Daniil Kharm Letters And Memories

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Daniil Kharms - Letter to the Lipavskys Russian literature seems always able to bring forth a crop of new and interesting writers who are experimenting somewhere at the frontiers of literary style, language or story. Among our contemporaries, we think of Andrey Sinyavsky (alias 'Abram Tertz'), Vasiliy Aksyonov, Sasha Sokolov and Yevgeniy Popov, along with the women writers who emerged under glasnost', during the last Soviet years: Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Tatyana Tolstaya and others. But alongside the new writers, we continue to rediscover the old. Mikhail Bulgakov and Andrey Platonov, unexpected jewels from the Stalinist period, only came to prominence decades after their own span. Discoveries from the 'Silver Age' period (roughly the 1890s to 1917) are still coming or returning to light. Neglected figures from even further back are now achieving or recovering a belated but deserved readership (Vladimir Odoevsky from the Romantic period, Vsevolod Garshin from later in the nineteenth century). Another fascinating figure, the contemporary of Bulgakov and Platonov, but with a peculiar resonance for the modern, or indeed the post-modern, world is Daniil Kharms. 'Daniil Kharms' was the main, and subsequently the sole, pen-name of Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachov. The son of a St. Petersburg political, religious and literary figure, Daniil was to achieve limited local renown as a Leningrad avant-garde eccentric and a writer of children's stories in the 1920s and 30s. Among other pseudonyms, he had employed 'Daniil Dandan' and 'KharmsShardam'. The predilection for 'Kharms' is thought to derive from appreciation of the tension between the English words 'charms' and 'harms' (plus the German Charme; indeed, there is an actual German surname 'Harms'), but may also owe something to a similarity in sound to Sherlock Holmes (pronounced 'Kholms' in Russian), a figure of fascination to Kharms. From 1925 Kharms began to appear at poetry readings and other avantgarde activities, gained membership of the Leningrad section of the AllRussian Union of Poets (from 1926), one of the many predecessors to the eventual Union of Soviet Writers, and published two poems in anthologies in 1926 and 1927. Almost unbelievably, these were the only 'adult' works Kharms was able to publish in his lifetime. In 1927 Kharms joined together with a number of like-minded experimental writers, including his talented friend and close associate Aleksandr Vvedensky (1900-1941) and the major poet Nikolay Zabolotsky (1903-1958), to form the literary and artistic grouping Oberiu (the acronym of the 'Association of Real Art'). Representing something of a union between Futurist aesthetics and Formalist approaches, the Oberiut considered themselves a 'left flank' of the literary avant-garde. Their publicity antics, including a roof-top appearance by Kharms, caused minor sensations and they succeeded in presenting a highly unconventional theatrical evening entitled 'Three Left Hours' in 1928, which included the performance of Kharms's Kafkaesque absurdist drama 'Yelizaveta Bam'. Among the Oberiu catch-phrases were 'Art is a cupboard'

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(Kharms normally made his theatrical entrances inside or on a wardrobe) and 'Poems aren't pies; we aren't herring'. However, in the Stalinising years of the late 1920s, the time for propagating experimental modernist art had passed. The rising Soviet neo-bourgeoisie were not to be shocked: tolerance of any such frivolities was plummeting and hostile journalistic attention ensured the hurried disbandment of the Oberiu group after a number of further appearances. Kharms and Vvedensky evidently felt it wiser to allow themselves to be drawn into the realm of children's literature, writing for publications of the children's publishing house Detgiz, known fondly as the 'Marshak Academy', run by the redoubtable children's writer (and bowdleriser of Robbie Burns), Samuil Marshak, and involving the playwright Yevgeniy Shvarts. By 1940 Kharms had published eleven children's books and contributed regularly to the magazines 'The Hedgehog' and 'The Siskin'. However, even in this field of literary activity, anything out of the ordinary was not safe. Kharms, in his 'playful' approach to children's writing, utilised a number of Oberiu-type devices. The Oberiu approach had been denounced in a Leningrad paper in 1930 as 'reactionary sleight-of-hand' and, at the end of 1931, Kharms and Vvedensky were arrested, accused of 'distracting the people from the building of socialism by means of trans-sense verses' and exiled to Kursk. However the exile was fairly brief, the times being what Akhmatova described as 'relatively vegetarian'. Nevertheless, little work was to be had thereafter; Kharms was in and out of favour at Detgiz and periods of near starvation followed. Kharms and Vvedensky (the latter had moved to the Ukraine in the mid-30s: see Kharms's letter to him) survived the main purges of the 1930s. However, the outbreak of war brought new dangers: Kharms was arrested in Leningrad in August 1941, while Vvedensky's arrest took place the following month in Kharkov. Vvedensky died in December of that year and Kharms (it seems of starvation in prison hospital) in February 1942. Both were subsequently 'rehabilitated' during the Khrushchev 'Thaw'. Most of their adult writings had to await the Gorbachev period for publication in Russia. Both starvation and arrest were anticipated in a number of Kharms's writings. Hunger and poverty were constant companions; indeed, Kharms can lay claim to being the poet of hunger (not for nothing did he take strongly to Knut Hamsun's novel of that name), as the following translation of an unrhyming but rhythmic verse fragment shows: This is how hunger begins: The morning you wake, feeling lively, Then begins the weakness, Then begins the boredom; Then comes the loss Of the power of quick reason, Then comes the calmness And then begins the horror. On his general situation in life, Kharms wrote the following quatram in 1937:

