Kharkov. There, in 1941, two years after start of World War II, when Nazi Germany invaded USSR from previously occupied Poland, he was unable to board a crowded evacuation train.
He stayed on in Kharkov hoping to catch up later with his family, but was arrested for "counterrevolutionary agitation" in September 1941. With other prisoners evacuated from Kharkov he was shipped to Kazan but died of pleuritis on the way. His place of burial is unknown.
