was formed in the twenties, when there existed (along with others) the type of the
Oleinikov, Zoshchenko, and Shostakovich appropriated this specifically Petersburgian mask of the “shy man,” who was simultaneously infantile and ironic. For Zoshchenko and Shostakovich it became a second face. Oleinikov used it in a more theatrical manner. He was helped by the tragically carnivalesque atmosphere of Leningrad in the mid-twenties, when the acute and tragic awareness of the disappearance of the old city and its values was transformed into a marked theatricality in the intellectual elite’s daily life.
And at this dramatic moment in the life of Petersburg-Leningrad came the Oberiu group, to which Oleinikov belonged. The acronym Oberiu referred to the Association for Real Art. The name reflected in part the unwillingness of the group’s members to associate themselves openly with “avant-garde” or “left” art and their desire to avoid labels of any “-ism,” like acmeism or futurism. In their manifesto, published in 1928, they insisted, “We are the creators not only of a new poetic language, but creators of a new sensation of life and its objects. Our will to create is universal: it overflows all forms of art and tears into life.”
The central figure of Oberiu was twenty-two-year-old Daniil Yuvachev, who took the pseudonym Kharms (according to one version, forming it from the English words “charm” and “harm”). A poet, prose writer, and playwright, Kharms stylized himself as the classic Petersburg eccentric. Tall and long-haired, looking, as one of his friends said, like both “a puppy of good pedigree and the young Turgenev,” Kharms strolled around Leningrad in an unusual getup for a Soviet city: a British-style gray jacket, vest, and plus fours tucked into checked socks. The image of “mysterious foreigner” was completed by a starched collar, narrow black velvet ribbon on his forehead, thick walking stick, pocket watch the size of a saucer on a chain, and crooked pipe.
Kharms insisted that he was a wizard and frightened friends with stories of his strange magic powers.88 His apartment was filled with books on black magic, satanism, chiromancy, and phrenology, as well as a book for interpreting dreams, for Kharms was very superstitious. He would return home if he met a hunchback on the street, and drank milk only if all the windows and doors were shut tight and the smallest cracks were stuffed with cotton. In Kharms’s bedroom, which was full of wires and springs stretching in all directions, on which bounced occult symbols and all sorts of demons and imps made of paper, stood an ancient harmonium on which the wizard host liked to play works by his beloved composers Bach and Mozart. (Kharms used to show off an old medallion depicting a severe-looking man in a powdered wig, telling people that this was a unique portrait of “Ivan Sevastyanovich himself,” that is, Johann Sebastian Bach.)
Kharms’s domestic imps were undoubtedly descended from the private furnishings, known all over town, of another legendary Petersburg eccentric, the writer Alexei Remizov, who by 1921 had already emigrated to the West. A subtle stylist who tried to purify and vivify the Russian language the way it had been “before Peter the Great,” Remizov was an important influence on Zamyatin and on the Serapion Brothers, including Zoshchenko. He also gave the young people of Petrograd a lesson that they remembered for many years, living as if in a subtle literary game. One of the Serapions, Konstantin Fedin, called Remizov one of the most terrible and most miserable harlequins of Russian literature, “who were hindered from tasting earthly delights by the mask they wore. O, of course, it was all stylization! Their whole life was stylization, and their writing, too—almost a joke, a trifle, but what a fatal trifle and what a heart-breaking joke!”89
Remizov invented a literary order called The Simian Great and Free Chamber, whose members, with appropriate titles—bishops, princes, cavaliers—were his writer friends: Blok, Zamyatin, and the Serapion Brothers. Shklovsky’s rank was “short-tailed monkey.” Remizov had a marvelous calligraphic hand. Stoop-shouldered, hook-nosed, and half-blind, he would sit in his tiny Petrograd cell, inscribing filigreed “simian certificates” and turning scraps of paper and wool into little imps that he hung up with string all around his room. So Kharms’s love for hand-illustrating his own texts, inventing cryptograms and hieroglyphs, and organizing various societies, into which he included (and excluded) his friends, echoed Remizov’s eccentricities.
