This is the first comprehensive study of the group of avant-garde Soviet writers who styled themselves OBERIU, "The Association for Real Art." Graham Roberts reexamines commonly-held assumptions about OBERIU, its identity as a group, its aesthetics, its relationship to the formalists and the Bakhtin circle, and its place within Russian and European literary traditions. Roberts concludes by showing how the self-conscious literature of OBERIU--its metafiction--occupies an important transitional space between modernism and postmodernism.