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Daniil Kharms - December 17 (Old Style) / December 30 (New Style), 1905 - 1942 |
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Poet, short story writer, and dramatist, a representative of avant-garde trends in the Soviet literature before Socialist Realism was declared the only acceptable form of artistic expression. During his lifetime, Daniil Kharms was best-known for his humorous children's stories; he managed to publish only two of his works outside the children's literature. These writings were rediscovered in the late 1960s. Today Kharms' fame rests chiefly on his experimental, absurd prose pieces. "I always believed in fair play and never beat anyone for no reason, because, when you are beating someone, you always go a bit draft and you might overdo it. Children, for example, should never be beaten with a knife or anything made of iron, but women – the opposite: they shouldn't be kicked. Animals – they, it is said, have more endurance." (from Incidents, translated by Neil Cornwell, Serpent's Tail, 2006, p. 124) Daniil
Kharms was born Daniil Ivanovich Iuvachev (also
Yuvachev) in St. Petersburg (the city was to change its name twice).
His father, Ivan Pavlovitch Iuvachev, was a revolutionary, a member of
The People's Freedom (Narodnaya Volya) group. The group had been
responsible for the assassination
of the Emperor Aleksandr in 1881. Ivan Pavlovitch became
a writer after returning in 1900 from his imprisonment on Sakhalin
Island. He sent his stories to Leo Tolstoy, who read one of them,
'Celestial Court,' and said that it was well written but it was too fantastic for his taste. (Russia's Lost Literature of the Absurd: A Literary Discovery.
Selected Works of Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky, edited and
translated by George Gibian, Cornell University Press, 1971, p. 5) In St. Petersburg he made a career as a scientist and
religious writer. Nadezhda Ivanova Koliubakina, Kharms' mother, ran a
women's shelter. She came from a noble family from Saratov province. Kharms attended school in Tsarskoe Selo, and continued then in the privileged German Peterschule (1915-22), and Second Soviet Labour School (1922-24). In 1925 he entered the Leningrad Electro-Technical College but did not graduate. In 1926 he enrolled on film course at the Institute of the History of the Arts. In 1925 he married Ester Aleksandrovna Rusakova, a member of an old émigré revolutionary family. They divorced in 1932. In 1934 Kharms married Marina Vladimirovna Malich to whom he dedicated a special notebook of his prose pieces. Kharms was associated with the abstract painter Kazimir Malevich, who had established the Suprematist school of art. He was also a member of the poet Aleksander Tufanov's group Orden Zaumnikov DSO. From 1925 attended the philosophical discussion circle known as the "chinari." Its other central members included Aleksandr Vvedenskii, Nikolai Oleinikov, Leonid Lipavskii, Tamara Lipavskaia, and Iakov Druskin. With his friend Vvedenskii he co-founded the School of Chinari in 1926. Several members of the group were arrested in the Great Purge in 1937. Vvdedenski was arrested again in Kharkov and he died in 1941 on route to Siberia. Kharms' second wife Marina survived the communist era. In 1926, Kharms joined the Petrograd branch of the All-Russian Union of Poets but three years later he was exluded. Two of his poems were published anthologies produced by the Union of Poets. They were the only poems for adult readers which were printed during his lifetime. In addition, Kharms participated in public reading of poetry, already using his pseudonym. It was perhaps was created from the words "charms" or "charme" and "harms." His other pen-names included "Charms," "Dandan," "Shardam," 'Kharms-Shardam" and "Karl Ivanovich Shusterling." His own life Kharms made a piece of art. He was tall and long-haired, and due to his fascination with Sherlock Holmes, he dressed in a British-style jacket, vest, and plus fours tucked into checkered socks. One of his friends said he looked like both "a puppy of good pedigree and the young Turgenev." (St. Petersburg: A Cultural History by Solomon Volkov, Free Press Paperbacks, 1997, p. 392) His apartment full of books on black magic and occultist symbols. On his old harmonium Kharms played Bach and Mozart. His favorite composers also included Mikhail Glinka, whose song, "Calm down, emotions of passion" he occasionally performed in a duet with the poet Nikolay Zabolotsky, one of the foremost Soviet poets. In his early poems Kharms experimented with structure and
