Vvedensky, Aleksandr Ivanovich (1904–1941)

Known during his lifetime as a failed avant-garde poet who went on to a successful, if minor, career as a children’s writer, Vvedensky is acknowledged today as one of the most important voices of the Leningrad poetic avant-garde in the late 1920s and 1930s. A co-founder of the short-lived but influential Obedinenie real’nogo iskussta or OBERIU (The Association for Real Art), Vvedensky is one of the creators of Russia’s first literature of the Absurd. Starting from the premise that language and logic were unable to convey the truth of reality, Vvedensky rejected the traditional conventions of Russian poetry and sought the key to human cognition in the concept of the absurd [bessmyslitsa].