Concerts Opera Dance Theater Gigs Exhibits

	Overlook Duckworth Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms By Daniil Kharms Trans. by Matvei Yankelevich Overlook Duckworth 272 pages. $29.95

The Small Print

Daniil Kharms' miniatures might well be required reading for anyone out to revolutionize literature.

By Benjamin Paloff
Published: April 4, 2008

Reading Russian poetry and aesthetic theory of the early Soviet period against the backdrop of the American poetry produced since then, one easily gets the feeling that a great deal of American paper could have been spared if these Russian texts had been available in English earlier. Such backhanded praise for the innovations of the Russian literary avant-garde does not diminish the originality of American originals, such as the prose-poet Russell Edson or the poetic prose-writer Lydia Davis, both of whom intersect engagingly with the work of Daniil Kharms, and both of whom are duly noted in Matvei Yankelevich's introduction to this collection of Kharms' poems, mini plays, anecdotes and mixed genres. But for the sizeable army of inadvertent imitators and the would-be trendsetters who enter American creative writing programs each year intending to reshape modernity, there is a growing catalog of what should be required reading before pen is set to manifesto. And "Today I Wrote Nothing" might well find itself near the top of that list.

Born Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachyov in 1905, Kharms spent most of his life in St. Petersburg, witnessing his native city's many transformations and name changes. He adopted his own artistic nom de guerre, following the almost conventional unconventionality of the time, in 1924. For the rest of that extraordinary decade, Kharms aggressively played the buffoon of the Leningrad art scene, staging one-page plays and recitations with his friends -- including the writers Nikolai Zabolotsky, Alexander Vvedensky and Konstantin Vaginov, with whom Kharms formed the Association for Real Art, or OBERIU, in 1927. Kharms' texts from this period, designed specifically to offend readers' and audiences' expectations about how people are supposed to behave and what literature is supposed to do, might strike today's reader as the products of a smarmy teenager, too cool for school, aggressively scandalous and self-indulgent.

Kharms has been slow to break into English, and the same confrontational attitude that offended the tastes of the Leningrad literati may be partly to blame. Inherently anti-establishmentarian and himself a political prisoner who died of starvation in 1942, Kharms nevertheless fails to fit American images of the oppressed Soviet poet who broadcasts important historical truths to a prosperous but morally bankrupt West. Instead, Kharms tends to write about people hitting each other in the face -- a dominant theme in his work -- or becoming enmeshed in complex, ultimately meaningless tasks, as in "The Meeting":

"Now, one day a man went to work
and on the way he met another man,
who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread,
was heading back home where he came from.

And that's it, more or less."

Overlook Duckworth Born in St. Petersburg before the Revolution, Kharms set out to defy prevailing literary standards.

This is the entire story, and Kharms, in a typical closing line, tells us as much. Literary convention tells the reader that the first sentence should blossom into a network of actions and associated themes, as plausible as they are contrived, which we might otherwise call a "story." Kharms, however, refers to these narratives as "events" or "incidents," not as stories per se. The reader will either have to learn to live with disappointment or find some other critical rubric in which seemingly pointless texts can be accommodated.

In recent years, American publishers have accomplished this by filing Kharms under the general heading of absurdism. George Gibian's 1997 anthology, "The Man in the Black Coat: Russia's Literature of the Absurd," follows this line, as does Eugene Ostashevsky's more recent "OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism." While these collections provide worthwhile introductions to Kharms' art, they may be a bit misleading, since Kharms has little in common with the absurdism that would become a staple of postwar European literature and philosophy. Though occasionally reminiscent of a graduate seminar paper, Yankelevich's extremely astute and detailed introduction cuts through the American penchant for reducing Kharms and similar writers to peddlers of the meaningless: "The claim that there is an 'Absurdist tradition' in Russia runs close to revisionism and at best is an attempt to apply a generic label to that which is unfamiliar or hard to pin down." At the same time, the translator properly cautions us not to read Kharms as a voice of political protest, perhaps the most common and restrictive mold into which Westerners press authors from the Soviet Union. As Yankelevich notes, "We stumble on (or over) this kind of oversimplification again and again in our culture's popularization of difficult writers in difficult times." That past readers have tended to read Kharms either through absurdism or political allegory -- framing devices that offer opposing verdicts about whether a literary text should mean anything at all -- gives some sense of his enormous, largely untapped interpretive potential.

If the reader is willing to look beyond these reductions, Kharms' poetry and prose suggest the much more unsettling truth that his writing is about real life, often observed in terms so direct and frightening that readers mistake it for whimsy. The violence that permeates these brief texts is no less plausible for being random, as we see in the opening sentence of "An Incident on the Street": "A man once jumped off a tram, but he did it so badly that a car hit him." The author then fills a page with a list of similar incidents following each other in a loose causal chain, until: "Later everything was alright again, and Ivan Semyonovich Karpov even dropped into a self-service cafeteria." It does not matter that this closing sentence is the first mention of Karpov. In fact, Kharms seems to suggest that nothing matters, whether in a literary text or in our own daily existences, except insofar as we are willing to ascribe it meaning. Or, as Kharms declares in one of the numbered, aphoristic entries in "The Blue Notebook," "While traveling, do not give yourself over to daydreams, but fantasize and pay attention to everything, even the insignificant details."

Kharms practices an almost religious devotion to these "insignificant details." In small doses, such devotion can be hilarious or horrifying by turns. At longer stretches, it can be downright numbing. Ultimately, Kharms' attention to the banal is worthwhile because his prose sounds like a deflated fairytale, his poems like deconstructed nursery rhymes. With accumulation, the details of his world lose their luster and become merely endless repetitions of the quotidian. While this effect may fall well within Kharms' philosophy of art, it also makes for a slow and sometimes stultifying experience of the prose. Similarly, the English renderings of the poems are not nearly as jaunty as their Russian originals, which may be ascribed in part to the erratic punctuation of Kharms' manuscripts and the decision, however admirable from a scholarly standpoint, to preserve it here.

These are cautions rather than misgivings. "Today I Wrote Nothing" is, as one may surmise from its title, a different kind of book. It does not call out to be read in one sitting, or even ten. It does not necessarily care whether you read it at all. But it exists as a layman's scripture, a Bible of the mundane, for occasional, bemused reference, to be incorporated into the sacraments of one's daily life. Kharms himself would be proud.

Benjamin Paloff is a poetry editor at Boston Review. His poems have recently appeared in Gulf Coast, Jacket, The Literary Review and elsewhere. He teaches at the University of Michigan.

Print this article

E-mail this article

Copyright © 2008 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.