Biography
Daniil Yuvachev was born on December 17 (30), in St. Petersburg, in the family of Ivan Yuvachev, a former naval officer, revolutionary-People's Will, exiled to Sakhalin and took up religious philosophy there. Kharms's father was an acquaintance of Chekhov, Tolstoy and Voloshin.
Daniil studied at the privileged St. Petersburg German school Petrishule. In he entered the Leningrad Electrical Technical School, but was soon forced to leave it. In he took up writing. In his early youth he imitated the futuristic poetics of Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh. Then, in the second half of the s, he abandoned the predominance of “zaumi” in versification.
In , Yuvachev met the poetic and philosophical circle of plane trees, which included Alexander Vvedensky, Leonid Lipavsky, Yakov Druskin and others. He quickly gained scandalous fame in the circles of avant-garde writers under his pseudonym “Kharms”, invented at the age of Yuvachev had many pseudonyms, and he playfully changed them: Kharms, Haarms, Dandan, Charms, Karl Ivanovich Shusterling, etc. However, it was the pseudonym “Kharms” with its ambivalence (from the French “charme” - “charm, charm” and from the English “harm” - “harm”) most accurately reflected the essence of the writer’s attitude to life and creativity. The pseudonym was also enshrined in the introductory questionnaire of the All-Russian Union of Poets, where Kharms was accepted in March on the basis of the submitted poetic works, two of which (“An Incident on the Railway” and “Poem by Peter Yashkin - a Communist”) were published in the Union’s small-circulation collections. Apart from them, until the end of the s, only one “adult” work by Kharms was published in the USSR - the poem “Mary Comes Out, Bowing” (Sat. Day of Poetry, ).
The early Kharms was characterized by “zaum”; he joined the “Order of Brainiacs DSO” led by Alexander Tufanov. Since , Kharms has been actively trying to organize the forces of “left” writers and artists in Leningrad, creating the short-lived organizations “Radix” and “Left Flank”. Since , Kharms has been writing for the children's magazine Chizh (its publishers were arrested in ). At the same time, he became one of the founders of the avant-garde poetic and artistic group “Union of Real Art” (OBERIU), which in held the famous evening “Three Left Hours”, where Kharms’s absurdist “piece” “Elizabeth Bam” was presented. Later, in Soviet journalism, the works of OBERIU were declared “the poetry of the class enemy,” and since , the activities of OBERIU in the previous composition (which continued for some time in informal communication) actually ceased.
Kharms was arrested in December , along with a number of other Oberiuts, accused of anti-Soviet activities (he was also charged with the texts of his works) and sentenced on March 21, by the OGPU board to three years in correctional camps (the term “concentration camp” was used in the text of the sentence). . As a result, the sentence was replaced by deportation (“minus 12”) on May 23, , and the poet went to Kursk, where the deported A.I. Vvedensky was already located.
He arrived on July 13, and settled in house number 16 on Pervyshevskaya Street (now Ufimtseva Street). The city was crowded with former Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, simply nobles, representatives of various oppositions, scientific, technical and artistic intelligentsia. “Half of Moscow and half of Leningrad were here,” contemporaries recalled. But Daniil Kharms was not happy with him. “I didn’t like the city in which I lived at that time,” he wrote about Kursk. It stood on a mountain and there were postcard views everywhere. They disgusted me so much that I was even glad to sit at home. Yes, in fact, apart from the post office, the market and the store, I had nowhere to go There were days when I did not eat anything. Then I tried to create a joyful mood for myself. He lay down on the bed and started smiling. I smiled for up to 20 minutes at a time, but then the smile turned into a yawn I began to dream. I saw in front of me an earthenware jug of milk and pieces of fresh bread. And I myself sit at the table and quickly write I open the window and look into the garden. There were yellow and purple flowers growing near the house. Further on there was tobacco growing and a large military chestnut tree. And there the orchard began. It was very quiet, and only the trains were singing under the mountain.”
Kharms stayed in Kursk until the beginning of November, returning to Leningrad on the 10th.
Upon returning from exile, Kharms continues to communicate with like-minded people and writes a number of books for children to earn a living. After the publication in of the poem “A Man with a Club and a Bag Came Out of the House” in a children’s magazine, which “has since disappeared,” Kharms was not published for some time, which put him and his wife on the brink of starvation. At the same time, he writes many short stories, theatrical sketches and poems for adults, which were not published during his lifetime. During this period, the cycle of miniatures “Cases” and the story “The Old Woman” were created.
On August 23, , he was arrested for defeatist sentiments (based on a denunciation by Antonina Oranzhireeva, an acquaintance of Anna Akhmatova and a long-term NKVD agent). In particular, Kharms was accused of saying, “If they give me a mobilization leaflet, I’ll punch the commander in the face and let them shoot me; but I won’t wear a uniform” and “The Soviet Union lost the war on the first day, Leningrad will now either be besieged and we will die of starvation, or they will bomb it, leaving no stone unturned.” Kharms also claimed that the city was mined, and unarmed soldiers were being sent to the front. To avoid execution, he feigned madness; The military tribunal determined, “based on the gravity of the crime committed,” to keep Kharms in a psychiatric hospital. He died during the siege of Leningrad, in the most difficult month in terms of the number of starvation deaths, in the psychiatry department of the hospital of the Kresty prison (Arsenal Embankment, 9).
The archive of Daniil Kharms was preserved by Yakov Druskin.
Daniil Kharms was rehabilitated in , but for a long time his main works were not officially published in the USSR. Until the time of perestroika, his work circulated from hand to hand in samizdat, and was also published abroad (with a large number of distortions and abbreviations).
Kharms is widely known as a children's writer (“Ivan Ivanovich Samovar”, etc.), as well as as an author of satirical prose. Kharms is erroneously credited with the authorship of a series of historical anecdotes “Jolly Fellows” (“Once Gogol dressed up as Pushkin…”), created in the s by the editorial office of the magazine “Pioneer” in imitation of Kharms (he actually owns a number of parody miniatures about Pushkin and Gogol). In addition, when publishing the poems “Plikh and Plyuch” it is often not indicated that this is an abbreviated translation of the work of Wilhelm Busch from German.
Kharms's absurdist works have been published in Russia since An unknown person in an interview with one of the USSR TV programs said: “This is pure nonsense, but very funny.”
