A short biography of Kharms for children. Biography of Daniel Kharms

Biography

He studied at the privileged German school Petrischule. In 1924 he entered the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute, but was soon forced to leave it. In 1925 he took up writing. In his early youth, he imitated the tourist poetics of Khlebnikov and the Kruchenykhs. Then, in the second half of the 1920s, he abandoned the predominance of "zaumi" in versification.

Upon returning from exile, Harms continues to communicate with like-minded people and writes a number of books for children in order to earn his living. After the publication in 1937 in a children's magazine of the poem "A man with a club and a sack came out of the house", which "disappeared since then", Kharms was not printed for some time, which puts him and his wife on the verge of starvation. At the same time, he writes many short stories, theatrical skits and poems for adults, which were not published during his lifetime. During this period, a cycle of miniatures "Cases", the story "The Old Woman" are created.

Addresses in Petrograd - Leningrad

  • 1922-1924 - apartment of N. I. Kolyubakina - Children's Village (now the city of Pushkin), Revolution Street (now Malaya), 27;
  • 12.1925 - 08.23.1941 - Trofimov's house - Nadezhdinskaya street (since 1936 Mayakovsky street), 11, apt. eight.

Notes

Links

  • www.daharms.ru, Daniil Kharms - complete works. Biography, documents, articles, photos, anecdotes
  • kharms.ru - Daniil Ivanovich Kharms. Biography, works, story "The Old Woman", associates.
  • Daniil Kharms in the Anthology of Russian Poetry
  • Daniil Kharms on the Elements
  • Who are you, Daniil Kharms? Review of the book by A. Kobrinsky "Daniel Kharms".

Recitations

  • Incidents by Daniil Kharms performed by Sergey Yursky and Zinovy ​​Gerdt

Screen adaptations

  • "The Kharms Case" by Slobodan Pesic (1987);
  • "Clownery" by Dmitry Frolov (1989) - a tragicomedy of the absurd, based on the works of Daniil Kharms;
  • "Staru-kha-rmsa" by Vadim Gems (1991) - a film adaptation of the story by D. Kharms "The Old Woman";
  • "Concerto for a Rat" by Oleg Kovalov (1996)
  • "Falling into the sky" by Natalia Mitroshina (2007)
  • “Plyukh and Plikh” by Ekran studio Nathan Lerner (1984), based on the book by Walter Bush, translated by Daniil Kharms

Literature

  • 100th anniversary of Daniil Kharms: Materials of the conference. SPb., 2005.
  • Glotser V. Marina Durnovo. My husband is Daniil Kharms. Moscow: IMA-Press, 2001.
  • Jacquard J.-F. Daniil Kharms and the end of the Russian avant-garde. SPb., 1995.
  • Kobrinsky A.A. About Kharms and not only. SPb., 2007.
  • Kobrinsky A. A. Daniil Kharms. M .: Young Guard, 2008. - (“Life of wonderful people”). 2nd ed. - 2009.
  • Kharmsizdat presents: Sat. materials. SPb., 1995.
  • Tokarev D. Heading for the worst: absurdity as a category of text by Daniil Kharms and Samuel Beckett. M.: New Literary Association, 2002. - 336 p.

Music

  • The poem "Very, very tasty cake" in the musical interpretation of the Commonwealth "Other Creative".

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See what "Kharms" is in other dictionaries:

    Daniil (real name Yuvachev Daniil Ivanovich; 1905, St. Petersburg - 1942, Leningrad), Russian writer. D. Kharms The son of the writer I. P. Yuvachev. In 1922 or a little earlier he began his poetic activity. Together with L. S. Lipavsky, Ya. S. Druskin, A ... Literary Encyclopedia

    See: Oberiut Lexicon of non-classics. Artistic and aesthetic culture of the XX century. VV Bychkov. 2003 ... Encyclopedia of cultural studies

    - (real name Yuvachev) Daniil Ivanovich (1905-42), Russian writer. Member of the literary group Association of Real Art (OBERIU, 1927-1930). In poetry, plays (Comedy of the city of St. Petersburg, 1927, published posthumously; Elizabeth to you ... Russian history

    Kharms D.I.- HARMS (real name Yuvachev) Daniil Ivanovich (1905–42), Russian. writer. Member Lit. group of the Association of Real Claims (OBERIU, 1927–30). In poetry, plays (Comedy of the city of St. Petersburg, 1927, publ. see; Elizaveta Bam, post. 1928), pov ... Biographical Dictionary

    Daniil Kharms Birth name: Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev Date of birth: December 17 (30), 1905 Place of birth: St. Petersburg Date of death: February 2, 1942 Place of death: Leningrad ... Wikipedia

Name: Daniil Kharms (Daniil Yuvachev)

Age: 36 years

Activity: poet, writer, playwright

Family status: was married

Daniil Kharms: biography

Daniil Ivanovich Kharms is a talented poet, a member of the OBERIU creative association, but first of all Kharms is associated with readers as an author of children's literature. He gave girls and boys poems and stories that, after many years, became immortal. Such works include “Amazing Cat”, “Liar”, “A Very Scary Story”, “First and Second”, “A Man Came Out of the House”, “Old Woman”, etc.

Childhood and youth

Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev was born on December 17 (30), 1905 in the cultural capital of Russia - the city of St. Petersburg. The boy grew up and was brought up in an intelligent and wealthy family. His father Ivan Pavlovich also left a mark on history: initially he positioned himself as a revolutionary of the People's Will, and miraculously avoiding the death penalty, changed his outlook on life and became a spiritual writer.


It is known that during a trip to Sakhalin, where he spent eight years in hard labor, the father of Daniil Kharms met, who made Yuvachev the prototype of a revolutionary in his work “The Story of an Unknown Man” (1893). The link helped Yuvachev get rid of undress moods, and, having survived all the hardships of fate, in 1899 Ivan Pavlovich returned to St. Petersburg, where he served in the inspectorate of the Savings Banks Administration, worked in the editorial office and was engaged in literary activities.


Yuvachev Sr. communicated not only with Chekhov, but also was in friendly correspondence with and. In 1902, Ivan Pavlovich made a marriage proposal to Nadezhda Ivanovna Kolyubakina, who came from a noble family who settled in the Saratov province. She was in charge of the orphanage and was known as the comforter of women who had been in captivity. And if Nadezhda Ivanovna raised her children in love, then Ivan Pavlovich adhered to strict rules regarding the behavior of offspring. In addition to Daniel, the couple had a daughter, Elizabeth, and two other children died at an early age.


When the first seeds of revolution grew on the territory of the Russian Empire, the future poet studied at the privileged German school "Die Realschule", which was part of the "Petrishule" (the first educational institution founded in St. Petersburg in 1702). The main breadwinner in the house had a favorable influence on his son: thanks to his father, Daniel began to study foreign languages ​​(English and German), and also fell in love with scientific literature.


According to rumors, the son of Ivan Pavlovich studied well, but the little boy, however, like all children, was characterized by pranks: in order to avoid punishment from teachers, Daniil sometimes played acting scenes, pretending to be an orphan. After receiving a matriculation certificate, the young man chose a mundane path and entered the Leningrad Energy College. However, Harms did not stay long on the bench of this educational institution: the careless student did not bother to get a diploma due to the fact that he often skipped classes and did not participate in public works.

Poems

After Daniil Yuvachev was expelled from the Leningrad Technical School, he began to engage in literary activities. Although, it is worth saying that he developed a love for creativity in his early years: as a schoolboy, he composed an interesting fairy tale, which he read to his four-year-old sister Natalia, whose early death was a shock to the future poet.


Daniil Ivanovich did not want to see himself as a prose writer and chose composing poems as his career. But the first creative attempts of the beginning poet resembled an incoherent stream of thought, and the young man's father did not share his son's literary tastes, as he was an adherent of strict and classical literature in the person of Leo Tolstoy and.

In 1921-1922, Daniil Yuvachev became Daniil Kharms. By the way, some writers are still struggling to solve the mystery that shrouded the creative pseudonym assigned by the world-famous author of children's poems. According to rumors, the son of Ivan Pavlovich explained to a friend that his nickname comes from the English word "harm", which means "harm" in Russian. However, there is an assumption that the word "Kharms" comes from the French "charme" - "charm, charm."


Others believe that Daniel's nickname was inspired by his favorite character Sherlock Holmes from Sir's books. It was also said that the poet signed in his passport with a pencil next to his real name through the line “Kharms”, and then completely legalized his pseudonym. A talented literary figure believed that one constant nickname brings misfortune, so Daniil Ivanovich had many pseudonyms that changed like gloves: Khharms, Khaarms, Dandan, Daniil Shardam, etc.


In 1924-1926, Daniil Ivanovich begins his creative biography. The young man not only composes poems, but also recites other people's works at speeches to the public. Also in 1926, Kharms joined the All-Russian Union of Poets, but the writer was expelled three years later for non-payment of membership dues. At that time, the poet was inspired by the work of and.


In 1927, a new literary community appeared in Leningrad, which was called "OBERIU" ("Association of Real Art"). Just like with other futurists, he called for throwing modernity off the steamer and, the "plane trees" abandoned conservative forms of art, promoting original methods of depicting reality, the grotesque and the poetics of the absurd.


They not only read poems, but also arranged dance evenings, at which those who came danced the foxtrot. In addition to Kharms, this circle included Alexander Vvedensky, Igor Bakhterev and other literary figures. At the end of 1927, thanks to Oleinikov and Zhitkov, Daniil Kharms and his associates begin to compose poems for children.

The works of Daniil Ivanovich could be seen in the popular publications "Hedgehog", "Chizh" and "Cricket". Moreover, Yuvachev, in addition to poems, also published stories, drew cartoons and puzzles that were solved by both children and their parents.


