Daniil Kharms

on 30 December 2013, Google doodle celebrated Daniil Kharms’ 108th Birthday.

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.

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".

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). 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.

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.

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.

Daniil Ivanovich Kharms (Russian: Дании́л Ива́нович Хармс; 30 December [O.S. 17 December] 1905 – 2 February 1942) was an early Soviet-era Russian avant-gardist and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist.

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. 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.

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".

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.

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.

In 1928, his play "Elizaveta Bam" ("Елизавета Бам") premiered; it is said to have foreshadowed 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 Kafka's Trial and Nabakov's Invitation to a Beheading for its "depiction of a hapless individual destroyed by arbitrary governmental authority."

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 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".

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 (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 married twice, to Esther Rusakova (1909 Marseilles, France – 1943 Magadan, USSR) and Marina Malich (1909 St. Petersburg, Russia – 2002 USA). His wives sometimes appear in some of his lyrical or erotic poems.