DANIEL KHARMS: “I SAY TO BE”
Kobrinsky A.A. Daniil Kharms. – M.: Young Guard, – p., ill. – (Life of remarkable people: ser. biogr.; issue )
An insidious thing - posthumous glory! I'm afraid that the widest reader knows D. Kharms, first of all, for anecdotes about Pushkin, Gogol and L. Tolstoy, “who loved little children very much.” And although, of course, the very idea of the cycle and several stories are, yes, “from Kharms,” the main block of jokes was composed in the early 70s by journalists N. Dobrokhotova and V. Pyatnitsky. And if we remember the poems about siskins that are familiar to everyone from childhood, then not everyone will name their author: Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev (Kharms).
However, thank God, there are fewer and fewer such ignorant but “using” readers. And more and more we recognize Daniil Kharms as one of the key figures in Russian literature of the last century.
A. Kobrinsky’s page work is probably the most complete biography of Kharms to date. The author strongly emphasizes the genre of his book, citing a lot of quotes from documents of the era. Perhaps the average reader on some of these pages will get stuck in the clothy and stuffy style of Stalinist officialdom. But it will become even clearer WHAT dissonance with the mainstream of that time the personality and work of the writer Kharms were.
In general, it seems that life itself carried out a cruel, but important experiment for descendants on the Oberiuts and especially on their leader Daniil Kharms. The 20s, the time of their formation and debut, are no longer the Silver Age with its freedom of creative exploration, although the innovations of the 20s themselves were “cooler” and more unexpected. However, the next era inexorably narrowed the possibilities of free manifestation in art, both at the level of content and in the field of form-creation.
For writers, all this will culminate in the establishment of the Writers' Union. The state will assume the monopoly right to regulate the creative process. But the Oberiuts (and Kharms in particular) remained largely literary marginals - and this allowed them to maintain creative freedom. That is, using their example, one can trace how our literature would develop if it had the same freedom of exploration as in the 10s and early 20s.
Of course, the Oberiuts are only one of the trends that formed in the 20s, and the trend at its very birth could not become widespread at all. And yet the winds of tomorrow wandered in the souls of these very people!
Daniil Kharms has been developing so intensively in the 30s that now even the spiritual father of the Oberiuts, V. Khlebnikov, seems to him to be moving back to the 19th century, seems “too bookish.”
A. Kobrinsky accurately notes: the pathos of the Oberiut aesthetics was to return the poet’s word from the mists of symbolism to the full-fledged reality of life. Moreover, in a certain sense, they thought of the word as the same real thing as, say, a stone. “Poems should be written in such a way that if you throw a poem at a window, the glass will break,” Kharms dreamed. And he wrote in his diary in April “The power inherent in words must be released It is not good to think that this force will make objects move. I am confident that the power of words can do this too” (p. ).
“Poems, prayers, songs and spells” - these are the forms of the existence of words, organized by rhythm and filled with the charisma of life, that attracted Daniil Kharms.
And in this sense, he wrote poems for children not only for the sake of earning money (like, for example, his closest associate A. Vvedensky). It was a completely organic form of creative expression.
Although Kharms could not stand children themselves (like old people and especially old women). On the lampshade of his table lamp, he personally drew a “house for the destruction of children.” E. Schwartz recalled: “Kharms hated children and was proud of it. Yes, that suited him. Defined some side of his being. He was, of course, the last of his kind. From there, the offspring would have gone absolutely horribly wrong. That’s why even other people’s children scared him” (p. ).
Kobrinsky adds his version: “Perhaps he (Kharms - V.B.) instinctively felt them (old people and children - V.B.) being close to death - both from one end and the other" (p. ).
In general, the list of what Kharms loved and what he could not stand creates a paradoxical, but also paradoxically holistic image. They occupied him: “Illumination, inspiration, enlightenment, superconsciousness. Numbers, especially those not related to sequence order. Signs. Letters. Fonts and handwriting Everything is logically senseless and ridiculous. Everything that causes laughter and humor. Stupidity Miracle Good form. Human faces” (p. ). They were disgusting: “Froth, lamb, children, soldiers, newspaper, bathhouse” (p. ). The latter - because it humiliatingly exposes bodily deformities.
Ernst Kretschmer, who was working on his classification of psychotypes in approximately the same years, would classify Kharms as a pronounced schizoid. These are people of keen individuality who keep their distance from the world around them, re-creating the impulses coming from it into something sometimes extremely original, and in the case of special talent - into something very deep and significant. The schizoid nature will help Kharms in the future to resort to simulating mental illness (more on this below).
In the meantime, collisions with the Soviet world - a world permeated with the currents of crude collectivism, the spirit of communal apartments, dorms, barracks, cells - sometimes led to the most amusing creative results.
Here, for example, is a drill “song” that, at the request of the commander, Private Yuvachev composed while undergoing military service (author’s punctuation):
A little into the yard
We arrived on March 7
Got up got up got into formation
We attached it to the rifle
Bayonet and
Our company is the best.
And here is the “May Day Song”, written by the already mature poet Kharms for the children’s magazine “Chizh” in
We'll go to the podium
Let's come,
We'll go to the podium
In the morning,
To shout before everyone else
Earlier then others,
To shout before everyone else
Hurray for Stalin.
Kharms’s creative discrepancy with Soviet reality was complemented by inconsistency at even the everyday level. Thus, Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev came up with a special anglicized look for himself (cap, knee socks, leggings, pipe), for which in the summer of he was constantly subject to obstruction on the streets of provincial Kursk, where he was exiled. A fan of German and English culture, he chose a pseudonym for himself, consonant with the surname of his favorite literary hero - Sherlock Holmes.
Yes, Kharms was a paradoxical man! A deep believer, he, although formally Orthodox, allowed himself a mysticism of a completely Protestant nature: letters and notes directly to God! An avant-garde in art, he maintained a devoted love for the “classic classics” themselves: Pushkin and Gogol, Bach and Mozart.
Over the years, the craving for classic designs has only intensified. In them, the mature Kharms saw manifestations of true vitality. This led to disagreements with some of his closest associates. Kobrinsky cites A. Vvedensky’s dry review of the masterpiece of the late Kharms, the story “The Old Woman”: “I didn’t give up left-wing art” (p. ). Vvedensky hinted that the motifs of “The Queen of Spades” and “Crime and Punishment” are too obvious in the story, and that the artistic fabric itself, despite the surreal nature of the concept, is “too” (for an avant-garde work) realistic.
For Kharms, the movement towards tradition is natural, at least as a true Petersburger and demonstrative “Westerner.” But here we are faced with moments of a more general plan. Even T. Mann and G. Hesse noted: the most notorious creators of avant-garde art of the 20th century sometimes ended up as convinced “classicists” or, in any case, acutely, subtly and more than respectfully perceived and used the classical tradition. Proust and Picasso, Dali and Prokofiev, Matisse and Stravinsky (and Hesse and T. Mann themselves)…
In the evolution of Kharms the writer, this “almost regularity”, which seems to be completely unexplained, only manifests itself.
