Alexander Vvedensky & Daniil Kharms – OBERIU Alogic: Cartoonish Bizarre Violence, Peculiar Digressions And Sudden Twists

Alexander Vvedensky, An Invitation for Me to Think (Green Integer, 2009)

Alexander Vvedensky, The Gray Notebook (Ugly Duckling Press, 2009)

George Gibian (Editor), Russia's Lost Literature of the Absurd: Selected works of Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky (W. W. Norton, 1974)

Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky, The Man with the Black Coat: Russia's Literature of the Absurd (Northwestern University Press, 1997)
Eugene Ostashevsky (Editor), OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern University Press, 2006) )

Daniil Kharms, Incidences (Five Star, 2007)
Daniil Kharms, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook TP, 2009)

"Poetry, language and thought: this is the crossroads at which the poetry of Alexander Vvedensky (1904-1941) takes root. But it is a paradoxical meeting, for what results is not so much a synthesis of this trinity but rather a collision of meanings in which silence triumphs over voice, non-sense over meaning, fragmentation over unity—an unsettling compound that this brief essay will set out to explore. First, though, and especially for the non-Russian reader, a context must be developed—by turns literary, biographical, and cultural—within which to situate our analysis.
Russia has always been a land of profound contrasts: the splendor of St. Petersburg’s numerous palaces and the misery of its general population; the utopianism of Russia’s historical aspirations and the all too frequent nightmare of its various realizations; the greatness of its poetry and the tragedy of so many of its poets. For better or worse, the life of Alexander Vvedensky can serve as a model for what might be called ‘Russian fate.’
Alexander Vvedensky was born in St. Petersburg in December 1904—only months before the Russian revolution of 1905—into a highly educated and successful family: his father was an economist and his mother one of the city’s leading physicians, no mean feat for a woman at the turn of the 20th century. The years of Vvedensky’s childhood coincided not only with the triumph of the Bolshevik revolution but with what many consider the finest flowering of modern Russian culture, not only in poetry but in music, art, and philosophy... in 1926 he and his poetic comrade-in-arms Daniil Kharms had two poems published in the yearly anthology of the Writers Union; soon after that, they were in correspondence with one of the giants of the Soviet poetic avant-garde, Boris Pasternak, and no less an artist than Kazimir Malevich was seeking to collaborate with Vvedensky and Kharms in a venture that was to combine theater, poetry, music and painting; from 1927 to early 1930 he and Kharms were leaders of the last great Soviet-Russian avant-garde organization, Oberiu ; and in 1930 Mikhail Kuzmin was confiding in his diary that he considered Vvedensky the leading light of the young generation. But these, as it turned out, were false signals: the publication in the Writers Union anthology proved to be the only publication of adult poetry during his lifetime (like Kharms, Vvedensky wrote children’s verse for economic and social survival). This brief period of acclaim and public visibility was followed by arrest and exile (1931-32), then a return to a Leningrad of danger, obscurity, and semi-starvation. Following the repression of 1936. that cost the lives of many, including one of his best friends (the poet Nikolai Oleinikov), there was a kind of escape, into loneliness and creativity, to Kharkov, the hometown of his third wife. Finally, inevitably, there was his gruesome death in December 1941 from dysentery while on forced transit from Kharkov to Siberia. Although it is true that fate was merciless to all who lived to the 1930s (to mention only three: suicides by Mayakovsky and Tsvetaeva, death on the way to internment for Mandel’shtam), Vvedensky’s elders managed to live their poetic, personal and even political lives on the public stage. It was Vvedensky’s fate—and that of millions of others—to be slaughtered in silence and seemingly forgotten forever, consigned to Stalin’s ‘dustbin of history.’
But forever is a long time. And thanks to Yakov Druskin it didn’t come; or at least it hasn’t come yet. This ‘revival’ or second life of Vvedensky (and of Kharms) began with an act of rescue: in December, 1941, in siege-bound Leningrad, Druskin, ill and starving, along with Kharms’s second wife Maria Malich, trudged across the city to Kharms’s bombed-out apartment building to take charge of a trunk full of manuscripts. Druskin transported these materials to Siberia during the evacuation of Leningrad, then kept them hidden through the 1940s and 1950s. Only in the 1960s did he begin to share them with an emerging generation of young avant-garde Leningrad artists, poets, and thinkers. (This did not prevent one of them, Mikhail Meilakh, from serving jail time for ‘illegally’ publishing Vvedensky’s complete works abroad, with the Ardis Press in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1979.) What was discovered changed both our understanding and the course of 20th century Russian literature: in Kharms, Vvedensky, Vaginov and Oleinikov the young underground writers of the Leningrad and Moscow 1960s and 70s found the ‘missing link,’ the third generation, in the transmission of Russian Modernism. Here was poetry and prose written in the shadow of the Silver Age but with a decidedly post-apocalyptic, metaphysical and absurdist sensibility that perfectly resonated with the rising underground cultures of Moscow and Leningrad. With perestroika and glasnost’, Vvedensky and Kharms were finally brought to light and recognized as two of Russia’s signal twentieth century poets, and for many in post-perestroika Russia their lives became both a warning and a talisman to guard against the various temptations of post-Soviet life.
What then was Vvedensky’s artistic credo? In literary terms one might say that his poetic sensibility combines the Russian Symbolist concern for transcendence, God, and ‘other worlds,’ with the Futurist orientation toward syntactical and semantic deformations that draw attention to the artifices of language. In terms of method it is clearly to the Russian Futurists, and especially to Velemir Khlebnikov, that Vvedensky owes his poetic beginnings. However, unlike most Futurists (Western European well as Russian), Vvedensky was neither a nihilist nor a Utopian world-maker, he was a believer, an apophatic Christian: the semantic kenosis to which he subjects language has a theological purpose. In analyzing his critique of language, poetry and thought we must keep in mind the absurd faith (particularly pronounced after 1930) that fires his poetry: the alogical communication for which his poetry strives is an act of communion. For this reason we must radically distinguish between Vvedensky’s deformations of poetic language and Futurist practice: the former is religiously inspired and oriented toward communication, the latter is linguistically inspired and oriented toward expression. Moreover, while in one way or another the Futurists sought to overcome meaning, Vvedensky celebrated and used non-meaning and non-sense to suggest, in a kind of poetic apophasis, a transcendent meaning that simultaneously underpins and negates our human understanding. At the same time, unlike the Symbolists, his aim is neither to create an aesthetic paradise nor to suggest or build a bridge to another world—Vvedensky’s is an aesthetics of martyred aesthetics, of not knowing, of the defeat of ‘poetry’ in the service of truth. As he writes in the opening of his poetic dialogue of 1930, “The Demise of the Sea”:
'SEA DEMON
and the sea too means nothing
and the sea too is a round o
and in vain does man hop
into the deep from guns and blades
and in the sea as well the fishies go
dogs run around violins play
and seaweed sleeps like aunts
and boats skip up and down like fleas
and in the sea there is as little sense
it obeys the same numbers
it is deserted and dark
maybe o sea you are a window?
maybe o sea you are a widow?'...Given Vvedensky’s attention to the tension between language and thought, between poetry and meaning, it is no wonder that poetic form plays a crucial role—although a profoundly ‘negative’ one, as we shall see—in his aesthetics. Vvedensky’s metrical practice is marked by what can be called an extreme primitivism, even infantilism (recall that Vvedensky wrote children’s verse) that is in constant conflict with the ‘seriousness’ of his subject matter. Moreover, in this poem in particular and in Vvedensky’s poetry in general, there is a pronounced tension between the rationality, even overdetermination of the form (in the case of “The Demise of the Sea,” lines of irregularly rhymed iambic tetrameter) and the “absurdity” and grotesquery of the content (I refer here both to the poetic lexicon—the incongruities of the sea, the fishies, the fleas—, and to much of the imagery—the seaweed sleeping like aunts, the boats skipping like fleas). Often, as here, Vvedensky strikes a comic note, navigating between high and low, tragedy and comedy, archaic and avant-garde, meaning and non-sense. Miraculously, the translator, Eugene Ostashevsky, is in large measure able to communicate to the reader this zero sum game.
The author (and the reader) of this article is thus up against at least a double resistance: that of Vvedensky’s inherently, “non-sensical” poetic semantics and the limits of translation. Happily, some of Vvedensky’s own, extremely perceptive comments about his work have survived. It is to them, and to the context in which they were made, that we will now turn.
