Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms

by Daniil Kharms, Matvei Yankelevich (Translator)

Daniil Kharms has long been heralded as one of the most iconoclastic writers of the Soviet era, but the full breadth of his achievement is only in recent years, following the opening of Kharms' archives, being recognized internationally. In this brilliant translation by Matvei Yankelevich, English-language readers now have a comprehensive collection of the prose and poetry that secured Kharms s literary reputation a reputation that grew in Russia even as the Soviet establishment worked to suppress it.

A master of formally inventive poetry and what today would be called micro-fiction, Kharms built off the legacy of Russian Futurist writers to create a uniquely deadpan style written out of and in spite of the absurdities of life in Stalinist Russia. Featuring the acclaimed novella The Old Woman and darkly humorous short prose sequence Events (Sluchai), Today I Wrote Nothing also includes dozens of short prose pieces, plays, and poems long admired in Russia, but never before available in English. A major contribution for American readers and students of Russian literature and an exciting discovery for fans of contemporary writers as eclectic as George Saunders, John Ashbery, and Martin McDonagh, Today I Wrote Nothing is an invaluable collection for readers of innovative writing everywhere.

About the Editor


MATVEI YANKELEVICH is also a co-translator of Oberiu: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (2006). His translation of the Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem "Cloud in Pants" appears in Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and About Mayakovsky. He is the author of a long poem, The Present Work, and his writing has appeared in Fence, Open City, and many other literary journals. He teaches Russian Literature at Hunter College in New York City and edits the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Press in Brooklyn.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Short Stories, Russia, Russian Literature, Literature, Classics

Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 2007

About the author

Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev (Даниил Хармс) 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 “

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first half of the twentieth century… Realism is tasteless and out of fashion… Absurdism and surrealism reign all over the world… And Daniil Kharms is a virtuoso in both genres… And he knows a lot of weird 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 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.

Reading the book we keep wondering what a bizarre world it is… But to those who live inside the stories their world appears to be quite normal and ordinary…

In the courtyard stands an old woman holding in her hands a clock. I walk past the old woman, stop and ask her: “What time is it?”
“Take a look,” says the old woman.
I look and see that the clock has no hands.
“There are no hands there,” I say.
The old woman looks at the clock face and says to me:
“It’s quarter to three.”
“So, that’s how it is? Thanks very much,” I say and leave.

Horrendously wondrous things happen all around…

I once saw a fly and a bedbug get into a fight. It was so frighten­ing that I ran out into the street and ran as far as I could.

Some stare and don’t see and for others just a glance is enough.

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picture a tall, thin man with blazing light blue eyes parading down the main pedestrian boulevard in a city wearing a tweed suit, Sherlock Holmes double-brimmed hat and smoking a curved ivory Sherlock Holmes pipe, putting himself on display as if he were a perfectly balanced combination of Oscar Wilde and that famous London detective. And, as the crowning moment of his performance, the tall, thin man halts in the middle of a gaping crowd of onlookers and theatrically lies down in the middle of the sidewalk, and then, after several minutes, nonchalantly rises to his feet and continues his stroll.

Quite a sight; quite a man. Are we among artists in gay-Paris in 1868 or among Greenwich Village hippies in 1968? No, indeed, we are not -- we are in a totalitarian state, more specifically, we are in 1931 Stalinist Russia. Meet our one-of-a-kind author, Daniil Kharms. Considering the communist ideal of every healthy man and woman seeing themselves as a productive, hard-working citizen of the state, taking their place elbow to elbow with their comrades in the field or the factory, it is something of a miracle Daniil Kharms's short life (the state locked him in a mental institution at age 38 where he died of starvation) wasn't even shorter.

So, how, you may ask, does this one-of-a-kind writer tell a story? Before making more general comments on several stories and plays, here is a story entitled Events in its entirety: "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 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."

Quite a story in the tradition of great Russian literature: multiple deaths, a case of alcoholism, disease, madness, forced unemployment. And, of course, some moral philosophy thrown in at the end. Of course, I'm being ironic, but only partially. This is vintage Kharms, a literary vision and expression that is nothing less than piercing. After all, how should an artist and poet create when living in a society that is cruel, oppressive and repressive? Write conventional, familiar narrative? It is as if those penetrating light blue eyes of Kharms could see through all the pretense, sham, invention, deceit, and façade in both life and art and he would have none of it.

This collection contains well over one hundred pieces, mostly one-page stories, but also some poems and micro-plays along with several longer works, including a twenty-two page tale involving an old woman mysteriously sitting in the narrator's favorite armchair. Again, we have another one-page story of a fight where a man mutilates his opponent's face and nose with his dentures, another one-pager about a man who not only loses his handkerchief, hat, jacket and boots but also himself, another one-pager where an artist goes to a canal to buy rubber so he can make a rubber band to stretch but meanwhile an old woman gets burned up in a stove, and still another one pager where an engineer builds a wall across all of Petersburg but never knows what the wall is good for.

Also included is a one page play where Pushkin and Gogol do nothing but repeatedly trip and fall over one another and another play where a single actor takes the stage only to vomit and is followed by three more solo appearances of vomiting actors followed by a little girl who tells the audience to go home since all the actors are sick. Weird? Absolutely. Bizarre, strange, outlandish, crazy, nutty, kooky, wild? Again, yes, absolutely.

There is an excellent twenty-five page introduction by Matvei Yankelevich giving the reader new to Daniil Kharms the cultural and literary context as well as biographical information of the author. Anything more than this introduction might be too much since the uniqueness of Kharms demands (and I don't think demands is too strong a word here) freshness. Rather than reading Kharms and being reminded of Kafka, Sartre, Camus, Beckett or Dada, keep it fresh - read Kharms and read Kharms slowly and carefully, as if you were reading literature for the first time. Be open for miracles. And you will witness miracles, lots of them.