And again a paradox! Living practically in isolation from the life of world culture in the s, the Oberiuts struggled with the same problem as Western intellectuals: the problem of language as a means of communication. This topic has largely determined the aesthetics, politics, ideology and information technology of our days. “Kharms, together with his friend Vvedensky, became the founder of the literature of the absurd, which does not represent a total absence of meaning, but, on the contrary, a different meaning that does not fit into everyday logic, destroying, as a rule, established logical connections” (p. ).
Alas, such advancement had to be paid for even in the relatively free 20s! After D. Kharms’s first public speech (January ), his relatives rejoiced: “Everything is fine, and Danya was not beaten” (p. ).
Ironically, Kharms drifted towards the literary tradition along with our entire culture of the 30s. EXTERNALLY, this drift to some extent coincided with the vector of development of literature of the Stalinist empire, as it was outlined in the early 30s by the First Congress of Soviet Writers. The fundamental difference was that Kharms moved towards the classical tradition regardless of instructions and opinions from above and retained absolute creative freedom in its understanding. And this alone made him a dissident in the eyes of the authorities. However, in the early 30s he was still among the ultra-vanguardists.
The wave of repression hit Kharms and his friends among the first and earlier than many, many, right in the midst of the struggle for the uniformity of our literature.
In December , Kharms and his comrades were arrested. The wave of repression was only gaining strength, and this saved them: the punishment was quite light.
You can’t erase a word from the song: A. Kobrinsky claims that considerable blame for the arrest lies with I.L. Andronikov, then close to the circle of Oberiuts. “If all the other arrested people first of all testified about themselves, and only then were forced to talk about others, as members of the same group with them, then Andronikov’s style of testimony is the style of a classic denunciation” (p. ).
By the way, Andronikov was the only one of those involved in the case who was not injured in any way.
A 4-month exile to Kursk was, of course, far from the worst punishment possible at that time. But Kharms survived it quite hard. “We are made of the stuff intended for geniuses,” he once remarked (p. ). And genius, according to Kharms, has three properties: authority, clairvoyance and intelligence. Even then, he understood too well where the fate of events was leading everyone
In the terrible year of , in the third issue of the children's magazine “Chizh”, D. Kharms’ poem “A Man Came Out of the House” was published. Now researchers find in it a paraphrase of the ideas of the philosopher A. Bergson that interested Kharms. But then the era placed these poems in a completely different semantic context, making them almost political satire.
Just listen:
A man left the house
With a baton and a bag
And on a long journey,
And on a long journey
I set off on foot.
He walked straight and forward
And he kept looking forward.
Didn't sleep, didn't drink,
Didn't drink, didn't sleep,
Didn't sleep, didn't drink, didn't eat.
And then one day at dawn
He entered the dark forest.
And from then on,
And from then on,
And from then on he disappeared.
But if somehow he
I'll happen to meet you
Then hurry up
Then hurry up
Tell us quickly.
This is how one of Kharms’ most talented friends, N.M., “disappeared” in broad daylight for his loved ones. Oleynikov. Seeing him one morning, a friend rushed over to say hello to him. But immediately I saw two people who accompanied him. Oleinikov’s glance confirmed the guess that horrified her Five months later, the poet Oleinikov was executed.
During these months, Kharms himself was waiting for trouble, waiting for arrest. His wife Marina Malich recalled: “He had a presentiment that he had to escape. He wanted us to completely disappear, to go on foot into the forest together and live there” (p. ).
Kharms was not arrested then, but was excommunicated from literature: he was forbidden to publish.
Years of desperate poverty and real famine followed. Multiply this by the creative crisis that Kharms was experiencing then! However, this crisis was somehow strange. It’s not that there hasn’t been any writing at all: the poems have dried up. But prose texts appeared quite often. Actually, it was a crisis of “perestroika” - a crisis of creative maturation and departure into new genres.
And the clouds were gathering not only over Kharms. He acutely sensed the approaching military danger. Literally a few days before a possible conscription to the front (on November 30, , the war with the “Finnish booger” began), he managed to get a white ticket. To do this, Kharms had to pretend to have a mental disorder.
The writer understood his incompatibility with military service. “In prison you can remain yourself, but in the barracks you can’t, it’s impossible,” he repeated (p. ).
12 days before the start of the Great Patriotic War, Daniil Kharms writes his last and most cruel story, “Rehabilitation.” This is perhaps the first and certainly brilliant example of black humor in Russian:
“Without bragging, I can say that when Volodya hit me on the ear and spat on my forehead, I grabbed him so much that he won’t forget it. Later I hit him with a Primus stove, and I hit him with an iron in the evening. So he didn’t die right away. And I killed Andryusha simply out of inertia, and I cannot blame myself for this I am accused of bloodthirstiness, they say that I drank blood, but this is not true. I licked up the blood puddles and stains - this is the natural need of a person to destroy traces of his, even trifling, crime. And also I did not rape Elizaveta Antonovna. Firstly, she was no longer a girl, and secondly, I was dealing with a corpse, and she doesn’t have to complain Thus, I understand the fears of my defender, but still I hope for a complete acquittal” (pp. – ).
You can laugh, of course. But, perhaps, expanding the framework of what is accepted in our literature in such an unusual way at that time, Kharms also prophesied a bloody mess, the specter of which was already hanging over his contemporaries and would become a reality for them in less than 2 weeks?..
Kharms also foresaw the hour of his arrest. On August 23, , he was “captured” by NKVD officers from his apartment. The fact that D.I., recognized as mentally ill, Yuvachev-Kharms came to their attention - the “merit” of the informant. She reported to the “authorities” about the writer’s critical statements about the Soviet government. Now we know this lady's name. Her name was Antonina Oranzhireeva (née Rosen). In the post-war years, she will become a “mother hen” under Anna Akhmatova, and she, too, will not unravel this creation. When Anta Oranzhireeva died in , Akhmatova dedicated poems to her memory:
In memory of Anta
Even if it’s from another series
I see a smile from clear eyes,
And she “died” so pitifully
To the nickname dear,
It's like the first time
I heard him
By the grace of dear Anta, Kharms was brought to the investigation. In December , he was placed in the psychiatric ward of the prison hospital at Kresty. On February 2, , at the most brutal time for the siege survivors, Kharms passed away.
