Here appears Kharms.
He was not Kharms at first; his real name was Daniil Ivanovich Yuyachev.
Later, in his 20-ies he starts to create pseudonyms for himself. In total around 30 of them but one the most popular turned out to be Daniil Kharms. Kharms is derived from the English words "harms", "charms" and "Holmes", as in Sherlock, the fictional detective whose sartorial style he followed as an example.
Let’s start again.
Here appears Kharms.
As he himself claimed, he was born twice.
First time he was born but then pushed back in. Second time he was born. Maybe he was never born at all. Perhaps ‘’we don’t even know who we’re talking about,’’ as Kharms admitted about the redheaded man.
Kharms was sent to a very strict school in St. Petersburg, where he learned English and German.
The parents: the mother ran a refuge for women who were released from prison. The father was a former member of the People's Will revolutionary organization, who later became a pacifist.
Kharms – a kid finding himself first playing football in the middle of Revolution’s field, after growing up into the civil war, later on hiding in the basements and smoky city bars from the terror of Stalin, in the very end loosing his comrades into Syberian labor camps, finally rotting away in a prison hospital during the Leningrad Blockade: unheard, unpublished, spitted on and erased from the surface of soviet reality.
Kharms became an involved and active writer in the times of Great Terror of Stalin, a
period of hunger, cruelty, censorship and poverty. Affected by everyday reality he started
to become interested in nonsense that had no practical meaning. The Russian word
‘’chush’’ (nonsense) stands for rubbish, a bunch of crap or something that happens by
chance in the most everyday sense. It stands for something meaningless.
Seriousness was the fundament that held ideology together in the Soviet Union. And all of a sudden there is Kharms with his nonsensical writing. Nonsense was seen as a protest against the dictatorship of the proletariat. The roots of Kharms interest in nonsensical things and events would lead to unavoidable prison. Nevertheless Kharms kept on writing.
In Kharmsian reality, absurd life is real life. One can glimpse upon it only through the means of the oddest objects, through the weirdest gestures and through the events that make no rational sense.
In OBERIU manifesto Kharms wrote about himself:
He was not Kharms at first; his real name was Daniil Ivanovich Yuyachev.
Later, in his 20-ies he starts to create pseudonyms for himself. In total around 30 of them but one the most popular turned out to be Daniil Kharms. Kharms is derived from the English words "harms", "charms" and "Holmes", as in Sherlock, the fictional detective whose sartorial style he followed as an example.
Let’s start again.
Here appears Kharms.
As he himself claimed, he was born twice.
First time he was born but then pushed back in. Second time he was born. Maybe he was never born at all. Perhaps ‘’we don’t even know who we’re talking about,’’ as Kharms admitted about the redheaded man.
Kharms was sent to a very strict school in St. Petersburg, where he learned English and German.
The parents: the mother ran a refuge for women who were released from prison. The father was a former member of the People's Will revolutionary organization, who later became a pacifist.
Kharms – a kid finding himself first playing football in the middle of Revolution’s field, after growing up into the civil war, later on hiding in the basements and smoky city bars from the terror of Stalin, in the very end loosing his comrades into Syberian labor camps, finally rotting away in a prison hospital during the Leningrad Blockade: unheard, unpublished, spitted on and erased from the surface of soviet reality.
The light in the room is blinking as if it is breathing
Seriousness was the fundament that held ideology together in the Soviet Union. And all of a sudden there is Kharms with his nonsensical writing. Nonsense was seen as a protest against the dictatorship of the proletariat. The roots of Kharms interest in nonsensical things and events would lead to unavoidable prison. Nevertheless Kharms kept on writing.
In Kharmsian reality, absurd life is real life. One can glimpse upon it only through the means of the oddest objects, through the weirdest gestures and through the events that make no rational sense.
In OBERIU manifesto Kharms wrote about himself:
’A poet and dramaturge who’s attention is not focused on a static object but on the collision ofobjects and
their correlation. In the moment of action an object takes new concrete outlines, full of actual meaning.
The action converted into a new way holds in itself ‘’the classical print’’ and at the same time represents a
wide range of OBERIU’s perception of the world.’’
By the action of collision he would make an attempt to cleanse words of their ‘’normal’’ meanings and ‘’undress’’ the objects from their functions and uses. That reminds me of Kharms’ credo about a poem where ‘’verses that are as concrete as things can, so that, if thrown at a window, the window would break’’. Here the two objects – the poem and the window collide and invite new meaning in.
Another thing in Kharmsian world is the sense of being right. According to Kharms, to be right, means also to be wrong, means to contain a slight error and only through mistakes and errors something or someone will be truly real.
For Kharms a work of art has to exist in the world as a rock, as a sun, as grass; as an object.
"When I write poetry, the most important thing for me is not the idea, not the contents and not the form and not the obscure notion of "quality", but something even more obscure and unintelligible to the rational mind, but understandable to me...This is--purity of order. This purity is the same in the sun, in the grass, in man, and in poetry. Real art stands side by side with the first reality. It creates the world and is its first reflection." Kharms wrote in a letter to a friend.