Not to say that this kind of occupation brought Kharms unprecedented pleasure: Daniil Ivanovich did not like children, but children's literature was the only source of income for a talented writer. In addition, Yuvachev approached his work thoroughly and tried to scrupulously study absolutely every work, unlike his friend Vvedensky, who, according to some researchers, liked to hack and treated his duties extremely irresponsibly.

Kharms managed to gain popularity among little boys and girls, to whom mothers and fathers, grandparents read poems about cats who did not want to taste vinaigrette from onions and potatoes, about a pot-bellied samovar and about a cheerful old man who was afraid of spiders.


Surprisingly, even the author of harmless works for children was persecuted by the authorities, who considered some of Yuvachev's works to be undressed. Thus, the illustrated book "Naughty Jam" was not censored and was "under the curtain" for ten years, from 1951 to 1961. It got to the point that in December 1931 Kharms and his comrades were arrested for promoting anti-Soviet literature: Daniil Ivanovich and Vvedensky were deported to Kursk.

Personal life

Not without reason, in most of the illustrations, Daniil Ivanovich is depicted with a tobacco pipe, since in life the gifted poet practically did not let it out of his mouth and sometimes smoked right on the go. Contemporaries used to say that Yuvachev dressed strangely. Harms did not walk around fashion boutiques, but ordered clothes from a tailor.


Thus, the writer was the only one in the city who wore short pants, under which one could see knee-high socks or leggings. But his eccentric habits (for example, Kharms sometimes stood at the window in what his mother gave birth) did not prevent others from seeing his spiritual kindness. Also, the poet never raised his voice, he was a correct and polite person.

“Apparently, for the children there was something very interesting in this appearance of him, and they ran after him. They terribly liked the way he was dressed, the way he walked, when he suddenly stopped. But they were also cruel - they threw stones at him. He did not pay any attention to their antics, was completely unperturbed. Walked and walked. And he also didn’t react to the views of adults in any way, ”recalled Marina Malich.

As for love relationships, a certain Esther Rusakova became the first chosen one of Daniil Ivanovich. Kharms devoted an unprecedented number of poems to his passion, but their love was not cloudless: according to rumors, Yuvachev went to the left, and Rusakova burned with jealousy, as evidenced by the poet's diary entries. In 1932, the couple filed for a formal divorce.


In the summer of 1934, Kharms proposed to Marina Malich, and the girl agreed. The lovers lived hand in hand until the arrest of Yuvachev, which took place in 1941.

Death

In August 1941, Daniil Ivanovich, again breaking the law, was arrested for spreading objectionable sentiments: the writer allegedly said that the USSR would lose the war (words that, according to researchers, were copied from a denunciation).


To avoid the death penalty, Kharms pretended to be mentally ill, so he was sent to a psychiatric clinic, where he died on February 2, 1942. After 18 years, his sister managed to restore the good name of his brother, who was rehabilitated by the Prosecutor General's Office.

Bibliography

  • 1928 - "First and Second"
  • 1928 - "On how Kolka Pankin flew to Brazil, and Petka Ershov did not believe in anything"
  • 1928 - "Ivan Ivanovich Samovar"
  • 1929 - "About how an old woman bought ink"
  • 1930 - "About how my father shot my ferret"
  • 1937 - "Cats"
  • 1937 - "Stories in Pictures"
  • 1937 - Plikh and Plukh (translation of the work of Wilhelm Busch)
  • 1940 - "The Fox and the Hare"
  • 1944 - "The Amazing Cat"
Daniil Kharms (Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev) was born on December 30 (old style - 17) December 1905. His father, Ivan Pavlovich Yuvachev, was a man of exceptional destiny. For participation in the Narodnaya Volya terror, he (then a naval officer) was tried in 1883 and spent four years in solitary confinement, and then more than ten years in hard labor. Kharms' mother was in charge of a shelter for former convicts in St. Petersburg.
Kharms studied at the St. Petersburg German School (Petershule), where he acquired a thorough knowledge of German and English. In 1924, he entered the Leningrad Electrotechnical School, from where he was expelled a year later for "poor attendance" and "inactivity in public works." Thus, the writer could not receive either higher or secondary specialized education. But he was intensively engaged in self-education, he was especially fond of philosophy and psychology. Lived exclusively literary earnings. Since 1924, he begins to call himself Kharms. This was the main of his many pseudonyms; originating, perhaps, from the French “charm” (charm, charm), and from the English “harm” (harm, attack); he quite accurately reflected the essence of the writer's attitude to life and work: Kharms was able to travesty the most serious things and find very sad moments in the most seemingly ridiculous. The same ambivalence was also characteristic of his personality: an orientation towards the game, towards a merry prank, combined with sometimes painful suspiciousness, with the certainty that he brings misfortune to those he loves.
In 1925 Harms met the young Esther Rusakova and soon married her. The romance and marriage were difficult and painful for both parties - until the divorce in 1932. However, all his life he will remember Esther and compare with her all the women with whom fate will bring him.
In 1925, Kharms joined a small group of Leningrad poets, headed by Alexander Tufanov, who called themselves "thinkers". Here an acquaintance and friendship with Alexander Vvedensky takes place. In 1926, together with the young philosophers Leonid Lipavsky and Yakov Druskin, they formed the "Planar" association. Around the same time, Kharms and Vvedensky were admitted to the Leningrad branch of the All-Russian Union of Poets. In the collections of the Union, they publish two of their poems, which remain the only "adult" works that they are destined to see printed. The main form of activity of the "plane trees" is performances with the reading of their poems in clubs, universities, literary circles; they usually ended in scandals.
Harms participates in various left-wing associations, initiates their creation. In 1927, the Association of Real Art (OBERIU) appeared, which, in addition to Kharms and Vvedensky, included Nikolai Zabolotsky, Konstantin Vaginov, Igor Bakhterev, Nikolai Oleinikov, who became a close friend of Kharms, also joined them.
The only evening of OBERIU on January 24, 1928 became some benefit of Harms: in the first part he read poetry, and in the second part his play “Elizaveta Bam” was staged (it in many ways anticipates the opening of the European theater of the absurd). Sharply negative reviews in the press determined the impossibility of such evenings, now the Oberiuts could only perform with small programs. Finally, one of their performances in the dormitory of the Leningrad State University caused new accusations of counterrevolutionaryism. In 1930, OBERIU ceased to exist, and at the end of 1931 Kharms and Vvedensky were arrested. The verdict, however, was relatively mild - exile to Kursk, and the efforts of friends led to the fact that already in the autumn of 1932 the poets were able to return to Leningrad.
At the end of 1927, Oleinikov and Boris Zhitkov organized the "Association of Writers of Children's Literature" and invited Kharms to join it. From 1928 to 1941, he constantly collaborated in the children's magazines "Hedgehog", "Chizh", "Cricket", "October", he published about 20 children's books. Poems and prose for children provide a kind of outlet for his playful element, but they were written solely for making money and the author did not attach much importance to them. The attitude of official party criticism towards them was unambiguously negative.
After the exile, there could no longer be any talk of any publications or speeches. Moreover, it was necessary to hide their creativity from outsiders. Therefore, the communication of the former Oberiuts and people close to them now took place in apartments. Kharms, Vvedensky, Lipavsky, Druskin, Zabolotsky, Oleinikov, talked on literary, philosophical and other topics. The activities of this circle continued for several years. But in 1936 he married a Kharkov woman and Vvedensky went to her, in 1937 Oleinikov was arrested and soon shot.
"Adult" works of Kharms are now written exclusively "on the table." Poetry is replaced by prose, the story becomes the leading prose genre. In the 30s. there is a desire for a large form. The cycle “Cases” can be considered its first example - thirty short stories and sketches that Kharms arranged in a certain order, copied into a separate notebook and dedicated to his second wife Marina Malich (whom he married in 1935). In 1939, the second big thing appeared - the story "The Old Woman". There are about a dozen stories written in 1940-1941.
By the end of the 1930s, the ring around Kharms was shrinking. Fewer opportunities to publish in children's magazines. The result was a very real famine. The tragedy of the writer's works during this period intensifies to a feeling of complete hopelessness, complete meaninglessness of existence. Kharms's humor is also undergoing a similar evolution: from light, slightly ironic to black.
The beginning of the war and the first bombardments of Leningrad strengthened Kharms' sense of his own impending doom. In August 1941 he was arrested for "defeatist remarks". For a long time, no one knew anything about his future fate, only in February 1942, Marina Malich was informed of the death of her husband. Opinions about his last days are mixed. Some believe that Kharms, who was threatened with execution, feigned a mental disorder and was sent to a prison psychiatric hospital, where he died in the first Leningrad winter of the siege. There is also information that Kharms was indeed diagnosed with schizophrenia shortly before his arrest, so he was placed in a hospital for compulsory treatment. It is not known exactly where he died - in Leningrad or Novosibirsk. Date of death - February 2, 1942
Kharms' manuscripts were preserved by his friend Iosif Druskin; he took them in the winter of 1942 from the empty room of the writer. I did not part with this suitcase either during the evacuation or upon returning to Leningrad, for about twenty years I did not touch its contents, retaining hope for a miracle - the return of the owner. And only when there was no hope, he began to sort through the papers of his deceased friend.
Daniil Kharms has verses that many call prophetic:

A man came out of the house
With rope and bag
And on a long journey, and on a long journey
Went on foot.
He walked and kept looking ahead,
And looked ahead
Didn't sleep, didn't drink
Didn't sleep, didn't drink
Didn't sleep, didn't drink, didn't eat.
And then one morning
He entered the dark forest
And from that time, and from that time,
And since then he has disappeared...
And if somewhere
You have to meet
Then quickly, then quickly
Tell us quickly.

