At the literary evenings of the “oberiuts,” as the members of Oberiu were called, the heavily powdered Kharms would be wheeled out on the stage on top of a huge black lacquered wardrobe, from which he would begin reciting in a singsong his intentionally infantile verses:
Once granny waved and the steam engine instantly served the children and said: eat your mush and trunk.
Other members of the group declaimed their works while bicycling around the stage. The culmination of the oberiuts’ theatrical ambitions was their 1928 production of Kharms’s absurdist play, Elizaveta Bam. The composer of the music for this performance was Pavel Vulfius, later my mentor at the Leningrad Conservatory. Smiling somewhat mysteriously, he would tell me about what he called a dadaist opera: “Elizaveta Bam was layered with music and the actors often switched from rhythmic declamation to song, and the beginning of the play was a half-parody, half-homage to Glinka’s Life for the Tsar.” (Glinka was one of Kharms’s favorite composers; he loved to sing his song, “Calm down, emotions of passion,” sometimes in a duet with another Oberiu member, the poet Nikolai Zabolotsky.)
The day after the play the Leningrad Krasnaya gazeta (Red Gazette) printed a review that described Elizaveta Bam as “cynically frank muddle, in which virtually no one could tell what the hell was going on.” This was a blatant overstatement because the cream of Leningrad’s avant-garde was at the performance, and they certainly would have understood the connection between Kharms’s play and Blok’s Fair Show Booth, as well as the futurist masterpieces, the tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky, and the opera Victory Over the Sun. Kharms sent out invitations to the performance to the creators of Victory Over the Sun, Matyushin and Malevich, to members of FEKS, and to other leading cultural experimenters in Leningrad. The oberiuts consciously strove to unite various directions in Leningrad modernism—artists, musicians, theater people, poets, and writers—in what came to be called “happenings” in the 1960s. The traditional collectivist spirit of Petersburg innovators was strong in them.
When the oberiuts turned to Malevich for support, he replied, “I’m an old hooligan, you’re young ones—let’s see what happens.” In those years there was already a feeling in the air that the “left front” in the arts was in its final battle with the winning Philistines. The oberiuts demonstrated this sense of being part of a common cause, lofty but doomed, by appearing, as one later recalled, “in full complement” at the premiere of Shostakovich’s Nose. “It seemed that everyone in the audience knew one another (and in fact that was very much the case!) and, as if they had planned it, they had all come to enjoy a last triumph.”90
The performance of Elizaveta Bam by Kharms was another such demonstration of solidarity. It took place in the Leningrad House of the Press, which was located in the former aristocratic town house on the Fontanka River embankment not far from Nevsky Prospect. The director of the House of the Press, who sympathized with left art, invited Filonov and his students to paint on the walls of the lobby and the theater. The audience for the oberiuts play saw an unforgettable sight:
On canvases, depicted in soft, transparent colors, were purple and pink cows and people, who seemed to have had their skin removed by some marvelous surgery. The veins and arteries and internal organs were clearly visible. Through the figures grew pale green runners from trees and grasses. Elongated proportions and a strictly measured composition made one think of the frescoes of the ancient masters, spiritual and devoid of physical solidity.91
Filonov, who with Zheverzheyev was one of the founders in Petersburg of the art association Union of Youth in 1910, was one of the masters beloved of the futurists and oberiuts. Khlebnikov described his “cherry eyes and pale cheekbones.” The Russian avant-gardists were fanatical figures, but even among them Filonov was distinguished by his unprecedented single-mindedness, the stubbornness with which he set his goals, and his frenzied proselytizing. Leningrad had a surfeit of art schools—those of Malevich, Matyushin, Petrov-Vodkin. Filonov’s school had the most students, up to seventy followers, the most faithful of whom formed a collective in the late twenties that they called Masters of Analytical Art.