'I carried out a so to speak poetic critique of reason, more fundamental than Kant’s abstract one. For instance, I doubted whether the words “house,” “tower” and “cottage” could be subsumed under the concept of “building.” Perhaps “shoulder” should be connected to “four.” I did this in practice, in poetry, and showed it to be so. I became convinced of the falseness of conventional ties but am unable to say what the new ones should be. I don’t know whether there should be one system of connections or many. What I have is a fundamental intuition of the disconnectedness of the world and the fragmentation of time. And since this intuition contradicts reason, reason does not comprehend the world.'As mentioned earlier, Vvedensky and Kharms enjoyed a period of public visibility as leaders of the group Oberiu. After the ‘scandal’ surrounding their performance of December 1929, and the subsequent furor it provoked, Oberiu was disbanded and its leaders later arrested and briefly exiled. However, this ‘exoteric’ formation concealed another, ‘esoteric’ one whose activities began earlier (in the mid-1920s) and lasted longer (until 1937). These are the Chinars (from the Russian word chin, designating spiritual rank), and included the poets Vvedensky, Kharms and Nikolai Oleinikov, and the philosophers Leonid Lipavsky and Yakov Druskin. These five friends, these ‘amateurs’ cut off from the institutions of public life, engaged in a continuous, extraordinary conversation. By 1931, with publication out of the question and physical survival rather than glory the fundamental challenge, Vvedensky and his friends began to write only for and even through each other, developing a hieroglyphic language and a sacred-foolish ideal that differentiates them artistically from almost any other group aesthetic of the 20th century. In their works and conversations they roamed freely amidst the entire heritage of world culture: from the Gospels to Lenin, from Plotinus to Cusanus and Bergson, from Dante to Christian Morgenstern and Edward Lear. What emerged from Vvedensky’s pen was a religio-absurdist poetry that questioned, along lines later followed by Lewis Worf and Ludwig Wittgenstein, language’s ability to escape its own prison house: identity and difference, signified and signifier, self and other, mind and body, text and metatext, all of them were set up, sent up, ‘bracketed.’ As Vvedensky wrote: “Before every word I put the question: what does it mean, and over every word I place the mark of its tense.” This is because, as Vvedensky saw it, it is time that both embodies and occults the two essential mysteries of life: God and death; and it is this triadic mystery that poetry must reveal, even if in the mode of failure. In the Gray Notebook he explains why:
'Our human logic and our language do not in any way correspond to time, neither in its elementary nor in its complex understanding. Our logic and our language skid along the surface of time.'Thus a poetry that aspires to telling the truth about time will have to be non­logical. This is because human logic and language falsely spatialize all of reality (including time); it then divides and quantifies this falsified spatiality into discrete units (words or moments). Once this is accomplished—and it requires ruse and self-deception to be carried off—we can now pretend that time is quantitative (numerical) and that past time can be talked about like the house we saw yesterday: but in truth where is yesterday? How can you compare the last “three months” to “three newly grown trees?” Vvedensky, with Rimbaud, challenges language with the request “give me a kilo of four o’clock,” knowing full well that our language is set up so that we do not experience the novelty of each moment, its utter non-cognitive independence; for if we experience this autonomy, this paradoxical fragmentation, we (temporarily) exit time and experience—in terror—both our own nakedness and the utter conventionality of all our human concepts, our words and ideas in the face of eternity. Suddenly it is not only verbs that bear time—everything (and every thing ) is in time; and time, Vvedensky writes, “turns everything into null.” Try this experiment:
'Let a mouse run over a stone. Count only its every step. Only forget the word every, only forget the word step. Then each step will seem a new movement. Then, since your ability to perceive a series of movements as something whole has rightfully disappeared, that which you wrongly called a step (you had confused movement and time with space, you falsely transposed one over the other), that movement will begin to break apart, it will approach zero. The shimmering will begin. The mouse will start to shimmer. Look around you: the world is shimmering (like a mouse).'This slowing down of time, this annihilation of memory and logical meaning, this poetics of aphasia is the linguistic equivalent of the approach of God and death: its shimmering is as close as we can come to experiencing reality, which always lies beyond us, in what Vvedensky calls “finality” (okonchatel’nost’). Only in fragmentation and incoherence can we experience the finality that allows for a true communicative act. Only at the moment of death do we experience real “finality” and end the illusion of time. Indeed at the moment of death “miracle” is possible. This is because “death is the stopping of time.” In this sense death, for Vvedensky, is the only real event: all else is seeming.All our logic, our language, is ultimately nothing more than a convenient, useful—and not even always useful—fiction that actually serves to disguise our real, and onlytrue, condition: one of total ignorance. In this Vvedensky shares the apophatic view of the early Renaissance Christian mystic Nicholas of Cusa who asserted that knowledge, which is relative, complex and finite, is incapable of grasping the truth, which is simple and infinite. The best we can hope for, Vvedensky writes, is to “to determine those few basic principals underlying our superficial feeling of time; and on the basis of them perhaps the path to death and comprehensive incomprehension will become clear.” To do this we must abandon our knowledge of 1. logic, 2. language, and 3. understanding. This is precisely the aim of Vvedensky’s poetry:
'In art the plot and action are vanishing. Those actions that exist in my poems are illogical and useless, they cannot be called actions. Of a person who used to put on a hat and walk outside, we used to say: he walked outside. This was meaningless. The word ‘walked’ is an incomprehensible word. But now: he put on his hat and it was getting light and the (blue) sky took off like an eagle. Events do not coincide with time. Time has eaten the event. Not even the bones are left.'Although this kind of “knowledge” is not satisfactory to logic, such an approach to experience produces two positive results: the possibility of communion and the necessity of faith in—in the form of waiting for—God (and God alone). As for the first, Vvedensky writes that, with the growth of this non-understanding, “it will become clear to you and me that there is no woe, neither to us, nor to those pondering, nor to time “ The entire world of conventional thought—and its distance—is annihilated in this immanent not-knowing, which is “clear to you and me.” Through this paradoxical indirectness, which is alogicality, the walls—which are the creation of reason—between “worlds” (words) evaporate. At the same time “…in the walls of time’s vessel he thought he saw God show himself. “ In this breakdown of conventional reality, in this emptying of our logico-material self, in this not quite human comedy, we find ourselves thrust into God’s invisible hands, enveloped—or surrounded—by his final and alogical finality. As Vvedensky wrote in the Gray Notebook: “Our last hope is Christ risen.” Vvedensky’s art seeks to be poetic “proof” of just that postulate.
Perhaps we can now briefly return to the epigraph to this section. Clearly, part of Vvedensky’s poetic effort is aimed at discrediting normative semantics: his poetry seeks to show the unreality of conventional reality as expressed in language. Neither the language of common sense nor of science tells us anything about the ultimate nature of things or of our relation to them. In this sense, Vvedensky and Kant start with an identical point of departure—that is, the assumption of a world beyond mind—but head in opposite directions. The noumenal world, according to Kant, is the world of things in themselves: it is the limiting concept that assures the reality of the phenomenal world. Vvedensky asserts that the noumenal world is the limiting concept that assures the unreality of the phenomenal world. This, of course, cannot be proved logically: it can either be lived existentially or expressed poetically in what Vvedensky calls “the star of non-sense,” which both reveals phenomenal unreality and opens the door to a glimpse of the unseeable real, the noumena:
The star of non-sense shines
It alone is bottomless
A dead gentleman comes running in
And silently removes time.Here and now, time, death, and God meet. Here too meaning ends, and the zero experienced at the bottom of the sea in “The Demise of the Sea” proves to be not nihilistic play or stoic resignation but the ultimate affirmation of a reality beyond thought and meaning that glimmers through things even as they consume us.
...The poem [Natasha and Kuprianov] navigates between the apparently absurd (reed and duck, for example, are ‘produced’ via the Russian pair dudka/utka) and the legitimacy of the need for that absurd—we truly are funny, and bored, Natasha’s clothes really are a kind of plumage. But we are also truly separated, both from ourselves and from each other: language, desire, coupling only increase the awareness of distance, death, sin, nature, time, and God:
How everything is boring
And monotonously nauseating,
Look, like a naked herring,
I stand before you, luxuriating
And my fourth arm
points mightily to the skies,
If only someone came to look at us,
we are alone with Christ
upon this icon.
It’s interesting to know how long we took to undress.
Half an hour, I reckon. What’s your guess?As Christ finally appears above them (and at what a moment!), making them three, Natasha waits to receive Kuprianov—to receive his darkness, hoping to experience “the last ring of the world / that isn’t yet pried apart.” For Kuprianov, however, the distance between his physical existence and spiritual desire only grows greater, reaching the breaking point when life’s only ‘real’ issue is raised; Natasha’s entreaty that he hurry up (Kuprianov has said the same earlier) because “we will die soon.” What is he to do, torn between the ultimately solitary yet impersonal ecstasy of the body and the feeling of finality/death/self that inhabits him? “No, I don’t want to.” But why doesn’t he want to? Is it that he doesn’t want to die soon (perhaps he wants rather to die now?); or does he not want to die at all (thus his fear)? Moreover, who is this “I” that doesn’t want to (in Russian, translated literally, he simply says “No, don’t want to”), the spiritual or animal self? And what does he want? From his actions, from his growing desperation, it would appear that Kuprianov is kenotically surrendering his right to desire anything beyond nature; surrendering completely to his solitary animality in order to overcome it: paradoxically surrendering to materiality (to nature and death) in order to experience immateriality. Thus he “exits” and does what ‘comes naturally’: he pleasures himself, just as nature does (note Kuprianov’s “indulging in solitary pleasure” and the repetition of this phrase in the poem’s last line, after Kuprianov’s “disappearance,” when nature does the same). In the opposite direction (for eros is ‘stuck’ in the logic of the body), as the lovers mechanically dress, as Kuprianov tries to ‘understand’ what has gone wrong, Natasha in contrast engages in reproach, in self-reproach, and finally in her own pleasure:
I tickle myself.
I swell with marvelous joy.
I am my own fountainhead.A sense of defeat, of anti-erotic despair, and on Natasha’s part anger, now grips the poem. Kuprianov was wrong: the way to the sacred was not through the body. Or rather: it was through the body but not in the way he ‘thought’; not in the purported unity of the sex act but in the fragmentation of desire; not in the power of naming but in its futility; not in coupling but uncoupling. The attempt to enact the sacred has revealed the profane, nature the masturbator. Yet in this failure and blindness there is an unveiling: Kuprianov and Natasha are fallen. Kurprianov is likened to ‘ordure,’ but he is nevertheless—as Natasha sees—the stuff of which eternity (and salvation) is made: indeed it is only because of faith in the “one star” (the one Natasha feared) that we strive—and fail—to be ideal lovers. And it is also why we must fail. We are not Gods—we are sinners in love. It is only when we at last “understand nothing” and “disappear” that we might begin (not) to understand something: that only beyond understanding—beyond poetry, language and thought—, where time ends and death shimmers, does God perhaps appear, invisible." - Thomas Epstein
"Let us consider Daniil Kharms, the Russian writer often described as an absurdist, largely unpublished in his lifetime except for his children’s books, who starved to death in the psychiatric ward of a Soviet hospital during the siege of Leningrad, having been put there by the Stalinist government for, among other reasons, his general strangeness. His brilliant, hilarious, violent little stories, written “for the drawer,” are now being discovered in the West.
Kharms’s stories are truly odd, as in: at first you think they’re defective. They seem to cower at the suggestion of rising action, to blush at the heightened causality that makes a story a story. They sometimes end, you feel, before they’ve even begun. Here, in Yankelevich’s translation, is the entire text of “The Meeting”:
“Now, one day a man went to work and on the way he met another man, who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was heading back home where he came from.
“And that’s it, more or less.”Bring that into workshop! You’ll get slaughtered. Crickets will sound in the seminar room. Someone will say, “I guess I’d like to know more about the Polish bread.” No starving former lover crosses the path of our man as he brings home the bread to his own hungry family; no child needs to be pulled from the Neva; the man does not pass the open door of a shoemaker’s shop, inside of which the shoemaker is berating his wife, which makes our man contemplate his own troubled marriage, as he has a meaningful flashback to his honeymoon, crushing the bread in sudden angst.
Again and again, Kharms shuffles up to the place in Freytag’s Triangle where the rising action bursts upward, then turns and hustles back the way he came. Read enough Kharms and you soon begin to recognize this refusal to play the game as his intentional aesthetic, and wonder: So, what is the meaning of this refusal to play?
