Daniil Kharms
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Daniil
Kharms (Russian: Дании́л Ива́нович Хармс;
30 December [O.S. 17 December] 1905 – 2
February 1942) was an early Soviet-era
surrealist and absurdist poet, writer
and dramatist. He signed his name in
Latin alphabet as Daniel Charms.
Life
Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev (Даниил
Иванович Ювачёв) was born in St.
Petersburg, into the family of Ivan
Yuvachev, a well known member of the
revolutionary group, The People's Will.
By this time the elder Yuvachev had
already been imprisoned for his
involvement in subversive acts against
the tsar Alexander III and had become a
religious philosopher, acquaintance of
Anton Chekhov during the latter's trip
to Sakhalin.
Daniil
invented the pseudonym Kharms while
attending high school at the prestigious
German "Peterschule". While at the
Peterschule, he learned the rudiments of
both English and German, and it may have
been the English "harm" and "charm" that
he incorporated into "Kharms".
Throughout his career Kharms used
variations on his name and the
pseudonyms DanDan, Khorms, Charms,
Shardam, and Kharms-Shardam, among
others. It is rumored that he scribbled
the name Kharms directly into his
passport.
In
1924, he entered the Leningrad
Electrotechnicum, from which he was
expelled for "lack of activity in social
activities". After his expulsion, he
gave himself over entirely to
literature. He joined the circle of
Aleksandr Tufanov, a sound-poet, and
follower of Velemir Khlebnikov's ideas
of zaum (or trans-sense) poetry. He met
the young poet Alexander Vvedensky at
this time, and the two became close
friends and inseparable collaborators.
In
1927, the Association of Writers of
Children's Literature was formed, and
Kharms was invited to be a member. From
1928 until 1941, Kharms continually
produced children's works and had a
great success.
In
1928, Daniil Kharms founded the
avant-garde collective OBERIU, or Union
of Real Art. He embraced the new
movements of Russian Futurism laid out
by his idols, Khlebnikov, Kazimir
Malevich, and Igor Terentiev, among
others. Their ideas served as a
springboard. His aesthetic centered
around a belief in the autonomy of art
from real world rules and logic, and the
intrinsic meaning to be found in objects
and words outside of their practical
function.
By the
late 1920s, his antirational verse,
nonlinear theatrical performances, and
public displays of decadent and
illogical behavior earned Kharms — who
always dressed like an English dandy
with a calabash pipe — the reputation of
being a talented but highly eccentric
“fool” or “crazy-man” in Leningrad
cultural circles.
Even
then, in the late 20s, despite rising
criticism of the OBERIU performances and
diatribes against the avant-garde in the
press, Kharms nurtured a fantasy of
uniting the progressive artists and
writers of the time (Malevich, Filonov,
Terentiev, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Kaverin,
Zamyatin) with leading Russian Formalist
critics (Tynianov, Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum,
Ginzburg, etc.,) and a younger
generation of writers (all from the
OBERIU crowd—Alexander Vvedensky,
Konstantin Vaginov, Nikolai Zabolotsky,
Igor Bakhterev), to form a cohesive
cultural movement of Left Art. Needless
to say it didn't happen that way.
Kharms
was arrested in 1931 together with
Vvedensky, Tufanov and some other
writers, and was in exile from his
hometown (forced to live in the city of
Kursk) for most of a year. He was
arrested as a member of "a group of
anti-Soviet children's writers", and
some of his works were used as an
evidence. Soviet authorities, having
become increasingly hostile toward the
avant-garde in general, deemed Kharms’
writing for children anti-Soviet because
of its absurd logic and its refusal to
instill materialist and social Soviet
values.
He
continued to write for children's
magazines when he returned from exile,
though his name would appear in the
credits less often. His plans for more
performances and plays were curtailed,
the OBERIU disbanded, and Kharms receded
into a very private writing life. He
wrote for the desk drawer, for his wife,
Marina Malich, and for a small group of
friends, the “Chinari”, who met
privately to discuss matters of
philosophy, music, mathematics, and
literature.
In the
1930s, as the mainstream Soviet
literature was becoming more and more
conservative under the guidelines of
Socialist Realism, Kharms found refuge
in children's literature. (He had worked
under Marshak at DetGiz, the state-owned
children's publishing house since the
mid-1920s, writing new material and
translating children literature from the
west, including Wilhelm Busch's Max and
Moritz). Many of his poems and short
stories for children, published in the
Chizh (Чиж), Yozh (Ëж), Sverchok (Сверчок)
and Oktyabryata (Октябрята) magazines,
are considered classics of the genre and
his roughly twenty children's books are
well known and loved by kids to this
day, - despite his personal deep disgust
for children, unknown to the public -
whereas his "adult" writing was not
published during his lifetime with the
sole exceptions of two early poems.