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We've had it now in life's realm, Of all hope we are now bereft. Gone are dreams of happiness, Destitution is all that's left. The arrest of Kharms came, reportedly, when the caretaker of the block of flats in which he lived called him down, in his bedroom slippers, 'for a few minutes'. He was apparently charged with spreading defeatist propaganda; there is evidence that, even in those times, he managed to clear himself of this charge, possibly by feigning insanity. Kharms had been a marked man since his first arrest in 1931 and he was probably lucky to escape disaster when he landed in trouble over a children's poem in 1937 (about a man who went out to buy tobacco and disappeared). In addition, his first wife, Ester Rusakova, was a member of a well-known old emigre revolutionary family, subsequently purged; it is intriguing to recall that Kharms had been, for several years, Viktor Serge's brother-in-law. By the 1930s, Kharms was concentrating more on prose. In addition to his only then publishable works, his children's stories and verse, he evolved ('for his drawer') his own idiosyncratic brands of short prose and dramatic fragment. Theoretical, philosophical and even mathematical pieces were also penned, as well as diaries, notebooks and a sizeable body of poetry. The boundaries between genre are fluid with Kharms, as are distinctions between fragment and whole, finished and unfinished states. Most of Kharms's manuscripts were preserved after his arrest by his friend, the philosopher Yakov Semyonovich Druskin, until they could be safely handed on or deposited in libraries. It will come as no surprise to readers with the most cursory inkling of Soviet literary conditions in the 1930s that these writings were then totally unpublishable -and indeed that their author is unlikely to have even contemplated trying to publish them. What is much more surprising is that they were written at all. From 1962 the children's works of Kharms began to be reprinted in the Soviet Union. Isolated first publications of a few of his short humourous pieces for adults followed slowly thereafter, as did mentions of Kharms in memoirs. Only when Gorbachev's policy of glasnost' took real effect though, from 1987, did the flood begin, including a major book-length collection in 1988. Abroad, an awareness of Kharms and the Oberiuts began to surface in the late 1960s, both in Eastern Europe, where publication was often easier, and in the West, where a first collection in Russian appeared in 1974. In 1978 an annotated, but discontinuous, collected works of Kharms began to appear, published in Bremen by the Verlag K-Presse (appropriately enough, the 'Kafka Press'), edited from Leningrad. Four volumes (the poetic opus) have appeared to date. It is probably safe to assume that virtually all of Kharms's surviving works have now appeared. The most recent 'find' is a selection of rather mild erotica, largely clinically voyeuristic and olfactory in nature, which suitably counterpoints certain tendencies already noticeable in some of Kharms's more

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mainstream writing. The English or American reader may have come across some of Kharms's work in the anthologies published from 1971 by George Gibian (see p. 226). In addition, scholarly literature on the Oberiuts is growing fast. Kharms translations have appeared in German and Italian, while the Yugoslav director Slobodan Pesic has made a surrealistic film, called 'The Kharms Case'. In Russia Oberiu evenings and Kharms 'mono-spectaculars' have become commonplace and Moscow News (back in 1988, in its Russian and English issues alike) was proclaiming Kharms 'an international figure'. In the present age of post-modernist fragmentation, Kharms's time has surely come. On the assumption that Kharms's published oeuvre may now be more or less complete (and this may still be a big assumption to make: only in 1992 his puppet play, The Shardam Circus, was published for the first time), overall assessments of his achievement begin to assume some validity. Definitive texts from archival sources have, in some instances, replaced dubious sources. We now know the intended order and content of the 'Incidents' cycle, here presented as a complete entity for the first time in English. Many of the later examples of Kharms's prose have only come to light recently, as have notebooks and letters. The prose miniature has long been a genre more commonly found in Russian literature than elsewhere. Among the disparate examples that come to mind (many of them by authors very different from Kharms) we may mention, from the nineteenth century: the feuilletons of writers such as Dostoevsky, the prose poems of Turgenev and the shortest works by Garshin and Chekhov; and, from the twentieth, short pieces by Zamyatin, Olesha and Zoshchenko and, more recently, the aphoristic writings of Abram Tertz and the prose poems of Solzhenitsyn. In spirit, Kharms clearly belongs to a tradition of double-edged humour extending from the wordplay and irrelevancy of Gogol and the jaundiced mentality of Dostoevsky's 'underground' anti-heroes to the intertextual parody of Tertz and the satirical absurd of Voinovich. Kharms has clear affinities with certain of the experimental Soviet writings that sprang from a Futurist Formalist base in the 1920s. In a verse and prose sequence entitled 'The Sabre' (Sablya of 1929), Kharms singles out for special admiration Goethe, Blake, Lomonosov, Gogol, Kozma Prutkov and Khlebnikov. In a diary entry of 1937, he lists as his 'favourite writers': Gogol, Prutkov, Meyrink, Hamsun, Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Such listings are revealing in determining Kharms's pedigree. On a general European level, Kharms had obvious affinities with the various modernist, Dadaist, surrealist, absurdist and other avant-garde movements. Borges wrote brief masterpieces in a rather different vein. Arguably, Kafka and Beckett provide closer parallels, while Hamsun and Meyrink furnished Kharms with certain motifs. Some of the post-modernist and minimalist writings of very recent decades are perhaps closer than anything else.

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'The Old Woman', a story reaching almost epic proportions by Kharms's standards, has strong claims to be regarded as his masterpiece. A deceptively multilayered story, this work looks simultaneously back to the Petersburg tradition of Russian story-telling and forward to the meta-fictional devices of our post-war era. 'Incidents' signals a neo-romantic concern with the relationship between the fragment and the whole (observable too in the theoretical pieces) and, now in its 'complete' form, it has begun to attract critical interpretation as an entity in itself. The 'assorted stories', arranged chronologically, indicate the development of Kharms's idiosyncratic preoccupations over the decade from the early 1930s. 'Yelizaveta Bam' represents Kharms's contribution to the theatre of the absurd. The remaining 'non-fictional and assorted writings' give an idea of Kharms's excursions into other forms of writing. If Kharms still seems somehow different from all previous models or comparisons, or more startling, this is perhaps most readily explained by his constant adoption, at various levels, of what might be termed a poetics of extremism. Take, for example, his brevity: not for nothing did he note in his diary that 'garrulity is the mother of mediocrity'. If certain stories included here (especially some from 'Incidents') seem texts of concise inconsequentiality, there remain others which incommode the printer even less: consider, for instance, the following: "An old man was scratching his head with both hands. In places where he couldn't reach with both hands, he scratched himself with one, but very, very fast. And while he was doing it he blinked rapidly." Another feature of Kharmsian extremism resides in his uncompromising quest for the means to undermine his own stories, or to facilitate their selfdestruction: there are numerous examples of this in the texts which follow. Kharms, then, turns his surgical glance on both the extraordinary world of Stalin's Russia and on representation, past and present, in story-telling and other artistic forms. He thus operates, typically, against a precise Leningrad background. He reflects aspects of Soviet life and its literary forms, passing sardonic and despairing comment on the period in which he lived. He also ventures, ludicrously, into historical areas, parodying the ways in which respected worthies, such as Pushkin, Gogol and Ivan Susanin (a patriotic hero of 1612) were currently being glorified in print. Certain of Kharms's miniatures seem strangely anticipatory of modern trends: 'The Lecture' could almost have been set in politically correct America, 'Myshin's Triumph' smacks of London's cardboard city, and 'On an Approach to Immortality' would fascinate Kundera. The most striking feature, for many readers, will be the recurrence of Kharms's strange and disturbing obsessions: with falling, accidents, chance, sudden death, victimisation and all forms of apparently mindless violence. These again are often carried to extremes, or toyed with in a bizarre manner which could scarcely be unintentional. Frequently there appears little or no