When I first discovered Kharms, my answer (like the answer of many readers and critics before me) was, These stories are an absurdist response to the brutality of his times. (In the face of unimaginable savagery, traditional story conventions are quaint, even reactionary.) Kharms’s work is certainly random and violent enough. In one story, five-plus people (four, plus “the Spiridonov children”) die in the first five sentences. In another, a succession of women fall out the same window and shatter on impact — six in all, until the narrator gets bored with all these falling, shattering babushkas and wanders off.
But it occurs to me — inspired by Yankelevich’s excellent introduction — that Kharms might be writing the same way were he with us today, dressed as Matlock, lying down on Park Avenue. That is, weirdness this deep seems more likely to stem from an aesthetic crisis than a political one. What exactly was Kharms’s crisis? He was spooked by the dishonesty of the moment of necessary falsification.Stories are, in a sense, a scam. There was never a clerk as unconflicted, docile and pathetic as Akaki Akakievich, but from the subterfuge that such a man could exist, Gogol made the wonder that is The Overcoat. Ghosts don’t show up to save the stingy, and many stingy die unsaved, but “a stingy guy stayed stingy, then died” is not a story, and is certainly not A Christmas Carol. Princes don’t invite their entire kingdoms to the palace, but if at least one doesn’t, our story is “Once upon a time Cinderella miserably cleaned, forever and ever.”
All of us who write fiction have, I suspect, felt some resistance to this moment of necessary artifice. But for Kharms this moment hardened into a kind of virtuous paralysis. I imagine him looking out his little window there in St. Petersburg, seeing people walking around out there in those Russian hats, and just as he’s about to invent some “meaningful,” theme-causing things for them to do, he freezes up, because per his observations, such meaningful, drama-exuding things do not happen so tidily in reality.When his stories proceed — if they proceed at all — it is often by way of a kind of comic language-momentum. A riff will appear, and an elaboration of that riff will follow, along language lines rather than sense lines. In “Blue Notebook #10,” for example, Kharms starts out conventionally enough (“There was a redheaded man ...”) but then, as if reacting against all the common ways a writer might further describe this redheaded man, veers off in a mini-critique of the descriptive tradition itself. This redheaded man, we learn, “had no eyes or ears.” Succumbing to a strange frequency in his underlying logic, Kharms begins Kharmsifying: “He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily.” By the end of the story — a scant two paragraphs later — our poor redheaded man has also been shorn of his mouth, nose, arms, legs, stomach, back, spine and insides. “There was nothing!” Kharms crisply concludes. “So, we don’t even know who we’re talking about. We’d better not talk about him anymore.”In the process of pounding a nail, Kharms has vaporized his own hammer.
Art requires artifice, but certain souls balk at artifice the way a horse balks at a snake-smelling stall. Stories make emotion and moral truth, or the illusion of these, but reading Kharms we sense his fear that the smallest false step at the beginning, magnified over the course of the tale, might produce monstrous results: falsity clothed as truth, whistling in the dark, propaganda or (worst of all) banality.
Kharms’s work is exhilarating, especially in a time when, if Beckett were alive, he might find himself on television leading a panel discussion about “People Who Have Waited Too Long for Someone!” It’s good to be reminded that fiction is more than just a device for transmitting information or learning about reality or dissecting problems. Fiction is about simultaneously outing and satisfying our innate desire for narrative. Kharms, admittedly, does more of the former than the latter. Exiting a Kharms story, we are newly aware of how hungry we are for rising action, and we have a fresh respect for, and (importantly) suspicion of, storytelling itself. We’re reminded that narrative is not life, but a trick a writer does with language, to make beauty.
Here is Kharms, standing, saw in hand, before the woman in the box. He thinks of all the other magicians who have worked so hard over the centuries to be appearing to saw her in half, then puts down the saw, mutters, “Well, I could do it, but I’m not sure it’s honest,” and leaves the stage.
But wonderfully, even this refusal to saw constitutes a story of sorts. And it’s the kind of story Kharms writes again and again, until, having read too much Kharms at one sitting, you feel like saying: “Daniil, Daniil, you’re going to starve to death before you’re 38! Dude, get cracking! Write your masterwork!”
Then you realize he’s already done it.
Reading Kharms makes us look askance at more traditional stories. We see more clearly what they are: beautiful reductions. They are more substantial, yes, more moving, more consoling. But his work constitutes a kind of noble boundary, the limit to which stories can go before succumbing to the necessary falsification — dozens of small crouching men, misshapen but dignified, refusing, forever, to jump." - George Saunders
"An old woman leans out of her window and, ‘because of her excessive curiosity’, leans too far: she falls to the ground and shatters to pieces. A second old woman leans out of her window to see what has happened to the first – and also leans too far, tumbling to the same fate. More women follow suit (a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth), a chain that ends only because the narrator of this story, ‘sick of watching them’, breaks off to go to the market.
We are clearly in a fictional world very different from our own, in which curious old women are in infinite supply, and seemingly made of glass. The narrator’s yawning nonchalance towards these events only underlines the distance separating our world from his, where death is cartoonish and commonplace rather than traumatic or terrifying. It is the world of Daniil Kharms, a Russian writer whose work – predominantly written in the Soviet Union in the 1930s – contains countless comic reversals, fantastical or nonsensical outcomes, as well as outbursts of unmotivated violence. Occasionally his characters simply die out of the blue: ‘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.’ ‘Characters’ is perhaps too strong a word for these unfortunates: we are given no idea of who Orlov, Krylov or Spiridonov are, just the fact of their demise. Here, as with the old women, Kharms’s narrator brushes aside all the tragic ends, closing instead with a brisk judgment: ‘All good people but they don’t know how to hold their ground.’ The story in question is only ten lines long, and reads like a Chekhovian equivalent of the Monty Python sketch where contestants are asked to summarise Proust in 15 seconds – with an incongruous, unforgiving moral added as a punchline. Elsewhere in the world of Kharms, even fraudulent guidance is withheld: after a fight between Comrades Koshkin and Mashkin involving arm-waving, grotesque leg movements, yelps and punches, the bottom line is simply that ‘Mashkin killed Koshkin.’
Kharms’s work has frequently been classed as absurdist, a forerunner to the theatre of Ionesco or Beckett, or else interpreted as a blackly humorous allegory for the dehumanising effects of the Soviet system – as if Kafka had been made to inhabit one of the bureaucracies he invented. But readings of the first kind arguably start at the wrong end, tracking back from comparator to original; and treating Kharms as an Aesopian anti-totalitarian requires some long interpretative leaps. His poetry, plays and prose stand in a complex, uncomfortable relation to his times; indeed, there is about them a strong sense of untimeliness: when Kharms began his literary life in the mid-1920s, the astonishing avant-garde ferment of the pre and immediately post-Revolutionary period had already become an embattled minoritarian trend, as representational art and realism came increasingly to dominate. In many ways, his work represents the limits of the Russian literary vanguard as much as its strengths: its creativity, its formal radicalism, but also its exhaustion and collapse in the leaden years of Stalinism.
Kharms was born Daniil Yuvachev in St Petersburg in 1905, to an aristocratic mother and a father who had been a member of the violent populist organisation Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will). Educated in part at the elite Peterschule, where instruction was in German, Kharms was also fluent in English; his anglophilia may explain the pseudonym he adopted in 1924, which echoes the Cyrillic transcription of Sherlock Holmes’s surname. But, much like Kharms himself, the name is an idiosyncratic one-off, unplaceable within any obvious frame of reference, except perhaps some private symbolic universe of the writer’s own. It seems likely that he had one: many of his poems are dated using astrological symbols, and some of the nonsense names that crop up in his work – ‘Nona’, ‘Khniu’, ‘Ligudim’ – have been decoded as references to arcane sources, though more straightforwardly Christian motifs feature in his later work.
Throughout his life, Kharms cultivated an eccentric public persona that reinforced the singularity of his written output. This involved such oddball stunts as perching on the façade of the Singer building on Nevsky Prospekt in plus fours and spats to invite the passing crowds to a poetry evening. One visitor to his apartment reported seeing a contraption made of bits of metal, wooden boards, springs, a bicycle wheel and empty jars; Kharms said it was ‘a machine’, and, when asked what kind, replied: ‘No kind. Just a machine.’ He also seems to have collected unusual friends: in her 1982 monograph on Kharms, Alice Stone Nakhimovsky mentions a Dr Chapeau; apparently ‘ideally attentive’ as a physician, Chapeau also ‘drank a great deal and tended to urinate on the floor’. An obliging Kharms, we are told, ‘simply kept a mop on hand’.
Kharms’s studiedly outlandish behaviour belonged to the world in which he operated. In 1925, he joined the Writers’ Union, having dropped out of engineering school the year before, and became involved in the avant-garde poetry circles of the newly renamed Leningrad. The most radical pre-Revolutionary poetic tendency had sought to liberate the word from stale, conventional meaning through jarring juxtapositions of sound. The combinations of words and fragmented phonemes supposedly constituted a ‘transrational’ – zaumnyi – language that would better express the true nature of the world. Its leading exponent, Velimir Khlebnikov, had died in 1922, but Kharms joined the group that had formed around Khlebnikov’s self-professed heir, the now largely forgotten poet Aleksandr Tufanov. Through these connections, Kharms met a number of other poets and writers, with whom he founded an experimental theatre group in 1927; this in turn was the basis for a new literary movement called the Society for Real Art. Oberiu, its slightly contorted acronym, doubled handily as a nonsense word in its own right, signalling a debt to the earlier zaum poets.
The ‘Oberiu Declaration’ was presented in January 1928 at a theatrical soirée involving circus acts, juggling and a pipe-smoking Kharms sitting on top of a cupboard. It urged listeners to ‘look at an object with bare eyes and you will for the first time see it cleansed of its crumbling literary gilding . . . To cleanse the object of the rubbish of ancient, decayed cultures – is this not the real requirement of our times?’ The combination of clowning and seriousness – painted faces claiming to represent, through broken verses, an ultimate, ‘true’ reality beyond conventional appearances – is typical enough of the Russian avant-garde. But the Oberiu was hoisting the standard of radical experimentation at a time when more conventional modes and mores were resurgent. Its founding manifesto starts on a revealingly defensive note, protesting at the marginalisation of painters such as Malevich and Pavel Filonov, to whom the group were close, but who were under increasing attack from artists and critics close to officialdom for their continued attachment to abstraction and formalism.
