A Strangely Funny Russian Genius

Daniil Kharms, a Russian writer who came of age in the worst of Soviet times, is categorized as an absurdist, partly (I think) because it’s hard to know what else to call him. To me he makes more sense as a religious writer. (…)

He took the name Kharms when he was nineteen and he wrote under it for the rest of his life. A connection may have existed between it and the English words “charm” and “harm,” both evoking his interest in magic. It is pronounced with the same hard, throaty h that enlivens the Russian pronunciation of names like Hemingway and Huckleberry Finn. At that point his life was more than halfway over. The next year he met Alexander Vvedensky, Leonid Lipavsky, Yakov Druskin, and Andrei Oleinikov, his future literary collaborators and friends. Kharms wrote hard-to-categorize plays, published two poems (the only works of his for adults to come out in his lifetime), and with Vvedensky, Nikolai Zabolotsky, and others formed a movement called OBERIU, an abbreviation made from letters in the words “Union for Real Art.” Public performances by OBERIU participants angered audiences to near riot and received threateningly negative reviews.

(…) In 1931 he was arrested for putting anti-Soviet ideas in his children’s writing. He spent part of his brief sentence of exile in Kursk with Vvedensky, who was also exiled there. Esther Rusakova, his first wife, to whom he had been married in the late 1920s, received a five-year Gulag sentence in 1936 and later died in prison. His friend Oleinikov was shot in 1937. In 1939 Kharms was diagnosed as schizophrenic and given an exemption from military service. In August 1941 he was arrested and charged with spreading panic and anti-Soviet propaganda. Held in a psychiatric prison hospital in Leningrad during the first and hardest winter of the German blockade, he starved to death on February 2, 1942, at the age of thirty-six. In 1956 he was rehabilitated, but his poems, prose pieces, and plays did not begin to be published in Russia until the late 1980s.

(…) The OBERIU poets’ rejection of plot, sense, logic, and the other consolations of meaning came out of a deep asceticism. “I’m always suspicious of everything comfortable and well off,” Kharms wrote to a friend in 1933. Their aspirations were also, in a sense, patriotic. To their critics, they replied that they were seeking “a genuinely new art” for all of Russia. Their methods tapped the spirituality that Russians have turned to before in drastic times. Kharms admired contemporary mathematicians of the Moscow School who used mystical, nonrational thinking to crack previously unsolved problems in set theory and the nature of infinity. He idolized the formalist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, twenty years his senior, who had cofounded an artistic movement called zaum, from the Russian za um, “beyond mind.” Kharms’s friend and close OBERIU collaborator Vvedensky declared his three themes to be “time, death, and God.” / Ian Frazier, New York Review of Books MAY 7, 2015 ISSUE

• “I Am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary”: The Notebooks, Diaries, and Letters of Daniil Kharms
  selected, translated from the Russian, and edited by Anthony Anemone and Peter Scotto
  Academic Studies Press, 586 pp., $69.00, $35.00 (paper)
• Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms
  edited and translated from the Russian by Matvei Yankelevich
  Ardis, 288 pp., $16.95 (paper)
• The Old Woman
  by Daniil Kharms, adapted by Darryl Pinckney, directed by Robert Wilson
  Brooklyn Academy of Music, June 22–29, 2014
• Moi Muzh Daniil Kharms [My Husband Daniil Kharms]
  by Marina Durnovo with Vladimir Glotser
  Moscow: B.S.G. Press, 196 pp.
• OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism
  edited by Eugene Ostashevsky, translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich
  Northwestern University Press, 258 pp., $22.95 (paper)
• An Invitation for Me to Think
  by Alexander Vvedensky, selected and translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky, with additional translations by Matvei Yankelevich
  NYRB/Poets, 135 pp., $12.95 (paper)