Twenty-five years after his death Kharms was appreciated by the general reader. His second birth began, which continues today.



..............................................
Copyright: Daniil Kharms

Biography

HARMS, DANIL IVANOVICH (real surname Yuvachev) (1905−1942), Russian poet, prose writer, playwright. Born December 17 (30), 1905 in St. Petersburg. His father, when he was a naval officer, was brought to trial in 1883 for complicity in the Narodnaya Volya terror, spent four years in solitary confinement and more than ten years in hard labor, where, apparently, he experienced a religious conversion: along with memoirs Eight years on Sakhalin ( 1901) and Shlisselburg Fortress (1907), he published mystical treatises Between the World and the Monastery (1903), Secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven (1910) and others. Kharms's mother, a noblewoman, was in charge of a shelter for former convicts in St. Petersburg in the 1900s. Kharms studied at the St. Petersburg privileged German school (Petershule), where he acquired a thorough knowledge of German and English. In 1924 he entered the Leningrad Electrotechnical School, from where he was expelled a year later for "weak attendance" and "inactivity in public works." Since then, he devoted himself entirely to writing and lived exclusively by literary earnings. The versatile self-education accompanying writing, with a special focus on philosophy and psychology, as his diary testifies, proceeded extremely intensively.

Initially, he felt the “power of poetry” in himself and chose poetry as his field, the concept of which was determined by him under the influence of the poet A.V. Tufanov (1877−1941), admirer and successor of V.V. ) and the founder (in March 1925) of the Order of Zaumnikov, the core of which included Kharms, who took the title “Look Zaumi.” Through Tufanov, he became close to A. Vvedensky, a student of the more orthodox “Khlebnikov” poet and admirer of A. Kruchenykh I. G. Terentiev (1892−1937), the creator of a number of agitation plays, including the "actualizing" stage adaptation of the Inspector General, parodied in the Twelve Chairs by I. Ilf and E. Petrov. Harms had a strong friendship with Vvedensky, who, sometimes without any particular reason, took on the role of Harms' mentor. However, the direction of their work, which is related in terms of literary searches, is fundamentally different from beginning to end: Vvedensky develops and maintains a didactic orientation, while Kharms's is dominated by play. This is evidenced by his first well-known poetic texts: Kika with Koka, Vanka Vstanka, the grooms and the poem Mikhaila invented the earth.

Vvedensky provided Kharms with a new circle of constant communication, introducing him to his friends L. Lipavsky and Ya. Druskin, graduates of the philosophical department of the Faculty of Social Sciences, who refused to renounce their teacher, the prominent Russian philosopher N. O. to develop his ideas of self-value of personality and intuitive knowledge. Their views undoubtedly influenced Kharms's worldview, for more than 15 years they were the first listeners and connoisseurs of Kharms, during the blockade Druskin miraculously saved his compositions.

Back in 1922, Vvedensky, Lipavsky and Druskin founded a tripartite alliance and began to call themselves "plane trees"; in 1925 they were joined by Kharms, who from “gazing zaumi” became “plane-gazer” and quickly gained scandalous fame in the circles of avant-garde writers under his newly invented pseudonym, which became the plural of the English word “harm” - “misfortune”. Subsequently, he signed his works for children in other ways (Charms, Shardam, etc.), but he never used his own surname. The pseudonym was also fixed in the introductory questionnaire of the All-Russian Union of Poets, where Kharms was accepted in March 1926 on the basis of the submitted poetic works, two of which (The case on the railway and the Poem of Peter Yashkin, a communist) managed to be printed in small-circulation collections of the Union. In addition to them, until the end of the 1980s, only one “adult” work of Kharms was published in the USSR - the poem Mary comes out, having bowed (Sat. Poetry Day, 1965).

As a member of the literary association, Harms got the opportunity to read his poems, but took advantage of it only once, in October 1926 - other attempts were futile. The playful beginning of his poems stimulated their dramatization and stage performance: in 1926, together with Vvedensky, he prepared a synthetic performance of the avant-garde theater "Radix" My mother is all in hours, but things did not go beyond rehearsals. Kharms met K. Malevich, and the head of Suprematism presented him with his book God will not throw off with the inscription "Go and stop progress." Kharms read his poem On the Death of Kazimir Malevich at a memorial service for the artist in 1936. Kharms' gravitation towards the dramatic form was expressed in the dialogization of many poems (Temptation, Paw, Revenge, etc.), as well as in the creation of the Comedy of the City of Petersburg and the first predominantly prose work - a play by Elizaveta Bam, presented on January 24, 1928 at the only evening of the "Association of Real Art" (OBERIU), which, in addition to Kharms and Vvedensky, included N. Zabolotsky, K. Vaginov and I. Bakhterev, and to which N. Oleinikov joined - with him Kharms developed a special intimacy. The association was unstable, lasted less than three years (1927−1930), and Kharms' active participation in it was rather external, not affecting his creative principles in any way. The characterization given to him by Zabolotsky, the compiler of the OBERIU manifesto, is vague: "a poet and playwright whose attention is focused not on a static figure, but on the collision of a number of objects, on their relationships." At the end of 1927, Oleinikov and B. Zhitkov organized the "Association of Writers of Children's Literature" and invited Kharms to join it; from 1928 to 1941 he constantly collaborated in the children's magazines "Hedgehog", "Chizh", "Cricket" and "October", during which time he published about 20 children's books. These works are a natural offshoot of Kharms' work and give a kind of outlet for his playing element, but, as his diaries and letters testify, they were written exclusively for earnings (more than meager since the mid-1930s) and the author did not attach much importance to them. They were printed through the efforts of S. Ya. Marshak, the attitude of leading criticism towards them, starting with an article in Pravda (1929) Against hack work in children's literature, was unequivocal. This is probably why it was necessary to constantly vary and change the pseudonym. His unpublished works were regarded by the Smena newspaper in April 1930 as "the poetry of a class enemy", the article became a foreshadowing of Kharms's arrest at the end of 1931, the qualification of his literary pursuits as "subversive work" and "counter-revolutionary activity" and exile in Kursk. In 1932 he managed to return to Leningrad. The nature of his work is changing: poetry fades into the background and less and less poetry is written (the last completed poems date back to the beginning of 1938), while prose works (with the exception of the story of the Old Woman, creations of a small genre) multiply and cycle (Cases, Scenes, etc.). ). In place of the lyrical hero - an entertainer, a ringleader, a visionary and a miracle worker - a deliberately naive narrator-observer appears, impartial to the point of cynicism. Fiction and everyday grotesque reveal the cruel and delusional absurdity of "unattractive reality" (from diaries), and the effect of terrifying authenticity is created due to the scrupulous accuracy of details, gestures, and speech mimicry. In unison with the diary entries (“the days of my death have come”, etc.), the last stories (Knights, Fall, Interference, Rehabilitation) are imbued with a feeling of complete hopelessness, the omnipotence of crazy arbitrariness, cruelty and vulgarity. In August 1941 Harms was arrested for "defeatist remarks". Kharms' writings, even printed ones, remained in complete oblivion until the early 1960s, when a collection of his carefully selected children's poems, The Game (1962), was published. After that, for about 20 years, they tried to assign him the appearance of a cheerful eccentric, a mass entertainer in the children's part, which was completely inconsistent with his "adult" writings. Since 1978, his collected works have been published in Germany, prepared on the basis of saved manuscripts by M. Meilakh and V. Erl. By the mid-1990s, Kharms firmly occupies the place of one of the main representatives of Russian art literature of the 1920s and 1930s, in fact opposed to Soviet literature. Kharms died in Leningrad on February 2, 1942 - in custody, from exhaustion.

Daniil Ivanovich Kharms (Yuvachev), (December 30, 1905 - February 2, 1942) - a famous poet and prose writer, playwright and wonderful children's writer. He chose a pseudonym for himself very early and began to write early. He was an active participant in the Association of Real Art (OBERIU). R> Daniil Yuvachev was born in St. Petersburg in the family of Ivan Yuvachev, a revolutionary exiled to hard labor, and Nadezhda Yuvacheva. Parents were familiar with many famous writers of that time. p> 1915-1918 - secondary school of the Main German School; 1922-1924 - Children's rural unified labor school; 1924 - Leningrad Electrotechnical School; 1926 - expulsion; March 5, 1928 - married to Esther Rusakova, Kharms devoted many works and diary entries to her in the period from 1925 to 1932. The relationship was difficult, in 1932 they divorced by mutual agreement. 1928 - 1941 - actively collaborates with children's magazines, writes a lot of children's works, collaborates with Marshak; He has written more than 20 children's books. July 16, 1934 Harms marries Marina Malich and does not part with her until the very end; August 23, 1941 - arrest (false accusation of spreading "slanderous and defeatist sentiments") on the denunciation of Antonina Oranzhireeva (NKVD agent); Psychiatric clinic "Crosses" - so as not to be shot, the writer feigns madness. p>

He was arrested for the second time and again sent to a psychiatric hospital. p> He died on February 2, 1942 from exhaustion during the terrible blockade of Leningrad. p>

On July 25, 1960, at the request of Harms' sister, his case was reviewed, he himself was found not guilty and was rehabilitated, and his books were republished. p>

Today Harms is called one of the most avant-garde, extraordinary and paradoxical writers of the 20th century. p>


en.wikipedia.org

Biography

Daniil Yuvachev was born on December 17 (30), 1905 in St. Petersburg, in the family of Ivan Yuvachev, a former naval officer, a People's Will revolutionary who was exiled to Sakhalin and took up religious philosophy there. Kharms' father was an acquaintance of Chekhov, Tolstoy and Voloshin.