[Alialiarya · Rating 4 out of 5]

و بالاخره یک روز باید به میدان اصلی شهر بروم. جلوی تک تک عابران را بگیرم و بعد از چند ثانیه خیره‌شدن به چشم‌هایشان از آن‌ها بپرسم آیا تا به حال اثری از «دانیل خارمس» خوانده‌اند یا نه؟ و در جوابِ جواب‌هایشان، در حالی که تلاش می‌کنم وحشتم را پنهان کنم، دست‌هایم را دوطرف سرم قرار بدهم و بگویم: «ممکن نیست!»
و بعد، از آن‌ها که اثری از او نخوانده‌اند یک‌بار بگریزم.
و بعد، از آن‌ها که اثری از او خوانده‌اند دوبار بگریزم
زاهد بارخدا

خارمس خالق هنر نیست، بلکه خود هنر است
الکساندر ویدینسکی

مرد موقرمزی بود که نه چشم داشت و نه گوش. حتی مو هم نداشت، بنابراین بدون هیچ دلیلی موقرمز نامیده می‌شد. نمی‌توانست صحبت کند چون دهان نداشت. حتی دماغ هم نداشت. او نه پا داشت و نه دست. نه شکم، نه کمر، نه ستون فقرات و نه حتی دل و روده. اصلا چیزی آن‌جا نبود! با این حساب دیگر معلوم نیست درباره‌ی چه کسی صحبت می‌کنیم. در حقیقت بهتر است بیش از این درباره‌اش صحبت نکنیم
دفتر آبی شماره‌ی دهم
ص۶۱

بهترین، غنی‌ترین و عمیق‌ترین داستانی که امسال خوانده‌ام داستان بالاست. اگر بخشی از متن یک کتاب بهترین راه برای معرفی‌اش باشد بی‌شک با شاهکار طرفیم. کتاب پر است از این داستان‌ها. داستان‌هایی عجیب و غیرعادی مانند زندگی نویسنده‌شان. خارمس بارها زندانی شد و از نوشتن محروم و حتی اجازه‌ی انتشار را از او گرفتند او در سال‌های پایانی عمرش برای فرار از جنگ خود را به دیوانگی زد اما بعد از آزمایش‌های انجام شده او را دیوانه یافتند و به درمان اجباری در بخش روانپزشکی فرستادندش. سپس جنگ شروع می‌شود و منابع کشور بسیار اندک. او در سی و هفت سالگی در یک سلول به علت گرسنگی بله گرسنگی جان باخت. خیال می‌کنم چگونه ممکن است همچین نابغه‌ای که ضربات و کلمات‌اش یادآور بزرگانی مانند بکت و یونسکو است پس از محکوم شدن به سکوت دیوانه نشده باشد. آیا بکت هم دیوانه نمی‌شد اگر قلمش را می‌گرفتند؟ او در تاریخ ادبیات زنده است. درست است ظلم استالین باقی نماند و عمری نکرد و استبداد روزی به پایان می‌رسد اما مظلومین هم دیگر به زندگی و حیات باز نمی‌گردند. چندین خارمس در چنگال استبداد تیکه‌پاره و نابود شده‌اند؟
اولش بیشتر می‌خندیدم. بی‌هودگی داستان‌‌ها بامزه بود. اما هرچه جلوتر رفت ترس جای خنده را گرفت. ترس از قدرت او در به تصویر کشیدن ظلم استبداد بی‌هودگی جهان و تهی بودن زیست از ارزش. خارمس مانند کسی نیست. نمی‌توانم او را به دیگری مانند کنم. قرار است در آینده دیگران را مانند او بخوانم. همان‌طور که بولانیو والزر پسوا مانند کسی نبودند. کشف همچین هنرمندی لحظه‌ی بی‌نظیری‌ست

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

WINDOW:
I opened suddenly.
I'm a hole in the walls of buildings.
The soul spills out through me.
I'm the air vent of enlightened minds.

I read this collection of Kharms' poetry and short prose in less than a day. His voice just seemed to be clicking with me so I went with it. And where I went was a wacked-out world where people suddenly die a lot in very matter-of-fact ways and stories often end abruptly with the words THAT'S ALL, making me think of Looney Tunes cartoons, which in some cases are not that far off the mark from Kharms' brand of humor. [Note: Yankelevich, the translator, uses THAT'S ALL as a sign-off for later works and enough for earlier ones as a way to compensate for how the actual word Kharms used in Russian, 'vse', does not translate well into English—Yankelevich describes the word as "a kind of flippant version of "The End" that became one of Kharms' peculiar trademarks.)

Children, old people, and the dead should perhaps steer clear of this book, for there may be a bias against you:

"I just can't stand dead people and children."
"Yeah, children are disgusting," Sakerdon Mikhailovich agreed.
"In your opinion, what's worse—dead people or children?" I asked.
"Children, I'd say, are worse. They get in the way more often. You have to admit, dead people don't barge into our lives like that," said Sakerdon Mikhailovich.

Later, he gets even more specific:

I hate children, old men and old women, and reasonable older individuals.
Poisoning children is cruel. But something has to be done about them!

(I have to agree with him about reasonable older individuals...ugh, they are the worst.)

I really think Kharms might have hated children. I mean, I know this is fiction, but I sensed a fixation (and Yankelevich does note in the introduction that even his diaries reflected his extreme dislike of children):

From the street I can hear the unpleasant screams of little boys. I lie there dreaming up tortures for them. Most of all I like the idea of afflicting them with tetanus so that they'd suddenly stop moving. Their parents drag them back to their respective homes. They lie in their little beds and can't even eat, because their mouths don't open. They are nourished artificially. After a week the tetanus goes away, but the children are so weak that they still have to be confined to their beds for a whole month more. Then, bit by bit, they begin to recover, but I afflict them with a second bout of tetanus and they all expire.

Clearly Kharms had thought this out in extreme detail. It makes me think of the signs in my neighborhood that say, "No Ball Playing," but much, much worse, like if those signs had existed outside Kharms' house, I mean Kharms' character's house, maybe the whole tetanus fantasy never would have materialized.

The funny thing about all of this is that Kharms made a living from writing children's books.

I sort of love him. I sort of love anyone who admits to having "consciously renounced contemporary reality." We probably would have been friends. It sounds like he was a lot of fun. From the introduction:

He was prone to interrupt the flow of foot traffic on Nevsky Prospect by suddenly taking a prostrate position on the pavement, then, after a crowd had gathered around to see what was the matter, getting up and walking away as though nothing had happened. He kept a large machine at home, which he made of found scrap. When asked what it did, Kharms would retort, "Nothing. It's just a machine."

Yes. It is just a machine.

Kharms' diaries also reflected struggles with depression. I saw familiar evidence of this in one of his poems, which is kind of long to type here, but to hell with it...

I looked long at the green trees.
Peace filled my soul.
Still, as before, big and united thoughts elude me.
Just the same shreds, clumps, tatters and tails.
Then an earthly desire might flare up.
Or my arm reaches out toward an entertaining book,
Or suddenly I might grab a sheet of paper,
But right then a sweet dream knocks on the mind's door.
I sit down by the window in the deepest armchair,
I look at my watch, I light my pipe,
But then I jump up and cross over to the table,
I sit down on a hard chair and roll myself a cigarette.
I see: a spider running cross the wall,
I watch him closely, I cannot tear myself away.
He keeps me from picking up the pen.
Kill the spider!
Too lazy to get up.
Now I look within myself,
But inside I'm empty, monotonous, boring,
The beating of intense living is nowhere to be found,
Everything is limp and drowsy, like damp straw.
Now I've been inside myself
And now I stand before you.
You expect me to tell you of my travels,
But I am silent, for I have seen nothing.
Leave me be and let me look calmly—upon the green trees.
And then, perhaps, peace will fill my soul,
And then, perhaps, my soul will wake,
And I will wake, and intense living will beat again inside me.