Responses to the Oberiu were similarly critical: in 1928, Krasnaya gazeta described the on-stage antics of Kharms and Co as ‘obscene’, objecting to their daubed faces and alogical slogans (‘Art is a cupboard!’). That year, the First Five-Year Plan was announced, inaugurating a period of forced-pace industrialisation and massive social mobility across the USSR. The Oberiu continued to put on events until 1931, but was often treated with hostility: a 1930 performance in a student dormitory was described as ‘reactionary juggling’. The audience was ‘indignant’, the reviewer claimed, because ‘in a period of the most intense efforts of the proletariat on the front of socialist construction, the Obereuts [sic] stand outside the social reality of the Soviet Union.’ Even at the time, the Oberiu was seen as a belated arrival on the avant-garde scene that was only repeating earlier provocations, and in a context where they were at best likely to be ineffective. The Futurist escapades of the 1910s – face-paint, garbled language, a manifesto entitled ‘A Slap in the Face of Public Taste’ – had taken place in a bourgeois culture whose conventions they were designed to disrupt; but as the Krasnaya gazeta correspondent observed of the Oberiu, ‘in 1928 no one will be épaté by a red wig, and there is no one left to scare.’
But it was not simply barriers of class consciousness that the Oberiu confronted: it had also arrived at an unbreachable literary limit. The 1928 manifesto had sharply distanced the group from their former mentor Tufanov, who by this time had decided to lead poetry away from the word altogether, proclaiming the phoneme as its medium; it was Tufanov the Oberiu were targeting when they announced themselves to be ‘the first enemies of those who castrate the word and turn it into an impotent and senseless mongrel’. The task, rather, was to liberate the word from its mundane representational burdens by breaking the associative chains that conventional usage imposed. A 1927 text by Kharms contends that ‘every object has four working meanings and a fifth, quintessential meaning’, described as ‘the free will of the object . . . The fifth meaning of the cupboard is the cupboard. The fifth meaning of running is running.’ The incongruous juxtapositions of objects in Kharms’s poetry were intended to sever the connections between the object and its ‘working’ meanings, leaving a free-floating ‘verbal series’ of independent essences which would only seem ‘nonsensical from a human perspective’.
There are some obvious problems with this: the human perspective is the only one we have, and if we are to grasp an object’s quiddity through poetry, it will have to be through linguistic conventions of some sort. (Would the object notice its liberation from the bonds of language?) The fact that an aesthetic project was impossible was, of course, never an obstacle to the Russian avant-garde. But there seems to be something especially forlorn about Kharms’s ideas here: as if what he wanted was not to remake language or the world of social relations underpinning it, but rather to have both language and the world become something wholly other than what they were. In his excellent 1991 study, Daniil Harms et la fin de l’avant-garde russe, Jean-Philippe Jaccard noted the differences between the Oberiu’s aspirations and those of its predecessors. The zaum poets had attempted to create their ‘transrational’ language the better to grasp reality: in Kharms, ‘this disintegration of language went in tandem with the disintegration of the world itself. A zaum which was supposed to help understand the world now did no more than describe its incoherence.’
This sense of a disordered world is shared by Kharms’s poetry, much of which now seems rather dated and awkward, and his prose of the 1930s, which has retained a taut freshness, its humour always teetering on the brink of something altogether more sombre. The reason perhaps is that the poetry depends on arbitrary suspensions of conventional meaning, whereas the prose relies for its effect on an ambiguous interaction between the accepted range of references and a wild zone where all logical connections have unravelled. It is the possibility of their abolition, the threat of senselessness, that gives Kharms’s work its energy.
The Oberiu was dissolved in 1931. Later that year, Kharms was briefly arrested, as part of a sweep targeting avant-garde writers linked to the Children’s State Publishing House (Detgiz), the only place where he’d been able to secure paid work. (The same is true of many Soviet writers, including Andrei Platonov.) After a few months in exile in Kursk, Kharms returned to Leningrad in late 1932, and spent the remaining ten years of his life there, struggling to earn a living writing nonsense rhymes for children. Poems such as ‘Ivan Ivanich Samovar’ and ‘A Million’ were for decades his most widely known work in Russia, but his reputation now rests on what he wrote ‘for the drawer’ in these years, work never published in his lifetime.
Kharms’s diaries from the 1930s detail recurrent bouts of hunger, paranoia and helplessness as well as prayers for salvation. A line in his ‘Blue Notebook’ from 1937 reads: ‘We’ve died on the fields of the everyday’ – an echo of Mayakovsky’s suicide note of 1930 (‘The boat of love ran aground on the everyday’). Though they distort and transform it often in hilarious ways, Kharms’s prose fragments convey a great deal about the everyday reality of 1930s Russia: queuing for food, overweening bureaucracy, a pervasive sense of vulnerability; violence erupting constantly and inexplicably. A father carries his daughter’s body to the building superintendent and asks him to certify the death, which he does by rubber-stamping her forehead; a man named Kalugin is judged unsanitary, folded in half and thrown out with the trash; after a pointless argument, one man beats another to death with a cucumber: these are only a few examples drawn from a series entitled ‘Sluchai’, which translates as ‘instances’, ‘events’, ‘happenings’ – as if Kharms were calmly chronicling the world outside his window.
But these short pieces do much more than parody the observational mode. There are wonderful send-ups of any number of genres. The epistolary: ‘I am writing to you in answer to your letter, which you are planning to write to me in answer to my letter, which I wrote to you.’ Literary biography, as in the deliberately misspelled ‘Anegdotes from the Life of Pushkin’, in which the poet writes abusive poems about his friends – ‘He called these poems “erpigarms”’ – and where we discover that ‘Pushkin had four sons and all of them idiots. One didn’t even know how to sit on a chair and was always falling off. Pushkin himself was not so great at sitting on chairs.’ Here the principal foil for Kharms’s wit is the Russian literary tradition, irreverently plundered and distorted, as in the novella ‘The Old Woman’, which effectively reverses Crime and Punishment by having an old woman turn up and die unaided in the narrator’s flat. Perhaps the most brilliant piece in ‘Sluchai’ is the pseudo-play ‘Pushkin and Gogol’. Gogol falls onto the stage from behind the curtain and lies still; Pushkin enters, trips over Gogol and falls, crying: ‘What the devil! Could it be Gogol!’ Now Gogol gets up, walks and immediately trips over Pushkin, who gets up again, only to trip over Gogol. And so on until the two exit the stage, each still exclaiming his annoyance at tripping over the other.
Kharms is particularly fond of tantalising comic negations: the beginning that is not a beginning, information that is not information, the story that is not a story. ‘Once upon a time there lived a four-legged crow. Strictly speaking, it had five legs, but that’s not worth talking about.’ We are told that ‘at two o’clock on Nevsky Prospect, or rather on the Avenue of October 25th nothing of note occurred.’ ‘The Meeting’ in its entirety reads: ‘Now, one day a man went to work and on the way he met another man, who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was heading back home where he came from. And that’s it, more or less.’ As with the tumbling old women, the narrative breaks off precisely when we would be expecting it to develop into an exploration of the facts it has previously placed before us; instead, we are left with meaningless specifics, with context and backdrop removed. Sometimes Kharms builds the process of subtraction into the fabric of the story, as in the case of the redheaded man ‘who had no eyes or ears’:
He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily.
He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He didn’t have a nose either.
He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, no spine, and he didn’t have any insides at all. There was nothing! So, we don’t even know who we’re talking about.
We’d better not talk about him any more.In his notebook, on the page facing this entry, Kharms wrote ‘Against Kant’: an indication that he was playing a more philosophical game. In ‘On Phenomena and Existences #2’, Nikolai Ivanovich Serpukhov sits before a bottle of vodka, yet behind him there is nothing: ‘There isn’t even any air-less space or, as they say, universal ether.’ In front of him there is ‘the complete lack of any sort of being, or, as they used to joke, the absence of any presence’.
Kharms is not interested in merely pulling the ontological rug from under our feet, however; his recurrent fascination with being and non-being is of a piece with the religious preoccupations that surface with increasing frequency in his later years. ‘The Old Woman’, written in 1939, ends with the (male) protagonist kneeling on the ground in a forest, at one with nature; he bows his head in prayer, seemingly redeemed. But such positive portents are rare. ‘How I Was Visited by Messengers’ betrays a gnawing anxiety about whether we can recognise or even perceive the arrival of the otherworldly: ‘I began looking for the messengers. But how is one to find them? What do they look like?’ In a diary entry from 1939, Kharms wrote that ‘only miracle interests me, as a break in the physical structure of the world.’ The role of miracles in Kharms’s work is not to occur: in ‘The Old Woman’ the narrator plans to write a story ‘about a miracle worker who lives in our time and does not work miracles’. The story doesn’t get written either, the narrator here a transparent proxy for Kharms himself, who was both compelled to write and heavily afflicted by the compulsion. A diary entry reads: ‘I was most happy when pen and paper were taken from me and I was forbidden from doing anything. I had no anxiety about doing nothing by my own fault, my conscience was clear, and I was happy. This was when I was in prison.’
In August 1941, Kharms was rounded up by the NKVD once again. He feigned mental illness to avoid a sentence of hard labour, but died in a prison hospital in 1942, during the siege of Leningrad. After his rehabilitation in the 1960s, some of his unpublished work began to trickle out, much of it in samizdat, but it was only in the 1980s that Russians started to rediscover Kharms. English translations of his poetry were included in anthologies from the 1960s, but anglophones had to wait until the late 1980s for his prose.
The principal difference between the new selection of Kharms, Today I Wrote Nothing, and those previously available is the number of poems Matvei Yankelevich, the translator, includes; this makes it more representative of Kharms’s output as a whole, but the poetry is undeniably patchy. Neil Cornwell’s Incidences (1993) is a stronger volume since it includes some of Kharms’s letters and theoretical writings, as well as the dramatic work Elizaveta Bam, which was performed at the first public Oberiu event in 1928. There are few real errors in Yankelevich’s translations (though I would question whether ‘God bless’ is the best rendering of the Russian Bog s nim, essentially a dismissive locution indicating a desire to change the subject rather than to bless anyone). But in an attempt to convey the colloquial, informal flavour of Kharms’s prose, Yankelevich has made some poor decisions that place us rather too squarely in the present-day US: at one point we are told to ‘check out this scene’, at another that the narrator was ‘shaking so bad that [he] couldn’t answer’; it’s unlikely Kharms would have said ‘gnawing on the goddamn dark’, and unclear who might actually use the expression ‘make my eyes with surprise’.