Daniil studied at the privileged St. Petersburg German school Petrishule. In 1924 he entered the Leningrad Electrotechnical School, but was soon forced to leave it. In 1925 he took up writing. In early youth he imitated the futuristic poetics of Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh. Then, in the second half of the 1920s, he abandoned the predominance of "zaumi" in versification.

In 1925, Yuvachev got acquainted with the poetic and philosophical circle of plane trees, which included Alexander Vvedensky, Leonid Lipavsky, Yakov Druskin and others. He quickly gained scandalous fame in the circles of avant-garde writers under his pseudonym "Kharms" invented at the age of 17. Yuvachev had many pseudonyms, and he effortlessly changed them: Khharms, Khaarms, Dandan, Charms, Karl Ivanovich Shusterling and others. However, it was the pseudonym "Kharms" with its ambivalence (from the French "charme" - "charm, charm" and from "harm" - "harm") most accurately reflected the essence of the writer's attitude to life and work. The pseudonym was also fixed in the introductory questionnaire of the All-Russian Union of Poets, where Kharms was accepted in March 1926 on the basis of the submitted poetic works, two of which (“The Case on the Railway” and “The Verse of Pyotr Yashkin the Communist”) managed to be printed in small-circulation collections of the Union. In addition to them, until the end of the 1980s, only one “adult” work of Kharms was published in the USSR - the poem “Maria comes out, bowing down” (Sat. Poetry Day, 1965).

For the early Harms was characterized by "absurdity", he joined the "Order of the abstruse DSO" headed by Alexander Tufanov. Since 1926, Kharms has been actively trying to organize the forces of the "left" writers and artists of Leningrad, creating the short-lived organizations "Radiks", "Left Flank". Since 1928, Kharms has been writing for the children's magazine Chizh (its publishers were arrested in 1931). At the same time, he became one of the founders of the avant-garde poetic and artistic group "Association of Real Art" (OBERIU), which in 1928 held the famous "Three Left Hours" evening, where Kharms' absurdist "piessa" "Elizabeth Bam" was also presented. Later, in Soviet journalism, the works of OBERIU were declared "poetry of a class enemy", and since 1932, the activities of OBERIU in the same composition (which continued for some time in informal communication) actually ceased.

Kharms was arrested in December 1931, along with a number of other Oberiuts, accused of anti-Soviet activities (at the same time, the texts of the works were also charged with him) and sentenced on March 21, 1932 by the OGPU collegium to three years in correctional camps (the term "concentration camp" is used in the text of the sentence) . As a result, on May 23, 1932, the sentence was replaced by deportation (“minus 12”), and the poet went to Kursk, where the exiled A.I. Vvedensky was already there.



He arrived on July 13, 1932 and settled in house number 16 on Pervyshevskaya Street (now Ufimtsev Street). The city was filled with former Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, ordinary nobles, representatives of various oppositions, scientific, technical and artistic intelligentsia. “Half of Moscow and half of Leningrad were here,” contemporaries recalled. But Daniil Kharms was not happy with him. “The city in which I lived at that time,” he wrote about Kursk, “I did not like at all. It stood on a mountain, and postcard views opened up everywhere. I was so sick of them that I was even glad to stay at home. Yes, in fact, apart from the post office, the market and the store, I had nowhere to go ... There were days when I did not eat anything. Then I tried to create a joyful mood for myself. He lay down on the bed and began to smile. I smiled up to 20 minutes at a time, but then the smile turned into a yawn ... I began to dream. I saw in front of me an earthenware jug of milk and pieces of fresh bread. And I myself sit at the table and write quickly ... I open the window and look into the garden. Near the house grew yellow and purple flowers. Further on, tobacco grew and there was a large military chestnut tree. And there was an orchard. It was very quiet, and only trains sang under the mountain.”

Kharms stayed in Kursk until the beginning of November, and returned to Leningrad on the 10th.

Upon returning from exile, Harms continues to communicate with like-minded people and writes a number of books for children in order to earn his living. After the publication in 1937 in a children's magazine of the poem "A man with a club and a sack came out of the house", which "disappeared since then", Kharms was not printed for some time, which puts him and his wife on the verge of starvation. At the same time, he writes many short stories, theatrical skits and poems for adults, which were not published during his lifetime. During this period, a cycle of miniatures "Cases", the story "The Old Woman" are created.

On August 23, 1941, he was arrested for defeatist sentiments (according to the denunciation of Antonina Oranzhireeva, an acquaintance of Anna Akhmatova and a long-term NKVD agent). In particular, Kharms was charged with his words: “If they give me a mobilization sheet, I will punch the commander in the face, let them shoot me; but I won’t wear a uniform” and “The Soviet Union lost the war on the very first day, Leningrad will now either be besieged and we will die of starvation, or they will bomb it, leaving no stone unturned.” Harms also claimed that the city was mined, and unarmed soldiers were sent to the front. To avoid being shot, he feigned insanity; the military tribunal determined "by the severity of the crime committed" to keep Kharms in a psychiatric hospital. He died during the siege of Leningrad, in the most difficult month in terms of the number of starvation deaths, in the psychiatry department of the Kresty prison hospital (Arsenalnaya Embankment, 9).

The archive of Daniil Kharms was kept by Yakov Druskin.

Daniil Kharms was rehabilitated in 1956, but for a long time his main works were not officially published in the USSR. Until the time of perestroika, his work went from hand to hand in samizdat, and was also published abroad (with a large number of distortions and abbreviations).

Kharms is widely known as a children's writer ("Ivan Ivanovich Samovar" and others), as well as the author of satirical prose. Kharms is mistakenly credited with the authorship of a series of historical jokes “Merry Fellows” (“Once Gogol dressed up as Pushkin ...”), created in the 1970s by the editors of Pioneer magazine in imitation of Kharms (he really owns a number of parody miniatures about Pushkin and Gogol). In addition, when publishing the poems "Plikh and Plukh" it is often not indicated that this is an abridged translation of the work of Wilhelm Bush from German.

Harms' absurdist works have been published in Russia since 1989. An unknown person in an interview with one of the TV programs of the USSR said: "This is pure nonsense, but very funny."

DANIEL KHARMS: "I SAY TO BE"


Kobrinsky A.A. Daniel Kharms. - M .: Young Guard, 2008. - 501. p., ill. – (Life of Remarkable People: Ser. Biogr.; Issue 1117)

An insidious thing - posthumous glory! I'm afraid that D. Kharms is known to the widest reader, first of all, for anecdotes about Pushkin, Gogol and L. Tolstoy, "who was very fond of small children." And although, of course, the very idea of ​​the cycle and several stories - yes, “from Kharms”, the main block of jokes was composed in the early 70s by journalists N. Dobrokhotova and V. Pyatnitsky. And if we remember the verses about siskins familiar to everyone from childhood, then even then not everyone will name their author: Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev (Kharms).

However, such ignorant, but "using" readers, thank God, are less and less. And more and more Daniil Kharms is realized by us as one of the key figures of Russian literature of the last century.

The 500-page work of A. Kobrinsky is probably the most complete biography of Kharms to date. The author in every way emphasizes the genre of his book, citing a lot of quotations from documents of the era. Perhaps the average reader on some of these pages will get stuck in the stuffy and stuffy style of Stalin's officialdom. But it will become even clearer WHAT a dissonance with the mainstream of that time was the personality and work of the writer Kharms.


In general, the impression is that life itself put on the Oberiuts, and especially on their leader Daniil Kharms, a cruel, but important experiment for posterity. The 1920s, the time of their formation and debut, is no longer the silver age with its freedom of creative pursuits, although the innovations of the 1920s are in themselves “cooler” and more unexpected. However, the next era inexorably narrowed the possibilities of free manifestation in art, both at the level of content and in the field of form creation.

For writers, all this will culminate in the establishment of the Writers' Union. The state will arrogate to itself the monopoly right to regulate the creative process. But the Oberiuts (and Kharms in particular) remained in many ways literary outcasts - and this allowed them to maintain creative freedom. That is, using their example, one can trace how our literature would develop if it had the same freedom of search as in the 10s and early 20s.

Of course, the Oberiuts are only one of the trends that formed in the 1920s, and the direction, at its very birth, could not become any mass. And yet the winds of tomorrow roamed in the souls of these people!

Daniil Kharms developed in the 30s so intensively that now even the spiritual father of the Oberiuts, V. Khlebnikov, seems to him to be receding into the 19th century, seems “too bookish”.

A. Kobrinsky accurately notices: the pathos of the aesthetics of the Oberiuts was to return the poet's word from the mists of symbolism to the full-fledged real life. Moreover, in a certain sense, the word was thought of by them as real, like, say, a stone. “Poems must be written in such a way that if you throw a poem out the window, the glass will break,” Kharms dreamed. And he wrote in April 1931 in his diary: “The power inherent in words must be released ... It is not good to think that this power will make objects move. I am sure that the power of words can do this too” (p. 194).

"Poems, prayers, songs and charms" - these are the forms of the existence of the word, organized by rhythm and filled with the charisma of life, that attracted Daniil Kharms.

And in this sense, he had poems for children not only for the sake of earning money (as, for example, his closest associate A. Vvedensky). It was a completely organic form of creative expression.



Although the children themselves (as old men and especially old women) Harms could not stand. On the shade of his table lamp, he painted with his own hand "a house for the destruction of children." E. Schwartz recalled: “Kharms could not stand children and was proud of it. Yes, it suited him. Defined some side of his being. He was, of course, the last of his kind. Further offspring would have gone absolutely terrible. That is why even other people's children frightened him” (p. 287).

Kobrinsky adds his own version: “Perhaps he (Kharms, - V. B.) instinctively felt them (old people and children, - V. B.) approaching death - both from one end and from the other” (p. 288 ).

