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Common Knowledge

Canonical name: Kharms, Daniil
Legal name: Yuvachov, Daniil Ivanovich
Ювачёв, Даниил Иванович
Other names: Charms, Daniil
Birthdate: 1905-12-30
Date of death: 1942-02-02
Gender: male
Nationality: Russia
USSR
Country (for map): Russia
Birthplace: St. Petersburg, Russian Empire
Place of death: Leningrad, Russia, USSR
Cause of death: Forgotten in prison in Leningrad USSR he died of hunger
Places of residence: Saint Petersburg, Russia
Education: Leningrad Electrotechnicum (expelled)
St Peter's School, St Petersburg, Russian Empire
Occupations: poet
children's book author
playwright
Organizations: OBERIU (Association for Real Art)
Short biography: Married first to Esther Rusakova, then to Marina Malich.

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Reviews

Today I Wrote Nothing by Daniil Kharms

I can see why some people would hate Kharms' work but personally I am convinced that he is a genius. It's probably better to read it slowly over a longer period of time though. I wouldn't recommend trying to read it all in one sitting. Some of the stuff in this collection is better than others but overall I thought it was really good and got a lot out of it I think. These "stories" (they're more like poems a lot of the time are like nothing else I've ever read.

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ZetaRiemann | 12 other reviews | Apr 19, 2024 |

Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writing of… by Daniil Kharms

Better not to talk about Kharms.

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3Oranges | 12 other reviews | Jun 24, 2023 |

Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writing of… by Daniil Kharms

"To have only intelligence and talent is too little. One must also have energy, real interest, clarity of thought, and a sense of obligation." - Daniil Kharms, Blue Notebook #23

Whatever anyone thinks of Daniil Kharms, it can't be denied that he possessed all the qualities that he claimed in his Blue Notebook to be so important. Everything he wrote was flooded with his energy, and while it may be difficult to figure out exactly what was going on in his head while he was writing, there's no doubt that it was consistent.

If you set aside Kharms' short story "The Old Woman", Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings contains 152 different pieces over the course of 185 pages. Most of them go something like this:

Petrov gets on his horse and, addressing the crowd, delivers a speech about what would happen if, in place of the public garden, they'd build an American skyscraper. The crowd listens and, it seems, agrees. Petrov writes something down in his notebook. A man of medium height emerges from the crowd and asks Petrov what he wrote down in his notebook. Petrov replies that it concerns himself alone. The man of medium height presses him. Words are exchanged and discord begins. The crowd takes the side of the man of medium height and Petrov, saving his life, drives his horse on and disappears around the bend. The crowd panics and, having no other victim, grabs the man of medium height and tears off his head. The torn-off head rolls down the street and gets stuck in the hatch of a sewer drain. The crowd, having satisfied its passions, disperses.

It's one thing to read one story like that, but reading one after another after another over the course of several hours really makes you question the way you're living your life.

That doesn't mean I didn't like the collection. I enjoyed the majority of the pieces, and I marked down 10-15 of them that I particularly enjoyed. I just wish that the editor had picked the "selected writings" a little more selectively.

The best of the bunch is the 25-page story "The Old Woman". It's funny, scary, and compelling in a way that you wouldn't expect from a writer so focused on deadpan micro-fiction, and it really speaks to his artistic potential, which was snuffed out in a prison in Leningrad in 1942.

Matvei Yankelevich, the editor and translator of the collection, wrote an excellent introduction in which he addresses the tendency of modern critics to tie Kharms' work to an anti-Soviet ideology, an idea that doesn't make sense given Kharms' personal goals in his writing. Kharms believed in art's obligation to work outside of any sort of logical understanding of the world, meaning that our assumptions of political intent actually underestimate how far he is trying to push the reader. Yeah, most of this is silly (I now get how most of Kharms' success in his lifetime came from writing children's stories), but it's silly on Kharms' terms, not ours. That, more than anything, is how he operated at his best: on his own terms.