The fate of his widow is amazing. From the blockade, Marina Malich ended up in evacuation, from it - into occupation, and from there - into emigration. In France, she finally met her mother, who abandoned her as a child. No moral obligations bound Marina to her parent, and Malich married her husband, her stepfather Vysheslavtsev. Then she moved with him to Venezuela, where her third (after Kharms and Vysheslavtsev) husband was a representative of the old noble family, Yu. Durnovo (however, Malich’s grandmother was from the Golitsyns). In , her son moved her to the USA, where Marina Malich died in at the age of Fate confirmed to her the correctness of the words of Daniil Kharms, who once said that there are more miracles in the world than she thinks.
Unfortunately, the only miracle in the fate of Kharms himself was his creativity
Like any genre, biography has its limitations. Outside the scope of Kobrinsky’s book, the broader context of world and domestic literature remains, in which Kharms’s work takes on additional significance. Although, remaining on a purely biographical level, Kobrinsky speaks in some detail about the complex convergences and divergences of the Oberiuts with the greatest poets of that time, V. Mayakovsky and B. Pasternak, with the philologists B. Eikhenbaum and V. Shklovsky. But nothing is said at all about Kharms’s influence on domestic writers of the postmodern generation, because here the matter was not limited to “Kharmsyaty” alone, as a certain literary authority called his later unlucky epigones.
Of course, such research is more suitable for scientific research. But Kharms’s work is still so alive and important for our contemporaries, so original (and sometimes the very fact of his influence gives rise to controversy) that it was hardly worth passing over in silence.
And yet, overall, a convincing and interesting portrait of a remarkable writer has been created in the frame of his era. Thanks to this book, Daniil Kharms becomes for the general reader not a name or a myth, but a living person. And this is the main point.
Valery Bondarenko
Bologov P.
Daniil Kharms. Experience in pathographic analysis
To the remark: “You wrote it wrong,” respond:
This is what my writing always looks like.”
From the diary entries of D. Kharms
Pathography, as part of clinical and social psychiatry, as well as its history, is simultaneously a special methodological technique for studying outstanding personalities, with the study of illness (or personality anomalies) and assessment of the activity (creativity in the broadest sense of the word) of a given subject in a specific sociocultural situation.
In this regard, it seems possible to discuss certain distinctive features of the work of Daniil Kharms () in the light of his biography (psychopathological characteristics and human fate).
From biographical information about the writer’s heredity, it is known that Kharms’ mother (a teacher by training) worked in a correctional institution for women, where she lived with her son for about ten years, which is why one of the biographers wrote about Kharms: “Having been born next to the prison, he died in prison " The mother was distinguished by a strong-willed, assertive character, but at the same time she was uncommunicative, quite formal and tough, stingy in expressing feelings. Apparently there was no trusting, warm relationship with his son. The writer's diary entries are replete with the names of aunts and other relatives, but we do not find any mention of his mother in them. In an autobiographical sketch (“Now I’ll tell you how I was born”), Kharms, in his characteristic grotesque and absurd form, reports that “ turned out to be a premature baby and was born four months premature the midwife began to push me back from where I had just crawled out. ”, then it turns out that he was “stuffed in a hurry in the wrong place,” and he was born a second time after his mother was given a laxative. Thus, the mother becomes an object of ridicule, and the author himself, identifying himself with excrement, demonstrates an extreme degree of self-deprecation with a touch of emotional flaw, recreating the life scenario of a loser who was not born like everyone else and could not realize himself in life. On the other hand, this “metaphor” can be seen as a confirmation of alienation from the mother, who remains static and indifferent during the events, not showing interest in which way her child will be born. It can be assumed that Kharms is trying to take revenge on his mother, devaluing her image, and then, as if punishing himself for disrespect for the maternal figure, he associates himself with impurities. This assumption, being purely hypothetical, aims to show a combination of traits of vulnerability and sensitivity in Kharms’s personal structure with elements of emotional flattening and regressive syntony of the “wood and glass” type. This key characterological feature of the writer, called “psychaesthetic proportion,” left an imprint on his entire work and largely predetermined his originality.
The writer's father (Ivan Yuvachev) in his youth joined the People's Will organization, but was almost immediately arrested. While in the casemate of the Shlisselburg fortress, he experiences a remarkable transformation of his worldview: from a convinced socialist and atheist, he turned into a fanatical religious person. Many of the prisoners who sat with him spoke about his “religious insanity” and that he should have been transferred from the fortress to a monastery. Soon Kharms’s father was sent into exile to Sakhalin, where he met with A.P. Chekhov, who called him in his notes “a remarkably hardworking and kind person.” Upon returning to St. Petersburg, I. Yuvachev became an Orthodox preacher, publishing about 10 books of soul-saving content under the pseudonym “Mirolyubov.” The son listened to his father and kept his instructions, copied from the sacred books. Later, he himself, already a writer, began to compose moralizing parables. But in Kharms’s instructions, the didactics were confused, inverted, pretentious: “a completely normal professor is sitting on a bed in a madhouse, holding a fishing rod in her hands and catching some invisible fish on the floor. This professor is just a pitiful example of how many unfortunates there are in life who do not occupy the place in life that they should occupy,” or “one man from a young age to a very old age always slept on his back with his arms crossed. He eventually died. Therefore, don’t sleep on your side.” Kharms's anti-didacticism is caricatured and rejects the existence of universal human commandments and foundations. This reveals not only a desire to avoid moralizing, but also a bitter parody of the morals of the writer’s contemporary society and even pain for a dying person. The father did not understand and did not approve of his son’s creativity, but despite this, he remained an authority for Kharms throughout his short life - “Yesterday dad told me that as long as I am Kharms, I will be haunted by needs. Daniel Charms." His father's ideological inconsistency, categoricalness and ambition, the desire for opposition, and in recent years, paradoxical religiosity were inherited by the writer and played an important role in his sad fate.