In general, the list of what Kharms loved and what he could not stand creates a paradoxical, but also paradoxically holistic image. He was occupied with: “Illumination, inspiration, enlightenment, superconsciousness. Numbers, especially those not related by sequence order. Signs. Letters. Fonts and handwriting... Everything is logically meaningless and ridiculous. Anything that evokes laughter and humour. Stupidity ... Miracle ... Good tone. Human faces” (p. 284). Disgusting were: “Foam, lamb, ... children, soldiers, a newspaper, a bathhouse” (p. 285). The latter - because it humiliatingly exposes bodily deformities.

Ernst Kretschmer, who in the same years worked on his classification of psychotypes, would classify Kharms as a pronounced schizoid. These are people of sharp individuality who keep a distance from the surrounding world, recreating the impulses coming from it into something sometimes extremely original, and in the case of special giftedness - into something very deep and significant. The schizoid warehouse of nature will help Kharms to resort to the simulation of a mental illness in the future (more on this below).

In the meantime, collisions with the Soviet world - a world permeated with the currents of rough collectivism, the spirit of a communal apartment, hostel, barracks, cells - sometimes led to the most amusing creative results.

Here, for example, is a combatant “song”, which, at the request of the commander, was composed by Private Yuvachev, while undergoing military service (author’s punctuation):

A little out in the yard
We arrived March 7th
Stand up stand up stand up
We attached to the rifle
bayonet and
Our company is the best.

And here is the "May Day Song", written by the already mature poet Kharms for the children's magazine "Chizh" in 1939:

We'll go to the podium
Let's go
We will come to the podium
In the morning,
To scream first
Earlier then others,
To scream first
Stalin "cheers".

The creative discrepancy between Kharms and Soviet reality was supplemented by a discrepancy even at the everyday level. So, Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev came up with a special english look for himself (caps, golfs, leggings, pipe), for which in the summer of 1932 he was constantly subjected to obstruction on the streets of provincial Kursk, where he was exiled. A fan of German and English culture, he chose a pseudonym for himself, consonant with the name of his favorite literary hero - Sherlock Holmes.


Yes, Kharms was a paradox man! A deep believer, he, formally being Orthodox, allowed himself mysticism of a completely Protestant nature: letters and notes directly to God! An avant-garde in art, he retained a devoted love for the “classic-classics” itself: for Pushkin and Gogol, for Bach and Mozart.

Over the years, the craving for classic designs has only intensified. In them, the mature Kharms saw manifestations of true vitality. This led to quarrels with some of the closest like-minded people. Kobrinsky cites A. Vvedensky's dry review of the masterpiece of the late Kharms - the story "The Old Woman": "I have not abandoned leftist art" (p. 434). Vvedensky hinted that the motives of The Queen of Spades and Crime and Punishment are too obvious in the story, and the artistic fabric itself, for all the surrealness of the idea, is “too” (for an avant-garde work) realistic.

For Kharms, the movement towards tradition is already natural, if only for a true Petersburger and a demonstrative “Westernizer”. But here we are faced with moments of a more general plan. Even T. Mann and G. Hesse noticed: the most notorious creators of avant-garde art of the 20th century sometimes ended up as convinced "classicists" or, in any case, sharply, subtly and more than respectfully perceived and used the classical tradition. Proust and Picasso, Dali and Prokofiev, Matisse and Stravinsky (and Hesse themselves with T. Mann)…

In the evolution of Kharms the writer, only this general, it seems to be completely unexplained, this "almost regularity" is only manifested.

And again a paradox! Living practically in isolation from the life of the world culture of the 30s, the Oberiuts struggled with the same problem as Western intellectuals: the problem of language as a means of communication. This topic has largely determined the aesthetics, politics, ideology and information technology of our days. “Kharms, together with his friend Vvedensky, became the founder of the literature of the absurd, which is not a total absence of meaning, but, on the contrary, a different meaning that does not fit into ordinary logic, destroying, as a rule, established logical connections” (p. 417).

Alas, one had to pay for such advancement even in the relatively free 20s! After the first public speech of D. Kharms (January 1927), the relatives rejoiced: “Everything is fine, and Danya was not beaten” (p. 126).


Ironically, Kharms drifted towards the literary tradition along with our entire culture of the 30s. OUTSIDE, this drift to some extent coincided with the vector of development of the literature of the Stalinist empire, as outlined in the early 1930s by the First Congress of Soviet Writers. The fundamental difference was that Harms went to the classical tradition, regardless of instructions and opinions from above, and retained absolute creative freedom in its understanding. And this alone made him a dissident in the eyes of the authorities. However, in the early 30s he was still listed in the camp of the ultravanguardists.

A wave of repressions swept over Kharms and his friends among the first and before many, many, just at the height of the struggle for the uniformity of our literature.

In December 1931 Kharms and his comrades were arrested. The wave of repressions was only gaining strength, and this saved them: the punishment was quite light.

You can’t erase a word from a song: A. Kobrinsky claims that I.L. is to blame for the arrest. Andronikov, then a close circle of the Oberiuts. “If all the other arrested people first of all testified about themselves, and only then they were forced to talk about others as members of the same group with them, then the style of Andronikov’s testimony is the style of a classic denunciation” (p. 216).

By the way, Andronikov was the only person involved in the case who did not suffer in any way.

A 4-month exile in Kursk was, of course, far from the worst car possible at that time. But Kharms also experienced it quite hard. “We are from material intended for geniuses,” he remarked once (p. 282). A genius, according to Kharms, has three properties: authority, clairvoyance and intelligence. Even then, he understood too well where the fate of events was leading everyone ...


In the terrible year 1937, in the third issue of the children's magazine "Chizh", a poem by D. Kharms "A man came out of the house" was published. Now researchers find in it a paraphrase of the ideas of the philosopher A. Bergson that interested Kharms. But then the era placed these poems in a completely different semantic context, made them almost a political satire.

You just listen:
A man came out of the house
With club and bag
And on a long journey
And on a long journey
Went on foot.
He walked straight ahead
And looked ahead.
Didn't sleep, didn't drink
Didn't drink, didn't sleep
Didn't sleep, didn't drink, didn't eat.
And then one day at dawn
He entered the dark forest.
And from that time
And from that time
And has since disappeared.
But if somehow
You happen to meet
Then quickly
Then quickly
Tell us quickly.

That is how, in broad daylight, one of the most talented friends of Kharms N.M. "disappeared" for relatives. Oleinikov. Seeing him one morning, a friend rushed to say hello to him. But immediately she saw two people who accompanied him. Oleinikov's glance confirmed her terrifying guess... Five months later, the poet Oleinikov was executed.

During these months, Kharms himself was waiting for trouble, waiting for arrest. His wife Marina Malich recalled: “He had a presentiment that he had to run. He wanted us to completely disappear, to go together on foot into the forest and live there” (p. 382).

Then Kharms was not arrested, but he was excommunicated from literature: he was forbidden to print.

Years of desperate poverty, real hunger came. Multiply this by the creative crisis that Kharms was going through then! However, this crisis was somehow strange. It’s not that they didn’t write at all: the poems dried up. But prose texts were quite common. Actually, it was the crisis of "perestroika" - the crisis of creative maturation and withdrawal into new genres.

And the clouds were gathering not only over Kharms. He keenly felt the approach of military danger. Literally a few days before a possible call to the front (November 30, 1939, the war with the "Finland booger" began), he managed to get a white ticket. To do this, Kharms had to play a mental disorder.

The writer understood his incompatibility with military service. “In prison you can remain yourself, but in the barracks you can’t, it’s impossible,” he repeated (p. 444).


12 days before the start of the Great Patriotic War, Daniil Kharms writes his last and most cruel story "Rehabilitation". This is perhaps the first time and certainly a brilliant example of black humor in Russian:

“Without boasting, I can say that when Volodya hit me on the ear and spat on my forehead, I grabbed him so that he would not forget it. Later I beat him with a primus stove, and I beat him with an iron in the evening. So he didn't die right away. And I killed Andryusha simply out of inertia, and I cannot blame myself for this ... They accuse me of bloodthirstiness, they say that I drank blood, but this is not true. I licked up blood puddles and stains - this is a natural need of a person to destroy the traces of his, at least trifling, crime. And also I did not rape Elizaveta Antonovna. Firstly, she was no longer a girl, and secondly, I dealt with a corpse, and she does not have to complain ... Thus, I understand the fears of my defender, but still I hope for a full justification ”(pp. 466-467 ).

You can, of course, laugh. But, perhaps, expanding the scope of what was accepted in our literature so unusually then, Kharms also prophesied a bloody mess, the ghost of which already hung over his contemporaries and would become a reality for them in less than 2 weeks? ..

Kharms foresaw the hour of his arrest. On August 23, 1941, he was "taken" by the NKVD in his apartment. The fact that recognized as mentally unhealthy D.I. Yuvachev-Kharms fell into their field of vision - the "merit" of the informer. She reported to the "authorities" about the writer's critical statements about the Soviet government. Now we know the name of this lady. Her name was Antonina Oranzhireeva (née Rosen). In the post-war years, she will become a "hen" under Anna Akhmatova, and she, too, will not unravel this creature. When Anta Oranzhireeva dies in 1960, Akhmatova will dedicate a poem to her memory:

In memory of Anta

Even if it's from another cycle...
I see a smile of clear eyes,
And "died" so pitifully crouched
To the nickname dear,
Like it's the first time
I heard him

By the grace of dear Anta, Kharms was brought to the investigation. In December 1941, he was placed in the psychiatric ward of the prison hospital at Kresty. On February 2, 1942, at the most fierce time for the blockade, Kharms died.