Yankelevich has, however, written a sensitive introduction that treads a careful path through the many interpretative possibilities open to Kharms readers. What emerges most strongly from the selection is the character of Kharms’s world: both the one he created, in which Gogol and Pushkin tumble across a stage cursing each other and four-legged crows have five legs, and the one in which he was uncomfortably living. It would be wrong to draw too direct a line between the two, but their most obvious shared feature is the violence: carried out, in the case of the stories, or misanthropically imagined, in the case of diary entries and other writings. ‘I hate children, old men and old women, and reasonable older individuals,’ Kharms wrote in the late 1930s. An undated piece begins: ‘When I see a man, I want to smack him in the face. It’s so much pleasure to pound on a man’s face.’ In ‘The Hunters’, six men go hunting and for no good reason begin to tear each other’s limbs off; in ‘The Lecture’, Pushkov expounds on the nature of woman and is constantly interrupted by blows from a silent crowd, who beat him senseless, without the motive for their attacks ever becoming clear.
The violence is often what makes the stories so funny: we laugh at the febrile rage of Kharms’s muzhiks or the pointless arguments of his intelligenti. And we can laugh because the characters are not people but abstractions: the tumbling old women are made of words, they only fall out of the word for a window. But the stories still generate unease, as if the fantastical could at any moment tip over into something horribly real, with our laughter making us complicit. The casual brutality is all the more shocking because it can only be a partial reflection of possibilities latent in reality; it re-creates in fragmentary form the disordered world in which Kharms felt he lived – déréglé, in Rimbaud’s sense. Where zaum poetry took words apart, Kharms’s prose describes a condition in which all meaning has been dismantled, leaving the way open both to comic flights of fancy and to the arbitrary and endless use of force.
The consequences of this were appalling enough in reality; in ‘Rehabilitation’, they are the stuff of terrifying black comedy. The story takes the form of a statement from a multiple murderer, in which he simultaneously outlines his actions in explicit terms and exculpates himself. First he kills a man named Volodya – but ‘it was already evening when I beat him with the clothes iron. Therefore his death was not at all sudden. The fact that I had already cut off his leg in the daytime is no evidence at all.’ Then Andryusha and Elizaveta Antonovna are killed because they got in his way; but, he says, ‘I did not rape Elizaveta Antonovna. First of all, she was not a virgin anymore and, secondly, I was dealing with a corpse, so she has no cause for complaint.’ He also kills her unborn child – but ‘he was created not for this life’ – and their dog; but ‘isn’t it cynical to accuse me of the murder of a dog when, one could say, three human lives were annihilated.’ As for the fact that he drank the blood of his victims and defecated on them, the first was out of a rational desire to cover his tracks, the second the product of a perfectly natural urge, ‘and for that reason not a criminal act’.
In its blithe brutality – the killer refers to most of his victims with friendly diminutives – the story seems to be suggesting that boundless violence is part of the normal repertoire of behaviour; that no reasonable person could have acted otherwise. The cheerful legalism of the conclusion is meant to reveal the full extent of the criminal’s delusion. But its more disturbing effect is to raise the possibility that he might be right; that in both Kharms’s world and ours, justice has as much substance as the non-existent redheaded man: ‘Thus, I understand the apprehensions of my defence, but still have hope for a complete acquittal.’" - Tony Wood
"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, 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." - Benjamin Lytal

"In 1927, just as his colleagues were being encouraged to forget experimentation and concentrate on extolling the joys of communism, Daniil Kharms and some likeminded friends formed the avant garde literary organisation OBERIU, The Society for Real Art in Leningrad. Knowing that this "real" work was unpublishable, the members survived by writing children's books, while meeting in the evenings to read to each other nonsense poems, stories and plays. Kharm's work in particular revealed a strange, inner world, full of accidents and disappearances, violent deaths and sudden resurrections, not to mention plummeting old women. The stories were extremely short, sometimes only a few sentences long, such as this little gem which he inscribed by hand in a blue notebook:
"There was a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn't have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily.
He couldn't talk because he had no mouth. He didn't have a nose either.
He didn't even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, no spine, and he didn't have any insides at all. There was nothing! So we don't even know who we're talking about.
So we'd better not talk about him any more."The difficulty of knowing a man who seemingly exists but in fact does not applies to Kharms' own biography. His birth name was Yuvachev: Kharms was derived from the English words "harms", "charms" and "Holmes", as in Sherlock, the fictional detective whose sartorial style he emulated. He had also consciously developed eccentricities, such as a strange hiccup-snorting seizure that disconcerted the NKVD agents who interrogated him. And finally Kharms himself was to vanish, and along with him all the notebooks containing his works. Only after 30 years did they reappear in samizdat, before finally being officially published in the 1980s.
Nowadays Kharms is a major cult figure in Russia, but in the west he remains obscure. Though the first translations of his work appeared in 1971, it is only in the last decade that an awareness of it has begun to filter through to a foreign audience. The most comprehensive edition in English to date, Today I Wrote Nothing, was published last month - its editor and translator, the Russian-American poet Matvei Yankelevich, is the leading Kharmsian writing in English, and also the grandson of the famous Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. His book is the result of 15 years' detective work in archives in Moscow and Saint Petersburg: "The manuscripts are all handwritten, covered in doodles and strange calligraphy. Some notebooks contain stories that have been worked over and copied out neatly in a final form, but even the most complete one, Events, which he dedicated to his wife, becomes more careless towards the end, as if he accepted it was never going to be published."
Kharms was first arrested in 1931 during a purge of anti-Soviet children's writers. Kharms detested children, but that wasn't why he was included. Suspicious of his nonsense, the nervous builders of utopia wondered what it was he wasn't saying. "They were looking for monarchist and religious remarks. They found a poem in one of his notebooks that mentioned God. That was religious enough for exile to Kursk." Though life in the provinces was a torment to Kharms, he might have relished the irony that the first official anthology of OBERIU nonsense writing had been compiled by an NKVD agent. Today it sits in the archives of the secret police in Moscow: "At one time I wanted to publish a limited edition just of that file," says Yankelevich. "In the end I took one poem from it, I Raise My Gaze, and included it in the new book. It exists in no other archive. The NKVD agent rescued it."
Kharms eventually returned to Leningrad, but it became increasingly difficult for him to publish even his children's writing. Frequently starving, he nevertheless remained committed to nonsense, writing up until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The stories in particular retain all the hallmarks of his dark imagination - the bizarre violence, peculiar digressions and sudden twists - and are written in a style that Yankelevich characterises as "direct, visceral and yet with something hidden".
Given the details of Kharms' life, western critics usually view his works as critiques of Stalinism, interpreting the disappearances and diversions almost allegorically. Yankelevich resists this approach: "I'm not completely against political readings, of course; I just worry about them. When you view the work through that lens you lose a lot of depth." In fact, he goes further, criticising the term "absurdist" which is also frequently applied to Kharms' texts: "I have an instinct that there's something political in that too, that this is an urge dating back to the cold war to reduce all Russian literature to an eternal act of protest, a belief that because the writers couldn't speak the truth out loud they wrote nonsense."
Yankelevich argues that Kharms' "absurdism", which was influenced not only by Russian Futurism but also by Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Nikolai Gogol, differs significantly from the post-war variety of Camus, Beckett and Ionesco. "Kharms' work continued the avant garde gesture of nihilism and destruction in the hope that he would break old connections and form new ones. He was interested in finding purity, in meanings that are not absurd. He wasn't hopeless about communication like Ionesco; he reduced things to absurdity in the hope that he might break through to the transcendent. For him, writing was about exorcising demons, about faith, hope, and belief in the miracle... In his notebooks the anti-logical stories sit right alongside magic spells, incantations, prayers, as though he were trying to change the world."Kharms' father had been a member of the same revolutionary group as Lenin's elder brother. The connection didn't save him. When the Nazis invaded in 1941, the NKVD arrested all suspicious characters in Leningrad; Kharms was detained in a hospital and starved to death during the blockade. His work would have been lost forever were it not for the loyalty of his friend Yakov Druskin. He ran to Kharms' lodgings on Mayakovsky Street (which had narrowly avoided being destroyed by a bomb) and retrieved the suitcase stuffed with notebooks that today comprises the majority of Kharms' oeuvre. Druskin held onto the suitcase until Soviet scholars became interested in the OBERIU in the 1960s, and worked to promote the work of the group until he died in 1980.
Whether or not all readers will agree with Yankelevich's de-Stalinised take on Kharms, there is no question that he has done the English-speaking audience a service in compiling this new volume. Kharms' suitcase is still being pulled from that building by those that love him. Finally recognised in his homeland, now his enigmatic blend of laughter and violence will shock, delight and baffle an audience that even he, so dedicated to the impossible and illogical, could never have imagined." - Daniel Kalder
"Who were the Oberiuts? Born in the early years of the 20th century, they were practically children at the time of the 1917 October Revolution. That they, the last representatives of Russian modernity, transformed and completed the entire spectrum of that modernity – from the mystically disposed Symbolism to the avant-garde leftist futurism - borders on the miraculous. As Daniil Kharms wrote: "Life has been victorious over death in a way unbeknownst to me." The idea of the miracle was a leitmotiv for Kharms and his friends, and they came back to it again and again. A further miracle: the whole group very nearly vanished without a trace, which would have had enormous consequences for the development of Russian literature. We would have seen their names in just a few memoirs, such as by dramatist Yevgeny Shvarts. As it turns out, the only reason we have access to their texts is because one of them, the philosopher Yakov Druskin, went over to where Daniil Kharms had been living in beseiged Leningrad before he was arrested, and slid his entire archive back home on a children's sled. He could have died under the German bombs, or he could have died of starvation like more than a million of the city's inhabitants: Or he could have been arrested and shared the fate of his friend.
Daniil Kharms died of starvation in 1942 in the prison clinic. Alexander Vvedensky died in 1941 during a prison transport. Nikolay Oleynikov was arrested and shot in 1937, Nikolay Zabolotsky was arrested in 1939, Leonid Lipavsky fell in the war in 1941. Yakov Druskin lived until 1980 in constant dialogue with the departed. He wrote: "It's embarrassing to talk about yourself. So I'll be brief: I'm interested in the final division. What I mean by that is: I remain alone."
