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Daniil Ivanovich Kharms (; – 2 February 1942) was a Russian Avant-garde and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist in the early Soviet era.
Daniil invented the pseudonym Kharms while attending Saint Peter's School. While at Saint Peter's, he learned the rudiments of both English and German, and it may have been the English words "harm" and "charm" that he incorporated into "Kharms".Frazier, Ian (7 May 2015). "A Strangely Funny Russian Genius". The New York Review of Books 62 (8): 36–38. His pseudonym might have been also influenced by his fascination with Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, as the two words (Holmes and Harms) start and end similarly but there are a number of other theories regarding the pseudonym. Throughout his career, Kharms used variations on this name and the pseudonyms DanDan, Khorms, Charms, Shardam, and Kharms-Shardam, among others. (2025). 9780719074103, Manchester University Press. ISBN 9780719074103
In 1924, he entered the Leningrad Electrotechnicum, from which he was expelled for "poor attendance," "not participating in community service," and not "fitting into the class physiologically". (2025). 9781936235964, Academic Studies Press. ISBN 9781936235964
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, 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.
In 1928, his play "Elizaveta Bam" ("Елизавета Бам") premiered; it is said to have Foreshadowing the Theatre of the Absurd. The play begins with Elizaveta being arrested by the secret police for the murder of one of the arresting officers, who is later killed by another character, and ends with the first scene repeating. It has been compared to Franz Kafka's The Trial and Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading for its "depiction of a hapless individual destroyed by arbitrary governmental authority."
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, Yevgeny Zamyatin) with leading Russian formalist critics (Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Boris Eichenbaum, Lev S. 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 instil 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 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, , and later – Kharms; the majority was fired.
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 the era of glasnost.
Kharms' stories are typically brief vignettes 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 Nikolai Gogol tripping over each other; Count Leo Tolstoy showing his chamber pot to the world; Pushkin and his sons falling off their chairs; etc.).
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, Italian and Finnish. 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 University 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). His short story cycle Incidences (1933–1939) was published in English in 1993. 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 (1939). Another collection in the translation of Alex Cigale, Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings, appeared in the Northwestern World Classics series in 2017. A selection of Kharms's dramatic works, A Failed Performance: Short Plays and Scenes, translated by C Dylan Bassett and Emma Winsor Wood, was released by Plays Inverse in 2018. Individual pieces have also been translated by Roman Turovsky. "DANIIL HARMS, Poet/Writer/Dramatist" The Polyhymnion Foundation
On 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 besieged or starved to death. Or it will be bombed to the ground, leaving no stone standing. If they give me a mobilization order, I will punch the commander in the face, let them shoot me, but I will not put on the uniform and will not serve in the soviet forces, I do not wish to be such trash. If they force me to fire a machine-gun from rooftops during street-to-street fights with the Germans, I would shoot not at the Germans, but at them, from the very same machine gun".
To avoid execution, Kharms simulated insanity; the military tribunal ordered him to be kept in the psychiatric ward of the 'Kresty' prison due to 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.Кобринский А. Даниил Хармс. — М.: Молодая гвардия, 2009. — С. 471—486. 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.
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