Biography Daniil Kharms

Daniil Kharms (Даниил Хармс, real name Daniil Yuvachev) (1905 – 1942) an author of absurd verses, short stories and plays. Daniil Yuvachyov was born in 1905, in St. Petersburg. At school, he studied German and English. In 1925 he entered the Leningrad Electro-Technical College but soon was expelled for not participating in “socially conscious activities.” Next year, he took a film course at the Institute of the History of the Arts. When in school, he began referring to himself under the pseudonym of Kharms.

In both his literature and his life, Kharms was a peculiar eccentric like many of his avant-garde fellow writers. In 1926-1929, Kharms was a member of the All-Russian Union of Poets. In 1928, together with like-minded writers, such as Aleksandr Vvedensky, Nikolai Oleinikov he founded the famed OBERIU group (Association for Real Art). This avant-garde group of poets and artists became famous for their experimental poetry and public readings of nonsensical verses, provocative theatrical performances. The presentations took place in theaters, university auditoriums, dormitories and prisons. Kharms and his fellow poets tried to create an art of the irrational, experimented with classical language and addressed the reality beyond the logical world. In the press of late 1920s they were derided as “a literary hooligans.” During his lifetime Kharms wrote for both adult and children, but only two adult stories were published and the only of his absurd plays — Elizaveta Bam — was produced. In the 1920s and 1930s, he published his humorous children’s stories and verses in the children’s magazine Hedgehog (Ezh) and Siskin (Chizh) and in Detgiz (Soviet and Russian publishing house for children’s literature).

By 1930, Soviet authorities, having become increasingly hostile toward the avant-garde in general. Kharms rarely published his works during his lifetime, and mostly kept diaries and organized his work in the notebooks. However, in 1931, he was arrested as a member of “a group of anti-Soviet children’s writers” and imprisoned on charges of distracting people from the tasks of industrial construction with “trans-sense” poetry. Kharms was not persecuted for his serious work, but absurdly enough, some of his hilarious and surreal children’s works were used as an evidence of “significant damage to the cause of forming the rising Soviet generation” by seducing it away from “contemporary concrete reality” (see further discussion in Anemone, Scotto). He spent six months in prison and then was exiled for a few months to live with his friend Vvedensky in exile in Kursk, in southeast Russia. Released in 1932, he returned to Leningrad and continued writing for children to survive.

He was arrested again in 1938 for a children’s poem in which a man goes out for cigarettes and disappears. Kharms pretended to be insane, and was placed for a short period in a mental hospital. Since that year, he was ban from publishing even his children’s works. In 1941 he was arrested on suspicion of treason, imprisoned in the psychiatric ward at Leningrad Prison No. 1 where he died in February, 1942.

Only in the 1960s Kharms’ adult works were discovered and picked up by Russian samizdat. In Russia, Kharms works were widely published only from the late 1980s.

Sources

Ostashevsky, Eugene. Oberiu. n Anthology of Russian Absurdism. Northwestern, 2006.

Anemone, Anthony & Scotto, Peter. I Am a Phenomenon Quite Out of he Ordinary. Academic. Studies Press, 2013.