After the Oberiuts came a long Soviet night. It was only at the end of the 1950s that those who came after attempted to build a small bridge to this tradition, all ties to which had been severed so definitively. Thanks to Anna Akhmatova, Josef Brodsky and his circle discovered the poetry of Russian classical modernity. But not yet the Oberiuts. Michail Meilach, who did so much to conserve and disseminate of the texts of the Oberiuts, remembers how distanced, even ironic, Brodsky had been toward them. Just like Akhmatova, his mentor. Perhaps she acted that way because she felt the Oberiuts had been distanced, even ironic, toward her (which was true too). That's literary life. For the next generation, Akhmatova and Mandelstam were taken for granted. But the "thaw" that had made this awakening possible was soon over once more.
The poets of the 1970s had no hope of cultural freedom (Brodsky and his contemporaries had had their hopes, even if they were in vain). Perhaps the Oberiuts fit in better in the triste post-"thaw". Their texts had a great effect on the so-called "second culture," which was just dawning at the time in Leningrad, whose means of dissemination was type-written copies and readings at home. Today this legendary "second culture" is of a huge significance, and through them the Oberiuts remain the protective patrons of many up and coming writers.
How do poets live in a totalitarian state? House searches come to mind, interrogations, the gulag and more. All very true. But there is also the painful slog: not belonging, being poor and poorly dressed, living in paltry surroundings, appearing as a bit of an oddball to others who are better at fitting in. It takes a lot of resistance to be able to say no to the general aesthetic and create an autonomous world of your own with a tiny group of like-minded people.
From 1933 to 1934, Leonid Lipavski protocolled (or photographed, as he called it) the talks of the Oberiuts in their sparsely-furnished rooms, as they sat down to meager meals and - sometimes - plenty to drink. These records are a unique document in the history of literature (they appeared in 1992, translated into Germany by Peter Urban, excerpts of which appear in the "Schreibheft" numbers 39 and 40. Unfortunately there are not yet available in book form in German).
"My ex-wife had an astonishing talent. At any time she could put her hand to her chest and pull out a flea. I've never met anyone like her since. Fleas don't bite me so often. But when they do, they're big. They come in the door, lie down and there's hardly any room left for me," Kharms tells his friends. His characteristic style is immediately recognisable. The Oberiuts spoke often in an exaggerated way, discovering for themselves the huge potential of the absurd. They used the term bessmysliza, nonsense. They loved every form of discourse, they wrote dialogues and plays. Lipavski: "What a beautiful thing is disinterested discussion. Two goddesses stand behind the talkers: the goddess of freedom and the goddess of earnestness. They look on well-meaningly and respectfully, listening with interest."
The Oberiuts leapt from Chekhov, whose every-day stories stand on the bridge to the theatre of the absurd, into the unknown 20th century. With all the differences between East and West, there was nevertheless a common breathing rhythm in the 20th century. When we watch Soviet and Western films from the 1930s today, or come across specific cut flowers or hair styles, we notice an astonishing similarity. Even the ideas and the ways of putting them into words were part of that. The thinking of the Oberiuts was strikingly close to existential philosophy. And not only did they discover the absurd before Beckett and Ionesco, in a certain way they were also more radical. "And in fact, all descriptions are indeterminate. The sentence 'A man sits, over his head is a ship' is certainly more correct than 'A man sits and reads a book'," wrote Vvedensky. Meaning can still be made out behind the absurdity of Beckett or Ionesco. The departure of the Oberiuts into nonsense was uncompromising.
This radicality was even too much for one of the group's friends. Already in 1926 Nikolay Zabolotsky had written, "my objection to A. Vvedensky: the authority of nonsense," demanding a universally valid logic. It was perhaps no accident that Zabolotsky was the only one of the group whose name was already known outside the small circle of Leningrad boheme. Zabolotsky survived the gulag and started a new life after his release in 1944 as an entirely different (although also good) poet.
It would be wrong to see the Oberiuts as political poets, or to cast their absurdist games as masked protest against the regime. They were no heroes, and did not seek confrontation with the powers that be. They exercised escapist literary careers (children's literature, translation), and apart from this bread-and-butter work, they wrote what they thought was right. They considered themselves the last people, the last specimens of another culture.
Yet another Oberiu wonder bordering on the miraculous: one of the researchers into the Oberiuts, Vladimir Glozer, managed to locate Daniil Kharms' wife, Marina Malich, on the Caribbean coast in Venezuela. After Kharms' death she was evacuated, then ended up in the occupied zone and was brought back to Germany, where she was made a household slave. After the war she managed to keep on moving west.
One sunny winter day, she had walked to the clinic in the jail where her husband was imprisoned. In her hands she had a small package containing the entire sparse rations she had received in besieged Leningrad. On the way over the icy Neva she met two children who fell over with weakness. She carried on her way, only to discover Kharms was dead. Suddenly she was taken with remorse about the two children. Glozer's book is based on tape recordings of Marina Malich. Many Oberiu specialists say he made it up, but I can't imagine anyone could be so talented as to make up something like that." - Olga Martynova
"What to remember about Kharms? Here was this little kid running around in the middle of a revolution. Then he grew up a little and here was this teenager running around in the middle of a civil war. And then the new society followed by the terror first in slow-time and then in a rush. At first the revolution was everywhere, revolutionary hope, and revolutionary plans for the good society and revolutionary art. The new shined and the old fell into shadows. In Petrograd/Leningrad where Kharms lived revolution was everywhere in politics, science, art and literature. The place was exploding with energy and change. The new was everywhere. Artists, writers sought to reach out and shape it. Small coalitions of artists and writers formed, then flew apart, then suddenly came together in new combinations. Manifestoes announced each group and its take on the new. Kharms sorted through them joined a few, and feasted on their ideas in the give and take in the city's bars and coffee shops. He found friends who shared his ideas, friends who helped him work out new ones as the times changed and his perspective on his work deepened.
Early on Kharms had become a servant of the Literature. Most were sure that literature was a severe maiden that lived on the peak of a high mountain. One served her at a distance in the valley below, humbly, with respect and sobriety, for it was a wonderful and holy thing to create literature though it was difficult to do so. Most thought discipline, care for details, and accuracy were required. Kharms discovered how to climb the mountain and make love to that maiden on the peak. And he discovered that she really liked it.
He made love to her in his short stories which were vulgar, violent, irrational, filled with sudden, surprising changes. Shaped with a strong sense of narrative form, his stories moved quickly and effortlessly to their conclusion. And they are funny. Kharm's work shares much with popular Russian humor vaudeville, circus clowns, folk drama, Punch-and-Judy type puppet shows, and low-class raunchy jokes.
Here is one of his best: THE PLUMMETING OLD WOMAN
A certain old woman, out of excess curiosity, fell out of a window, plummeted to the ground, and was smashed to pieces. Another old woman leaned out of the window and began looking at the remains of the first one, but she also, out of excessive curiosity, fell out of the window, plummeted to the ground and was smashed to pieces. Then a third old woman plummeted from the window, then a fourth, then a fifth. By the time a sixth had plummeted down, I was fed up watching them, and went off to Mal'tseviskiy Market, where, it was said, a knitted shawl had been given to a certain blind man.None of Kharms stories were published in his lifetime except a few he was able to disguise as children's literature. And rightly so. Whether Kharms realized it, whether the authorities realized it his work was deeply subversive of the Soviet state. First there was the matter of seriousness. The Soviet culture cops knew, "Nonsense verse is a protest against the dictatorship of the proletariat." And indeed it was. Seriousness was the glue that holds ideology together. But there was a deeper problem. Kharms turned the Marxist dialectic on its head. According to it a thesis generates an antithesis which then comes together with it to form a synthesis. In Kharms when the thesis and antithesis came together, there was an explosion, Pow, Bam, someone got a rap on the head and a kick in the pants.
Kharms was an absurdist writer in that he demonstrated in his stories the meaninglessness of human existence and at the same time the desire of people to have meaning in their lives. His strategy in writing was fairly simple: He posed a situation in which something happened that his reader wanted to make sense of. With verve and intelligence he drew his reader into his stories which, though they should have had meaning, turn out to have none. Absurdism may be defined as a celebration of the meaninglessness of life. It is nihilism with dirty shoes, a smile on its face and a song in its heart. Kharms was one of its masters.
He lived through more history that either you or I ever will, but this was not the time for writers to live long and prosper. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union had become murderous. In 1931 Kharms was first arrested, then released to a spell of internal exile in Kharkov. This marked him. He lost all but his bravest friends, he could not get a job anywhere, and he was set up for destruction later. Arrested in 1941 he starved to death in a prison hospital in early 1942. He was only 37." - http://amr.obook.org/daniil_kharms.php
"In Russian, they are called oberiuty, from the acronym OBERIU, standing for The Union of Real Art: so they referred to themselves between 1927 and 1931. Western scholars sometimes speak of them as Russian absurdists, because their work bears stylistic and existential similarities to what later, with Beckett and Ionesco, became known as the Absurd. OBERIU operated in Leningrad.
Its ringleaders were Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedensky. Kharms was tall. Vvedensky was not. Kharms cultivated the dress and manner of an English eccentric. Vvedensky dressed modestly and had rotten teeth. There was nothing artistic in his conduct save for a mania for cards. Kharms was into found objects, and at one point assembled a huge metallic thingamajig in his room. “What is this?” asked an astounded visitor. “A machine.” “What kind of a machine?” “No kind. Just a machine.” “But where did you get it?” “I put it together myself!” “But what does it do?” “Nothing.” “Then why do you have it?” “I just wanted a machine in my room.”1 Vvedensky, on the other hand, had almost no furniture. “Vvedensky came over with a pint of vodka,” recorded a friend. “He drank a half of it and sat quietly on the couch, saying only that he was saving himself for the evening’s party.”
Kharms wrote poetry, prose and plays. It is his play Elizaveta Bam that, in the whole absurdist oeuvre, is most reminiscent of Ionesco. Its plot consists of the arrest of a woman for the murder of one of the people who have come to arrest her. The play is full of non-sequiturs, circus acts, music and wild changes in tempo. Both Elizaveta Bam and some of Kharms’s hilarious prose texts, with their illogical action and grotesque, puppet-like violence and eroticism, have appeared in English, in the translations of George Gibian and Neil Cornwell. George Gibian has also translated Vvedensky’s play Christmas at the Ivanovs’, but Vvedensky’s major achievement—his poetry—has not been available for the English-speaking reader until now.