Once during a literary evening where Kharms performed his poetry he met Alexander Vvedensky (Russian poet and avant-garde artist). They soon became good friends and comrades. Later they both were invited to become members of the ‘’Zaum’’ (literal translation from Russian – ‘’beyond the mind’’) movement, founded in 1913 by Kruchenykh. Kruchenykh defined Zaum as “a language which does not have any definite meaning, a trans rational language” that “allows for fuller expression and that can become a universal language, born originally and not artificially, like Esperanto”.
Later on Kharms and Vvedensky formed a separate branch of Zaum, calling themselves the Chinari. Chinari’s only one literal evening ended with the audience whistling, spitting on the performers and with brutal fights in the audience.
But that was not enough for their ambitions and in 1927 Kharms proposed the creation of an Academy of Left Classics. The aim of this movement would be to ‘’struggle against hacks’’. And that is when OBERIU (Russian: ОБэРИу - Объединение реального искусства; English: the Union of Real Art or the Association for Real Art) was founded.
OBERIU – an avant-garde collective of Russian Futurist writers, musicians, artists, writers that lived in the late 1920’s and 1930’s, emerged in the times of "intense centralization of Soviet Culture" and the decline of the avant-garde culture of Leningrad, when ‘’leftist’’ groups were increasingly repressed.
By the action of collision he would make an attempt to cleanse words of their ‘’normal’’ meanings and ‘’undress’’ the objects from their functions and uses. That reminds me of Kharms’ credo about a poem where ‘’verses that are as concrete as things can, so that, if thrown at a window, the window would break’’. Here the two objects – the poem and the window collide and invite new meaning in.
Another thing in Kharmsian world is the sense of being right. According to Kharms, to be right, means also to be wrong, means to contain a slight error and only through mistakes and errors something or someone will be truly real.
For Kharms a work of art has to exist in the world as a rock, as a sun, as grass; as an object.
"When I write poetry, the most important thing for me is not the idea, not the contents and not the form and not the obscure notion of "quality", but something even more obscure and unintelligible to the rational mind, but understandable to me...This is--purity of order. This purity is the same in the sun, in the grass, in man, and in poetry. Real art stands side by side with the first reality. It creates the world and is its first reflection." Kharms wrote in a letter to a friend.
Once during a literary evening where Kharms performed his poetry he met Alexander Vvedensky (Russian poet and avant-garde artist). They soon became good friends and comrades. Later they both were invited to become members of the ‘’Zaum’’ (literal translation from Russian – ‘’beyond the mind’’) movement, founded in 1913 by Kruchenykh. Kruchenykh defined Zaum as “a language which does not have any definite meaning, a trans rational language” that “allows for fuller expression and that can become a universal language, born originally and not artificially, like Esperanto”.
Later on Kharms and Vvedensky formed a separate branch of Zaum, calling themselves the Chinari. Chinari’s only one literal evening ended with the audience whistling, spitting on the performers and with brutal fights in the audience.
But that was not enough for their ambitions and in 1927 Kharms proposed the creation of an Academy of Left Classics. The aim of this movement would be to ‘’struggle against hacks’’. And that is when OBERIU (Russian: ОБэРИу - Объединение реального искусства; English: the Union of Real Art or the Association for Real Art) was founded.
I miss Wundik very much.
Last time I saw him was in Tallinn, 18.08.2013
45 minutes in the green grass
He looked sick but same wise.
OBERIU – an avant-garde collective of Russian Futurist writers, musicians, artists, writers that lived in the late 1920’s and 1930’s, emerged in the times of "intense centralization of Soviet Culture" and the decline of the avant-garde culture of Leningrad, when ‘’leftist’’ groups were increasingly repressed.
In its manifesto, the OBERIU said its main task was ‘’to portray the world in a clearly
objectified manner. “ They called themselves a new avant-garde of the revolutionary Left in
fine arts, theater, cinema, music and literature.“Art is a cupboard,” the group stated, and
“Poems aren't pies; we aren't herring.”
One year later Kharms started to work for the children's magazine "Yozh" ("Hedgehog"), edited by Marshak, in order to survive and have a chance to publish at least some of his texts in disguise.
It sounds strange, but kids really loved his stories, with all the irrationality, chance and cruelty that were so typical for Kharms. But Kharms himself really didn’t like children just as he could not stand old women and corpses. Perhaps this was because Kharms sensed the presence of death on both edges of the age.
“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! ...’’ -Daniil Kharms
Kharms played in his texts with the subject of the meaninglessness of human existence and at the same time the desire of people to have meaning in their lives. He played with hopeless hope.
In 1938 Kharms hosted a musical-literary experiment evening in his apartment. At the entrance he placed a note ‘’ List of Persons Particularly Respected in This House’’. The list welcomed Bach, Gogol, Glinka, Goethe, Lewis Carroll and Knut Hamsun.