And that's it, more or less.… (more)

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bgramman | 12 other reviews | May 9, 2020 |

Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writing of… by Daniil Kharms

Picture a tall, thin man with blazing light blue eyes parading down the main pedestrian boulevard in a city wearing a tweed suit, Sherlock Holmes double-brimmed hat and smoking a curved ivory Sherlock Holmes pipe, putting himself on display as if he were a perfectly balanced combination of Oscar Wilde and that famous London detective. And, as the crowning moment of his performance, the tall, thin man halts in the middle of a gaping crowd of onlookers and theatrically lies down in the middle of the sidewalk, and then, after several minutes, nonchalantly rises to his feet and continues his stroll.

Quite a sight; quite a man. Are we among artists in gay-Paris in 1868 or among Greenwich Village hippies in 1968? No, indeed, we are not -- we are in a totalitarian state, more specifically, we are in 1931 Stalinist Russia. Meet our one-of-a-kind author, Daniil Kharms. Considering the communist ideal of every healthy man and woman seeing themselves as a productive, hard-working citizen of the state, taking their place elbow to elbow with their comrades in the field or the factory, it is something of a miracle Daniil Kharms's short life (the state locked him in a mental institution at age 38 where he died of starvation) wasn't even shorter.

So, how, you may ask, does this one-of-a-kind writer tell a story? Before making more general comments on several stories and plays, here is a story entitled Events in its entirety: "One day Orlov stuffed himself with mashed peas and died. Krylov, having heard the news, also died. And Spiridonov died regardless. And Spiridonov's wife fell from the cupboard and also died. And the Spiridonov children drowned in a pond. Spiridonov's grandmother took to the bottle and wandered the highways. And Mikhailov stopped combing his hair and came down with mange. And Kruglov sketched a lady holding a whip and went mad. And Perekhryostov received four hundred rubles wired over the telegraph and was so uppity about it that he was forced to leave his job.
All good people but they don't know how to hold their ground."

Quite a story in the tradition of great Russian literature: multiple deaths, a case of alcoholism, disease, madness, forced unemployment. And, of course, some moral philosophy thrown in at the end. Of course, I'm being ironic, but only partially. This is vintage Kharms, a literary vision and expression that is nothing less than piercing. After all, how should an artist and poet create when living in a society that is cruel, oppressive and repressive? Write conventional, familiar narrative? It is as if those penetrating light blue eyes of Kharms could see through all the pretense, sham, invention, deceit, and façade in both life and art and he would have none of it.

This collection contains well over one hundred pieces, mostly one-page stories, but also some poems and micro-plays along with several longer works, including a twenty-two page tale involving an old woman mysteriously sitting in the narrator's favorite armchair. Again, we have another one-page story of a fight where a man mutilates his opponent's face and nose with his dentures, another one-pager about a man who not only loses his handkerchief, hat, jacket and boots but also himself, another one-pager where an artist goes to a canal to buy rubber so he can make a rubber band to stretch but meanwhile an old woman gets burned up in a stove, and still another one pager where an engineer builds a wall across all of Petersburg but never knows what the wall is good for.

Also included is a one page play where Pushkin and Gogol do nothing but repeatedly trip and fall over one another and another play where a single actor takes the stage only to vomit and is followed by three more solo appearances of vomiting actors followed by a little girl who tells the audience to go home since all the actors are sick. Weird? Absolutely. Bizarre, strange, outlandish, crazy, nutty, kooky, wild? Again, yes, absolutely.

There is an excellent twenty-five page introduction by Matvei Yankelevich giving the reader new to Daniil Kharms the cultural and literary context as well as biographical information of the author. Anything more than this introduction might be too much since the uniqueness of Kharms demands (and I don't think demands is too strong a word here) freshness. Rather than reading Kharms and being reminded of Kafka, Sartre, Camus, Beckett or Dada, keep it fresh - read Kharms and read Kharms slowly and carefully, as if you were reading literature for the first time. Be open for miracles. And you will witness miracles, lots of them.… (more)

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Glenn_Russell | 12 other reviews | Nov 13, 2018 |

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