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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.

Members

Reviews

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

I have absolutely no memory of how ‘Today I Wrote Nothing’ came to be on my to-read list. I added it in 2013, possibly after coming across Kharms some other early Soviet era fiction? Or a review of it? Or some Russian history? Who knows, but I trust past-me to choose books for future-me. It has taken me this long to locate a copy because only last week I realised I could get borrowing rights for an additional academic library. Combined with the magic of www.worldcat.org, another recent joyous discovery, I now have access to various obscure volumes I’ve been meaning to read for many years. As the National Library of Scotland sadly does not allow borrowing, this is a wonderful development.

You will notice the digressive tone of this review. I allow myself this latitude in tribute to Kharms, who wrote with spectacular disdain for narrative or coherence. In the excellent introduction, his translator seeks to avoid pigeonholing Kharms’ work as absurdism or political satire. Indeed, the translator appears exasperated by the tendency to assume everything written in 1930s Russia was implicit critique of Stalin. As he puts it: ‘After all, it wasn’t all Stalin all the time’, despite Stalin’s best efforts to the contrary. Kharms appears to have had greater ambitions to undermine core precepts of literary endeavour. His coterie seem in retrospect to be precursors of the surrealists. Delightfully, they couldn’t make a living writing for adults, as Soviet Realism was de rigueur, so wrote bizarre children’s books. Life for an avant garde writer in Stalinist Russia was certainly no picnic and Kharms died in prison during the siege of Leningrad. Nonetheless, a lot of his writing has survived for us to puzzle over today.

It is most certainly a puzzle. As with other Russian fiction I’ve read, such as [b:The Slynx|310722|The Slynx|Tatyana Tolstaya|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320532928s/310722.jpg|3535], [b:The Gray House|32703696|The Gray House|Mariam Petrosyan|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1476844394s/32703696.jpg|11258864], and [b:The Foundation Pit|715995|The Foundation Pit|Andrei Platonov|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1418363439s/715995.jpg|702247], I felt a lot of meaning was going straight over my head due to lack of linguistic and cultural awareness. Translating short pieces of intentional nonsense is obviously very challenging. The results reminded me, if anything, of internet memes and particularly so-called tumblr shitposts. I mean no insult to Kharms by this comparison! The surreal, deconstructed, and recursively referential nature of the humour assumes a lot of contextual knowledge from the reader. Can you imagine trying to comprehend currently popular memes 80 years later in translated form? Kharms was not composing his snippets to be skimmed and re-posted on social media, yet this sort of thing sounds eerily akin to @dril tweets:

"They say all the good babes are wide-bottomed. Oh, I just love big-bosomed babes. I like the way they smell.” Saying this he began to grow taller and, reaching the ceiling, he fell apart into a thousand little spheres. [‘How One Man Fell To Pieces’, page 231.]

Poisoning children is cruel. But something has to be done about them!

What’s all the fuss about flowers? It smells way better between a woman’s legs. That’s nature for you, and that’s why no-one dares find my words distasteful. [Untitled, page 252]

I regret to say, however, that I found most of the pieces in the book baffling without being amusing. I lacked the reference points to appreciate Kharms arbitrary humour, despite the endnotes attempting to explain where possible. Almost all of the collected writings are very short, little notes and snippets, so I was reminded slightly of the time I read the first volume of Kafka’s diaries (over Christmas, foolishly). Still, Kharms did make me laugh several times. The echoes of his humour in current memes tempt me to speculate about popular humour when there is no privacy, be it under Stalinism or surveillance capitalism. In [b:Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia|21413849|Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible The Surreal Heart of the New Russia|Peter Pomerantsev|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1407196452s/21413849.jpg|40714614], Pomerantsev observes that when all coherent political ideas have been co-opted by the ruling class, the resistance fall back on surreal nonsense. Comfort and distraction from existential anxiety and powerlessness can come from the ridiculous. The surreal and absurd are more difficult to co-opt and monetise, not that brands aren’t trying very hard to, because they deliberately evade meaning. In other words, Kharms definitely still has something to tell us, although I can’t tell you what exactly. The longest and most conventional piece in the book, a short story titled ‘The Old Woman’, is also by far the most terrifying. Imagine Kafka writing about disposing of a corpse. While Kharms clearly could write a suitably horrifying short story, it’s his very brief pieces that convey the full force of his subversive and proto-surreal style.… (more)

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annarchism | 13 other reviews | Aug 4, 2024 |

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 | 13 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 | 13 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)