What I find so poignant about this poem is the narrator's humor in the face of his despondency. I don't pretend to know Kharms' state of mind when he was writing this poem, but if he was in fact depressed, then the humor that flares up briefly midway through the poem seems so much braver here. And he also captures the restless distraction that can so often come with depression, this drifting from one activity to the next, never settling, and the oppressive lassitude, the involuntary shuttering of the interior, the inability to communicate, to tell what has been seen, for nothing has indeed been seen.

One other curiosity: Kharms mentions 'spheres' a lot. He was interested in the occult, so maybe there is a connection there...

It seems that these verses have become a thing, and one can take them off the page and throw them at a window, and the window would break. That's what words can do!

THAT'S ALL

[sAmAnE · Rating 4 out of 5]

پاییز ۱۹۳۷، دانیل خارمس در خاطراتش نوشت: «من فقط به چیزهای بی‌معنی علاقه‌مندم، چیزهایی که معنای کاربردی ندارند. زندگی تنها در عبث‌ترین تجلیاتش توجه مرا به خود جلب می‌کند.»

مجموعه‌ای از داستان‌های بسیار کوتاه ولی گیرا. داستان پیرزن در حالی که طنز جالبی داشت بسیار هولناک بود و من کمتر بین نویسنده‌ها دیده بودم که انقدر هوشمندانه از داستانی سورئال از یک واقعه‌ی هولناک بنویسند. داستان‌ها پر از نماد و کنایه‌های عجیب و غریب بودند. کتابی بود که با هر خط خواندنش ترسیدم، خندیدم و کیف کردم.

مطمئنا مورد پسند همه نیست.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

from The Werld:

Then I realized that since before there was somewhere to look – there had been a world around me. And now it’s gone. There’s only me.

And then I realized that I am the world.

But the world – is not me.

Although at the same time I am the world.

But the world’s not me.

And I’m the world.

But the world’s not me.

And I’m the world.

But the world’s not me.

And I’m the world.

And after that I didn’t think anything more.

This guy is funny. This guy is frightening. He’s ultra-serious and slapstick hilarious. The world portrayed in his writings is like a world reduced to a Beckett stage-set – a bed, a cucumber, a clock – in an otherwise whited-out world, and with this minimalism a metaphysical cosmos of violent absurdity and eccentricity, strobe-lit with transcendent flashes, is created.

His intentions were in fact to write short intense works, or "Incidences" as he preferred, that isolate absurd or violent events, or events so mundane as to be meaningless, and through this isolation to create a “flash” of transcendent vision and a moment of being beyond earthly constraints.

And he knew constraints.

He was a second generation Soviet avant-gardist, which marginalized him by definition, and of course he was thoroughly uncompromising and a thoroughgoing dandy and purposeful eccentric (he actually developed a verbal/physical tic that was a literally embodied example of his fractured aesthetics). All this eventually led to his imprisonment on suspicion of anti-soviet activities. He died of starvation in prison in 1942 at the age of 37.

But though his work directly reflects his “condition” in the early Soviet Union, it by no means is dependent on that condition to give it meaning. This is literary experimentation of the highest universal order, and once the barbed surface of its seeming pointlessness and absurdity is broke, profound (though elusive) meanings spill out along with its more immediate literary pleasures.

AN INCIDENT INVOLVING PETRAKOV

So, once Petrakov wanted to go to sleep but, lying down, missed the bed. He hit the floor so hard he lay there unable to get up.

So Petrakov mustered his remaining strength and got on his hands and knees. But his strength abandoned him and he fell on his stomach again, and he just lies there.

Petrakov lay on the floor about five hours. At first he just lay there, but then he fell asleep.

Sleep refreshed Petrakov’s strength. He woke up invigorated, got up, walked around the room and cautiously lay down on the bed. “Well,” he thought, “now I’ll get some sleep.” But now he’s not feeling very sleepy. So Petrakov keeps turning in his bed and can’t fall asleep.

And that’s it, more or less.

[Sentimental Surrealist · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stalin.

Now that the only thing anyone ever fucking mentions about Daniil Kharms is out of the way, let's talk about Daniil Kharms. He's fun to read! The stuff here is fast-paced and short, and so stupid that it wraps back around and becomes witty; Kharms had the unique and enviable ability to embed complex concepts (the double-edged sword that is curiosity, the damage the veneration of idols does to our society, the complexities of faith and politics) into stories about people falling over and hitting each other over the head with heavy objects and trying to keep people from realizing there are dead bodies in their apartments. There's a certain type of stupid that I will fucking ADORE, and it's basically stupid things made by smart and talented people, like this book. Okay, so far so good, and to make things even better there's a real meditative edge amid all the slapstick. Characters basically pause within their overwhelming worlds, try to take breathers amid the confusion to figure out what the hell's going on, decide that's too much work, and instead plunge on ahead with falling and getting hit on the head with heavy objects and trying to keep people from realizing there are dead bodies in their apartments. And for the first three of this book's four sections, I thought I'd stumbled into a new favorite author. Yet for as unique and as (dare I say) profound as meditative slapstick is, it's all Kharms does, and the fourth segment, which consists of unpublished, unpolished, and potentially unfinished sketches, does rather drag, where the first three parts have a real sense of purpose to them. Still, four stars is pretty damn good for a book that tips its hand seventy pages before it ends, and there are some real gems to be found in the final segment. So if you're a fan of weird literature, you'd best find yourself a copy of this pronto.

[Bogdan]

In English below

Это, конечно, очень обширное сравнение, но можно сказать, что группа ОБЭРИУ — ранний, подпольный эквивалент французского Oulipo. Русское авангардное движение в литературе угасло гораздо быстрее — из-за давления советской цензуры и сталинских репрессий —, чем весёлый Oulipo, который во всём своём разнообразии расцвёл на свободном Западе.

ОБЭРИУ — трагичен: его главные создатели рано погибли. Бесподобный Даниил Хармс скончался от голода в сумасшедшем доме. Он не сошёл с ума, был просто в советском союзе излишними эксцентриком и непонятным прозаиком. Другой, А. Введенский, чей стихотворное творчество было критикой разума, более радикальной, чем у самого Канта, тоже, как совершенно подозрительный тип был преследуем, арестован, отправлен в ссылку и – благо вернулся на “свободу” –, умер молодым, как его товарищ.