I happened to be reading an introduction by Matvei Yankelevich titled ‘’The Real Kharms’’ from the book ‘’Today I wrote Nothing’’, where Yankelevich writes that
Kharms believed that his poem-object exists not only as ‘’another created object in the world’’ but also as a thing that does something. The written word passes the thing and becomes an action. If words create the world then something is ‘’happening’’. The act of writing is an act in the world, a gesture - that opens the world up to the new possibility of the connections, to new objects, new events.
Taking the paragraph above into consideration, one might say that Kharms believed in destruction of the old in order to make space for new. In his texts he used interruption as a tool to avoid the logical order and to break the old meaning. Subjects such as death, violence, love, affection, heroism are flattened to be equal and of the same sense, being served through the prism of comedy. These subjects loose their qualities, properties and become something else. Kharms would often say: "... Little by little a man loses his shape and becomes a sphere. And once he is a sphere, a man loses all his desires."
One year later Kharms started to work for the children's magazine "Yozh" ("Hedgehog"), edited by Marshak, in order to survive and have a chance to publish at least some of his texts in disguise.
It sounds strange, but kids really loved his stories, with all the irrationality, chance and cruelty that were so typical for Kharms. But Kharms himself really didn’t like children just as he could not stand old women and corpses. Perhaps this was because Kharms sensed the presence of death on both edges of the age.
“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! ...’’ -Daniil Kharms
Kharms played in his texts with the subject of the meaninglessness of human existence and at the same time the desire of people to have meaning in their lives. He played with hopeless hope.
Silence is moving towards the fog.
Can you hear it?
In 1938 Kharms hosted a musical-literary experiment evening in his apartment. At the entrance he placed a note ‘’ List of Persons Particularly Respected in This House’’. The list welcomed Bach, Gogol, Glinka, Goethe, Lewis Carroll and Knut Hamsun.
I happened to be reading an introduction by Matvei Yankelevich titled ‘’The Real Kharms’’ from the book ‘’Today I wrote Nothing’’, where Yankelevich writes that
Kharms believed that his poem-object exists not only as ‘’another created object in the world’’ but also as a thing that does something. The written word passes the thing and becomes an action. If words create the world then something is ‘’happening’’. The act of writing is an act in the world, a gesture - that opens the world up to the new possibility of the connections, to new objects, new events.
Taking the paragraph above into consideration, one might say that Kharms believed in destruction of the old in order to make space for new. In his texts he used interruption as a tool to avoid the logical order and to break the old meaning. Subjects such as death, violence, love, affection, heroism are flattened to be equal and of the same sense, being served through the prism of comedy. These subjects loose their qualities, properties and become something else. Kharms would often say: "... Little by little a man loses his shape and becomes a sphere. And once he is a sphere, a man loses all his desires."
Kharms consciously developed small performances for the NKVD agents who
interrogated him. Performances consisting of strange hiccup-snorting seizures and the
shielding of his thoughts from others by wearing all kind of objects on his head.
On 23 August 1941, he was arrested third time. The doorman asked him to come down
into the courtyard for something. After that Kharms disappeared; half- dressed, wearing
slippers on his bare feet.
Kharms died on 2 February 1942, in a prison hospital in Novosibirsk.
Or maybe Kharms never existed and instead Daniil Ivanovich Yuyachev died on 2 February 1942, in a prison hospital in Novosibirsk, leaving Kharms’ traces of absence hidden in between the times and the black and white lines.
Not only he himself vanished from the surface of the earth, but also all of his works. They reappeared only after 30 years in Samizdat – a form that existed around the Soviet bloc, where individuals would reproduce ‘’forbidden’’ publications by hand and pass the published materials from reader to reader.
Interrogation No.2
...’’Summing up my deposition, I confess that the activity of our group in the sphere of children’s
literature had an anti-Soviet character and did significant damage to the cause of forming the rising Soviet
generation. Our books separated the reader from contemporary concrete reality and acted in a destructive
way on the imagination of the child. In particular, from this point of view I can also point a poem entitled
‘’Liar,’’ published in the journal ‘’Hedgehog,’’ which contains elements devoid of sense.’’
-Daniil Khrms. December 23, 1931, Interrogator: A. Buznikov
When is it going to stop?
Here everything stopped
Kharms died on 2 February 1942, in a prison hospital in Novosibirsk.
Or maybe Kharms never existed and instead Daniil Ivanovich Yuyachev died on 2 February 1942, in a prison hospital in Novosibirsk, leaving Kharms’ traces of absence hidden in between the times and the black and white lines.
Not only he himself vanished from the surface of the earth, but also all of his works. They reappeared only after 30 years in Samizdat – a form that existed around the Soviet bloc, where individuals would reproduce ‘’forbidden’’ publications by hand and pass the published materials from reader to reader.
“Bizarre violence, peculiar digressions and sudden twists; direct, visceral and yet with something hidden
...” - Daniil Kharms about himself
‘’Now the time has come to say that, not only at Nikolai Ivanovich's back, but also in front of him—at
his chest, as it were—and all around him, there is nothing. A complete absence of any existence. Or, as
someone once said in jest, an absence of any presence.’’
-Daniil Kharms
