The Plummeting Old Women

Introduction

For things not to be perverse,

We should live life in reverse.

A

LEKSANDR

V

VEDENSKY

¹

Russian literature seems to enjoy a particular propensity for throwing up ‘new’ writers from its past – not to mention from its present; writers with something unexpected to say to the modern reader. These may have languished in obscurity from some point of the nineteenth century, or suffered repression in the twentieth. They may derive from the romantic movement or from modernism. In some cases, their main works may have remained unknown until decades after their death – the most striking example must be Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, first published 1966/7, over a quarter of a century after its author had died. In others, the very existence of both works and (even) author was virtually unknown for many years. Such is the case with Daniil Kharms (1905–42).

‘Daniil Kharms’ was the principal – and subsequently, constant – pen-name of Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachov. Son of a minor St Petersburg political, religious and literary figure, he was to achieve a certain local renown himself in the 1920s and ’30s as Leningrad eccentric and writer of (mainly) children’s stories. Among his other pseudonyms was ‘Daniil Dandan’ – see the three stories in this selection dated 18 September 1934 (pp. 47-52 below). The predilection for the name Kharms is thought to derive from the tension between the English words ‘charms’ and ‘harms’ (plus the German ‘scharm’), but it may also owe something to the similarity in sound to Sherlock Holmes (pronounced ‘Kholms’ in Russian), particularly in its variant form of ‘Kharms-Shardam’.

From 1925 Kharms began to appear at poetry readings, and gained membership of the Leningrad section of the All-Russian Union of Poets (one of many predecessors to the eventual Union of Soviet Writers, formed in 1932.) A small body of his verse appeared in a Poets’ Union anthology of 1926 and in an almanac of 1927. These were the only publications of ‘adult’ work which Kharms achieved in his entire lifetime. In 1927 he joined with like-minded experimental writers (including Vvedensky and the important poet Nikolay Zabolotsky, 1903–58) to form OBERIU, a literary group which took as its name the acronym of Ob"edineniye real’nogo iskusstva or the Association of Real Art.

Born of an interest in Futurist aesthetics and Formalist critical approaches, the Oberiuty considered themselves a ‘left flank’ of the literary avant-garde. Their publicity antics, including a roof-top appearance by Kharms, caused minor sensations, but the group succeeded in presenting a highly unconventional theatrical evening, ‘Three Left Hours’, in January 1928. The programme included a performance of Kharms’s absurdist drama, ‘Yelizaveta Bam’.² Among OBERIU catch-phrases were ‘Art Is a Cupboard’, and ‘Poems Aren’t Pies; We Aren’t Herring’. However, in the Stalinizing late ’20s, the time for propagating experimental modernism had passed, and there was no reasonable expectation of tolerance towards such activities. Hostile publicity ensured the hurried disbandment of OBERIU after a number of further appearances.

From 1928 onwards Kharms and Vvedensky published only works of children’s literature, and by 1940 Kharms had in fact published eleven books for children. Nothing out of the ordinary was safe even in this field of literary activity, though he managed to employ a number of OBERIU-type devices in his ‘playful’ approach. This OBERIU approach had been denounced generally in a Leningrad newspaper in 1930 as ‘reactionary sleight-of-hand’ and, at the end of 1931, Kharms (with others) was arrested and accused of ‘deflecting the people from the building of socialism by means of his trans-sense verses’. A short period of exile in Kursk followed: the times were still relatively mild. Little work was to be had thereafter. Kharms and Vvedensky survived the main purges of the 1930s. However, the outbreak of war brought new dangers, and Kharms was arrested in Leningrad in August 1941. He died in prison (probably of starvation) the following February. Both he and Vvedensky were subsequently exonerated and ‘rehabilitated’ during the Khrushchev period.

In a number of texts, Kharms seems to have anticipated starvation and arrest. Indeed, he can lay claim to the title of hunger’s laureate, as this translation of an unrhyming but rhythmic verse-fragment shows:

This is how hunger begins:

The morning you wake, feeling lively,

Then begins the weakness,

Then begins the boredom;

Then comes the loss

Of the power of quick reason,

Then comes the calmness

And then begins the horror.

Kharms’s arrest came, reportedly, when the caretaker of the building he lived in called him down in his bedroom slippers ‘for a few minutes’. One story current in Leningrad is that he was charged with involvement in some sort of terrorist conspiracy.

From 1962 the children’s stories began to be reprinted in the Soviet Union, together with isolated first publications of a few short humorous pieces for adults. Simultaneously Kharms came to be mentioned in memoirs, and the odd scholarly paper devoted to the Oberiuty appeared. Until Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost’ took real effect, however, only a small fraction of Kharms’s literary output had achieved Soviet publication. Abroad, an awareness of Kharms and the Oberiuty began to surface in the late 1960s, both in eastern Europe and in the west. One instance of especial interest in the present context is the inclusion of five pieces in the Dublin-based magazine Atlantis.³ Sporadic publication of the Russian texts in émigré journals followed, and a book-length collection appeared in 1974, yet textual doubts have arisen, especially in connection with the earlier publications.⁴ In 1978 in Bremen (West Germany) publication of an annotated collected works of Daniil Kharms commenced under the imprint of the Verlag K-Presse (the Kafka Press!) and under the editorial control (from Leningrad) of Mikhail Meylakh and Vladimir Erl’.⁵ The introduction to this series was delayed ‘for technical reasons’, and the whole project came to an abrupt but temporary halt with the summer 1983 arrest of Meylakh for alleged activities ostensibly unconnected with his OBERIU publishing programme. In this connection, it is reported by an unimpeachable source that British-made handcuffs are in common use in the Gulag. Happily, glasnost’ has seen the release of Meylakh in the 1987 amnesty and, along with other perhaps more astonishing miracles, a flood of minor Kharms publications in 1987 and 1988, culminating in a substantial book-length selection edited by Anatoliy Aleksandrov. OBERIU evenings and Kharms ‘mono-spectaculars’ are suddenly almost commonplace. Moscow News in September 1988, in its Russian and English issues alike, was proclaiming Kharms an international figure: suddenly his photograph was publicly available in the Soviet Union. A Yugoslav director has made a surreal film called ‘The Kharms Case’, while Islington’s Almeida Theatre staged an Oberiuty evening in 1984 – perhaps to balance, if not to unlock, the handcuffs.

Any remotely definitive assessment of Kharms’s achievement as a writer must await full publication of his oeuvre and other research. For the moment one can make little more than preliminary and somewhat impressionistic comments. The prose miniature is a more