Little Daniil Yuvachev had many talents. He had an absolute ear for music, sang well, played the horn, drew a lot, was smart, resourceful, and prone to mischief. Since childhood, he had an irrepressible imagination, and was almost always able to convince his peers of the reality of his inventions. While studying at a Lutheran gymnasium, he perfectly mastered the German and English languages. At the same time, he not only read foreign poetry exclusively in originals, but also had impeccable pronunciation. Already in the gymnasium, Daniil's passion for theatrical hoaxes and extravagant pranks manifested itself. He created a system of behavior thought out to the smallest detail - from clothing to poetic spells and masks - pseudonyms. He seriously convinced the teacher not to give him a bad grade - “not to offend the orphan,” he “settled” his imaginary, dearly beloved “muterchen” under the stairs of the house, and started long conversations with her in the presence of amazed neighbors. He climbed a tree and could sit among the branches for hours, writing something in a book. These examples show that, despite his clearly expressed demonstrativeism and extravagance, Kharms was driven not so much by the desire to impress as to realize his autistic and narcissistic fantasies. Already in adolescence, due to strange behavior, conflicts with society begin: at the age of 19, Yuvachev was expelled from the electrical engineering school; he was unable to receive either a higher or secondary specialized education. “Several accusations fell on me, for which I must leave the technical school). Inactivity in public works 2). I don’t fit the class physiologically” - thus, schizoid personal dynamics introduce disharmony into relationships with others, which Kharms himself is aware of. In his youth, he engaged in self-education a lot and intensively, with the help of which he achieved significant results. The range of his interests is difficult to limit: along with the works of literary classics - the works of ancient and modern philosophers; sacred texts of Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism, treatises of mystical and occult content, interspersed with numerous books on psychiatry and sexopathology. Gradually, a literary space is outlined with which Kharms’ texts will subsequently be associated (with reminiscences, quotes, motifs): A. Bely, V. Blake, K. Hamsun, N. Gogol, E.-T.-A. Hoffman, G. Meyrink, K. Prutkov. He also involves philosophers in the context of his work: Aristotle, Pythagoras, Plato, I. Kant, A. Bergson, Z. Freud. In his free time from reading and writing, young Kharms continues to “get weird”: he smokes a pipe of some unusual shape, wears a top hat and leggings, translates NEP songs into German and taps a tap dance to them, invents a bride for himself - a ballerina, etc. In , Yuvachev’s most famous pseudonym, Daniil Kharms, appeared. In general, Daniil Ivanovich had about 30 pseudonyms, and he playfully changed them: Kharms, Haarms, Dandan, Charms, Karl Ivanovich Shusterling, Harmonius, Shardam, etc. However, it was “Kharms” with its ambivalence (from the French Charm - charm , charm and from the English Harm - harm) most accurately reflected the essence of the writer’s attitude to life and creativity: he knew how to ironize the most serious things and find very sad moments in the funny. Exactly the same ambivalence was characteristic of the personality of Kharms himself: his focus on the game, hoaxes were combined with painful suspiciousness, the illogicality of the inner world was transferred to the world around him, magical thinking predetermined the external meaning of the pseudonym - Daniil the Magician - a man confident in his parapsychic and supernatural abilities (“to ignite trouble around oneself”), bringing misfortune to those he loves. Kharms's literary activity began in He was a member of the association of poets - "plane trees", then - "zaumniks", performed on the stage with his poems, and the public often perceived his semantic and formal poetic experiments very ambiguously. Scandals often broke out, so in , Kharms refused to read in front of an audience, comparing it either to a stable or to a brothel. Despite the fact that by that time he was already a member of the union of poets, there were hardly any illusions about the lifetime publication of his “adult” works. The early poetry of Daniil Kharms consists of separate, sometimes unrelated phrases, and neologisms fill the entire possible semantic spectrum:
Once the grandmother waved
And immediately the locomotive
He handed it to the children and said:
Drink porridge and chest
Everything will overtake esteg:
There are both gooks and snow
And you, aunt, are not weak,
You're a mikuka na hil.
The use of alogisms and semantic discontinuity as linguistic experiments was widely used by formal literary schools of the beginning of the century, especially by futurists (D. Burlyuk, A. Kruchenykh, V. Khlebnikov). However, in the case of Kharms, we are not dealing with experimentation (which had long gone out of fashion by that time), but with a self-sufficient creative method.
The themes of the poems (in which one can grasp at least some meaning) contain hints of one’s own exclusivity, not in terms of self-affirmation, so characteristic of young poetic talents, but in terms of hostility to all kinds of common maxims and templates:
I am a genius of fiery speeches.
I am the master of free thoughts.
I am the king of meaningless beauties.
I am the God of the vanished heights.
I am a stream of bright joy.
When I cast my gaze into the crowd,
The crowd freezes like a bird.
And around me, like around a pillar,
There is a silent crowd.
And I sweep the crowd away like trash.
Kharms's scandalous reputation was supported not only by his unusual creative style, which will be discussed below, but also by his extravagant antics and manners, as well as his pretentious appearance. Trying to distinguish himself from the bulk of citizens who joined the struggle for the industrialization of the country, Kharms appeared in public places “in a long checkered frock coat and a round cap, striking with his refined politeness, which was further emphasized by the dog depicted on his left cheek.” “Sometimes, for reasons also mysterious, he would bandage his forehead with a narrow black velvet cloth. So I walked, obeying internal laws.” One of Kharms’s inventions was the “invention” of a brother for himself, who was supposedly a private assistant professor at St. Petersburg University, a grouch and a snob. He imitated the manners of this “brother”. So, when going to a cafe, he took silver cups with him, pulled them out of his suitcase and drank only from his own dishes. When he went to the theater, he put on a fake mustache, declaring that it was “indecent for a man to go to the theater without a mustache.” While reading from the stage, he put a silk teapot cap on his head, carried a monocle-ball in the shape of a goggle-eyed eye, and loved to walk along the railings and cornices. At the same time, people who knew Kharms closely enough noted that his eccentricities and oddities somehow surprisingly harmoniously complemented his unique creativity. However, in general, Kharms’s appearance and behavior aroused distrust and rejection from others, was perceived as a mockery or even a mockery of public opinion, sometimes there were direct clashes with government officials: he was mistaken for a spy, and acquaintances had to verify his identity. Shocking behavior, which is often part of the image of a creative person, in this case was completely disharmonious with the social environment and public attitudes. It can be summarized that despite the thickening political atmosphere, Kharms’ behavior was dictated by internal, inexplicable motives, without taking into account realities. The writer’s personal life was just as chaotic and absurd. At a fairly young age, he married a year-old girl, from a family of French immigrants, who barely spoke Russian and was completely alien to the interests with which Kharms lived, and was also far from his social circle. Several of Kharms' poems dedicated to his wife are written ranging from pathetic inspiration, tender passion, to vulgar pornography. In the diary entries, there is a motif of misunderstanding and growing alienation in family relationships, tenderness is mixed with disgust, jealousy is combined with some kind of obsessive and monotonous flirting with random women. Increasing ambivalence of feelings and dissociation of emotions, combined with everyday unsettledness, made a break in relations with his wife inevitable.
