"INCOMPLETE COLLECTION" AT THE OBERIU MUSEUM
The second exhibition in Alexander Vvedensky's apartment delves into the history of the OBERIU circle. The project's curators focus on three heroes of avant-garde poetry of the 1920s and 1930s: Alexander Vvedensky, Daniil Kharms, and Nikolai Oleynikov.
The OBERIU Museum opened in 2025 on Syezhinskaya Street, in the apartment where Alexander Vvedensky lived from 1914 to 1936. Historians believe that this space, which remembers the OBERIU movement, has been preserved for posterity in its most authentic form. All twelve members of the group, including Daniil Kharms, and their many associates visited here.
"The shape of the room is certainly accidental, but it is characteristic — irregular: an elongated trapezoid; Three walls were papered, the fourth was whitewashed: there wasn't enough wallpaper (Vvedensky and Lipavsky painted this wall, one drawing was captioned: "Yakov Lev, a merry fellow! Ate straw on an empty stomach," Yakov Druskin writes about Vvedensky's apartment in his essay "Chinari." "Friends only visited Vvedensky, but they never gathered at his place... He had nowhere to lay his head — a wanderer in the valley of tears, in the words of the psalm." Numerous anecdotes about Vvedensky do not contradict this: one must distinguish between the outer and the innermost parts of a person's heart. In Kharms, both men were united, while in Vvedensky, they were completely separate."
The museum's collection contains about a thousand artifacts. The museum owes its existence to Andrei Gnatyuk, founder of the IMA-Press publishing house, and Yulia Senina, curator of the Joseph Brodsky Museum of One and a Half Rooms.
How The project's ideologists explain that the term "OBERIU" can be interpreted rather loosely. The museum space is dedicated not to individual members of the association of writers and filmmakers, but to the entire creative community whose members responded to the ideas of the OBERIUs.
The museum can only be visited by appointment.
The OBERIU Museum opened in 2025 on Syezhinskaya Street, in the apartment where Alexander Vvedensky lived from 1914 to 1936. Historians believe that this space, which remembers the OBERIU movement, has been preserved for posterity in its most authentic form. All twelve members of the group, including Daniil Kharms, and their many associates visited here.
"The shape of the room is certainly accidental, but it is characteristic — irregular: an elongated trapezoid; Three walls were papered, the fourth was whitewashed: there wasn't enough wallpaper (Vvedensky and Lipavsky painted this wall, one drawing was captioned: "Yakov Lev, a merry fellow! Ate straw on an empty stomach," Yakov Druskin writes about Vvedensky's apartment in his essay "Chinari." "Friends only visited Vvedensky, but they never gathered at his place... He had nowhere to lay his head — a wanderer in the valley of tears, in the words of the psalm." Numerous anecdotes about Vvedensky do not contradict this: one must distinguish between the outer and the innermost parts of a person's heart. In Kharms, both men were united, while in Vvedensky, they were completely separate."
The museum's collection contains about a thousand artifacts. The museum owes its existence to Andrei Gnatyuk, founder of the IMA-Press publishing house, and Yulia Senina, curator of the Joseph Brodsky Museum of One and a Half Rooms.
How The project's ideologists explain that the term "OBERIU" can be interpreted rather loosely. The museum space is dedicated not to individual members of the association of writers and filmmakers, but to the entire creative community whose members responded to the ideas of the OBERIUs.
The museum can only be visited by appointment.