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difference between Kharms's avowedly fictional works and his other writings. In his notebooks can be found such passages as: "I don't like children, old men, old women and the reasonable middle-aged. To poison children -- that would be harsh. But, hell, something needs to be done with them! . . . I respect only young, robust and splendiferous women. The remaining representatives of the human race I regard suspiciously. Old women who are repositories of reasonable ideas ought to be lassoed . . . Which is the more agreeable sight: an old woman clad in just a shift, or a young man completely naked? And which, in that state, is the less permissible in public? . . . What's so great about flowers? You get a significantly better smell from between women's legs. Both are pure nature, so no one dare be outraged at my words." How far into the cheek the tongue may go is often far from clear: the degree of identification with narrator position in Kharms is always problematic. The Kharmsian obsessions, too, carry over into his notebooks and diaries: "On falling into filth, there is only one thing for a man to do: just fall, without looking round. The important thing is just to do this with style and energy." At times the implications might seem sinister, as in the following note from 1940, which could equally be a sketch for a story, or even, as we have seen, be a mini-story in itself: "One man was pursuing another when the latter, who was running away, in his turn, pursued a third man who, not sensing the chase behind him, was simply walking at a brisk pace along the pavement." Sometimes, a diary entry is indeed indistinguishable from a Kharms miniature: "I used to know a certain watchman who was interested only in vices. Then his interests narrowed, and he began to be interested only in one vice. And so, when he discovered a specialisation of his own within this vice and began to interest himself only in this one specialisation, he felt himself a man again. Confidence built up, erudition was required, neighbouring fields had to be looked into and the man started to develop. This watchman became a genius." Other entries rather more predictably affirm what might be supposed to be his philosophy: "I am interested only in 'nonsense'; only in that which makes no practical sense. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestation."

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Letter to the Lipavskys 28 June 1932. Tsarskoye Selo Dear Tamara Aleksandrova and Leonid Savel'evich, Thank you for your wonderful letter. I have re-read it many times and learned it off by heart. I can be awakened in the night and I will immediately and word-perfectly begin: 'Hello there, Daniil Ivanovich, we are completely lost without you. Lyonya has bought himself some new...' and so on, and so on. I have read this letter to all my acquaintances in Tsarskoye Selo. Everyone likes it very much. Yesterday my friend Bal'nis came to see me. He wanted to stay the night. I read him your letter six times. He smiled very broadly, so it was evident that he liked the letter, but he didn't have time to express a detailed opinion, for he left without staying for the night. Today I went round to his place myself and read the letter through to him once more, so as to enable him to refresh his memory. Then I asked Bal'nis for his opinion. But he broke a leg off one of his chairs and with the aid of this leg he chased me out on to the street and furthermore said that if I turn up once more with this drivel he will lie my hands up and stuff my mouth with muck from the rubbish pit. These were, of course, on his part rather rude and stupid remarks. I, of course, went away and took the view that he quite possibly had a bad cold and that he was not himself. From Bal'nis I went off to Yekaterinskiy Park and had a go on the rowing boats. On the whole lake, apart from me, there were two or three other boats. And, by the way, there was a very beautiful girl in one of the boats. And she was completely on her own. I turned my boat (incidentally, you have to row carefully when you're turning a boat, because the oars are liable to jump out of the rowlocks) and rowed after the beauty. I felt as though I resembled a Norwegian and I must have cut a fresh and healthy figure in my grey jacket and my fluttering tie and, as they say, had quite a whiff of the sea about me. But near the Orlov Column some hooligans were swimming and, as I rowed past, one of them just happened to have to swim right across my path. Then another of them shouted: -- Wait a minute, while this cross-eyed and sweaty specimen goes past! -- and pointed at me with his foot. This was very disagreeable because the beauty heard every word. And since she was rowing in front of me and in a rowing boat, as everyone knows, you sit with the back of your head towards your direction of movement, the beauty could not only hear, but she could see the hooligan pointing at me with his foot. I tried to make out that all this had nothing to do with me and started to look to the side with a smile on my face. But there wasn't a single other boat around. And at this point the hooligan shouted