The fate of his widow is amazing. From the blockade, Marina Malich ended up in evacuation, from it - into occupation, from there - into emigration. In France, she finally met her mother, who abandoned her as a child. No moral obligations connected Marina with her parent, and Malich married ... her husband, her stepfather Vysheslavtsev. Then she moved with him to Venezuela, where her third (after Kharms and Vysheslavtsev) husband was a representative of the old noble family Yu. Durnovo (however, Malich was from the Golitsyns by her grandmother). In 1997, her son moved her to the USA, where Marina Malich died in 2002 at the age of 90. Fate confirmed to her the correctness of the words of Daniil Kharms, who once said that there are more miracles in the world than she thinks.

Unfortunately, only his work became a miracle in the fate of Kharms himself ...


Like any genre, biography has its limitations. Outside the framework of Kobrinsky's book, a broader context of world and domestic literature remained, in which Kharms's work acquires additional significance. Although, remaining on a purely biographical level, Kobrinsky speaks in some detail about the complex rapprochement-divergences of the Oberiuts with the largest poets of that time V. Mayakovsky and B. Pasternak, with philologists B. Eichenbaum and V. Shklovsky. But it is not said at all about the influence of Kharms on the domestic writers of the postmodern generation, because here the matter was not limited to “Kharms”, as some literary authority called his later unlucky epigones.

Of course, such research is more suitable for scientific research. But the work of Kharms is still so alive and important for our contemporaries, so original (and sometimes gives rise to controversy and the very fact of his influence), that it was hardly worth passing over in silence.

And yet, on the whole, a convincing and interesting portrait of a remarkable writer has been created in the frame of his era. Thanks to this book, Daniil Kharms becomes for the general reader not a name or a myth, but a living person. And this is the main point.

Valery Bondarenko

Bologov P.
Daniel Kharms. Pathographic experience

To the remark: "You wrote with an error," - answer:
This is how it always looks in my writing.”
From the diary entries of D. Kharms

Pathography, as part of clinical and social psychiatry, as well as its history, is at the same time a special methodological technique for studying outstanding personalities, with the study of the disease (or personality anomalies) and the assessment of the activity (creativity in the broadest sense of the word) of a given subject in a specific sociocultural situation.

In this regard, it seems possible to discuss some distinctive features of the work of Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) in the light of his biography (psychopathological features and human destiny).

From the biographical data on the writer’s heredity, it is known that Kharms’s mother (a teacher by training) worked in a women’s correctional institution, where she lived with her son for about ten years, why one of the biographers wrote about Kharms: “Born near the prison, he died in prison ". The mother was distinguished by a strong-willed, assertive character, at the same time she was uncommunicative, rather formal and tough, stingy in expressing feelings. Apparently, there was no trusting, warm relationship with his son. The writer's diary entries abound with the names of aunts and other relatives, but we do not find any mention of the mother in them. In an autobiographical sketch (“Now I’ll tell you how I was born ...”) Harms, in his usual grotesque and absurd form, reports that “... turned out to be a premature baby and was born four months prematurely ... the midwife ... began to push me back, from where I had just crawled out ... ", then it turns out that he was "shoved in a hurry in the wrong place", and he was born again after his mother was given a laxative. Thus, the mother becomes an object of ridicule, and the author himself, identifying himself with excrement, demonstrates an extreme degree of self-abasement with a touch of emotional flaw, recreating the life scenario of a loser who was not born like everyone else and could not be realized in life. On the other hand, this "metaphor" can be considered as a confirmation of alienation from the mother, who remains statically indifferent during the events, not showing interest in which way her child will be born. It can be assumed that Kharms is trying to take revenge on his mother, devaluing her image, and then, as if punishing himself for disrespect for the mother's figure, associates himself with impurities. This assumption, being purely hypothetical, aims to show a combination of traits of vulnerability and sensitivity in Kharms' personality structure with elements of emotional flattening and regressive syntonicity of the "wood and glass" type. This key characterological feature of the writer, called "psychesthetic proportion", left an imprint on all his work and largely predetermined his originality.


The writer's father (Ivan Yuvachev) joined the Narodnaya Volya organization at a young age, but was arrested almost immediately. Being in the casemate of the Shlisselburg Fortress, he experiences a remarkable transformation of his worldview: from a convinced socialist and atheist, he turned into a fanatical religious person. Many of the prisoners who sat with him spoke of his "religious insanity", that he had to be transferred from the fortress to the monastery. Soon Kharms' father was sent into exile to Sakhalin, where he met with A.P. Chekhov, who called him in his notes "a remarkably hardworking and kind person." Upon his return to St. Petersburg, I. Yuvachev became an Orthodox preacher, publishing about 10 books of soul-saving content under the pseudonym "Mirolyubov". The son listened to his father, kept his edifications, written out from the sacred books. Later, he himself, already a writer, will begin to compose moralizing parables. But in Kharms' instructions, the didactics was confused, inverted, pretentious: “... a completely normal professor sits on a bed in a lunatic asylum, holds a fishing rod in her hands and catches some invisible fish on the floor. This professor is just a pitiful example of how many unfortunates there are in life who occupy the wrong place in life, which they should have occupied, ”or -“ one person from an early age to a very old age always slept on his back with his arms crossed. Finally he died. Therefore, do not sleep on your side. Kharms's anti-didacticism is caricatured and rejects the existence of universal commandments and foundations. This manifests not only a desire to avoid moralizing, but also a bitter parody of the mores of the contemporary writer's society and even pain for a dying person. The father did not understand and did not approve of his son's work, but despite this, he remained an authority for Kharms throughout his short life - “Yesterday, dad told me that while I was Kharms, I would be haunted by needs. Daniel Charms. His father's ideological inconsistency, categorical and ambitiousness, the desire for opposition, and in recent years, paradoxical religiosity were inherited by the writer and played an important role in his sad fate.

Little Daniil Yuvachev had many talents. He had an absolute ear for music, sang well, played the horn, drew a lot, was smart, resourceful, prone to pranks. Since childhood, he had an indefatigable imagination, and he could almost always convince his peers of the reality of his inventions. While studying at the Lutheran gymnasium, he perfectly mastered German and English. At the same time, he not only read foreign poetry exclusively in the original, but also had an impeccable pronunciation. Already in the gymnasium, Daniel's passion for theatrical hoaxes and extravagant tricks manifested itself. He created a system of behavior thought out to the smallest detail - from clothes to poetic spells and masks - pseudonyms. He seriously convinced the teacher not to give him a deuce - “do not offend the orphan”, under the stairs of the house he “settled” his imaginary, dearly beloved “muterchen”, started long conversations with her in the presence of amazed neighbors. He climbed a tree and could sit for hours among the branches, writing something in a book. These examples show that, despite the obvious demonstrativeness and extravagance, Kharms was driven not so much by the desire to impress as to realize his autistic and narcissistic fantasies. Already in adolescence, due to oddities in behavior, conflicts with society begin: at the age of 19, Yuvachev was expelled from the electrical engineering school, he could not receive either higher or secondary specialized education. “Several accusations fell on me, for which I have to leave the technical school ... 1). Inactivity in public works 2). I do not fit the class physiologically ”- thus, the schizoid personality dynamics introduces disharmony into relationships with others, which is recognized by Kharms himself. In his youth, he was actively and intensively engaged in self-education, with the help of which he achieved significant results. The range of his interests is difficult to limit: along with the works of literary classics - the works of ancient and modern philosophers; sacred texts of Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism, treatises of mystical and occult content, interspersed with numerous books on psychiatry and sexopathology. The literary space is gradually outlined, with which Kharms' texts will subsequently be connected (by reminiscences, quotations, motives): A. Bely, V. Blake, K. Hamsun, N. Gogol, E.-T.-A. Hoffmann, G. Meyrink, K. Prutkov. In the context of his work, he also involves philosophers: Aristotle, Pythagoras, Plato, I. Kant, A. Bergson, Z. Freud. In his free time from reading and writing, young Kharms continues to “be weird”: he smokes a pipe of some unusual shape, wears a top hat and leggings, translates NEP songs into German and taps to them, invents a bride for himself - a ballerina, etc. In 1924, Yuvachev's most famous pseudonym appeared - Daniil Kharms. In general, Daniil Ivanovich had about 30 pseudonyms, and he effortlessly changed them: Khharms, Khaarms, Dandan, Charms, Karl Ivanovich Shusterling, Harmonius, Shardam, etc. However, it was “Kharms” with its ambivalence (from the French. Charm - charm , charm and from English Harm - harm) most accurately reflected the essence of the writer's attitude to life and work: he knew how to sneer at the most serious things and find very sad moments in the funny. Exactly the same ambivalence was characteristic of the personality of Kharms himself: his focus on the game, hoaxes were combined with painful suspiciousness, the illogicality of the inner world was transferred to the world around, magical thinking predetermined the external meaning of the pseudonym - Daniil the Wizard - a man confident in his parapsychic and supernatural abilities (“ignite trouble around you”), bringing misfortune to those he loves. The beginning of Kharms' literary activity falls on 1925. He was a member of the association of poets - "plane trees", then - "zaumniks", performed on the stage with his poems, and often the public perceived his semantic and formal poetic experiments very ambiguously. Scandals often broke out, so in 1927, Harms refused to read in front of an audience, comparing it either with a stable or with a brothel. Despite the fact that by that time he was already a member of the poets' union, illusions were hardly built about the lifetime publications of his "adult" works. The early poetry of Daniil Kharms consists of separate, sometimes unrelated phrases, and neologisms fill the entire possible semantic spectrum:

Somehow the grandmother waved
And immediately the steam locomotive
He gave it to the children and said:
Drink porridge and chest

Everything will overtake the estheg:
There are gooks and snow…
And you, aunt, are not frail,
You are a mikuka on the heel.