In our country, for a long time, Kharms was known primarily as a children's writer. K. Chukovsky and S. Marshak highly valued this hypostasis of his work, and even to some extent considered Kharms the forerunner of children's literature. The transition to creativity for children (and the phenomenal success among the children's readership) was due not only to forced external circumstances, but most of all to the fact that children's thinking, not bound by the usual logical schemes, is more prone to the perception of free and arbitrary associations. Kharms’s neologisms are also infantile and resemble words distorted by a child or conscious agrammatisms (“skask”, “song”, “shchekalatka”, “valenki”, “sabachka”, “matylek”, etc.).
At the same time, Kharms’s attitude towards children was very characteristic: “I don’t like children, old men and women Poisoning children is cruel. But something needs to be done with them, right?” The writer from the story “The Old Woman” categorically states: “Children are disgusting.” Kharms himself explained his dislike for children in a delusional manner: “All things are arranged around me in certain forms. But some forms are missing. For example, there are no forms of the sounds that children make when they scream or play. That's why I don't like children." The theme of “dislike for children” runs through many of Kharms’ works. The reasons for this phenomenon must be sought in the childhood of the writer himself; apparently, Kharms cannot accept his childhood image, due to some unpleasant memories and associations, and transfers his hostility to children in general. A contemporary recalls: “Kharms hated children and was proud of it. Yes, that suited him. Defined some side of his being. He was, of course, the last of his kind. From there, the offspring would have gone absolutely horribly.”
Who made up Kharms’ social circle, besides his fellow writers? Among the people around him, eccentrics and mentally ill people predominated (as he called them - “natural thinkers”); what he valued most in people were such qualities as illogicality and independence of thinking, “crazyness”, freedom from inert traditions and vulgar stereotypes in life and in art. “I’m only interested in ‘nonsense’; only that which has no practical meaning. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestation. Heroism, pathos, prowess, morality, hygiene, morality, tenderness and passion are words and feelings that I hate. But I fully understand and respect: delight and admiration, inspiration and despair, passion and restraint, debauchery and chastity, sadness and grief, joy and laughter.” “Any muzzle of a prudent style gives me an unpleasant feeling.” Kharms, thus, proclaims the spontaneity and immediacy of feelings, without their logical interpretation and any internal censorship. This ideological approach explains the exaggerated “childishness” in the behavior and creativity of the writer. This literary style, close in its principles to European “Dadaism,” formed the basis of the OBERIU (“Union of Real Art”) group created in by Kharms and like-minded people. The organized performances and literary evenings were held with elements of clownery and shocking: participants read their works sitting on cabinets, rode around the stage on children's bicycles along all sorts of trajectories outlined in chalk, hung up posters with absurd content: “the steps of mime kvass were walking,” “we are not pies” etc. OBERIU categorically did not fit into the literary process of the era of socialist construction and impending totalitarianism. The association existed for about 3 years, its members were branded in the press as “literary hooligans,” their performances were banned, and their works were never published. Kharms's play “Elizabeth Bam” () is an example of the ability to escape from the patterns of philistine thinking, to consider phenomena from unexpected angles, partly due to a disturbed perception of the environment. It was during these years that Kharms’ unique creative style was finally formed, which can be called a total inversion. The principle of this style is a general change of sign: life, everything this-worldly, nature, miracle, science, history, personality - a false reality; the otherworldly, death, non-existence, inanimate, impersonal - true reality. Hence the inconsistency and drama of the texts, with a shift in meaning and emphasis in the opposite direction from logic - towards intuition. J. Lacan, a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, studying the psychogenesis of mental disorders, paid special attention to structural and linguistic disorders in the mentally ill. To some extent, his descriptions may help explain the uniqueness of Kharms’ creative style: a combination of alogism -
I saw peas in a dream.
In the morning I got up and suddenly died.
and semantic aphasia -
Hey monks! We're flying!
We fly and fly THERE.
Hey monks! We're calling!
We call and THERE ring.
By , Kharms, against the background of external unfavorable factors (family discord, social ostracism, material need), experienced periods of clearly depressed mood, with the presence of ideas of self-deprecation, conviction of his own mediocrity and fatal bad luck. Due to his penchant for neologisms, Kharms gave his melancholy a feminine name: “Ignavia.” Kharms stubbornly hides his affectivity and sensitivity behind an autistic façade. Thus, Kharms' personality can be clinically viewed as psychopathic. In the structure of the personality, both narcissistic and hysterical (“liars and cheats”, “eccentrics and originals” according to E. Bleuler) and psychasthenic traits are visible, which allows us to classify this psychopathy as a circle of “mosaic” schizoids. However, the absence of signs of stabilization and compensation of psychopathy, the inability to adapt to life and find one’s social niche by adulthood, as well as the increase in autism with an even greater separation from reality, allows us to talk about signs of a latent schizophrenic process. The game of being a person who commits extravagant and mysterious acts gradually ceased to be a game and became the core of Kharms’ personality. We are talking about the “amalgamation” of acquired psychopathic traits with the schizoid core of personality, which also speaks in favor of the endogeneity of the process. The personal dynamics done by Kharms thus fits within the framework of pseudopsychopathy and has signs of process. Rough demonstrativeism is combined with autistic thinking and increased vulnerability; affective disorders become more and more atypical over time: in depression, signs of monoideism and dysphoria predominate, and hypomania is accompanied by foolish affect and disinhibition of drives. Thanks to his penchant for introspection and introspection, from Kharms’s diary entries we learn about episodes of dromomania; in some autobiographical literary passages and sketches, subpsychotic experiences are described (“About how messengers visited me,” “Morning,” “Sabre”). Some stories and letters can serve as examples of thinking disorders of the schizophrenic type (thought breaks, slippages, perseverations, symbolic writing). At the same time, it is necessary to separate the formal writing style, which could change over time, from the general style of Kharms’s work, which fully reflects all facets of his personality. An indirect sign confirming the presence of progression of the disease is some impoverishment and dimming of bright psychopath-like symptoms over time and the dominance of stable traits of eccentricity, pretentiousness and emotional flattening - post-processual states of the “verschrobene” type.
In the last days of , Kharms was arrested on a false denunciation. He spent about six months in an NKVD prison, then was exiled to Kursk. In prison and exile, Kharms was even more unable to adapt to his surroundings. For violating the prison regime, he was repeatedly transferred to the isolation ward. Prison had a devastating effect on the personality of the impressionable writer. In Kursk, he made the following characteristic diary entries: “ A dog’s fear comes over me From fear, my heart begins to tremble, my legs get cold and fear grabs the back of my head Then you will lose the ability to note your states, and you will go crazy.” “Kursk is a very unpleasant city. I prefer DPZ. Here, among all the locals, I am considered an idiot. On the street they always say something after me. That’s why I sit in my room almost all the time” In the fall of , Kharms returned to Leningrad. Restless, unadapted (“I’m all some kind of special loser”), starving, he nevertheless unsuccessfully tried to live only by literary work. He didn’t want to earn extra money “on the side,” or simply couldn’t.