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again: -- Now what do you think you're looking at? We're talking to you, aren't we? Hey, you, the sucker in the cap! I set about rowing with might and main, but the oars kept jumping out of the rowlocks and the boat only moved slowly. Finally, after an enormous effort, I caught up with the beauty and we got acquainted. She was called Yekaterina Pavlovna. We took back her boat and Yekaterina Pavlovna moved over to mine. She turned out to be a very witty conversationalist. I had decided to dazzle my friends with wit, and so I got out your letter and made a start on reading it: 'Hello, there, Daniil Ivanovich, we are completely lost without you. Lyonya has bought himself some new ...' and so on. Yekaterina Pavlovna suggested that, if we pulled in to the bank, then I might see something. And I did, I saw Yekaterina Pavlovna making off, and out of the bushes there crept a filthy urchin, saying: -- Mister, give us a ride in yer boat. This evening the letter came to grief. It happened like this: I was standing on the balcony, reading your letter and eating semolina. At that moment Auntie called me into the living room to help her wind the clock. I covered the semolina with the letter and went into the room. When I came back the letter had absorbed all the semolina into itself and I ate it. The weather in Tsarskoye Selo is well set: variable cloud, south-west wind, possible rain. This morning an organ-grinder came into our garden and played a trashy waltz, filched a hammock and ran away. I read a very interesting book about how one young man fell in love with a certain young person, and this young person loved another young man, and this young man loved another young person and this young person loved another young man yet again, who loved not her but another young person. And suddenly this young person stumbles down a trapdoor and fractures her spine. But when she has completely recovered from that, she suddenly catches her death of cold and dies. Then the young man who loves her does himself in with a revolver shot. Then the young person who loves this young man throws herself under a train. Then the young man who loves this young person climbs up a tram pylon from grief and touches the live wire, dying from an electric shock. Then the young person who loves this young man stuffs herself with ground glass and dies from perforation of the intestines. Then the young man who loves this young person runs away to America and takes to the drink to such a degree that he sells his last suit and, for the lack of a suit, he is obliged to lie in hospital, where he suffers from bedsores, and from these bedsores he dies. In a few days I shall be in town. I definitely want to see you. Give my best wishes to Valentina Yefimovna and Yakov Semyonovich. Daniil Kharms

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A Letter Dear Nikandr Andreyevich, I have received your letter and straight away I realised that it was from you. At first I thought that it might by chance not be from you, but as soon as I unsealed it I immediately realised it was from you, though I had been on the point of thinking that it was not from you. I am glad that you, long ago now, got married, because when a person gets married to the one he wanted to marry, then this means he has got what he wanted. I am very glad you got married, because when a person marries the one he wanted to marry, that means he has got what he wanted. Yesterday I received your letter and immediately thought that this letter was from you, but then I thought that it seemed not to be from you, but unsealed it and saw: it really is from you. You did exactly the right thing, writing to me. First you didn't write, and then you suddenly wrote, although before that, before that period when you didn't write, you also used to write. Immediately as I received your letter, I straight away decided that it was from you and, then, I was very glad that you had already got married. For, if a person should feel like getting married, then he really has to get married, come what may. Therefore I am very glad that you finally got married to the very one you wanted to marry. And you did exactly the right thing, writing to me. I was greatly cheered up on seeing your letter and I even immediately thought it was from you. It's true, while I was unsealing it, the thought did flash across my mind that it was not from you, but then, all the same, I decided it was from you. Thank you for writing. I am grateful to you for this and very glad for you. Perhaps you can't guess why I am so glad for you, but I will tell you at once that I am glad for you because you got married, and to the very one you wanted to marry. And, you know, it is very good to marry the very one you want to marry, because then you have got the very thing you wanted. It's for that very reason that I am so glad for you. But also I am glad because you wrote me a letter. I had even from some distance decided that the letter was from you, but as I took it in my hands I then thought: but what if it's not from you? But then I start to think: no, of course it's from you. I unseal the letter myself and at the same time I think: from you or not from you? From you or not from you? Well, as I unsealed it, then I could see: it's from you. I was greatly cheered and decided to write you a letter as well. There's a lot which has to be said, but literally there's no time. I have written what I had time to write in this letter and the rest I shall write another time, as now there really isn't time at all. It's a good thing, at least, that you wrote me a letter. Now I know that you got married a long time ago. I, from your previous letters too, knew that you had got married and now I see again: it's absolutely true, you have got married. And I'm very glad that you got married and wrote me a letter. I straight away, as soon as I saw your letter, decided that you had got married again. Well, I think it's a good thing that you have again got married and written me a

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letter about it. Now write to me and tell me who your new wife is and how it all came about. Say hello from me to your new wife. Daniil Kharms 1933 Letter to K. V. Pugachova: an Extract ...I don't know the right word to express that strength in you which so delights me. I usually call it purity. I have been thinking about how beautiful everything is at first! How beautiful primary reality is! The sun and the grass are beautiful, grass and stone, and water, a bird, a beetle, a fly, and a human being (a kitten and a key, a comb). But if I were blind and deaf, had lost all my faculties, how could I know all this beauty? everything gone and nothing for me at all. But I suddenly acquire touch anti immediately almost the whole world appears again. I invent hearing and the world improves significantly. I invent all the other faculties and the world gets even bigger and better. The world starts to exist as soon as I let it in to me. Never mind its state of disorder, at least it exists! However, I started to bring some order into the world. And that's when Art appeared. Only at this point did I grasp the true difference between the sun and a comb but, at the same time, I realised that they are one and the same. Now my concern is to create the correct order. I am carried away by this and only think of this. I speak about it, try to narrate it, describe it, sketch it, dance it, construct it. I am the creator of a world and this is the most important thing in me. How can I not think constantly about it! In everything I do, I invest the consciousness of being creator of a world. And I am not making simply some boot, but, first and foremost, I am creating something new. It doesn't bother me that the boot should turn out to be comfortable, durable and elegant. It's more important that it should contain that same order pertaining in the world as a whole, so that world order should not be the poorer, should not be soiled by contact with skin and nails, so that, notwithstanding the form of the boot, it should preserve its own form, should remain the same as it was, should remain pure. It is that same purity which permeates all the arts. When I am writing poetry, the most important thing seems to me not the idea, not the content, and not the form, and not the misty conception of 'quality', but something even more misty and incomprehensible to the rationalistic mind, but comprehensible to me and, I hope, to you (...) -- it is the purity of order. This purity is one and the same -- in the sun, in the grass, in a human being and in poetry. True art is on a par with primary reality; it creates a world and constitutes the world's primary reflection. It is indisputably real.

