The leader of the last Russian avant-garde liked to dress in English tweeds. In high school, he renamed himself Daniil Kharms, pronounced like Harms, in homage to Sherlock Holmes. Onstage, he performed in front of banners that read, “Art is a cupboard!” and “We are not cakes!” He read Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, and he and his friends, best known by the moniker OBERIU, have often been classified as absurdist. We might also call them nonsense poets.

We will have to pick some term, and stick to it, soon. A group of Russian-American poets associated with Brooklyn’s Ugly Duckling Presse have undertaken major translations of these writers, and American publishers are now responding. Eugene Ostashevsky’s comprehensive “OBERIU” anthology (Northwestern University Press, 258 pages, $22.95), published last year, got the ball rolling. Now a major selection of Kharms’s work, “Today I Wrote Nothing” (Overlook press, 287 pages, $29.95), edited by Matvei Yankelevich and excerpted this summer in the New Yorker, promises to make Kharms (1905–42) a familiar name in literary circles. A forthcoming selection of OBERIU poet Alexander Vvedensky (1904–41), from Green Integer, could possibly do the same for him — Vvedensky is that good.

To frame this renaissance, Mr. Yankelevich wants to banish the term “absurd” in favor of OBERIU-specific terms. Beckett and Ionesco might be useful points of reference, but talk of Russian absurdism is a misnomer and, according to Mr. Yankelevich, ultimately a lazy attempt to fit OBERIU into familiar dichotomies: “absurdist writer in a repressive society” or “artist writing under Stalin.”

Kharms and Vvedensky both died in Stalin’s prisons, but their art was formed in response to other art. Coined in 1928, OBERIU stands for Union of Real Art, though the acronym’s vowels were changed, for effect. Their manifesto declared war against the previous avant-garde generation, embodied by Velimir Khlebnikov, who wrote neologistic sound poetry. Khlebnikov sometimes abandons sense completely: “Hlahla! Hloufish lauflings lafe uf beloght lauchelorum!” runs his “Incantation by Laughter,” as translated by Paul Schmidt.

Where previous poets experimented with phonetics, the Oberiuty would experiment with semantics — they would invent crazy situations, but describe them in terms anyone would understand. An example from an early poem by Kharms, written in 1927, around the time of the manifesto, is as realistic as a Chagall: “A room. The room’s on fire. / A child juts out of the cradle. / Eats his kasha. Up above, / just below the ceiling now, / the nanny’s napping upside-down.”

Kharms came into his own when he turned to short prose pieces, in the 1930s. After his first arrest, in 1931, Kharms could no longer perform his poems and plays in public, and he began to write almost exclusively for the drawer. What money he made came from writing children’s literature — some of which can be found in George Gibian’s groundbreaking scholarly translations, collected in “The Man with the Black Coat” (1971). Indeed, a childlike sense of possibilities — mischievous, but morally blank — pervades Kharms’s adult work from this period. By now, the theory of OBERIU had become less important than a sensibility.

Violent, cartoonish, glib, abrupt, this sensibility is held together by a mellow humor. It is possible to quote an entire story, “Events”:

One day Orlov stuffed himself with mashed peas and died. Krylov, having heard the news, also died. And Spiridonov died regardless. And Spiridonov’s wife fell from the cupboard and also died. And the Spiridonov children drowned in a pond. Spiridonov’s grandmother took to the bottle and wandered the highways. And Mikhailov stopped combing his hair and came down with the mange. And Kruglov sketched a lady holding a whip and went mad. And Perekhryostov received four hundred rubles wired over the telegraph and was so uppity about it that he was forced to leave his job.

All good people but they don’t know how to hold their ground.

What the Oberiuty called “alogic” — not just illogic, but anti-logic — animates this chain of events. It defeats our normal sense of sequence and causal progress — “And Spiridonov died regardless.” The payoff is not philosophical but comic, a release. Kharms has the timing of a comedian, and he never lost his taste for onstage commitment. “Do some dirty thing and it’s too late” was the motto he put to his 1936 scrapbook. He never threw anything away.

Vvedensky, by contrast, was more interested in the perfection of his texts, judging from the selection in Mr. Ostashevsky’s “OBERIU.” His poems set up an exquisite tone, and then douse it in bathos, until the play of nice observations and wringing ironies becomes exquisite in itself: “Frightening the dark the candle burns, / it has silver bones. / Natasha, / [. . .] O darling let us go to bed, / I want to dig around in you / in search of interesting things.”

The Oberiuty represent the first generation to come of age after the 1917 revolutions. Their writings keep their cool; they are successfully youthful, but never rash. Perhaps the most overtly ironical Russians since Gogol, they are also some of the funniest avant-garde pranksters ever, at least in the translations of Mr. Yankelevich and Mr. Ostashevsky. Of all the labels assigned to them, perhaps the most choice, in passing, came from a Soviet newspaper critic, who called them the “reactionary jugglers.”

blytal@nysun.com