a Christian philosopher and music-theorist (he wrote on Bach, Schoenberg and Webern), was a key member of this group. Druskin and his friend Leonid Lipavsky (a children's writer under the name of Leonid Savelyev, and an amateur mathematician and author of philosophical tracts) had known Alexander Vvedensky in high-school, and had become friends with Kharms and Zabolotsky as well. Lipavsky actually wrote down a number of the "conversations." Nikolay Oleynikov, an editor at the children's publishing house which had long employed the young poets of the OBERIU as writers and translators of children's literature, became part of this group by the mid-thirties. This later grouping, which had no public outlet, is generally called the "chinari" (i.e. "the titled ones") group in Russian literary scholarship, though it is uncertain that they ever formalized a name for the group, nor that they called themselves "chinari" with any consistency. Thus, the names "OBERIU" and "chinari" are somewhat interchangeable in the scholarship. The borders between the two groups are (and were) permeable, and the only basic continuity is the presence of Kharms and Vvedensky. Influence Though short-lived, the OBERIU seems to have had lasting effects on Russian culture. Since the late 1980s a kind of cult fervor has grown in Russia around these long-forgotten writers. And, in fact, the ideas and art of the OBERIU had been influential even in the 1960s and 1970s, in what is called the "unofficial" art world of the Soviet Union. Some writers and artists of that period would proudly admit the influence of the OBERIU, in others it is clear enough. The OBERIU was seen as something of a missing link from the old Russian avant-garde to the new one. Poets like Genrikh Sapgir, Alexei Khvostenko, Anri Volokhonsky, Lev Rubinstein, Dmitri Prigov, Timur Kibirov, Eduard Limonov were certainly familiar with the OBERIU writers through "samizdat" publications circulating in the underground art scene, and their writing reflects that knowledge, though in very different ways for all of them. Leningrad avant garde musical group N.O.M. borrows heavily from OBERIU movement citing Kharms and Oleynikov as lyrical influences. They paid homage to Kharms, Oleynikov by releasing An Album Of Real Art with songs based on their lyrics. Novosibirsk punk rock musician Egor Letov cited Vvedensky as an influence for his lyrics. In English An anglophone edition of OBERIU writings translated by Eugene Ostashevsky, Matvei Yankelevich, Genya Turovskaya, Thomas Epstein and Ilya