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But, my God, what trivialities make up true art! The Divine Comedy is a great piece of work, but [Pushkin's] lines 'Through the agitated mists the moon makes its way' are no less great. For in both there is the same purity and consequently an identical proximity to reality, that is to independent existence. That means it is not simply words and thoughts printed on paper, but a piece of work which is just as real as the cut-glass bubble for the ink standing in front of me on the table. These verses seem to have become a piece of work which could be taken off the paper and hurled at the window, and the window would smash. That's what words can do! But, on the other hand, how helpless and pitiful these same words can be! I never read the newspapers. They are a fictitious world, not the created one. Just pitiful, down-at-heel typographical print on rotten prickly paper. Does a person need anything, apart from life and art? I don't think so: nothing else is needed, as everything genuine is to be found in them. I think that purity can be in everything, even in the way a person eats soup. 1933 Letter to his sister Ye. I. Yuvachova 28 February, 1936 Dear Liza, I convey my best wishes to Kirill on his birthday and similarly congratulate his parents on successfully fulfilling the plan prescribed for them by nature for the raising up to the age of two years of human offspring, unable to walk, but therefore gradually beginning to destroy everything around and finally, in attaining this junior pre-school age, belabouring across the head with a voltmeter stolen from his father's writing table his loving mother, who has failed to evade the highly skillfully delivered assaults of her not as yet fully mature child, who is planning already in his immature skull, having done away with his parents, to direct all his most penetrating attentions towards his venerable grandfather and by the same means demonstrate a mental development allotted beyond his years, in honour of which, on the 28th of February, will gather a couple of admirers of this indeed outstanding phenomenon, among whose number, to my great chagrin, I shall not be able to be, finding myself at the time in question under a certain pressure, being enraptured on the shores of the Gulf of Finland by an ability, innate since childhood, of grabbing a steel pen and, having dipped it in an ink-well, in short sharp phrases expressing my profound and at times even in a certain way highly elevated thoughts. Daniil Kharms

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Letter to Aleksandr Vvedensky Dear Aleksandr Ivanovich, I have heard that you are saving money and have already saved thirty-five thousand. What for? Why save money? Why not share what you have with those who do not even have a totally spare pair of trousers? I mean, what is money? I have studied this question. I possess photographs of the banknotes in widest circulation: to the value of a rouble, three, four and even five roubles. I have heard of banknotes of an intrinsic worth of up to 30 roubles at a time! But, as for saving them: what for? Well, I am not a collector. I have always despised collectors who amass stamps, feathers, buttons, onions and so on. They are stupid, dull superstitious people. I know for example that what are called 'numismatists' -- that's those who accumulate coins -- have the superstitious habit of putting them, have you ever thought where? Not on the table, not in a box, but... on their books! What do you think of that? Whereas money can be picked up, taken to a shop and exchanged, well... let's say for soup (that's a kind of food), or for grey-mullet sauce (that's also a kind of foodstuff). No, Aleksandr Ivanovich, you are almost as couth a person as I, yet you save money and don't change it into a range of other things. Forgive me, dear Aleksandr Ivanovich, but that is not terribly clever! You've simply gone a little stupid living out there in the provinces. There must be no one to talk to, even. I'm sending you my picture so that you will be able at least to see before you a clever, cultivated, intellectual, first-rate face. Your friend Daniil Kharms Late 1930's

How I Was Visited By Messengers Something clicked in the clock on the wall, and I was visited by messengers. At first, I did not realize that I was visited by messengers. Instead, I thought that something was wrong with the clock. But then I saw that the clock worked just fine, and probably told the correct time. Then I noticed that there was a draft in the room. And then it shocked me: what kind of thing could, at the same time, cause a clock to click and a draft to start in the room? I sat down on a chair next to the divan and looked at the clock, thinking about that. The big hand was on the number nine, and the little one on the four, therefore, it was a quarter till four. There was a calendar on the wall below the clock, and

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its leafs were flipping, as if there was a strong wind in the room. My heart was beating very fast and I was so scared it almost made me collapse. "I should have some water," I said. On the table next to me was a pitcher with water. I reached out and took the pitcher. "Water should help," I said and looked at the water. It was then that I realized that I had been visited by messengers, and that I could not tell them apart from the water. I was scared to drink the water, because I could, by accident, drink a messenger. What does that mean? Nothing. One can only drink liquids. Could the messengers be liquid? No. Then, I can drink the water, there is nothing to be afraid of. But I couldn't find the water. I walked around the room and looked for the water. I tried putting a belt in my mouth, but it was not the water. I put the calendar in my mouth -- that also was not the water. I gave up looking for the water and started to look for the messengers. But how could I find them? What do they look like? I remembered that I could not distinguish them from the water, therefore, they must look like water. But what does water look like? I was standing and thinking. I do not know for how long I stood and thought, but suddenly I came to. "There is the water," I thought. But that wasn't the water, and instead I got an itch in my ear. I looked under the cupboard and under the bed, hoping that there I might find the water or the messengers. But under the cupboard, in a pile of dust, I found a little ball, half eaten by a dog, and under the bed I found some pieces of glass. Under the chair I found a half-eaten steak, I ate it and it made me feel better. It wasn't drafty anymore, the clock was ticking steadily, telling the time: a quarter till four. "Well, this means the messengers are gone," I said quietly and started to get dressed, since I had a visit to make. August 22, 1937 DLROW For a while I was convinced that I saw the world. But the world as a whole was unreachable for my eyes, and I saw only fragments of it. And everything that I saw, I called 'world fragments'. And I observed characteristics of those fragments and, by observing them, I developed a science. I understood that there were intelligent and unintelligent characteristics in the fragments. I distinguished the fragments and gave them proper names. And depending on their characteristics, I saw the world fragments to be either intelligent or unintelligent. There were also world fragments that could deduce. And these fragments also observed the other world fragments, and me. And all those fragments were

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similar to each other, and I was similar to them. And I would talk to those fragments. I would say: "Fragments are the thunder." The fragments would say: "A heap of time." I would say: "I am, also, a part of some trinity." The parts would respond: "We are seeing nothing but little specks." And suddenly, I stopped seeing them, and then I stopped seeing the rest of the fragments. And I feared that the world was disappearing. But then I understood that I did not see the parts of the world anymore, but all the world as a whole. At first I thought that this was NOTHINGNESS. But then I understood that this was the world, and that what I had been seeing earlier, was not the world. And I always knew that this was the world, but, what that was that I had been seeing earlier, I still do not know. When the fragments disappeared, their intelligent characteristics stopped being intelligent, and their unintelligent characteristics stopped being unintelligent. And the world as a whole stopped being intelligent or unintelligent. But when I understood that I was seeing the world as a whole, I suddenly stopped seeing it at all. I got scared because I thought the world had disappeared. And while I was thinking, I understood, that if the world really had disappeared than I could not be thinking. And I looked, searched for the world, but I could not find it. After that I did not know where to look. Then I remembered that, no matter whether I looked or not -- the world was always around me. And now it was not anymore. There was only me. And then I realized, that I was the world. But the world was not me. Although, at the same time, I was the world. But the world was not me. But I was the world. But the world was not me. But I was the world. But the world was not me. But I was the world. And after that I did not think anything anymore.