Несмотря на всё это, у них много общего с шикарными, свободными французскими авангардистами Queneau, Perec, Roubaud — прежде всего живучесть и (мнимая) лёгкость их экспериментов. И Даниил Хармс, и Александр Введенский при жизни смогли опубликовать только абсурдные стихи и рассказы для детей. Нескласифицируемая же проза Хармса, которую он писал только для себя и нескольких друзей, чудом сохранилась в одном чемодане и увидела свет лишь много десятилетий спустя его трагической смерти. Так же и серьёзные стихи Введенского в Советском Союзе распространялись только в самиздате, впервые были опубликованы в Америке, а в России — лишь в 1993 году.

Принципиальное различие между Oulipo и ОБЭРИУ заключается в том, что для писателей первой группы — независимо от поразительной виртуозности и изобретательности, которые демонстрируют некоторые из их произведений, — побег от реальности был лёгким и весёлым. Их ограничения были самоназначенными и чисто эстетическими — например, написание целого романа без единой буквы “e” (La disparition). А вот для Введенского и Хармса сбежать — ни физически, ни психически — от кошмарной реальности или даже от абсурдной банальности советского режима было практически невозможно. Неизбежно, исподволь, всё это проникало в их внутренние иррациональные алхимические реторты и претерпевало там уникальное превращение: всякий абсурд скручивался своей противоположностью — страшной, неотвратимой реальностью; всё, покрытое налётом обыденности (советской), зияло галлюцинаторными безднами.

Возможно, в том, что писали обэриуты, ничто не было чистым словесным фокусничеством, но его так много у Oulipoв. Первые играли на грани реальности и разума, а вторые, быть может, были слишком свободны, чтобы не только играть, но и публиковаться…

Внизу — моё любимое стихотворение Введенского, которое я уже знал наизусть, когда только начинал учить русский, в 25 лет, — и короткий текст Хармса.

Гость на коне


Конь степной
бежит устало,
пена каплет с конских губ.
Гость ночной
тебя не стало,
вдруг исчез ты на бегу.
Вечер был.
Не помню твердо,
было все черно и гордо.
Я забыл
существованье
слов, зверей, воды и звёзд.
Вечер был на расстояньи
от меня на много верст.
Я услышал конский топот
и не понял этот шопот,
я решил, что это опыт
превращения предмета
из железа в слово, в ропот,
в сон, в несчастье, в каплю света.
Дверь открылась,
входит гость.
Боль мою пронзила
кость.
Человек из человека
наклоняется ко мне,
на меня глядит как эхо,
он с медалью на спине.
Он обратною рукою
показал мне — над рекою
рыба бегала во мгле,
отражаясь как в стек��е.
Я услышал, дверь и шкап
сказали ясно:
конский храп.
Я сидел и я пошёл
как растение на стол,
как понятье неживое,
как пушинка
или жук,
на собранье мировое
насекомых и наук,
гор и леса,
скал и беса,
птиц и ночи,
слов и дня.
Гость я рад,
я счастлив очень,
я увидел край коня.
Конь был гладок,
без загадок,
прост и ясен как ручей.
Конь бил гривой
торопливой,
говорил —
я съел бы щей.
Я собранья председатель,
я на сборище пришёл.
— Научи меня Создатель.
Бог ответил: хорошо,
Повернулся
боком конь,
и я взглянул
в его ладонь.
Он был нестрашный.
Я решил,
я согрешил,
значит, Бог меня лишил
воли, тела и ума.
Ко мне вернулся день вчерашний.
В кипятке
была зима,
в ручейке
была тюрьма,
был в цветке
болезней сбор,
был в жуке
ненужный спор.
Ни в чём я не увидел смысла.
Бог Ты может быть отсутствуешь?
Несчастье.
Нет я всё увидел сразу,
поднял дня немую вазу,
я сказал смешную фразу —
чудо любит пятки греть.
Свет возник,
слова возникли,
мир поник,
орлы притихли.
Человек стал бес
и покуда
будто чудо
через час исчез.
Я забыл существованье,
я созерцал
вновь
расстоянье.


1931–1934

Некий инженер задался целью выстроить поперёк Петербурга огромную кирпичную стену. Он обдумывает, как это совершить, не спит ночами и рассуждает. Постепенно образуется кружок мыслителей-инженеров и вырабатывается план постройки стены. Стену решено строить ночью, да так, чтобы в одну ночь всё и построить, чтобы она явилась всем сюрпризом. Созываются рабочие. Идёт распределение. Городские власти отводятся в сторону, и наконец настаёт ночь, когда эта стена должна быть построена. О постройке стены известно только четырём человекам. Рабочие и инженеры получают точное распоряжение, где кому встать и что сделать. Благодаря точному расчёту, стену удаётся выстроить в одну ночь. На другой день в Петербурге переполох. И сам изобретатель стены в унынии. На что эту стену применить, он и сам не знал.

Даниил Хармс - 1930

English

This is a very wide-reaching—maybe downright far-fetched—comparison, but I think that, at least partially, the Russian OBERIU group was an early, underground equivalent of the French group Oulipo. At first glance, they have little in common, but at second glance, very much! The third glance, though, shows them as radically different once again… After all, I had to admit this latter point to myself upon finishing the review above. It was an unexpected conclusion. Honestly.

(The first glance) The Russian avant-garde literary movement was—very soon after its inception—run down by Soviet censorship and Stalinist repression. The playful Oulipo, by contrast, flourished freely in France—on the democratic side of Europe—for many years.

OBERIU is a tragic case: its two main founders died young. The unclassifiable writer Daniil Kharms perished from starvation in a desolate madhouse. He had not lost his mind—no—he was simply a useless eccentric, and his incomprehensible prose seemed a tad dangerous to the Soviet authorities. And maybe it was! Aleksandr Vvedensky—whose poetic work was, in his own words, “a critique of reason more radical than Kant’s”—was likewise persecuted by the state’s security agents for being a thoroughly suspicious figure. He was arrested, even exiled, and—though he was fortunate enough to be set "free" again—died young, like his companion.

(The second glance) Despite all this, the Oberiuts had much in common with the ultra-chic avant-gardists of Oulipo, who were not seriously bothered by the democratic state they lived in. One was a lost generation, the other a thriving one, on two opposite geopolitical poles; yet the two O-movements shared a lightness and a versatility of experimentation that stemmed from their awareness of being at once in the atelier and in the funhouse of literature.

