Daniil Kharms

Early years

Daniil Ivánovich Yuvatchov (Даниил Иванович Ювачёв) was born in St. Petersburg, into the family of Ivan Yuvachev, a member of the revolutionary group The People's Will. By the time of his son's birth, the elder Yuvachev had already been imprisoned for his involvement in subversive acts against Tsar Alexander III and had become a philosopher.

Daniil invented the pseudonym Kharms while attending Saint Peter's School. There are some assumptions that this might have been influenced by his fascination with Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, as the two words (Holmes and Harms) sound vaguely similar in Russian, as well as a number of other theories. While at Saint Peter's, 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 this name and the pseudonyms DanDan, Khorms, Charms, Shardam, and Kharms-Shardam, among others.

In 1924, he entered the Leningrad Electrotechnicum, from which he was expelled for "lack of participation in socially conscious activities".

Career

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 collaborators.

In 1928, his play "Elizaveta Bam" ("Елизавета Бам") premiered; it is said to have foreshadowed the Theatre of the Absurd.

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, to 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 that intrinsic meaning is to be found in objects and words outside of their practical function.

By the late 1920s, his anti-rational verse, nonlinear theatrical performances, and public displays of decadent and illogical behavior earned Kharms – who dressed like an English dandy with a calabash pipe – the reputation of a talented and highly eccentric writer.

In the late 1920s, despite rising criticism of the OBERIU performances and diatribes against the avant-garde in the press, Kharms sought to unite 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.

Kharms was arrested in 1931 and exiled to 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 evidence in the case. Soviet authorities, having become increasingly hostile toward the avant-garde in general, deemed Kharms' writing for children anti-Soviet because of its refusal to instill materialist and social Soviet values. Kharms 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 mostly private writing life.

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 Samuil Marshak at Detgiz, the state-owned children's publishing house since the mid-1920s, writing new material and translating children's literature from the west, including Wilhelm Busch's Max and Moritz). Many of his poems and short stories for children were published in the Chizh (Чиж), Yozh (Ëж), Sverchok (Сверчок) and Oktyabryata (Октябрята) magazines. In 1937 Marshak's publishing house in Leningrad was shut down, some of employees were arrested: Alexandr Vvedensky, Nikolai Oleinikov, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Tamara Gabbe, and later - Kharms; the majority was fired.

Works

His "adult" works were not published during his lifetime with the sole exception of two early poems. His notebooks were saved from destruction in 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 popular work for children. His other writings (a vast assortment of stories, miniatures, plays, poems, and pseudo-scientific, philosophical investigations) were virtually unknown until the 1970s, and not published officially in Russia until "glasnost"

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.)

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.

A complete collection of his works was published in Bremen in 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 available in English, French, German and Italian. In 2004, a selection of his works appeared in Irish.

Numerous English translations have appeared of late in American literary journals. In the 1970s, George Gibian 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. Gibian'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 2006 in the USA (OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism. It contains poetry, drama and prose by Alexander Vvedensky, Daniil Kharms, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Nikolay Oleynikov, Leonid Lipavsky and Yakov Druskin, edited by Eugene Ostashevsky and translated by Matvei Yankelevich, Thomas Epstein, Genya Turovskaya, Eugene Ostashevsky and Ilya Bernstein), with an introduction by Eugene Ostashevsky (not Susan Sontag, who is listed on some websites as the author of the foreword). An English translation of a collection of his works, by Matvei Yankelevich, Today I Wrote Nothing was published in 2007. It includes poems, plays, short prose pieces, and his novella "The Old Woman". Another collection in the translation of Alex Cigale, Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings, appeared in the Northwestern World Classics series in 2017. Individual pieces have also been translated by Roman Turovsky .

Personal life

Kharms was married twice, to Esther Rusakova and Marina Malich. His wives sometimes appear in some of his lyrical or erotic poems.

23 August 1941 - Kharms was arrested for spreading "libellous and defeatist mood". According to the NKVD report Kharms said: "The USSR lost the war on its first day. Leningrad will be either beleaguered or starved to death. Or it will be bombed to the ground. If I got mobilization request, I would punch a commander in the face, they can shoot me but I will not wear the uniform and will not become a soviet soldier, I don't want to be a scumbag. If someone made me shooting from attics during street fights with the Germans, I wouldn't shoot the Germans, but those (*who would make me shoot)".

In order to avoid execution, Kharms simulated insanity; the military tribunal ordered to keep him in the psychiatric ward of the 'Kresty' prison on the severity of the crime. Daniil Kharms died of starvation 2 February, 1942 during the siege of Leningrad. His wife was informed that he was deported to Novosibirsk. Only on 25 July 1960, at the request of Kharms' sister, E.I. Gritsina, Prosecutor General's Office found him not guilty and he was exonerated.

Influence