The Thing A mom, a dad, and the maid named Natasha, were sitting at the table, drinking. The dad was, undoubtingly, an alcoholic. Furthermore, even the mom was looking down on him. But that didn't prevent the dad from being a good man. He was smiling honestly while rocking in a chair. Maid Natasha had a lace apron and was extremely very shy. The dad was playing tricks with his

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beard, but maid Natasha was lowering her eyes shyly, showing, in that way, that she was ashamed. The mom, a tall woman with a big hairdo, spoke with a horselike voice. Her voice was spreading around the dining room and echoing back from the yard and other rooms. After the first drink, everybody was quiet for a moment while they were eating a sausage. A moment later, they all started talking again. Suddenly, completely unexpected, somebody knocked at the front door. Neither the dad, nor the mom nor the maid, Natasha, could guess who was knocking at the front door. -- How strange! -- said the dad. -- Who could that be? The mom looked at him with compassion and, even if it was not her turn, poured another glass, chugged it down and said: -- Strange. The dad did not swear, but also poured a glass, chugged it down and got up from the table. The dad was a short man. Completely opposite from the mom. The mom was a tall, plump woman with a voice like a horse, and the dad was, simply, her husband. And above all that, the dad had freckles. He approached the door in one step and said: -- Who is that? -- Me, -- said the voice behind the door. The door opened immediately, and into the room entered a maid, Natasha, all confused and blushing. Like a flower. Like a flower. The dad sat down. The mom had another drink. Maid Natasha, and the other one, the like-a-flower one, got very shy and blushed. The dad looked at them but he did not swear, instead he had another drink and so did the mom. The dad opened a can of crab pate to get the bad taste out of his mouth. Everybody was happy and they were eating until the morning. But the mom was quiet and she did not move from the chair. That was very impolite. When the dad was about to sing a song, something hit the window. The mom jumped up terrified and screamed that she could clearly see somebody looking through the window from the street. The others were convincing the mom that that was impossible, because they were on the third floor and nobody from the street could possibly look through the window, for that one would have to be a giant or Goliath. But the mom would not change her mind. Nothing in the world could convince her that nobody could have been looking through the window. They gave her another drink, in order to calm her down. The mom chugged it down. The dad, also, poured a glass and drank it. Natasha and the maid, the like-a-flower one, were sitting, looking down in confusion.

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-- I cannot be happy when somebody is looking at us through the window. -the mom said. The dad was desperate, he did not know how to calm the mom down. So, he went down to the yard and tried to look through the window on the first floor. Of course, that was impossible. But that did not convince the mom. She did not even see that he couldn't reach the first floor window. Finally, confused by the situation, the dad run into the dining room and had two drinks in the row, giving one to the mom. The mom had her drink, and said that she was drinking for the sole reason that somebody was looking at them through the window. The dad spread his hands. -- Here, -- he said to the mom, and opened the window. A man with a dirty coat and a big knife in his hands tried to get in through the window. When the dad spotted him, he closed the window and said: -- Nobody is there. But, the man with a dirty coat was outside looking in the room through the window, and furthermore, he opened the window and got in. The mom was extremely disturbed by this. She started acting hysterically, and, after she had a drink that the dad gave her and ate a little mushroom, she calmed down. Soon the dad calmed down, too. Again everybody sat at the table and continued to drink. The dad took the papers and spent a long time flipping them up and down trying to determine what comes up and what comes down. But, no matter how long he tried he couldn't sort it out so he put the papers aside and had a drink. -- Nice, -- said the dad -- but we are out of pickles. The mom made a sound like a horse, which was pretty inappropriate, and made the maids look at the table cloth and laugh silently. The dad had another drink and suddenly grabbed the mom and put her on the cupboard. Mom's gray, big, light hair was shaking, she got red spots all over her face, and, generally speaking, she was pretty upset. The dad fixed his trousers and started a speech. But at this point a secret hatch opened down on the floor and from it crawled out a monk. The maids were so confused that one of them started to puke. Natasha was holding her forehead and trying to hide what was going on. The monk, the one that got out of the floor, aimed at the dad's ear and hit him so hard that everybody could hear the bells ringing in the dad's head! The dad just sat down without even finishing his speech. Than the monk approached the mom and with his hand, or leg, somehow from below, he kicked her. The mom started to scream and cry for help.

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Then the monk grabbed both maids by their aprons and, after swinging them through the air, let them hit the wall. Then, unnoticed, the monk crawled back into the floor and closed the hatch behind himself. For a long time neither the dad, nor the mom nor maid Natasha could recover. But later, when they got some fresh air, they had another drink while fixing their appearance, they sat down at the table, and started to eat salad. After another drink everybody was talking quietly. Suddenly the dad got red in the face and started to yell: -- What! What! -- the dad was yelling. -- You think that I am anal! You look at me like at a devil! I do not ask for your love! You are the devils! The mom and maid Natasha ran out of the room and locked themselves in the kitchen. -- Go away you drunk! Go, you son of a devil! -- whispered the mom and the totally confused maid Natasha, behind the door with. And the dad stayed in the dining room until the morning when he took his bag, put on a white hat and quietly went to work. 31 May 1929 A man left his house A man left his house With a cane and a sack, Set off Down the road And never looked back. He walked ever onward, He walked ever straight, Never slept, Never drank, Never drank, slept, or ate. He came to a forest As dark as the night. He walked Right in And vanished from sight. But if ever you chance To meet up with this man Oh please Let us know

