Daniil Kharms (1905-1942)

Tyrants would appear to be more comfortable with outright sedition, which they can at least understand, than with deliberate silliness. Autocrats of whatever tendency have one thing in common—the conviction that Truth exists, and that they have it firmly in hand. Their favorite opponents are those who share this conviction, differing only with details of the second part. But the true philosophical anarchists, those who see the world as devoid of reason and order, and who celebrate this vacancy by filling it with gleeful nonsense, violate all the rules of the great game. They strike at the very roots of legitimacy and—ultimate outrage to the sensibilities of puritanical ideologues—they seem to enjoy themselves immensely. What exactly is their little game? The latest refinements in torture cannot elicit an answer (there being none), and thus the practitioners of Terror, itself founded upon unpredictable illogic, are themselves terrified.

Kharms (the name is one of the numerous pseudonyms of Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev) belonged to a fugitive group that flourished, if that is the word, for about three years at the end of the 1920s and called itself the Oberiu. The first five letters of this name derive from the Russian words meaning “Association for Real Art.” Nothing is more typical of the Oberiuty than the sixth letter, the u, which they tacked on for the sheer hell of it. “Real Art” for Kharms and his friends meant the Absurd, and it comes as something of a shock to learn that Stalin’s Russia harbored writers whose aesthetic ideals resembled those of Alfred Jarry, Tristan Tzara, Eugène Ionesco, and, in the contemporary United States, the New Yorker writer Donald Barthelme.

Like many another clown (see the note on Zoshchenko, p. 215), Kharms had to struggle against periodic bouts of depression, which he did in part by making his everyday life a sequence of absurdist happenings. One of the few furnishings in his room was a contraption made of bits of metal, bicycle wheels, springs, and other scrap, which must have resembled the constructions of Francis Picabia and which was, like them, ideally functionless. At a time when the real aristocrats of Saint Petersburg were being systematically eradicated, Kharms publicly and dangerously flaunted his own imaginary nobility, refusing in bars to drink from anything but the family silver, which he carried about with him. Very little of what the Oberiuty wrote reached an audience except in the form of public readings. Kharms supported himself by writing for children. He was arrested in August 1941, and early in 1942 his wife was informed that he had died in prison.