During their lifetimes, both Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedensky were allowed to publish only a few absurd but seemingly innocent, naïve poems and stories for children. Those works are masterpieces too. What Kharms had the chance to write only for himself and a handful of friends was miraculously preserved (and transported across decades after his tragic death) in a suitcase. When that suitcase was opened, Kharms' manuscripts—or what I consider the greatest testament to the absurd—finally saw the light of day. Written before the popular discoveries of ‘the absurd’ in Western literature, Kharms’ work was destined to be published only after ‘the absurd’ had already ended its great literary career. Likewise, Vvedensky’s poems for grown-ups—of unfathomable madness and mysticism—circulated in the Soviet Union only through samizdat. They were first published in America and appeared in Russia only in 1993. If not for this delay in publication (to call it that), Vvedensky would have been considered at least one of the greatest surrealists.

(The third glance) An essential difference between Oulipo and Oberiu lies in the fact that, for the writers of the first movement—regardless of the amazing virtuosity and versatility many of their creations demonstrate—escaping reality was easy and fun. Their restraints were self-imposed and purely aesthetic, as in writing an entire novel without the letter “e” (La disparition). But for Vvedensky and Kharms, it was next to impossible to escape, either physically or psychologically, the nightmare realities and even the absurd banalities of the Soviet regime. Inevitably, these contradictions fueled the writers’ inner irrational alembics, where they were transmuted by a unique alchemy: however absurd, everything was mixed with its counterpart—the immediate, impending reality. All that bore the hues of ordinary life was also pregnant with its hallucinatory abysses.

Perhaps nothing was mere wordplay in what the Oberiuts wrote, whereas there is almost only that in the works of the Oulipians. The first played on the edge of reality and reason, while the second were maybe too free to play—and to publish…

The names of the two groups should have made this last point clear from the start. One group is more about experimenting with letters: Oulipo stands for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle—"workshop of potential literature." The other is about experimenting with “reality”: Oberiu (ОБЭРИУ) stands for Объединение реального искусства—the “Union of Real Art” or the “Association for Real Art”.

I'll illustrate this last point with an example from this volume:

A certain engineer has made up his mind to build a huge brick wall across Petersburg. He considers how to accomplish this, doesn't sleep for nights cogitating it. Gradually a group of engineering planners is formed and a plan for the construction of the wall is elaborated. It was decided to build the wall at night, indeed, to build the whole thing in one night, so that it would appear as a surprise to everyone. Workers are summoned. The organisation is under way. The city authorities are sidelined and finally the night arrives when this wall is to be built. The building of the wall is known only to four men. The workers and engineers receive exact instructions as to whom to place where and what to do. Thanks to exact calculation, they succeed in putting up the wall in a single night. On the following day there is consternation in Petersburg. And the inventor of the wall is himself dejected. To what use this wall was to be put, he himself did not know.

Daniil Kharms (1930)

Absurd, isn’t it? But everybody knows that, some decades later, a real wall was built in another big city—dividing it, and the whole of Europe, in two. That too happened for some obscure reason.


Here's also a translation of my favorite poem by the greatest unknown surrealist or “the most radical critic of pure reason”:

Guest on a Horse

Horse of the steppe
runs tired,
froth drips down the equine lip.
Guest of the night,
you expired,
you suddenly vanished mid-gallop.
There was evening.
I can’t remember,
everything was black and proud.
I forgot
the existence
of words, beasts, water, and stars.
Evening was at a distance
from me, of many miles.
I heard the hoofbeat of a horse,
I didn’t understand this hoarse
message, I thought it was a test
run of an object’s transformation
from iron into word, into noise,
dream, drop of light, disaster, loss.
The door opened,
the guest entered alone.
Pain pierced
my bone.
A man bends my way
out of a man,
stares at me like an echo,
has a medal pinned on his back.
He showed me with his inverse arm:
above the river in the dark
a fish upon its legs did pass,
reflected as if in a glass.
I heard the wardrobe and the door
clearly say:
a horse’s snort.
I was sitting and I went
like a plant onto a table,
like a concept void of life,
like a feather
or a beetle
to the universal congress
of all sciences and insects,
mountains, forests,
cliffs and demons,
birds and night,
words and day.
I am glad, O guest,
so happy
that I glimpsed the edge of the horse.
It was smooth,
without riddles,
clean and clear as a brook.
It shook its mane,
a little strained,
it said,
“I’d like a bit of soup.”
I was the chairman of the congress,
I had come to the assembly.
“Educate me, O Creator,”
and God answered, “very well.”
Sideways turned
the horse and
I looked
into its hand.
The horse wasn’t frightening at all.
I decided
I had sinned,
meaning, God deprived me
of body, mind, and will.
Yesterday came back to me.
In boiling water
there was winter,
in the stream
there was a prison,
in the flower
diseases acute,
in the beetle
a useless dispute.
I didn’t see meaning in anything.
God, maybe you’re absent?
What a disaster.
No, I saw it all at once,
I picked up the day’s mute vase,
I spoke out a funny phrase:
miracle loves to warm its heels.
Light appeared,
words appeared,
the world was spent,
the eagles fell silent.
The man became a demon here
in the meantime
like a miracle
in an hour disappeared.

I forgot about existence,
I again
contemplated
the distance.

1931–1934

[Fact100 · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Öldüm, bu çok açık! Artık bir kurtuluşum yok! Kafamda da öyle ulvi şeyler yok. Boğulacağım!"

Rus avangart akımımın önemli temsilcilerinden Daniil Harms, edebiyat tarihinin en aykırı isimlerinden biri.

"Sadece insan günah işliyorsa, bu, dünyanın tüm günahlarının insanın içinde yer aldığını gösterir. Günah insanın içine girmez, sadece içinden çıkar. Tıpkı yemek gibi: İnsan iyi şeyleri yer, kötü şeyleri bünyesinden atar. Dünyada kötü olan hiçbir şey yoktur, sadece insanın içinden geçip çıkan şeyler kötü olabilir."

Sovyetlerin, 30'lu yıllarda, sosyal gerçekçilik akımını destekleyen tutumu nedeniyle, anti-rasyonel öykü ve oyunlarıyla ün kazanan Harms'ın eserleri yayımlatılmamış. Hayatını sürdürmek için, gerçek hayatta hiç sevmediği çocuklara yönelik edebiyat eserleri kaleme alan Harms, bir iftira sonucunda rehabilitasyon kampına gönderilmiş ve Leningrad Kuşatması esnasında, bir akıl hastanesinde açlıktan can vermiş. Alışılmadık ve absürt işlere imza atan Daniil Harms, ancak öldükten sonra, az da olsa uluslararası bilinirlik kazanabilmiş.