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As quick as you can. A Tale (A story written by Daniil Charms in 1935, translated freely by Nick Sushkin, 1994) (Translator's note: Vanya is a boy, Lenochka is a girl.) -- Here,-- said Vanya, putting his notebook on the desk, -- let's start writing a tale. -- Ok,-- said Lenochka, taking a seat. Vanya took a pencil and wrote: "Once upon a time there was a king..." Then he started thinking and raised his eyes to the ceiling. Lenochka peeked into the notebook and read Vanya's writing. -- Such a tale has already been written,-- said Lenochka. -- How do you know? -- asked Vanya. -- I know because I've been reading,-- said Lenochka. -- What is that tale about? -- asked Vanya. -- Well, it's about the king who was drinking tea with an apple and choked suddenly, when the queen started patting him on the back to make a piece of an apple pop back. But the king decided that the queen was fighting him and hit her head with a glass. Then the queen got angry with the king and hit him with a plate. But the king hit the queen with a bowl. But the queen hit the king with a chair. But the king got up and hit the queen with a table. But the queen tapped a kitchen shelf over the king. But the king got out from under the kitchen shelf and threw a crown at the queen. Then the queen grabbed king's hair and threw him out of the window. But the king got back into the room through the other window, grabbed the queen and stuffed her into the oven. But the queen climbed to the roof through the chimney, then slided down a lightning rod to the yard and came back to the room through the window. Meanwhile the king was starting fire in the oven to burn the queen. The queen sneaked from the back and pushed the king. The king fell into the oven and burned down. That was the end of the story,-- said Lenochka. -- It is a very silly tale,-- said Vanya.-- I was going to write quite a different tale. -- Well, why won't you,-- said Lenochka. Vanya took a pencil and wrote: "Once upon a time there was a bandit..." -- Wait! -- yelled Lenochka.-- Such a tale has already been written! -- I didn't know,-- said Vanya. -- How come,-- said Lenochka,-- haven't you known how a bandit, when trying to escape the guards, tried to jump on horse, but fell to the other side and hit the ground. Tha bandit cursed and tried to ride the horse again, but

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his jump was still inaccurate, so he fell to the ground from the other side of the horse. The bandit got up, waved his clenched fist, jumped on the horse and again flew over and dropped to the ground. Then he grabbed a pistol from his belt, shot into the air and jumped on the horse with such a force that he again flew over and collapsed on the ground. Then the bandit ripped a hat off his head, danced all over it and again jumped on the horse, and again flew over, collapsed on the ground and broke his leg. The bandit limped to the horse and hit its forehead with a fist. The horse ran away. Meanwhile the guards arrived on their horses, caught him and lead him to the jail. -- Well, I won't write about a bandit then,-- said Vanya. -- But about whom then? -- asked Lenochka. -- I will write a tale about a smith,-- said Vanya. Vanya wrote: "Once upon a time there was a smith..." -- Such a tale has already been written, too! -- cried out Lenochka. -- What? -- said Vanya and put down the pencil. -- Surely,-- said Lenochka.-- Once upon a time there was a smith. One day he was forging a horseshoe and made such a swing with a hammer, that it tore the hammer head off the handle, the hammer head flew out through the window, killed four pigeons, hit the fire watch tower, bounced to the side, broke window in a house of a fire marshall, flew over the table, at which the fire marshall was sitting himself with his wife, broke through the wall in the house of the fire marshall and flew out to the street. Here it tipped a street lamp pole to the ground, hit down an ice-cream seller, and struck the head of Karl Ivanovich Shusterling, who took off his hat for a minute to check the back of his head. After bouncing off the head of Karl Ivanovich Shusterling, the hammer head flew back, hit down the ice-cream seller again, threw two fighting cats off the roof, turned a cow upside down, killed four sparrows and flew back into the smithy and sat back on its handle, which the smith was holding in his right hand. All that happened so fast, that the smith had not noticed anything and still kept on forging the horseshoe. -- Well, since a tale about a smith has already been written, I will write a tale about myself,-- said Vanya and wrote: "Once upon a time there was a kid Vanya..." -- The tale about Vanya has already been written,-- said Lenochka.-- Once upon a time there was a kid Vanya, and one day he came to... -- Wait,-- said Vanya,-- I was going to write a tale about myself. -- A tale about you has allready been written too,-- said Lenochka. -- This can't be so! -- said Vanya. -- I am telling you, it has,-- said Lenochka, -- Where is it, then? -- Vanya was surprised. -- Buy a "Chizh" magazine, issue number 7 and there you will read a tale about yourself,-- said Lenochka. Vanya bought "Chizh" number 7 and read exactly the same tale, that you have just read.

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1935 A Letter to T. A. Meyer-Lipavsky Translated by Serge Winitzki Dear Tamara Aleksandrovna, Valentina Efimovna, Leonid Savelyevich, Yakov Semyonovich, and Valentina Efimovna. Send my greetings to Leonid Savelyevich, Valentina Efimovna, and Yakov Semyonovich. How are you doing, dear Tamara Aleksandrovna, Valentina Efimovna, Leonid Savelyevich, and Yakov Semyonovich? What is new with Valentina Efimovna? Please do write to me, dear Valentina Efimovna, about how Yakov Semyonovich and Leonid Savelyevich are feeling. I missed you very much, dear Tamara Aleksandrovna, and also Valentina Efimovna, and Leonid Savelyevich, and Yakov Semyonovich. And what about Leonid Savelyevich, is he still at the dacha or already returned? If he is back, please send him my greetings. And also my greetings to Valentina Efimovna, Leonid Savelyevich, and Tamara Aleksandrovna. All of you are so much on my mind that at times it seems I could never forget you. Valentina Efimovna stands so lifelike before my eyes, and even Leonid Savelyevich is rather lifelike. Yakov Semyonovich is to me like a brother and a sister, and also you are like a sister or at the very least a cousin. Leonid Savelyevich is to me like a brother-in-law and also Valentina Efimovna like a relative of sorts. Every now and then I remember one of you or another, and always with such a terrifying clarity and distinctness. But none of you has appeared to me in dreams, and this even surprises me. For if I had dreamt of Leonid Savelyevich it would be one thing, but if instead I imagined Yakov Semyonovich it would be an altogether different matter. One cannot disagree with that. And if I dreamt of you, it would have been again a different matter than if I had dreamt of Valentina Efimovna. And wasn't it quite a happening a few days ago! Imagine that as I was almost ready to go somewhere I took my hat to put it on, and suddenly I noticed that the hat seems to be not mine, as if mine but then, it seems, it's not mine. Gee, I said, what a story! Is it my hat or not? And in the meantime I'm putting it on, all the while. As I had it on, I looked at myself in the mirror: well, the hat seemed as if mine. Although I'm still thinking: what if it is not mine. But then it's perhaps mine. It turned out to be mine, in fact. Also Vvedensky got caught in a fishnet while bathing in the river and was so upset that as soon as he was freed he came home and had a drink. And please also write to me about your life. Has Leonid Savelyevich already returned from the dacha or not yet. Aug. 1st, 1932. Kursk.