technique, trying to create new meanings through sounds alone. Later
his writing in general moved toward stylistic simplicity. In his mini
stories Kharms challenged ordinary logic and rationality of the world. Anna
Akhmatova
said, that Kharms "managed to do what almost no one else
could, write the so-called prose of the twentieth century. When they
describe, for instance, how the hero went out into the street and
suddenly flew up into the air, no one else can do that convincingly,
only Kharms." (St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, p. 407) Alongside
Igor Bakhterev and Vvedenskii, Kharms collaborated with the
experimental theatre
group Radiks'. He hoped to expand Radiks' even further and publish an
anthology of its material. These plans never came to fruition. With
Zabolotsky,
Konstantin Vaghinov and others, he was a founder-member of the informal
group of artist and writers called the OBERIU (The Association of Real
Art), which was active from 1926 to 1930. Its members did not associate
themselves openly with the avant-garde movement in Leningrad. "Art is a cupboard," the group stated. (Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, edited and translated by Matvei Yankelevich,
Overlook Duckworth, 2007, p. 24) In the one and only performance, which the group arranged on 24 January 1928 at the Leningrad Press Club, the audience heard such slogans as "Poems Aren't pies" and "We Aren't Herring". (The Last Soviet Avant-Garde: OBERIU - Fact, Fiction, Metafiction by Graham Roberts, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 7) An article, which appeared in the Petersburg newspaper Smena (Change) and which declared the poetry of OBERIU counterrevolutionary, marked not only the end of absurdist performances but the Russian modernism itself. Very few of the founders of the group escaped jail and exile. Zabolotsky spent the years 1938 to 1946 at various labour camps in Siberia. Vaghinov died ill and penniless in 1934. Elizaveta Bam, Kharms' absurdist drama, produced at the Leningrad Press Club, was a part of the 1928 OBERIU evening and shown only once. It was poorly reviewed by the Leningrad Krasnaya gazeta (Red Gazette). However, nowadays the play is considered a precursor of Eugène Ionesco's theater of the absurd. In its Kafkaesque world of false accusation, Elizaveta is accused of committing a crime she has not yet committed (i.e. killing Petr Nikolaevich, who arrests her). The play was not performed in Russia until the 1980s. In 1928 Kharms served in the Red Army. He started to publish literature for children in the journal Ezh, which changed its name later into Chizh. Although Kharms was not fond of children, he wrote 12 books of children's stories and worked for the children's publishing house Detzig, run by Samuil Marshak. Even in the 1930s, fairytales offered a way to express ideas that could not be articulated within the constraints of the party line. Kharms' poem 'Ivan Ivanych Samovar' is considered a classic of Soviet children's literature. His most famous work became Vo-pervyh i vo-vtoryh from 1929. After Stalin had gained full power, avant-garde art came into conflict with the official cultural policy, which aimed at centralized control. "Formalism" and experimentation was condemned. Literary organizations were disbanded in 1932 to create Soviet Writers' Union. "You, writers, also are engineers directing the construction of the human soul," Stalin declared. "This is work no less important than any other work which is performed in our country for the building of socialism and its victory." (Soviet Literary Theory and Practice During the First Five-year Plan, 1928-32 by Harriet Borland, Greenwood Press, 1969, p. 158) At the end of 1931, both Kharms and Vvedensky were arrested and accused of anti-Soviet activities and sent into exile to Kursk where Kharms spent several months before returning to Saint Petersburg. In 1934 Kharms became a member of the Soviet Writers' Union. Despite
the increasing misery of the 1930s, Kharms managed to produce
some of his best works. Between 1933 and 1939 he wrote a cycle of
stories and
sketches called Sluchai (Incidents), which not only continued
