A Machine That Does Nothing: Daniil Kharms

This Podcast episode is on the great Russian writer Daniil Kharms.

Daniil Kharms was a Russian writer from the 1930s and one of the founders of the avant-garde group called the OBERIU.  This group was one of the last little flare-ups of Russian modernism before Socialist Realism took hold as the official state sanctioned method for creating art.  Artists were expected to create something that carried on the state’s ideology. 

The avant-garde was celebrated but fell out of favor after the revolution.  These pre-revolutionary modernist experiments were seen as a pre-revolutionary decadent form and were discouraged.  The OBERIU directly challenged Socialist Realism and all existing conventions.  Daniil Kharms explains his literary theory in violent terms saying that his words are an object and could quite literally smash a window out:

It isn’t just words or thoughts printed on paper; it is a thing as real as a crystal inkwell, standing in front of me on the table.  It seems that these verses have become a thing, and one can take them off the page and throw them at a window, and the window would break.  That’s what words can do! (13 Kharms, Yankelevich)

Kharms does all of the wrong things on purpose.  He juxtaposes good and bad writing techniques, smashing them together to create something new.  Some of the ways he questions what a story is and what it is supposed to do by directly questioning what a narrative is.  Consider the story in Blue Notebook #10:

There was a red-haired man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily.

He couldn't talk because he had no mouth. He didn’t have a nose either.  

He didn't even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, no spine and he didn’t have any insides at all.  There was nothing!   So, we don’t even know who we’re talking about.

We’d better not talk about him anymore (45 Kharms, Yankelevich).

He starts the first sentence off with the kind of details that build an image in the reader’s head, “There was a red-haired man…” Kharms then abruptly abandons the constructive framework of narrative and piece-by-piece tears the entire story down to oblivion.  Kharms revels in oblivion, taking his time naming each non-existent appendage of the non-existent man.  The lack of story and character is the story. 

Kharms stripped words and narrative of its normal uses and meanings.  He wrote stories that break all of the rules, but function and work all the same because of the dark humor and irony.  Kharms treats writing as an event and plays with the idea of writer’s block.  Not writing anything is itself a story or often the story.  Kharms adds random outbursts of unexpected extreme senseless (to the plot) violence and pointless miracles that serve to either abruptly end the story or to provide a dark humorous punch line.

People often read Kharms in the context of political allegory.  George Gibian writes in Russia's Lost Literature of the Absurd:

Kharms and Vvedensky, however (incontrast to Kafka in Austria-Hungary and Czechoslovakia, or Beckett in Ireland and France), were satirizing and parodying the monstrosities and absurdities of a special set of circumstances, of their own age, of Soviet Russia of the first Five-year plan and the middle 1930s.  Language and rationality were being abused, facts distorted, values turned upside down.  Hundreds of thousands of people were being arrested, ostensibly for the purpose of creating a new, classless, perfect society (Kharms, Vvedenskiĭ , Gibian 28). 

While it is tempting to pigeonhole Kharms and fellow OBERIU writers as a reaction to the world around them and this was no doubt a part of it, the OBERIU were part of a larger global trend trying to reinterpret the world in new ways with new methods.  Kharms viewing his poems as a physical object is similar to William Carlos Williams poem The Red Wheelbarrow.  Williams constructed that poem the same way a sculptor would make a sculpture.  The big difference is the subversiveness of the OBERIU most of the members were jailed as World War II loomed on the horizon and many of the authors died in jail.  The manuscripts that were left behind stayed out of the public sphere until 1967 and have continued to trickle forward inspiring and finding new audiences.

Things on the web:

Absurdist Monthly Review The Complete Searchable Daniil Kharms

The Blue Notebook read online

NYTBR Kharms review that got me into his work.

Bibliography

Cornwell, Neil. Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd: Essays and Materials. New York: St. Martin's, 1991. Print.

Kharms, Daniil, Aleksandr Ivanovich Vvedenskiĭ, and George Gibian. Russia's Lost Literature of the Absurd: A Literary Discovery: Selected Works of Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971. Print.

Kharms, Daniil, and Matvei Yankelevich. Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2007. Print.

Roberts, Graham. The Last Soviet Avant-garde: OBERIU--fact, Fiction, Metafiction. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 1997. Print.

Wanner, Adrian. Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-story. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2003. Print.