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Excerpt from a biography of Daniil Charms, by Vladimir Glotser Translated from Russian by Nicholas Sushkin, (C) 1995. "I am thinking about the beauty of all that is first!" Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev (1905 -- 1942) invented a pen name "Charms" for himself when he was still in high school. He varied this name rather inventively, even within a single original: Kharms, Khorms, Charms, Haarms, Shardan, Harms-Dandan, etc. The thing was that Charms believed that a fixed name brings bad luck. He was taking a new last name each time as if trying to avoid it. "Yesterday my father told me, that while I was Charms, I would be always in need. Daniil Charms. December 23, 1936" (a diary record) He was brought up in a family of a well-known populist figure of Ivan Pavlovich Yuvachev, who was sentenced to death but whose sentence was substituted by life in prison, and who was being in exile in Sakhalin, where he made friends with Chekhov. Daniil was born after his father had been released, when Yuvachev came back to St. Petersburg. In those years at the beginning of the century, when Charms's father became an author of religious book and memoirs, he became a prototype of books by Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. So Charm's roots are very much in literature. But it is known that Ivan Pavlovich did not approve of his son's works, the works being rather unlike those Ivan Pavlovich was fond of in literature. Charms formed as a writer in the 20s, influenced by V. Khlebnikov and a "zaumnik" (complicator) A. Trufanov. Charms gained understanding in a circle of poets, who called themselves "Oberiuts" (from OBERIU - acronym for Association for Real Art). "Who are we? Why are we?" they were asking in their manifesto. "We are poets of new world awareness and new art... In our creations we expand and deepen the meaning of an object and a word, but we nowhere near destroying it. A concrete object becomes an object of art when washed off its literary and everyday-life shell. In poetry, a collision of word meanings expresses this object with a mechanical precision", etc. Oberiuts find a shelter for themselves under a roof of St. Petersburg House of Press, where their largest evening performance "Three Left Hours" took place on January 24, 1928. Charms, along with Nikolai Zabolotsky, A. Vvedensky, K. Vaginov, I. Bakhterev and others, were reading their poems sitting on a cabinet during the first hour. During the second hour they staged his piece "Elizaveta Bam", its author also being one of the producers. OBERIU very much captivated Charms, and he was torn apart (let's recall his age) between his OBERIU involvment and his beloved. "Who would advise me what to do? Esther brings misfortunes with her. I am perishing with her" -- exclaimed he in his diary record of January 27, 1928. -- "Where did the OBERIU go? Everything disappeared when Esther came into me. I was miserable ever since I stopped

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writing properly. If Esther brings misery with her, how can I let here go. But also, how can I jeopardize OBERIU, which is my job? -- God, help me! Make Esther leave me next week and live happily! Make me get on writing again and be free as before!" However some other external and evil forces helped to break this knot, after several years had passed. Wishing to end the OBERIU performances on campuses, clubs, military bases, etc, a youth newspaper "Next Generation" of St. Petersburg issued an article "Reactionary Juggling" (Apr 9, 1930) subtitled "About One Prank of the Literary Hoolihans." It was boldly stated that "the literary hoolihans" (read OBERIUtists) are nothing different but class enemies. The authors of the article were obviously quoting a real dialog between the "proletariat studentry" and OBERIUtists: "Vladimirov (the youngest OBERIUtist Yurij Vladimirov -- note by Vl.Glotser) was obnoxius enough to call the audience the aborigens, who turned up at the European city and stared at an automobile." Levin (a prosaist, OBERIUtist Dojvber Levin -- note by Vl. Glotser) declared that they are not "yet" (!) understood, but they are the only representatives (!) of the real art, who are building a large building. -- Who are you building this for? -- he was asked. -- For the whole Russa. -- the classical reply followed. And in 1931 Charms, Vvedensky and some of their friends were arrested and exiled to the town of Kursk for a year. Only two "adult" publications were left behind by Charms, one verse each, in two compilations by the Poet's Union (in 1926 and 1927). Daniil Charms (and also Alexander Vvedensky) couldn't publish one more "adult" line during their lives. Did Charms long for publications of his "adult" works? Was he thinking about them? I believe that he did. Firstly, this is the imminent law of any creative activity. Secondly, there is an indirect evidence that Charms considered more than forty of his compositions be ready for the publication. But still (what a feeling of "no-escape"!) he made no attempts of to publish any of his "adult" works after 1928. At least no one knows of such attempts yet. Moreover, he was trying not to share his writings with the people he knew. Artist Alisa Poret was recalling: "Charms himself was quite fond of drawing, but he never showed me his sketches, nor anything he wrote for the adults. He forbade all his friends and made me swear that I wouldn't try to obtain his original drafts." However, I think, that a small circle of his friends, namely A. Vvedensky, L. Lipavsky (L. Savelyev), Ya. S. Druskin and some others, were his customary audience in the 30th. And he was writing, or at least was trying to write, every day. "I didn't accomplish my goal of 3-4 pages a day today," he was blaming himself. And after that, in these days, he writes down "I was the most happy when they took the pen and the paper from me and forbade me to do anything. I had no anxiety that I wasn't doing anything of my own will, my conscience was

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clear, I was happy. It was when I was in the prison. But if they have asked me if I wanted to go there or be in a position similar to the jail, I would've said No, I don't want to." ...