The use of alogisms and semantic fragmentation as linguistic experiments was widely used by the formal literary schools of the beginning of the century, especially by the futurists (D. Burlyuk, A. Kruchenykh, V. Khlebnikov). However, in the case of Kharms, we are not dealing with experimentation (which by that time had long gone out of fashion), but with a self-sufficient creative method.

The themes of the poems (in which one can catch at least some sense) contain hints of their own exclusivity, not in terms of self-affirmation, so characteristic of young poetic talents, but in terms of hostility to all sorts of common maxims and patterns:

I am a fiery speech genius.
I am the master of free thoughts.
I am the king of meaningless beauty.
I am the God of vanished heights.
I am a stream of bright joy.
When I cast my gaze into the crowd,
The crowd freezes like a bird.
And around me, like around a pillar,
There is a silent crowd.
And I sweep the crowd like rubbish.

The scandalous reputation of Kharms was supported not only by his unusual creative manner, which will be discussed below, but also by extravagant antics and manners, as well as pretentious appearance. In an effort to differ from the bulk of citizens who joined the struggle for the industrialization of the country, Kharms appeared in public places "in a long plaid frock coat and a round cap, struck with exquisite politeness, which was further emphasized by the dog depicted on his left cheek." “Sometimes, for reasons also mysterious, he bandaged his forehead with a narrow black velvet. So he walked, obeying internal laws. One of Kharms's inventions was the "invention" of his own brother, who allegedly was a Privatdozent at St. Petersburg University, a grump and a snob. He imitated the manners of this "brother". So, going to a cafe, he took silver cups with him, pulled them out of his suitcase and drank only from his dishes. When he went to the theater, he stuck on a fake mustache, declaring that it was “indecent for a man to go to the theater without a mustache.” When reading from the stage, he put on a silk cap for a teapot on his head, carried a monocle ball in the form of a goggling eye, and liked to walk along the railings and cornices. At the same time, people who knew Kharms quite closely noted that his eccentricities and oddities somehow surprisingly harmoniously complemented his peculiar work. However, in general, the appearance and behavior of Kharms caused distrust and rejection of others, they were perceived as a mockery or even a mockery of public opinion, sometimes there were direct clashes with government officials: they took him for a spy, acquaintances had to verify his identity. Outrageous behavior, often part of the image of a creative person, in this case is absolutely out of harmony with the social environment and public attitudes. It can be summarized that despite the thickening political atmosphere, Kharms's behavior was dictated by internal, inexplicable motives, without taking into account realities. The personal life of the writer was just as chaotic and absurd. At a fairly young age, he married a 17-year-old girl, from a family of French immigrants, who barely spoke Russian and was completely alien to the interests that Kharms lived, and also far from his social circle. Several of Kharms' poems dedicated to his wife range from pathetic enthusiasm, tender passion, to vulgar pornography. In the diary entries, there is a motif of misunderstanding and growing alienation in family relationships, tenderness is mixed with disgust, jealousy is combined with some kind of obsessive and monotonous flirting with random women. The growing ambivalence of feelings and the dissociation of emotions, combined with everyday unsettledness, made the rupture of relations with his wife inevitable.


In our country, for a long time, Kharms was known primarily as a children's writer. K. Chukovsky and S. Marshak highly valued this hypostasis of his work, even to some extent considered Kharms a forerunner of children's literature. The transition to creativity for children (and the phenomenal success among the children's readership) was due not only to forced external circumstances, but most of all to the fact that children's thinking, not bound by the usual logical schemes, is more inclined to perceive free and arbitrary associations. Kharms' neologisms are also infantile and resemble words distorted by a child or conscious agrammatisms ("skazka", "song", "cheekalatka", "boots", "dog", "mother", etc.).

At the same time, Kharms's attitude towards children was very characteristic: “I don’t like children, old men and old women ... Poisoning children is cruel. But is there something to be done with them? The writer from the story "The Old Woman" categorically declares: "Children are disgusting." Harms himself explained his dislike for children in a delusional vein: “All things are arranged around me in certain forms. But some forms are missing. So, for example, there are no forms of those sounds that children make with their cry or play. That's why I don't like children." The theme of "dislike for children" runs through many of Kharms's works. The reasons for this phenomenon must be sought in the childhood of the writer himself, apparently, Kharms cannot accept his childish image, due to some unpleasant memories and associations, and transfers his dislike to children in general. A contemporary recalls: “Kharms hated children and was proud of it. Yes, it suited him. Defined some side of his being. He was, of course, the last of his kind. Further, the offspring would go absolutely terrible.



Who made up Kharms' circle of friends, in addition to fellow writers? Among the people around him, eccentrics, the mentally ill (as he called them - “natural thinkers”) prevailed, most of all he valued in people such qualities as alogism and independence of thinking, “crazy”, freedom from inert traditions and vulgar stereotypes in life and in art. “I'm only interested in 'nonsense'; just something that doesn't make any practical sense. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestation. Heroism, pathos, prowess, morality, hygiene, morality, tenderness and passion are words and feelings that I hate. But I fully understand and respect: delight and admiration, inspiration and despair, passion and restraint, debauchery and chastity, sadness and grief, joy and laughter. "Every muzzle of a prudent style makes me feel uncomfortable." Kharms, thus, proclaims the spontaneity and immediacy of feelings, without their logical interpretation and any internal censorship. Such an ideological approach explains the exaggerated "childhood" in the behavior and work of the writer. This literary style, close in its principles to European "dadaism", formed the basis of the OBERIU group (Union of Real Art) created in 1928 by Kharms and like-minded people. Arranged performances and literary evenings were held with elements of clowning and shocking: participants read their works sitting on cabinets, rode around the stage on children's bicycles along various trajectories outlined in chalk, hung out posters of absurd content: “there were steps of mime kvass”, “we are not pies” etc. OBERIU categorically did not fit into the literary process of the era of socialist construction and impending totalitarianism. The association existed for about 3 years, its members were branded in the press as "literary hooligans", their performances were banned, and their works were never published. Harms' play Elizaveta Bam (1929) is an example of the ability to get away from the patterns of philistine thinking, to consider phenomena from unexpected angles, partly due to a disturbed perception of the environment. It was during these years that the unique creative style of Kharms was finally formed, which can be called a total inversion. The principle of this style is in the general change of sign: life, everything of this world, nature, miracle, science, history, personality - a false reality; otherworldly, death, non-existence, inanimate, impersonal - the true reality. Hence the inconsistency and drama of the texts, with a shift in meanings and accents in the opposite direction from logic - to intuition. J. Lacan, a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, studying the psychogenesis of mental disorders, paid special attention to structural and linguistic disorders in the mentally ill. To some extent, his descriptions can help explain the originality of Kharms' creative manner: the combination of alogism -

I saw peas in a dream.
In the morning I got up and suddenly died.

and semantic aphasia -

Hey monks! We fly!
We fly and THERE fly.
Hey monks! We call!
We call and THERE ring.

By 1930, Kharms, against the background of external unfavorable factors (family discord, social ostracism, material need), had periods of distinctly lowered mood, with ideas of self-abasement, conviction of his mediocrity and fatal bad luck. Due to his penchant for neologisms, Kharms gave his melancholy a female name: "Ignavia". Kharms stubbornly hides his affectivity and sensitivity behind an autistic facade. Thus, Kharms's personality can be clinically considered as psychopathic. In the personality structure, both narcissistic and hysterical (“liars and rogues”, “eccentrics and originals” according to E. Bleuler) and psychasthenic traits are visible, which makes it possible to attribute this psychopathy to the circle of “mosaic” schizoids. However, the absence of signs of stabilization and compensation of psychopathy, the inability to adapt to life and find one's own social niche by adulthood, as well as the increase in autism with an even greater separation from reality, allow us to speak about the signs of a latent schizophrenic process. The game of a person who performs extravagant and mysterious acts gradually ceased to be a game, became the core of Kharms's personality. We are talking about the "amalgamation" of acquired psychopathic traits with a schizoid personality core, which also speaks in favor of the endogeneity of the process. Personal dynamics, done by Kharms, thus, fits into the framework of pseudopsychopathy and has signs of processuality. Gross demonstrativeness is combined with autistic thinking and increased vulnerability, affective disorders become more and more atypical over time: depressions are dominated by signs of monoideism, dysphoria, and hypomanias are accompanied by foolish affect and disinhibition of drives. Thanks to a penchant for introspection and self-observation, from Kharms' diary entries we learn about episodes of dromomania, some autobiographical literary passages and sketches describe subpsychotic experiences (“About how messengers visited me”, “Morning”, “Sabre”). Some stories and letters can serve as examples of thought disorders of the schizophrenic type (breaks in thoughts, slips, perseverations, symbolic writing). At the same time, it is necessary to separate the formal writing style, which could change over time, from the general style of Kharms' work, which fully reflects all the facets of his personality. An indirect sign confirming the presence of the progression of the disease is some depletion and fading of bright psychopathic symptoms over time and the dominance of stable features of eccentricity, pretentiousness and emotional flattening - post-processual states of the "verschrobene" type.


In the last days of 1931, Kharms was arrested on a false denunciation. He spent about six months in the NKVD prison, then was exiled to Kursk. In prison and exile, Kharms, all the more, could not adapt to the environment. For violating the prison regime, he was repeatedly transferred to the isolation ward. The prison had a devastating effect on the personality of an impressionable writer. In Kursk, he made such characteristic diary entries: “... Dog fear comes over me ... From fear, the heart begins to tremble, the legs get cold and fear grabs the back of the head ... Then the ability to mark your states will be lost, and you will go crazy.” “Kursk is a very unpleasant city. I prefer DPZ. Here, among all the locals, I have a reputation for an idiot. On the street, they always say something after me. Therefore, I, almost all the time, sit in my room ... ". In the autumn of 1932 Kharms returned to Leningrad. Restless, unadapted ("I'm all some kind of special loser"), starving, he nevertheless unsuccessfully tried to live only by literary work. He did not want to earn money "on the side", or simply could not.