This is how hunger begins:
In the morning you wake up cheerful,
Then weakness begins
Then boredom sets in;
Then comes the loss
Quick mind strength, -
Then calm comes,
And then the horror begins.
Kharms hides his literary work from others, with amazing tenacity he refuses to make his work public and writes “on the table.” During these years, the proportion of prose increased, and the leading genre became the story. The volume of what Kharms wrote is relatively small and can fit in one volume. Considering that the duration of his work was about 15 years, one could talk about reduced creative performance. Kharms himself calls the period since a period of “decline.” But it was precisely at this time that his spiritual and creative maturity began, the story “The Old Woman” and the most popular cycle of stories “Cases” were created. Kharms’s prose is no longer based on formal experiments and neologisms, but on the absurdity and surprise of the plot, which creates a strong emotional effect:
“Writer: I am a writer.
Reader: In my opinion, you are a go!
The writer stands for several minutes shocked by this new idea and falls dead. They take him out."
In recent years, Kharms's worldview has shifted to a darker side. The style of the narrative also changes somewhat: semantic and semantic aphasia is replaced by moral aphasia. When describing expressive disorders in people with schizophrenia, a violation of syllogical structures is noted: the schizophrenic uses forms that play with the identity of the predicates, such as in Kharms: “Mashkin strangled Koshkin.” The number of non-standard metaphors is increasing, the plots are deliberately schematic, formalized, which is a characteristic feature of the autistic writing style (an analogy can be drawn with the late Gogol or Strindberg). At the same time, the tendency to abstract and paradoxical reasoning, abstract moralizing and reasoning increases. The acting characters are impersonal, mechanically caricatured, their actions are devoid of internal logic, psychologically inexplicable and inadequate. One gets the impression of a universal Bedlam, subject to the bizarre twists of the writer’s thought, fatal and chaotic: “One day Orlov ate too much crushed peas and died. And Krylov, having learned about this, also died. And Spiridonov died of his own accord. And Spiridonov’s wife fell from the buffet and also died. And Spiridonov’s children drowned in the pond. And Spiridonova’s grandmother got drunk and went on the roads" The tragedy of the stories intensifies to a feeling of complete hopelessness, inevitably approaching madness, the humor takes on a sinister, black character. The heroes of the stories sophisticatedly maim and kill each other, elements of harsh reality woven into a grotesquely absurd form Kharms’s narrative no longer evokes laughter, but horror and disgust (“The Fall,” “Education,” “Knights,” “Interference,” “Rehabilitation,” etc.).
Being married for the second time, Kharms realizes his powerlessness to change external circumstances, acutely feels his guilt before his wife, who was forced to share with him a miserable, half-starved existence. Characteristic entries appear more and more often in the diaries: “I have become completely stupid. This is scary. Complete impotence in every senseI had reached a huge fall. I have completely lost my ability to workI am a living corpseOur affairs have become even worseWe are starvingI can’t do anything. I don’t want to live God, send us death quickly,” and finally - “God, now I have one single request to you: destroy me, break me completely, throw me into hell, don’t stop me halfway, but deprive me of hope and quickly destroy me forever and ever.”
We died in the field of life.
There is no hope anymore.
The dream of happiness is over.
All that was left was poverty.
At the end of the thirties, Kharms’s lifestyle and behavior remained just as extravagant, although there was no longer any need to shock the public. One can assume an increase in autism with a lack of criticism and an elementary instinct of self-preservation, the presence of an emotional decline, which led to an increase in unpredictable impulsiveness and inappropriate behavior. Diary entry from “I went naked to the window. Opposite in the house, apparently, someone was indignant, I think it was a sailor. A policeman, a janitor and someone else burst into my room. They stated that I had been disturbing the residents in the house opposite for three years. I hung the curtains. What is more pleasing to the eye: an old woman in only a shirt or a young man completely naked.” In , Kharms finally came to the attention of not only law enforcement agencies, but also psychiatrists. He is admitted to a psychiatric hospital for treatment and after discharge receives a certificate of schizophrenia. One can hardly agree with those biographers who believe that Kharms’ mental illness was “another artistic hoax,” a simulation in order to obtain a “safe conduct letter” that could save him from re-arrest. For many artists, of course, illness was one of the few means that allowed them to hide from a world that was not too friendly to them. In the case of Kharms, if anything can be assumed, it is only an aggravation of the current mental disorder.
In the summer of , Kharms was issued a second disability group, but soon on August 23, , a second arrest occurred: after the start of the war, NKVD officers “cleaned” the city. The official accusation charged the writer with “defeatist sentiments.” The only surviving photograph from the court case shows an emaciated man with disheveled hair, with an expression of extreme horror and despair in his eyes. Based on the forensic psychiatric examination, Kharms, as a mentally ill person, is released from criminal liability and sent for compulsory treatment to the psychiatric department of the hospital at the transfer prison, where he dies a few months later in a state of complete degeneration.
The tragedy of Kharms as an artist and as a person was not his illness. “Daniil Ivanovichmastered his madness, knew how to direct it and put it at the service of his art.” It is difficult to say whether Kharms felt complete satisfaction from his writing, whether he was able to “look at writing as a holiday.” Apparently, it is unlikely, but the very possibility of creative self-expression should have helped him stabilize his mental state and contributed to a more favorable course of the disease. The main problem was that Kharms turned out to be a pathological-sounding key on the keyboard of his time; his sound was dissonant, fell out of the general melody, but was not false. He sounded as only he could sound due to the peculiarities of his personality, fortunately for Russian literature and unfortunately for himself. Kharms existed and created in the world of his own surreal poetic scheme, which for him was higher than reality. The fate of such creators in a totalitarian era was non-recognition and death, so the fate of Kharms was shared by many of his closest literary friends. The avant-garde, in demand in the era of revolutionary changes and disruption of social consciousness (example: V. Khlebnikov), became unnecessary and dangerous when universal equality of slogans and opinions was required.
The rise of avant-garde literature in liberal Western countries confirms the role of the social factor in the acceptance of new cultural phenomena. Kharms anticipated his time, E. Ionesco and S. Beckett received the laurels of “fathers of the absurd”. F. Kafka, a writer in many ways similar to Kharms, if not in form, then in terms of plot issues, received loud recognition already during his lifetime, and then was completely “canonized” as a classic of psychological prose (both Kafka and the above-mentioned Khlebnikov suffered from the same mental illness, like Kharms).