the tradition Gogol by challenged the everyday logic and causality, but also reflected the reality of
living under totalitarian rule. These pieces, some
of which were
under ten lines long, were first published in the Soviet Union in 1988. In
one dramatic sketch Pushkin and Gogol are like performers in a slapstick routine: "GOGOL falls out from the wings on to the stage and quietly lies there. Pushkin appears on stage, stumbles over GOGOL and falls. PUSHKIN What the devil! Seems I've tripped
over Gogol!" (Ibid., p. 53) Then they all just stumble over each other, over and over again. A high complex achievement in Kharms' prose pieces is the short story 'Starucha' (The Old Woman), which he wrote in 1939. The narrator is a writer, who encounters an old lady whose clock is handless. She enters the writer's apartment and dies there. He has troubles distinguishing dreams from reality and the old woman turns out to possess supernatural powers. He puts her into a large suitcase, which gets stolen in a train. "At this juncture I temporarily conclude my manuscript, considering that it is quite long drawn out enough as it is." (Ibid,, p. 46) The story has been filmed by Duane Andersen (1999), starring Bryan D. Moss and Anna Platanova. In 1937-38 Kharms was banned from publishing. He wrote in a
poem (April 3, 1937): "We've died on the fields of the everyday. / No
hope is left to lead the way. / Our dreams of happiness are done. /
Poverty has won." (from The Blue Notebook by Daniil Kharms, in OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism,
edited by Eugene Ostashevsky, translated from the Russian by Eugene
Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich, Northwestern University Press,
2006, p. 133) Several of his friends had been
sent to the Gulag camps in Siberia. Hopelessly, he noted in his
journal that his extermination has begun. Kharms
was arrested again in 1941, after Germany attacked the
USSR. The building where he had lived had been damaged by a bomb but
Kharms' friend Yakov Druskin and Marina Malich managed to save his
archive, notebooks, diaries, unpublisjed works, and letters. Possibly feigning insanity, Kharms was declared mentally
ill and sent
to a prison psychiatric hospital. Kharms died in the psychiatric
section of an NKVD prison hospital in Leningrad (in some sources he
died of starvation in prison
in Novosibirsk), probably on February 2,
1942. He was barely 36. In 1956 during the "Thaw", a general liberalization of Soviet society, Kharms was rehabilitated, and his writings for children started to appear again in 1962. Kharms' friend, the philosopher Yakov Druskin, had managed to preserve most of the manuscript. After Stalin's death Sergei Slonimsky composed music to lyrics by Kharms. A Polish translation of Elizaveta Bam was published in Warsaw in the literature magazine Dialog (No. 12, 1966). The first collected editions of his work were printed in the 1970s. The K-Press in Bremen started to publish Kharms' collected works in the late 1970s, but the edition work was done in Leningrad. For further reading: Work Flows: Stalinist Liquids in Russian Labor Culture by Maya Vinokour (2024); Mnimoe sirotstvo: Khlebnikov i Kharms v kontekste russkogo i evropeĭskogo modernizma = Imaginary orphanhood: Velimir Khlebnikov and Daniil Kharms in the Context of Russian and European Modernism by Lada Panova (2017); Daniil Kharms: zhiznʹ cheloveka na vetru by Valeriĭ Shubinskiĭ (2015); Nabokov, Vian, and Kharms: From Solipsism to Dialogue by Margaret Simonton (2005); 'The Kharmsian Absurd: Against Kand and Causality,' in Bergson and Russian Modernism, 1900-1930 by Hilary L. Fink (1999); Reference Guide to Russien Literature, ed. by Neil Cornwell (1998); The Last Soviet Avant-Garde: OBERIU - Fact, Fiction, Metafiction by Graham Roberts (1997); 'Introduction: Daniil Kharms' by Neil Cornwell, in Incidents by Daniil Kharms (1993); Aspects of Dramatic Communication by Jenny Stelleman (1992); Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd, ed. by Neil Cornwell (1991); Laughter in the Void: An Introduction to the Writings of Daniil Harms and Aleksandr Vvedenskii by Alice Stone (1982); Russia's Lost Literature of the Absurd by G. Gibian (1974) - Note: Kharms' birthdate is some sources: December 25 (New Style), 1905; in this calendar: December 30 (New Style), 1905 Selected works:
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