Still, these were lean times and his
honorariums didn't quite pay the bills,
plus the editors in the children's
publishing sector were suffering under
extreme pressure and censorship and some
were disposed of during Stalin's purges.
Thus,
Kharms lived in debt and hunger for
several years until his final arrest on
suspicion of treason in the summer of
1941 (most people with a previous arrest
were being picked up by the NKVD in
those times). He was imprisoned in the
psychiatric ward at Leningrad Prison No.
1. and died in his cell in February,
1942—most likely, from starvation, as
the Nazi blockade of Leningrad had
already begun. His work was saved from
the war by loyal friends and hidden
until the 1960s when his children’s
writing became widely published and
scholars began the job of recovering his
manuscripts and publishing them in the
west and in samizdat.
His
reputation in the 20th century in Russia
was largely based on his widely beloved
work for children. His other writings (a
vast assortment of stories, miniatures,
plays, poems, and pseudo-scientific,
philosophical investigations) were
virtually unknown until 1970's, and not
published officially in Russia until
"glasnost".
Works
Kharms' stories are typically brief
vignettes (see also short prose and
feuilleton) often only a few paragraphs
long, in which scenes of poverty and
deprivation alternate with fantastic,
dreamlike occurrences and acerbic
comedy. Occasionally they incorporate
incongruous appearances by famous
authors (e.g.: Pushkin and Gogol
tripping over each other; Count Leo
Tolstoy showing his chamber pot to the
world; Pushkin and his sons falling off
their chairs; etc.)
He was
married twice (to Esther Rusakova and
Marina Malich). His wives sometimes
appear in those of his poems that are
lyrical or erotic.
The
poet often professed his extreme
abhorrence of children and pets, as well
as old people; his career as a
children's writer notwithstanding.
Kharms'
world is unpredictable and disordered;
characters repeat the same actions many
times in succession or otherwise behave
irrationally; linear stories start to
develop but are interrupted in midstream
by inexplicable catastrophes that send
them in completely different directions.
His
manuscripts were preserved by his sister
and, most notably, by his friend Yakov
Druskin, a notable music theorist and
amateur theologist and philosopher, who
dragged a suitcase full of Kharms's and
Vvedensky's writings out of Kharms's
apartment during the blockade of
Leningrad and kept it hidden throughout
difficult times.
Kharms'
adult works were picked up by Russian
samizdat starting around the 1960s, and
thereby did have an influence on the
growing "unofficial" arts scene. (Moscow
Conceptualist artists and writers such
as Kabakov, Prigov, Rubinstein, were
influenced by this newly found
avant-garde predecessor).
A
complete collection of his works was
published in Bremen as four volumes, in
1978-1988. In Russia, Kharms works were
widely published only from the late
1980s. Now several editions of Kharms's
collected works and selected volumes
have been published in Russia, and
collections are now available in German,
French and Italian. In 2004 a selection
of his works appeared in Irish.
As for
English translations—oddly, many have
appeared of late in American literary
journals. In the 1970s George Gibbian at
Cornell published the first English
collection of OBERIU writing, which
included stories and a play by Daniil
Kharms and one play by Alexander
Vvedensky. Gibbian's translations
appeared in Annex Press magazine in
1978. In the early 1990s a slim selected
volume translated into British English
by Neil Cornwell came out in England.
New translations of all the members of
the OBERIU group (and their closely knit
group of friends, the Chinari) appeared
in Summer, 2006 in the USA (OBERIU: An
Anthology of Russian Absurdism,
containing poetry, drama and prose by
Alexander Vvedensky, Daniil Kharms,
Nikolai Zabolotsky, Nikolai Oleinikov,
Leonid Lipavsky and Yakov Druskin,
edited Eugene Ostashevsky and translated
by Matvei Yankelevich, Thomas Epstein,
Genya Turovskaya, Eugene Ostashevsky and
Ilya Bernstein.), including not only
prose, but plays, poetry, and
philosophical tracts and treatises, with
an introduction by Eugene Ostashevsky
(not Susan Sontag, who is on some
websites advertised as the author of the
foreword). An English translation of a
collection of his works, translated by
Matvei Yankelevich, was published in
2007. Its title is Today I Wrote Nothing
and includes poems, plays, short prose
pieces, and his novella "The Old Woman".
Some poems were also translated by Roman
Turovsky.