"'Sizce hangisi daha kötü, ölüler mi, çocuklar mı?' diye sordum.
'Çocuklar herhalde, onlar daha fazla rahatsızlık veriyorlar sonuçta.' dedi."

Yazarın, bugüne ulaşabilen metinlerini bir araya getiren "Bugün Hiçbir Şey Yazmadım"da, varoluşsal ve toplumsal aykırılığını, hem biçim hem de içerik yönünden eserlerine yansıtan Harms'ın, okuyanı rahatsız edecek detayları çekinmeden, hatta bile isteye metinlerine dahil ederek normal kabul edilen her şeyle dalga geçercesine, alternatif bir (a)normallik inşa ettiğini görüyoruz.

"Ünlü bir ressamın uzun uzun bir horoza baktığı söylenir. Bakar, bakar ve horozun aslında var olmadığına kanaat getirir."

Edebiyata yaklaşımı ve hayatı ele alışı bakımından kabul edilenin ve 'normalin' ziyadesiyle dışında kalan Harms, okuyucuya, absürt olduğu kadar gerçek, komik olduğu kadar trajik yapboz parçalarıyla, dönemin muhafazakârlaşan Rusya'sından enstantaneler sunuyor.

"Beni kana susamışlıkla suçluyorlar, diyorlar ki ben kan içiyormuşum, doğru değil bu, ben sadece yerdeki kan birikintilerini ve damlaları yaladım; iyi de insanın kendi işlediği suçun izlerini, küçük bile olsa yok etmesinden daha doğal ne olabilir ki."

Duyarsızlaşmanın harflere dökülmüş hali olarak da niteleyebileceğim bu yazılar, anlamsızlığı kucaklayan, zekice oluşturulmuş hicivler barındırdığı gibi, saf anlamsızlık içeren metinler de içeriyor.

"Bir zamanlar gözleri ve kulakları olmayan kızıl kafalı bir adam varmış. Adamın hayatı boyunca hiç saçı olmamış, kızıl kafa da işin mecazi tarafı anlayacağınız. Bizim kızıl kafa konuşmaktan acizmiş çünkü hiç ağzı olmamış ve bir burnu da. Kolları ve bacakları da yokmuş. Bir karnı, sırtı, omurgası ve bahsedileceği iç organları da. Hiçbir şeyi yokmuş. Bundandır ki şu an kiminle ilgili konuştuğumuz hakkında bir fikrim yok. En iyisi mi ben konuyu değiştireyim."

Birçok okuyucunun kendine "ben ne okudum şimdi?" diye soracağına şüphe duymadığım bu (bana göre) gizli hazineyi, hayatın ve edebiyatın akılcı yapılarını yıktıktan sonra elimizde ne kalır diye merak eden ve deneysel işlerden keyif alan idmanlı okurlara öneririm.

[Mohammad · Rating 4 out of 5]

وقتی میخواهی پرنده‌ای بخری، حواست باشد که دندان نداشته باشد. اگر دندان داشت، بدان که پرنده نیست. (دانیل خارمس)

[Hanieh Sadat Shobeiri · Rating 5 out of 5]

"و بعد فهمیدم که من جهان هستم.
اما جهانْ من نیست.
هرچند که در آن واحد من جهان هستم."


پ.ن: !MASTERPIECE

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't do this book justice in a review right now. All I can say is that this is fucking brilliant.

[merixien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bu kitabı eğer önsözünü atlayarak ya da yazar hakkında biraz bir şeylere denk gelmeden okursanız, bu nasıl bir saçmalık diyerek bırakır, “bu nasıl bu kadar puan almış ya da nasl basılmış” diye yayınevine ve okurlarına söylenirsiniz. Daniil Harms’ın mikro ya da uzun öyküleriyle bağ kurabilmek, altında yatan anlamları yakalamak için; kendisinin nasıl gözetim altında tutulduğuna, bir şair olarak asla istediklerini yayınlayamadığı için çocuk kitapları yazarak geçinmek zorunda bırakıldığına ve çocuklara tahammül edemediği bu kadar iyi bilinen birisi göz önüne alındığında ne kadar zorlayıcı bir ceza olduğuna dair fikriniz olması gerekiyor. Sovyet dönemi bilim kurgu kitaplarınbı okuyanların çok iyi bildiği gibi SSCB sansürünü aşmanın en ideal yollarından birisi gerçekte olmayan evrenler üzerinden bir şeyler anlatmaktı. Daniil Harms için ise bu yol, çocuk kitapları hazırlayan şizofren bir yazarın ilk bakışta hiçbir şey ifade etmiyor gibi görünen notlarıydı muhtemelen. Bir diğer konu da bu yazıların tamamının, sahip olduğu tek şey olan eski bir bavulun içerisinde biriktirilmiş el yazması notlar olduğu. O yüzden zaman zaman kopukluklar ya da atlanan kısımlar olabiliyor maalesef, ölümünden yıllar sonra karısı ve bir arkadaşının muazzam çabalarının sonucunda basılabilmiş öyküler bunlar. Bazen “bunu okumamın bir anlamı var mı?” düşüncesine düşsem de genel olarak okuduğuma memnun olduğum kitaplardan birisiydi ama asla kimseye tavsiye edemem.

[Mostafa · Rating 5 out of 5]

درخشان
اگه به ادبیات ابزرد علاقه دارید شدیدا توصیه ش میکنم
یک نویسنده خاص و آوانگارد

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have absolutely no memory of how ‘Today I Wrote Nothing’ came to be on my to-read list. I added it in 2013, possibly after coming across Kharms some other early Soviet era fiction? Or a review of it? Or some Russian history? Who knows, but I trust past-me to choose books for future-me. It has taken me this long to locate a copy because only last week I realised I could get borrowing rights for an additional academic library. Combined with the magic of www.worldcat.org, another recent joyous discovery, I now have access to various obscure volumes I’ve been meaning to read for many years. As the National Library of Scotland sadly does not allow borrowing, this is a wonderful development.

You will notice the digressive tone of this review. I allow myself this latitude in tribute to Kharms, who wrote with spectacular disdain for narrative or coherence. In the excellent introduction, his translator seeks to avoid pigeonholing Kharms’ work as absurdism or political satire. Indeed, the translator appears exasperated by the tendency to assume everything written in 1930s Russia was implicit critique of Stalin. As he puts it: ‘After all, it wasn’t all Stalin all the time’, despite Stalin’s best efforts to the contrary. Kharms appears to have had greater ambitions to undermine core precepts of literary endeavour. His coterie seem in retrospect to be precursors of the surrealists. Delightfully, they couldn’t make a living writing for adults, as Soviet Realism was de rigueur, so wrote bizarre children’s books. Life for an avant garde writer in Stalinist Russia was certainly no picnic and Kharms died in prison during the siege of Leningrad. Nonetheless, a lot of his writing has survived for us to puzzle over today.