Vvedensky once said that his writing has only three themes: time, death, and God. On another occasion, he described his intellectual project as follows:
I raised my hand against concepts, against initial generalizations that no one previously had touched. Thereby I performed, you might say, a poetic critique of reason – more fundamental than that other, abstract [critique of Kant]. I doubted that, for instance, house, cottage and tower come together under the concept of building. Perhaps, the shoulder must be linked to the number four. I did it practically, in my poems, as a kind of proof. And I convinced myself that the old relations are false, but I don’t know what the new ones must be like. I don’t even know whether they should form one system or many. And so my basic sensation is that of disjointedness of time and fragmentation of space. Since this contradicts reason, it means that reason does not comprehend the world.
His pieces are all long, several pages and up, and often involve dialogue, or rather monologues of almost hallucinatory intensity, by beings who have no essence save speech. Typical Vvedensky anti-metaphors are “animals too are clocks” and “the sky became empty and clean like the sky.” In Russian these illogical combinations manage to be absolutely, unbearably tragic. He wrote poems in one or just a few sittings and almost never corrected, using rhymes and simple fast meters to aid the automatic-writing character of his process.
If another major oberiut poet, Nikolai Zabolotsky (1903-1958), was an absurdist, it was despite his best intentions; and his break with the group occurred, first and foremost, on theoretical grounds. A son of an agricultural scientist, with an acute eye for detail, in the 1920s Zabolotsky built a beautiful and ponderous style out of folkloric and cubist elements. Around 1930 he embarked on poems in which animals and people engage in profound philosophical discussions. His masterwork, The Triumph of Agriculture, predicts that scientific communism will liberate farm animals from mortality. Published in 1933, it encountered a storm of vitriol: Zabolotsky, the critics claimed, is a counter-revolutionary, cynically clearing his nostril upon everything that humanity holds dear! In fact, it seems as if the poor poet did expect the Revolution to lead to the liberation of nature from exploitation and death. He started moving towards more traditional forms, a process greatly aided by six years of hard labor (1938-1944).
Another member of the group, Nikolai Oleinikov (1898-1937), specialized in “bad” poetry—in what may be described, with Run DMC, as “not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good.” My favorite piece is about the vivisection of a cockroach by heartless scientists, whose most pathetic moment is: “There, in the shadow of a large cupboard, / abandoned by everyone, alone, / the son babbles, Papa! Papa! / Poor son!” Oleinikov also left a manuscript on number theory. He, Kharms and Vvedensky made a living as children’s writers.
The group also included the philosophers Leonid Lipavsky and Iakov Druskin; the talented and erudite poet / novelist with the unfortunate pseudonym of Konstantin Vaginov; the poet Igor Bakhterev, the director Doivber Levin and several others from the Radiks theater company. Since Zabolotsky was the only poet to publish adult pieces, the group made their work public in performances where poetry reading alternated with circus acts, arguments, singing, screaming and general ruckus. After one heated show, the newspapers took to accusing them, in increasingly hysterical tones, of counter-revolutionary attitudes and activities. The illogic of their work was seen as a deliberate attempt to confuse the proletariat. At the end of 1931, Kharms and Vvedensky were arrested, incarcerated, and sentenced to internal exile; however, they got out remarkably quickly, serving only a year each.
When they returned, there were to be no more performances. The oberiuty met informally, reading new work to each other and conducting philosophical and not-so-philosophical conversations, preserved for us by Lipavsky. In 1936, Vvedensky married and moved to Kharkov, in the Ukraine. In 1937 the Great Purge started. Oleinikov, as member of the Civil War generation that was the one of the targets of the purge, was arrested and executed as Trotskyite terrorist and saboteur of children’s literature. The publishing house where the oberiuty worked got cleaned out. Zabolotsky was arrested as well.
In the summer of 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. There were fresh arrests of anyone deemed potentially subversive, and Kharms and Vvedensky had political records. The Soviet police came for Vvedensky during the evacuation of Kharkov. He died in December 1941, apparently of dysentery in a cattle car headed for Siberia. Kharms, arrested in Leningrad, feigned madness to escape the firing squad; instead, he starved to death in a prison asylum during the first winter of the German blockade. Lipavsky was killed in the trenches. The oberiut Iakov Druskin, already in the state of dystrophy, walked across the mutilated city to Kharms’s apartment. Kharms’s wife, Marina Malich, gave Druskin a suitcase with Kharms’s and Vvedensky’s papers. He tied the suitcase to a child’s sled and pulled it back home. This is how the greater part of their surviving work came down to us." - Eugene Ostashevsky



It’s easy to dismiss grandiose claims about art and the nature of reality, especially when they’re made by a writer who spent time in a mental hospital. This is one reason why the rediscovery of the Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms has not led to much serious consideration of his ideas. In America, at least, Kharms’ life and his famous eccentricities have received as much attention as his work, a sad but predictable fate for a writer who enjoyed walking around Leningrad holding a butterfly net and wrote poetry in invented languages.
But a further reason for this neglect is that Kharms’ concerns—mysticism, the irrational, the absurd—are not among the priorities of contemporary American writing. He is an artifact of a literary culture vastly foreign to our own and vastly more radical, one in which publishing a manifesto that makes strange claims about art and reality, as Kharms did, was a reasonable way to start a literary career. But that time has passed, and what we modern Americans now find in Kharms’ work reflects our own priorities. We focus on the things about Kharms that are important within our own culture—his humor, his tragic life story—and generally ignore the effort at the center of his work: his attempt to create a literature of what he called “trans-sense” reality through classical literary means.
In both his personality and his work, Kharms was peculiar mixture of conservatism and radicalism. He was a revolutionary by temperament—he wanted to shock, to destabilize, to reinvent. The Soviet Revolution took place when he was an adolescent, and, whether or not he sympathized with its aims at first (Kharms’ beliefs on most social and political matters are unclear; I think he was simply apolitical), he absorbed the idea that the artists of his era must seek to remake art from the ground up, just as the Soviet Union was allegedly remaking society. But at the same time, he had an aristocratic aversion to the philistinism that the Revolution empowered, and hated the proletarian aesthetic wherever he saw it. “I am against everything that my country holds dear to its heart,” he wrote in a 1928 journal entry while enduring compulsory military service. “Everything that happens here seems foreign to me. My Dear God, free me from the proletariat.”
Kharms also opposed the literary establishment of the Soviet Union. He began his career alternately attacking and, when he wanted help getting published, ineptly cozying up to the reigning literary groups¹. This help, unsurprisingly, never came. What is surprising is that he found little in common with groups that were themselves at odds with the establishment. The best-known of the groups Kharms founded was the OBERIU (an acronym meaning “The Association for Real Art”) which he created in 1928 with the poet Alexander Vvedensky and a few others. The OBERIU worked, loosely, at the intersection of nonsense literature and public spectacle, ground that had already been worked over by the Futurists and the zaum (“za-oom,” meaning “trans-sense”) school of poetry centered around Velimir Khlebnikov. The OBERIU, however, hated being compared to these groups, whose writings represented for them a shallow formalism, excessively concerned with language itself. The OBERIU’s goal was to create art that addresses a level of reality beneath what they called in their manifesto “‘mundane’ or ‘everyday’ logic.” They did not want to undermine classical literary language and means of representation; rather, they wanted to use it to create an art of the irrational, to provide access to a world beyond logic and perceptible reality.
That Kharms actually succeeded in this ambition is where he parts ways with the OBERIU, and with context in general. I Am A Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary, released earlier this year by Academic Studies Press, gives the best sense of any book in English of Kharms both within his context and as a deeply fascinating individual whose work can’t be explained away by the circumstances of its creation.
The book’s translators and editors, Anthony Anemone and Peter Scotto, set out to assemble a “creative biography in documents” by including not only a selection of Kharms’ notebooks and letters but contemporary reviews, a handful of works that can plausibly be put in the category of creative autobiography, and official documents concerning his arrest, interrogation, and death. But the book is more than a creative biography—it’s a huge addition to the Kharms canon in English. Because Kharms barely published during his lifetime, and only in a few cases organized his work in any final form, there’s little distinction between the notebooks and his other works. Though many of Kharms’ notebook entries and letters have appeared in earlier collections of his prose, there are dozens of entries translated here for the first time that are just as great, as weird and delightful and mysterious, as his better-known works.
Beyond its value as a selection of Kharms’ work, the book can be read straight through as a postmodern novel of which Kharms is the protagonist. I hope that some of the readers who made Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives so popular a few years ago will read I Am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary. Not only does the “plot” of Kharms’ life mirror Bolaño’s novel—two friends start a radical literary movement, the movement breaks up, they age, they are battered by life, they die in obscurity—but both books similarly offer an endlessly varied view of their protagonists using a documentary, or, in Bolaño’s case, a pseudodocumentary technique. The difference is that I Am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary is about a writer greater and more strange than Bolaño or any of his creations, and one whose life story is much more devastating. Kharms was the unluckiest great writer of the early Soviet period, an impressive distinction in the generation of Babel, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and all the others. His bad luck was so excessive and perverse that his life story is almost Kharmsian, combining absurdity and brutality with dark, mordant humor.
The 36 years Kharms lived may have been the worst 36-year stretch in Russia’s history. He was born in 1905, a year of war and revolution, and he starved to death—like his idol Gogol—in the winter of 1942, while residing in the mental ward of a Leningrad prison, right around the time the residents of that besieged city began to eat one another. The years in between were not kind to him. The Soviet state persecuted Kharms for his writings, as it did many others, but Kharms had the ironic misfortune of being persecuted not for works heroically opposing Soviet rule but for what he considered hackwork, the children’s literature he wrote to survive. For his serious work he was not so much persecuted as obliquely threatened, which was enough to prevent him from even attempting to publish for the last twelve years of his life. Of his works for adults, which run to six volumes in Russian and were finally published in full in 2002, he saw a total of two poems appear in print in his lifetime. The bitter comedy of a failed avant-garde writer becoming a half-hearted children’s author is heightened by the fact that Kharms hated children.
Outside of literature, too, Kharms’ chief desires were thwarted. Sexually, he was a libertine in a very illiberal culture, obsessed with fantasies that seem to have been largely unfulfilled, and dissatisfied by his relationships with women who were inevitably too conservative for his tastes. He was a lover of the beach who lived in St. Petersburg, a religious believer under Soviet rule. In his notebooks, he wrote prayers for strength, sex, money, success; in the late 1930s he started praying for death. Mixed in with his prayers to God and the saints is the odd summoning spell.
