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This book offers a comprehensive account of the absurd in prose fiction. As well as providing a basis for courses on absurdist literature (whether in fiction or in drama), it offers a broadly based philosophical background. Sections covering theoretical approaches and an overview of the historical literary antecedents to the ‘modern’ absurd introduce the largely twentieth-century core chapters. In addition to discussing a variety of literary movements (from Surrealism to the Russian OBERIU), the book offers detailed case studies of four prominent exponents of the absurd: Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Daniil Kharms and Flann O'Brien. There is also wide discussion of other English-language and European contributors to the phenomenon of the absurd.

At first glance, the OBERIU theatrical program could not seem further removed from the amateur performances staged by Soviet workers in small club venues. Whereas the former started from a concept of “pure theater” and advocated self‐sufficient theatrical moments, the latter justified its existence by serving the immediate political and educational needs of the club. Yet these two seemingly incompatible types of theater were brought together by the work of Igor’ Terent’ev, an ardent innovator who derived many of his techniques from the workers’ clubs and directly influenced the OBERIU theater. This article takes Daniil Kharms’s collaboration with Terent’ev as a point of departure for repositioning the OBERIU theatrical program within the various “left” art movements of the 1920s. Such repositioning shows that the theater of OBERIU was engaged in a far‐reaching debate over the professional training requisite for Soviet theaters, while also invested in maintaining an experimental vision of the “left arts.”

In August 2012, having been found guilty of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,” Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot delivered a closing statement in which she argued that her group's performances are part of a canon of nonconformism and dissent–from Aristotle, to Jesus, to the Soviet dissidents. But she singled out an obscure early Soviet absurdist, Alexander Vvedensky, whose “poor rhyme” aesthetic she compared at length to the anarchist style of Pussy Riot. Her extended discussion of Vvedensky inspires this paper's analysis. Contrary to recent scholarship that has suggested that the Oberiuty cultivated reactionary politics, I argue that their work should be viewed in the context of anarchism in the arts. Vvedensky's work, and the collaborative performances and texts of his circle, the Oberiuty, differed considerably from the avant‐garde and mainstream artistic conventions of their time because of its anarchist principles. Instead of seeking to communicate artistic mastery, or advocating utopian paradigms and transcendent knowledge, their works sought to suspend the search for absolutes and to cultivate spontaneity. The final portion of this essay contextualizes Tolokonnikova's interpretation and appropriation of Vvedensky in the rediscovery and reception of the Oberiuty by leftist artists, writers, and philosophers.

The rediscovery of the OBERIU poets’ work in the 1960s was a major aesthetic revelation for contemporary Soviet poets. Alongside the obvious OBERIU critique of language and poetics of the absurd, other aspects of their work proved attractive and productive to Thaw‐era writers. In his writings on Daniil Kharms, the minimalist poet Vsevolod Nekrasov admiringly emphasized Kharms’s command of the “real” and “concrete” (in language and literature), as well as, somewhat paradoxically, the “theatrical.” An unofficial poet during the Soviet period, Nekrasov worked as a traveling theater critic in the 1960s–80s, and co‐authored a book on the nineteenth‐century realist playwright Alexander Ostrovsky. His take on Kharms and theater clearly reflects the priorities of his own poetic project, while shedding light on some of the paradoxes of OBERIU theater as well. To wit, the theater section of the 1927 OBERIU manifesto, authored by Kharms, rejects the traditional play’s realist imitation of life while declaring: “Our task is to present onstage the world of concrete objects in their interactions and collisions.” This paper explores the shifting meanings of concepts like “real” and “concrete,” and their ongoing significance for literature, through a sort of conversation between Nekrasov and Kharms.

Combining burlesque absurdism and lofty references to classical literature with a tongue-in-cheek plot about an industrializing rural proletariat, Beyond Tula--subtitled \"a Soviet pastoral\"--actually appeared in the official Soviet press in 1931. This novel offers an uproarious romp through the earnestly boring and unintentionally campy world of early Soviet \"production\" prose.