It is most certainly a puzzle. As with other Russian fiction I’ve read, such as The Slynx, The Gray House, and The Foundation Pit, I felt a lot of meaning was going straight over my head due to lack of linguistic and cultural awareness. Translating short pieces of intentional nonsense is obviously very challenging. The results reminded me, if anything, of internet memes and particularly so-called tumblr shitposts. I mean no insult to Kharms by this comparison! The surreal, deconstructed, and recursively referential nature of the humour assumes a lot of contextual knowledge from the reader. Can you imagine trying to comprehend currently popular memes 80 years later in translated form? Kharms was not composing his snippets to be skimmed and re-posted on social media, yet this sort of thing sounds eerily akin to @dril tweets:

"They say all the good babes are wide-bottomed. Oh, I just love big-bosomed babes. I like the way they smell.” Saying this he began to grow taller and, reaching the ceiling, he fell apart into a thousand little spheres. [‘How One Man Fell To Pieces’, page 231.]

Poisoning children is cruel. But something has to be done about them!

What’s all the fuss about flowers? It smells way better between a woman’s legs. That’s nature for you, and that’s why no-one dares find my words distasteful. [Untitled, page 252]

I regret to say, however, that I found most of the pieces in the book baffling without being amusing. I lacked the reference points to appreciate Kharms arbitrary humour, despite the endnotes attempting to explain where possible. Almost all of the collected writings are very short, little notes and snippets, so I was reminded slightly of the time I read the first volume of Kafka’s diaries (over Christmas, foolishly). Still, Kharms did make me laugh several times. The echoes of his humour in current memes tempt me to speculate about popular humour when there is no privacy, be it under Stalinism or surveillance capitalism. In Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, Pomerantsev observes that when all coherent political ideas have been co-opted by the ruling class, the resistance fall back on surreal nonsense. Comfort and distraction from existential anxiety and powerlessness can come from the ridiculous. The surreal and absurd are more difficult to co-opt and monetise, not that brands aren’t trying very hard to, because they deliberately evade meaning. In other words, Kharms definitely still has something to tell us, although I can’t tell you what exactly. The longest and most conventional piece in the book, a short story titled ‘The Old Woman’, is also by far the most terrifying. Imagine Kafka writing about disposing of a corpse. While Kharms clearly could write a suitably horrifying short story, it’s his very brief pieces that convey the full force of his subversive and proto-surreal style.

[Parham · Rating 4 out of 5]

یه جنون خوبی تو سبک خارمس هست. همه چیز رو به مسخره می گیره و تو شرایط غیرعادی هی اتفاق غیرعادی جدیدی میفته و همین متنا رو جالب میکنه.
یه جاهایی هم حس متن ها شبیه بوخفسکی بود.

[Matvei · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book i've been working on a long time, my translations of Daniil Kharms (1905-1942), is officially out in the world as of November 1st.

Today I Wrote Nothing
The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms
edited and with an introduction by Matvei Yankelevich
translated by Matvei Yankelevich
with Ilya Bernstein, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Simona Schneider
(hardcover, 272 pages)

Please check it out. It'd make a pretty good gift, for yourself and for a friend.
TO KHARMS! many thanks -- Matvei

Directly from the publisher:
http://www.overlookpress.com/book-det...

* if you think you'd like to review the book or give me a reading, you can contact the publicist:
Jack Lamplough at Overlook Press

On Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Today-Wrote-Not...

* if you have time and inclination, i'd be very grateful for your comments on Amazon.


WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT THIS BOOK:

"Kharms is a constant, invigorating surprise -- a slap in the face, or a knock on the head."
- Christopher Sorrentino

"Kharms's Nothing has the power that binds atoms."
- Amy Fusselman

"Yankelevich has done an heroic job...bringing this supreme poet of everyday life into English."

- Charles Bernstein

"Kharms's shock-stories and plays show the contents of modernism under extreme pressure."
- Keith Gessen

"Echoes of Beckett, Ionesco and Kafka..."
- Publishers Weekly


****and now for the quip****

as usual in this country, the translator is oppressed:

notice:
they don't even tell you who the translator is...
as if good old Daniil Kharms wrote in English...

another thing i've noticed on these book sites is:
not only can you NOT search for translators, but you can't even search by PUBLISHER...

that's too bad... who do I complain to? do I bother?
what's the use?

-matvei

[Ben Loory · Rating 5 out of 5]

it's like monty python reinterpreting the poetry of stephen crane under stalinist rule in the 1930s. really just madness most of the time, but the clearest, funniest, angriest, happiest madness ever... there's not a fragment in this book that doesn't feel like it was written yesterday... yesterday in the best mental institution ever...


Tumbling Old Women


Because of her excessive curiosity, one old woman tumbled out her window, fell and shattered to pieces.

Another old woman leaned out to look at the one who'd shattered but, out of excessive curiosity, also tumbled out her window, fell and shattered to pieces.

Then a third old woman tumbled from her window, and a fourth, and a fifth.

When the sixth old woman tumbled out of her window, I got sick of watching them and walked over to the Maltsev Market where, they say, a blind man had been given a knit shawl.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read a lot of Russian literature, but only recently discovered Kharms. There is much to like in his work. There is lots of irony, weird juxtaposition and strange humor. He wants to shake you up and force you to re-examine your worldview, and in this he is largely successful. There are shades of Kafka and Mayakovsky, and more than a little Gogol. Nonsense abounds.

But after he has shaken you up, he abruptly drops you with another "that's all." The brevity and abruptness are, of course, part of the point, but they also left me with a feeling that in the end of the day, there was something lacking.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is full of nonsense.

And that's it more or less.

[Billie Tyrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great collection of short stories, almost like flash fiction, meaning that I did a lot of skipping around and not reading it in order, and then going back to where I was meant to be linearly, found myself rereading some stories more than once just to enjoy the wordplay and laugh at the cleverness of it. Feels very ahead of its time whilst also feeling very early 20th century Russian.

[Geoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilarious, frightening, strange... everything literature should be. Smacks you out of your complacency concerning the signifier and what it signifies.

