Search results
6 Daniil Kharms as minimalist-absurdist Story Without Title There were about eleven of us in the room amd we all talked an awful lot. It was a warm May evening. Suddenly we all fell silent. – ‘Gentlemen, it’s time to go!’ said one of us. We stood up and went . . . (anonymous parody of Turgenev’s ‘Prose Poems’, 1883)1 A Kharms sketch The basic facts about Kharms have now become common knowledge, but might still be worth brief recapitulation here.2 ‘Daniil Kharms’ was the main, and subsequently the sole, pen-name of Daniil Ivanovich Iuvachev (1905–42). The son
This book offers a comprehensive account of the absurd in prose fiction. As well as providing a basis for courses on absurdist literature (whether in fiction or in drama), it offers a broadly based philosophical background. Sections covering theoretical approaches and an overview of the historical literary antecedents to the ‘modern’ absurd introduce the largely twentieth-century core chapters. In addition to discussing a variety of literary movements (from Surrealism to the Russian OBERIU), the book offers detailed case studies of four prominent exponents of the absurd: Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Daniil Kharms and Flann O'Brien. There is also wide discussion of other English-language and European contributors to the phenomenon of the absurd.
the proceedings, as perhaps is already obvious, began to make similar incursions. Nabokov, Daniil Kharms and Orhan Pamuk make brief intrusions. Even Boris Akunin’s Pelagia & The Black Monk , with its overt play on Chekhov’s figure, as well as on works by Dostoevsky, could encroach too on detection (though employing a non-psychic conventual sleuth) and on at least elements towards science fiction. Moreover, Akunin even casts a nod at Odoevsky – if only as the (unnamed) writer of ever-popular children’s fiction, by alluding to his story ‘The Little Town in the
other chronological end of the scale, we have earlier briefly noted the pre-war work of Witkiewicz. Even closer to postwar Theatre of the Absurd, arguably, are the main plays of the Russian OBERIU writers Kharms and Vvedensky. The OBERIU movement (or ‘Association of Real Art’) has already been summarised in general terms (see Chapter 3) and there will follow a separate chapter on the prose writings of Daniil Kharms. However, we here and now turn to Kharms’s main dramatic work, Yelizaveta Bam. Written in twelve days at the end of 1927 (when Kharms was still a mere
writer (and founder member of ‘Groupe Panique’, which included Arrabal). His minimalist short stories are reminiscent of Daniil Kharms, in their featuring of grotesque exaggeration, senseless violence, paranoia, irony and ‘what if?’ reversals of norms or archetypes. Accused – and not unjustifiably – of ‘sick humour’, Topor frequently dwells on amputation, cannibalism and acts of medical and mental aggression. Identity is played with, as friends and strangers are suddenly reversed (‘My Dear Friends . . .’; Amis très chers . . .) or the acquisition of a telephone brings
purpose as an analytical tool, for instance by Ann Shukman (in relation to the short prose of Daniil Kharms) and by David Lodge (applied to a short dramatic sketch by Harold Pinter). Isaak and Olga Revzin, adherents of the (then Soviet) Tartu school of semiotics, developing Jakobson’s system by adding further axioms of their own, demonstrated absurdness in plays by Ionesco (The Bald Prima Donna and The Lesson) on the grounds of ‘their frequent infringement of certain presuppositions which lie behind every normal act of communication’ (Shukman 1989a, 65). Jakobson
to play on in his story Terra Incognita (1931; English version 1963).10 For that matter, the barest bones of the plot of Heart of Darkness, or of isolated incidents there within (the Fresleven episode, for one: Conrad, 8–9), could almost suggest even the violent plotlines (in so far as they may be so described) of certain of the mini-stories (or ‘incidents’) of Daniil Kharms.11 The expansive external (and internal) worlds of Conrad may seem a far cry from those of Henry James, yet jungles of irrationality are explored in both, whether sought or feared, actual or
Hugh Maxton), that same commentator had contributed, as an ‘Afterword’ to an earlier volume in the same series presenting a selection of the briefer stories of Daniil Kharms, a short essay entitled ‘Kharms and Myles’ (Maxton, 1989).8 M. Keith Booker comments in more detail on affinities between Kafka and O’Brien, mentioning also shared elements of Menippean satire discerned between O’Brien and writers from Central and Eastern Europe, already familiar to us on absurdist grounds, such as Hašek, Bruno Schulz and Gombrowicz (Booker, 1995, 127–33; 126, n. 6). Furthermore
external exile. That boundless space that defines the Russian literary tradition has continually a concretely Petersburg subtext at its eccentric centre (as we will find in the Brazilian tradition, a Rio subtext). Whether the fiction tends towards a futuristic realism, as Olesha’s or Zamiatin’s city, or towards the fantastically real, as do Bely’s Petersburg, or Daniil Kharm’s and Vaginov’s, Tynianov’s and Bitov’s darker Leningrad fictions, the city remains wholly, and often self-consciously, interior and intertextual creation. Bitov, affiliated with Petrograd’s Дом
by Witkiewicz’s protagonist in The Cuttlefish (1922; performed 1933): ‘Together we’ll create pure nonsense in life, not in Art’ (The Cuttlefish, or The Hyrcanian Worldview, in Cardullo and Knopf, 297–320, at 319). At a somewhat different level, their contemporaries, Aleksandr Vvedensky and Yakov Druskin, said of another exponent of ‘cruelty’, Daniil Kharms: ‘Kharms does not create art, but is himself art. . . . This was not aestheticism: “the creation of life like art” was, for Kharms, a category not of an aesthetic order but what would now be called an existential