Kharms’ development as a writer remains a mystery, and I Am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary contains few clues about how Daniil Yuvachev the mediocre Petersburg student became Daniil Kharms the radical young poet; he is fully formed right from the start. A few of Kharms’ earliest letters have survived, and by the fourth letter in the book, written when he was 12, Kharms is recognizably himself—which is to say, extremely strange. Writing his father², he sets down some runic symbols in place of the date. “I’ve been writing it this way for 1 year. I already showed you. Be healthy.” Kharms was already inventing new symbolic systems, which would be an obsession throughout his life.
Renaming, subversion, upending. “I want to be in life what Lobachevsky was in geometry,” Kharms wrote in one notebook entry (Lobachevsky was the Russian mathematician who revolutionized geometry by proving that mathematical systems exist in which Euclid’s axioms—previously considered the most basic laws of the discipline—do not apply). Kharms, like Lobachevsky, wanted to expand his field by showing that it had hitherto confined itself to one roped-off corner of reality. Kharms believed that real art must confront phenomena like mysticism and insanity that are beyond rational understanding. In a letter to the actress Klavdia Pugacheva, he contrasted two general types of art, the comprehensible and the incomprehensible. The second category is what excites him.

It is unintelligible, incomprehensible and at the same time beautiful, this second category! But you can never attain it, it’s ridiculous to even seek it, there are no roads leading to it. It is precisely this second category that suddenly forces a man to drop everything and take up mathematics, and then, dropping mathematics, suddenly to become fascinated with Arabic music, and then, having knifed his wife and son, lie on his stomach and examine a flower.

Kharms’ best work, like “The Old Woman” and some of the short pieces collected as Sluchai (“Incidents”), are organized around incomprehensible, but intuitively tangible, sets of relationships. They tread a nearly imperceptible line between nonsense and cause-and-effect. Kafka is the only other writer I can think of who works in this place, and only in his most experimental work, like “A Country Doctor” and some of the parables.
The Soviet authorities seem to have been appropriately puzzled by Kharms—they didn’t quite know whether to treat him as class enemy or crazy person. Contemporary reviews of Kharms’ groups’ performances trace the Soviet Union’s slide from the relative freedom of the 1920s to the ideological prison of the 1930s. The first review included here, from 1925, has an amused, ironic tone. Just two years later, a review of a scandalous performance in which Kharms had tried to quiet the unruly crowd by saying he refuses to read in “stables or whorehouses” shows a dark cloud of bureaucratic menace forming over the Soviet literary world. “The students categorically objected to hooliganish attacks of this sort on the part of persons appearing in the capacity of official representatives of a literary organization to student meetings,” the reviewer wrote. “They are demanding the expulsion of Kharms from the Poets’ Union since they consider that there is no place in a legally-constituted Soviet organization for someone who at a well-attended meeting would dare to compare a Soviet Institution of Higher Education to a brothel or a stable.” Kharms’ and Vvedensky’s smart-assed response, calling the whorehouse comparison “entirely apt,” would have been unimaginable even by 1930, when, in a party paper, one “L. Nilvich” published a piece attacking the OBERIU as “class enemies” and calling their trans-sense poetry “a protest against the Dictatorship of the proletariat,” rounding up this considered literary judgment with the ominous, “Why is it that the Union of Writers tolerates in its midst such scum, such . . . OBERIUTs?” That was it for Kharms’ efforts to organize the avant-garde; from then on, he wrote for children and for his drawer.
The tireless close-readers of the Soviet security forces detected questionable elements in Kharms’ work for children as well. He was arrested in 1931, along with Vvedensky and other members of their circle, in a roundup of authors of children’s books. Kharms was interrogated and confessed to doing “significant damage to the cause of forming the rising Soviet generation” by seducing it away from “contemporary concrete reality.” He did six months in prison and then joined his friend Vvedensky in exile in Kursk, in southeast Russia. This was a terrible period for Kharms, judging from his notebooks. Miserable, nervous, sick, he lay in bed, obsessively recording his temperature and the frequency of his masturbations. He returned to Leningrad and to writing children’s literature, and was arrested again in 1938 for a children’s poem in which a man goes out for cigarettes and disappears—this was not a safe time to write about people disappearing. Kharms managed to convince his interrogators that he was crazy, and spent a short period in a mental hospital. In the fall of 1941, following the Nazi invasion, he was arrested again for counterrevolutionary sentiments and defeatism. The preposterous charges against him show that the Soviet police state had lost its subtlety, its sense of literary nuance, in the ten years since Kharms’ first arrest: “Yuvachev-Kharms said that to improve living conditions in the country, it was necessary to eradicate the entire proletariat or to make them slaves.” He was judged not guilty due to insanity, but the authorities locked him in the prison hospital, where he died.
It is possible that near the end of his life he crossed the line from pretending to be crazy to actually being crazy. “His delusions are characterized by absurdities,” wrote the prison psychiatrist who examined him. “To keep his thoughts concealed he wraps his head in a headband or a small rag.”
How would Kharms have developed as a writer if he’d survived? What’s so peculiar about him is that he wrote his greatest works when his life was at its worst, in the late 1930s through 1940. As Russia was becoming a full-fledged hell of paranoid, societywide violence, and as Kharms was poverty-stricken almost to the point of starvation, his work became less self-consciously experimental, more classical, smoother. He gradually left behind the self-consciously radical work of his 20s. In a 1936 speech, he described the Russian avant-garde that he had once so enthusiastically participated in as an “insolvent” movement that had reached a dead end with Kazimir Malevich. The way forward, Kharms felt, was backward, to artists like Pushkin and Mozart. “The time has come when art can begin to evolve with the strengths of classicism,” he said.
Samuel Beckett’s career is one possible model for how Kharms’ writing may have evolved had he lived. Beckett, too, spent many years hammering out a mature style after deciding that the could go no further in the direction of experimental modernism, which he felt had reached its end point with Finnegan’s Wake³. Both Beckett and Kharms experimented with absurdity, grotesquerie, and black humor in their early works; throughout their lives both were obsessed with logic, mathematics, chess, and arcane knowledge, and both believed that the highest goal of literature is to access the irrational that hides behind conventional language and categories of thought⁴. Beckett was just three months younger than Kharms, and at age 36 he was working on Watt (1953), a novel whose craziness cedes no ground to anything Kharms wrote, and whose mixture of the bizarre and the pedestrian it recalls. With Mercier and Camier (1946), Beckett began to bring this aspect of his work under control, and his greatest books—spare, classically controlled, but no less artistically or intellectually radical—were all written when he was in his 40s. Kharms’ turn toward classicism in his last years makes me think he might have developed in a similar way.
Kharms was carrying a copy of Vvedensky’s “Elegy” when he was arrested for the final time, according to the police’s inventory of his personal effects. This detail would be too perfect to be plausible in a novel. This poem⁵, Vvedensky’s most classical work, is an elegy for the destroyed Russian avant-garde, a kind of dystopian vision in which the great tropes of Russian romantic poetry—knights, carriage drivers, singers, forests, streams—are corrupted and broken. What’s striking is that Vvedensky blames the avant-garde themselves, his peers, for the ruin he sees. Vvedensky accuses “us”—his generation of writers—of cowardice, betrayal, passive obedience, self-pity, and, above all, of lacking vision, of failing to fulfill their great promise:
        We cultivated the flower of grief,
        ourselves to ourselves forgave,
        we, who like ashes have grown cold,
        prefer the carnation to an eagle.
Our own intellectual culture cherishes the idea of the oppressed writer, the martyr to tyranny. Nothing could be further from this notion than Vvedensky’s bitter poem. It’s even a little hard to imagine that what he wrote in “Elegy” is what he believed. Did Vvedensky—who would himself die in prison less than a year after Kharms’ arrest—really think that the Russian avant-garde was responsible for their own failure, or would it simply have been too dangerous for him to write a poem blaming the state? And what about himself and Kharms—are they included in this indictment? Did Vvedensky consider the two of them lukewarm, complacent, accommodating? It’s hard to imagine somebody accusing the OBERIU of this, but there it is. It’s sort of humbling. What would Vvedensky say about contemporary literature if he considered the Russian writers of his generation too conventional, too compromising, too obedient?
How Kharms himself understood his generation’s destruction by the state is not clear. I Am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary includes entries in a code of Kharms’ own invention, in which he wrote what were presumably his secrets: his infidelities, his despair over his marriage, his sexual fantasies, his preference on the subject of genital grooming and hygiene. But the subject that dominated nearly every aspect of his life, the Soviet state, is one that his surviving diaries hardly address. It’s a measure of the pervasive menace and paranoia of the times that there is just one direct reference to politics in his diary entries of he purge years. In 1934, he jotted down notes from the radio broadcast on the funeral procession of Kirov, the Leningrad party boss whose murder marked the beginning of the worst period of Stalinist terror. The notes are banal: “Carrying medals on a little red pillow. Small procession,” Kharms wrote. But what made Kharms sit by the radio and record these banal details—a sense of fear and foreboding? Contempt for state ceremonies? Boredom? or was it simply his usual compulsion to record quotidian details? His attitude toward the real world, the world of politics, history, war, and revolution, remains a puzzle. And his reticence on the great events that swallowed him up adds to the pathos of his diaries. He was killed over a game he had no stake in. “I’m a tiny little bird who’s flown into a cage with big angry birds,” he wrote in 1935. - Chris Cumming
 

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¹He wrote to Boris Pasternak, for instance, but misspelled the famous poet’s patronymic and never got a reply.
  ²Kharms’ parents are one possible root of his weird mix of radicalism and conservatism. His father had been in the People’s Will terrorist group as a young man, but converted to Christianity in prison; in later life he wrote books on religious themes. His mother was a member of the former aristocracy, a biographical fact that the Soviet state turned against Kharms during his interrogations.
  ³Malevich seems to have been for Kharms what Joyce was for Beckett—the worshipped mentor who represents the terminus of the movements they had followed in their youths.
  ⁴Take this statement on language and the irrational, from a 1937 letter by Beckett: “[M]ore and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through—I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.” Quoted in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume I: 1929-1940 (2009).
  ⁵The translation here is by Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich in Alexander Vvedensky: An Invitation for Me to Think, released earlier this year by the New York Review of Books.