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

These little - what: stories, poems, sketches? Whatever they are, they’re great. Funny, crazy, weirdly emotional. They butt up against absurdity, poetry, prose, plays, vaudeville, philosophy, essays, without being wholly one or the other. According to the translator’s introduction, Kharms was trying to remove words from their sleepwalking to awake into a true reality. It’s a reality that got him killed, as Soviets read his pieces as parodies or satire. But are they? People interpret, but Kharms created something so new that it was beyond comparison. I didn’t try and “figure them out,” I only smiled.

[Laurent De Maertelaer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mijn bespreking van WERKEN staat hier: https://thedreamlifeofbalsosnell.org/...
en
hier: http://mappalibri.be/?navigatieid=61&...

[Chase · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this a while back in 2017, it has stayed with me since... It's stupid, absurd, genius, hilarious, and terrifying. The abyss. Samuel Beckett ain't got shit on him.

[Shaghayegh.l3 · Rating 1 out of 5]

احمقانه و دم‌دستی‌ترین چیزایی که یه نفر می‌تونه به ذهنش برسه توی این کتاب نوشته شدن. شبیه دو-سه‌خطی‌های صفحات طنز روزنامه، از نظر بی‌مزگی و به هیچ‌جا بند نبودن.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems left me cold but the rest of this book was marvelous. To be honest, I'd never heard of Kharms and fell in love with the title while looking into some titles in modern Russian literature. The more I learned about him, the more intrigued I was, and the short "stories" and "incidents" in the book appealed to me deeply. There's something very satisfying about having people hurt themselves repeatedly, or old women falling out of windows and crack into pieces over and over again, something right about ridiculous fights, and starting points that lead nowhere. Thanks to the translator for taking the time on this. Even regardless of the era and circumstances in which it was written, it's an achievement. Sometimes very funny, sometimes gross, sometimes just throw-your-hands-up-in-the-air weird and spot on.

[Fin · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a story Daniil Kharms thought up. Just by this one story one can judge that Daniil Kharms has serious talent. Daniil Kharms is a really smart guy, very smart and very good!

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been terribly interested, lately, in experimental or subversive writers of interwar Russia, writers who wrote with exuberant creativity in the 20s only to see their options cut off systematically by Socialist Realism and Stalinism until they were forced to hide their writings, or flee, or face condemnation, imprisonment, and death. Of course, as warned by introduction to this volume, assuming political motivation to anything written during the Terror is to limit the scope of that work and author. Nonetheless, the boldness required to create such frenzied nonsense as Kharms', in the face of his times and ostracization, is not to be overlooked. This is heroic absurdity.



Though these stories and vignettes deal with many things (hardships and disappearances, yes, but also more timeless struggles of art and literature, of life and skewed quotidian observation), I do think they are most striking, then, viewed in light of their times. And in light of Kharms' story: born in 1905, he was involved in various avant-garde and dada-style theater and writing through the 20s, made a living writing stories for the children he secretly despised as a means of flying his wild imagination below the attention of censors and making ends meet, only to have even these options gradually cut off in the 30s until he starved to death in a psychiatric prison during the siege of Leningrad, victim of his own unwillingness to conform and the self-manufactured tics and eccentricities with which he distinguished himself (and sought to avoid military service).

And so Daniil Kharms is an amazing character. Many of his short bursts of feverish prose are amazing, lurching uncontrollably between ridiculous non-sequiturs and piercing satire. He uses repetition to great effect, his scenes are permeated with the surreal and unexplained. Sometimes he's hilarious. Sometimes a sudden all-too-real observation will be devastating. So why only three stars? Oftentimes his nonsense and absurdity can overwhelm a bit, especially when many ideas are so minimal as to end before they've properly begun. As Jimmy noted too many of these at once and they lose effect somewhat. A tighter selection could have helped, or I should have been less impatient and stretched these out of a longer time. On the other hand, I'll certainly keep pulling this off the shelf to read little bits aloud (where they fare excellently, I think) so I'll stretch this out that way at least.



Some of the best moments here are the oft-noted "Blue Notebook #10", "Black Water", and "Tumbling Old Women" (recently illustrated as the standalone picture book seen above), as well as "A Dream", the hysterical letter to Nikandr Andreyevich (p.181), "On Phenomena and Existences #1" and #2, "A Knight", and "How I was visited by Messengers". Maybe my favorite of all was the one longer story, "The Old Women", a heavily allusive tale of an unwanted, undeserved corpse or maybe not. Is there other long-form Kharms out there, cause I have a feeling I'd be most into that. Some kinds of strangeness need time and space to become fully interesting and resonant, I think.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kharms speaks for himself. I recommend reading in small, pleasant doses, like chocolate. Be wary of reading too much and then trying to go out and talk to people.

(Note: These translations below are from the web, not this volume I finished reading, which I'd lent to a complete stranger on the street in Friendship, which seemed like the proper thing to do. Though, I made a couple of corrections that I remembered liking more in the newer translation. If I ever get it back, I'll change the review.)


Blue Notebook No. 10

There was a red-haired man who had no eyes or ears. Neither did he have any hair, so he was called red-haired arbitrarily.
He couldn't speak, since he didn't have a mouth. Neither did he have a nose.
He didn't even have any arms or legs. He had no stomach and he had no back and he had no spine and he had no innards whatsoever. He had nothing at all! We don't even know who we are even talking about.
In fact it's better that we don't say any more about him.


What They Sell in the Shops These Days

Koratygin came to see Tikakeyev but didn't find him in.
At that time Tikakeyev was at the shop buying sugar, meat and cucumbers.
Koratygin hung about by Tikakeyev's door and was just thinking of scribbling a note when he suddenly looked up to see Tikakeyev himself coming, carrying in his arms an oilskin bag.
Koratygin spotted Tikakeyev and shouted: -- I've been waiting for you a whole hour!
-- That's not true -- said Tikakeyev -- I've only been out of the house twenty-five minutes.
-- Well, I don't know about that -- said Koratygin -- except that I've already been here a whole hour.
-- Don't tell lies -- said Tikakeyev -- you should be ashamed to lie.
-- My dear fellow! -- said Koratygin -- Be so good as to be a little more particular with your expressions.
-- I consider ... -- began Tikakeyev, but Koratygin interrupted him:
-- If you consider . . . -- he said, but at this point Tikakeyev interrupted Koratygin and said:
-- A fine one you are!
These words put Koratygin into such a frenzy that he pressed a finger against one of his nostrils and through his other nostril blew snot at Tikakeyev.
Then Tikakeyev pulled the biggest cucumber out of his bag and hit Koratygin across the head with it.
Koratygin clutched at his head with his hands, fell down and died.
What big cucumbers they sell in stores these days!



An Encounter

On one occasion a man went off to work and on the way he met another man who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was going his way home.
And that's just about all there is to it.