This is how hunger begins.

In the morning you wake up refreshed
Then the weakness begins
Then boredom sets in;
Then comes the loss
The quick mind of strength, -
Then comes the calm
And then the horror begins.

Kharms hides his literary work from others, with surprising persistence refuses to publish his work and writes "on the table." During these years, the proportion of prose is growing, and the story becomes the leading genre. The volume written by Kharms is relatively small and can fit in one volume. Given that the duration of his work was about 15 years, one could speak of a reduced creative capacity. Kharms himself calls the period from 1932 the period of "fall". But it was at this time that his spiritual and creative maturity came, the story "The Old Woman" and the most popular cycle of stories "Cases" were created. Kharms' prose is no longer based on formal experiments and neologisms, but on the absurdity and unexpectedness of the plot, which creates a strong emotional effect:

Writer: I am a writer.
Reader: And in my opinion, you are g ... oh!
The writer stands for a few minutes shocked by this new idea and falls down dead. They take him out."


In recent years, Kharms' outlook has shifted to a darker side. The style of the narration also changes somewhat: semantic and semantic aphasia is replaced by moral aphasia. When describing expressive disorders in persons with schizophrenia, there is a violation of syllogical structures: a schizophrenic uses forms that play with the identity of predicates, such as, for example, in Kharms: "Mashkin strangled Koshkin." The number of non-standard metaphors is growing, the plots are deliberately schematic, formalized, which is a characteristic feature of the autistic style of writing (an analogy can be drawn with the late Gogol or with Strindberg). At the same time, the tendency to abstract and paradoxical reasoning, abstract moralizing and reasoning increases. The acting characters are impersonal, mechanically caricatured, their actions are devoid of internal logic, psychologically inexplicable and inadequate. One gets the impression of a universal Bedlam, subject to the bizarre twists of the writer's thought, fatal and chaotic: “Once Orlov overate on crushed peas and died. And Krylov, having learned about this, also died. And Spiridonov died by himself. And Spiridonov's wife fell from the buffet and also died. And the children of Spiridonov drowned in the pond. And Grandma Spiridonova drank herself and went along the roads ... "The tragedy of the stories intensifies to a feeling of complete hopelessness, inevitably impending madness, humor takes on an ominous, black character. The heroes of the stories subtly maim and kill each other, elements of harsh reality woven into a grotesque-absurd form Kharms's narrative no longer evokes laughter, but horror and disgust (“Falling”, “Education”, “Knights”, “Interference”, “Rehabilitation”, etc.).

Being married for the second time, Kharms realizes his powerlessness to change external circumstances, acutely feels his guilt before his wife, who was forced to share a beggarly half-starved existence with him. Characteristic entries appear more and more often in the diaries: “I have completely lost my mind. This is scary. Complete impotence in every sense... I achieved a huge fall. I have completely lost my ability to work... I am a living corpse... Our affairs have become even worse... We are starving... I can't do anything. I don’t want to live ... God, send us death as soon as possible, ”and, finally,“ God, now I have one single request to you: destroy me, break me completely, plunge me into hell, don’t stop me halfway, but deprive me of hope and quickly destroy me forever and ever."

We died in the field of life.
There is no more hope.
The dream is over.
Only poverty remained.


At the end of the thirties, Kharms' lifestyle and behavior remained as extravagant, although there was no longer any need to shock the public. We can assume an increase in autism with a lack of criticism and an elementary instinct for self-preservation, the presence of an emotional decline, which led to an increase in unpredictable impulsivity and inappropriate behavior. Diary entry from 1938: “I went naked to the window. Opposite in the house, apparently, someone was indignant, I think it was a sailor. A policeman, a janitor, and someone else burst into me. They said that I had been disturbing the tenants in the building opposite for three years. I hung up the curtains. What is more pleasing to the eye: an old woman in one shirt or a young man, completely naked. In 1939, Kharms finally comes to the attention of not only law enforcement agencies, but also psychiatrists. He enters a psychiatric hospital for treatment and after discharge receives a certificate of schizophrenia. It is hardly possible to agree with those biographers who believe that Kharms' mental illness was "another artistic hoax", a simulation in order to obtain a "protection certificate" that could save him from re-arrest. For many artists, of course, illness was one of the few means that allowed them to hide from a world that was not very friendly to them. In the case of Kharms, if anything can be assumed, then only an aggravation of the current mental disorder.

In the summer of 1941, Kharms was issued a second disability group, but soon on August 23, 1941, a second arrest took place: after the start of the war, NKVD officers “cleaned” the city. The official charge imputed to the writer "defeatist moods". The only surviving photograph from the court case shows an emaciated man with tousled hair, an expression of extreme horror and despair in his eyes. On the basis of the forensic psychiatric examination, Kharms, as a mentally ill person, is released from criminal liability and sent for compulsory treatment to the psychiatric department of the hospital at the transit prison, where he dies in a state of complete dystrophy a few months later.


The tragedy of Kharms as an artist and as a person was not in his illness. "Daniil Ivanovich ... mastered his madness, knew how to direct it and put it at the service of his art." It is difficult to say whether Kharms felt complete satisfaction from his writing, whether he managed to "look at writing as a holiday." Apparently, it is unlikely, but the very possibility of creative self-expression should have helped him to stabilize his mental state and contributed to a more favorable course of the disease. The main trouble was that Kharms turned out to be a pathologically sounding key on the keyboard of his time, his sound was dissonant, fell out of the general melody, but was not false. He sounded the way he could sound due to the peculiarities of his personality, fortunately for Russian literature and unfortunately for himself. Kharms existed and created in the world of his own surreal poetic scheme, which for him was higher than reality. The fate of such creators in the totalitarian era was non-recognition and death, so the fate of Kharms was shared by many of his closest literary friends. The avant-garde, which was in demand in the era of revolutionary changes and the breakdown of public consciousness (for example, V. Khlebnikov), became unnecessary and dangerous when universal equality of slogans and opinions was required.

The flourishing of avant-garde literature in liberal Western countries confirms the role of the social factor in the acceptance of new cultural phenomena. Harms anticipated his time, the laurels of the "fathers of the absurd" received E. Ionesco and S. Beckett. F. Kafka, a writer in many respects similar to Kharms, if not in form, then in terms of plot, received loud recognition during his lifetime, and then was completely “canonized” as a classic of psychological prose (both Kafka and the aforementioned Khlebnikov suffered from the same mental illness, as Kharms).

While not yet widely known in his homeland (with the exception of children's poems), Kharms's work gained many fans in the West. A large number of literary and linguistic works were written.

In Russia, the disgraced and forgotten Kharms was published on photocopies, mixed with many fakes and imitations. A. Galich dedicated the touching "Ballad of Tobacco" to his memory. L. Petrushevskaya and D. Prigov continued the traditions of Harms in prose and poetry, his name became a cult in the youth mainstream. In the era of democratic changes in Russia, numerous epigones appeared who tried to copy Kharms's style. However, none of the imitators managed to get close to Kharms' writing style, which is explained by the impossibility of full empathy and artificial reconstruction of the inner world, the "thought-creativity" of a person suffering from schizophrenia, who also has an original talent.


Today Kharms is one of the most published and widely read authors in Russia. His talent has stood the test of time, his work has returned to us from oblivion and oblivion. The age-old dilemma of "genius and insanity" once again points out how non-standard individuals, holy fools and mentally ill, persecuted and executed, are the true engines of our culture. Unfortunately, progress comes at a high cost.



In conclusion - the lines of the poem, which Kharms dedicated to his friend, the poet N. Oleinikov, who was shot in 1938. These lines can also be addressed to the author himself:

Your verse sometimes makes me laugh, sometimes it disturbs the feeling,
Sometimes the ear saddens, or does not make laugh at all,
He even angers sometimes, and there is little art in him,
And into the abyss of petty deeds, he hastens to plunge.

Wait! Come back! Where cold thought
Are you flying, forgetting the law of visions of oncoming crowds?
Whom did he pierce in the chest with a sullen arrow?
Who is your enemy? Who is a friend? And where is your death pole?


References

Alexandrov A. "Truthful writer of the absurd." - In the book: D.I. Kharms. Prose. Leningrad - Tallinn: Lira Agency, 1990, p.5-19.
Alexandrov A. Miracle. The personality and work of Daniil Kharms. - In the book: D. Kharms. Flight to heaven. Poems. Prose. Drama. Letters. L .: "Soviet writer", 1991, pp. 7 - 48.
J.-F. Jacquard. Daniil Kharms and the end of the Russian avant-garde. St. Petersburg, 1995
Kobrinsky A., Ustinov A. "I participate in a gloomy life." Comments. _ In the book: D. Kharms. Throat raving with a razor. "Verb", N4, 1991, p. 5-17 and 142 - 194.
Petrov V. Daniil Kharms. _ V. book: Panorama of the Arts. Issue. 13. Sat. articles and publications. M .: "Soviet artist", 1990, pp. 235 - 248.
Kharms D. Circus Shardam: a collection of works of art. - St. Petersburg: LLC Publishing House "Kristall", 1999. - 1120 p.
Schwartz E. "I live restlessly ..." From the diaries. L .: "Soviet writer", 1990.
Shuvalov A. Pathographic essay on Daniil Kharms. - Independent Psychiatric Journal, N2, 1996, pp. 74 - 78.
Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd: Essays and Materials / Ed. by N/Cornwell. London, 1991.

original at: http://www.psychiatry.ru/library/ill/charms.html