While not yet widely known in his homeland (with the exception of children's poems), Kharms's work gained many fans in the West. A large number of literary and linguistic works were written.
In Russia, the disgraced and forgotten Kharms was published in photocopies, mixed with many forgeries and imitations. A. Galich dedicated the touching “Ballad of Tobacco” to his memory. L. Petrushevskaya and D. Prigov continued the traditions of Kharms in prose and poetic forms, his name became iconic in the youth mainstream. During the era of democratic changes in Russia, numerous imitators appeared, trying to copy Kharms’s style. However, none of the imitators managed to come close to Kharms’s style of writing, which is explained by the impossibility of complete empathy and artificial reconstruction of the inner world, the “thought creativity” of a person suffering from schizophrenia, who also has an original talent.
Today Kharms is one of the most published and read authors in Russia. His talent has stood the test of time, his creativity has returned to us from oblivion and oblivion. The eternal dilemma of “genius and madness” again points to how non-standard individuals, holy fools and the mentally ill, persecuted and executed, are the true drivers of our culture. Unfortunately, progress comes at a high price.
In conclusion, here are the lines of a poem that Kharms dedicated to his friend, the poet N. Oleinikov, who was executed in These lines can also be addressed to the author himself:
Your poem sometimes makes me laugh, sometimes it worries me,
Sometimes it saddens the ear, or doesn’t make me laugh at all,
He even makes you angry sometimes, and there is little art in him,
And he is in a hurry to plunge into the abyss of small matters.
Wait! Come back! Where with a cold thought
Are you flying, forgetting the law of visions of oncoming crowds?
Whom on the road did he pierce in the chest with a gloomy arrow?
Who is your enemy? Who is a friend? And where is your death pillar?
References
Alexandrov A. “Truthful writer of the absurd.” - In the book: D.I. Kharms. Prose. Leningrad - Tallinn: Agency "Lira", , p
Alexandrov A. Chudodey. Personality and creativity of Daniil Kharms. - In the book: D. Kharms. Flight to the skies. Poetry. Prose. Drama. Letters. L.: “Soviet Writer”, , pp. 7 -
J.-F. Jacquard. Daniil Kharms and the end of the Russian avant-garde. St. Petersburg,
Kobrinsky A., Ustinov A. “I participate in a gloomy life.” Comments. _ In the book: D. Kharms. The throat feels like a razor. “Verb”, N4, , p. and -
Petrov V. Daniil Kharms. _ V. book: Panorama of Arts. Vol. Sat. articles and publications. M.: “Soviet Artist”, , pp. -
Kharms D. Circus Shardam: a collection of works of art. - St. Petersburg: LLC Publishing House "Crystal", - p.
Schwartz E. “I live restlessly” From the diaries. L.: “Soviet writer”,
Shuvalov A. Pathographic essay about Daniil Kharms. - Independent Psychiatric Journal, N2, , pp. 74 -
Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd: Essays and Materials / Ed. by N/ Cornwell. London,
original at:
The Leningrad Press House was excited by the performance of young shocking writers calling themselves Oberiuts. They recited poems written in abstruse ways, staged the absurdist “Elizabeth Bam,” and to top it all off, they showed the world a montage film with the promising title “Meat Grinder.” The main one among the Oberiuts was Daniil Kharms, whose biography became the topic of this article.
The future poet was born on December 30, The penchant for writing was passed on to Daniil genetically: his father, who corresponded with Chekhov and Tolstoy, was known not only for his revolutionary activities, but also for his attempts at writing, and his mother was a noblewoman by birth and was in charge of an orphanage. A short biography of Daniil Kharms includes mention of his brilliant education at a privileged German school. After the revolution, he was enrolled in the Leningrad Electrical Technical School, from where he was expelled with the wording “poor attendance” and inactivity in public works.”
When did Daniil Ivanovich Kharms, whose biography became the subject of many studies, change his surname Yuvachev and finally believe in his talent as a writer? The first use of the pseudonym occurred in the early s. They tried to find the answer to the surname “Kharms” (as well as its many variants, including Kharms, Haarms and Karl Ivanovich, who came from nowhere) in numerous dialects. The analogies with the English and French languages should be considered the most plausible. If in the first harm is “harm,” then in the second a similar word means charm, attractiveness.
Around then, Kharms wrote his first poetic works. As a guide, he chooses Khlebnikov, or rather, his close admirer A. Tufanov. Subsequently, the “Order of Brainiacs” will be replenished with such a talented poet as Daniil Kharms. His biography also shows that in he joined the All-Russian Union of Poets, from which he was expelled due to non-payment of fees.
In the first half of the 20s, Kharms met Vvedensky and Druskin, who were the founders of the “plane tree” circle. Subsequently, Daniil will also join there, deciding to unite all the “left” writers under one name, one group - OBERIU. This complex abbreviation stands for “Union of Real Art”. Interestingly, in the group’s manifesto, published in , the Oberiuts declared the Zaumi school to be the most hostile to themselves. Kharms renounced the destruction of words, the usual game of nonsense. The goal of their group was global in nature and projected onto the world around them. The Oberiuts sought to clear the subject of “literary husk” and make its perception more real. This applies both to his clearly avant-garde experiments (the poems “The Evil Assembly of Infidels”, “I Sang ”), and to works of a humorous nature.
Kharms also explains the phenomenon of absurdity in prose miniatures like “Blue Notebook No. 10,” “Sonnet,” and “Old Women Falling Out.” In his opinion, the logic of art should be different from everyday logic. As an example, Kharms cites a case where the artist, contrary to anatomical laws, slightly twisted the main character’s shoulder blade, which, however, does not prevent us, the audience, from admiring the beauty of the depicted nature. Daniel also created dramatic works (for example, the above-mentioned “Elizabeth Bam”), which easily fit into the context of the experiences of the rest of the Oberiuts.
How did the biography of Daniil Kharms develop further? He began writing for children in the late 20s, collaborating with a number of magazines. Other members of OBERIU also worked there, however, unlike them, Kharms took his current job responsibly, which, as fate would have it, became his only source of income. The poet’s poems and puzzles were published in magazines, and he published a number of books (“Firstly and Secondly,” “The Game,” etc.). Some of them were banned or not recommended for public libraries, others were especially loved among young readers.
This period became especially difficult for writers who did not want to put their talent on the conveyor belt. Daniil Kharms was one of them. The biography (autobiography, more precisely) of those times is captured in the sad lines of the poem “On visits to the writer’s house”. The poet discovers with surprise and indignation that his acquaintances have turned their backs on him, a writer who has fallen out of favor. Kharms's first arrest took place in December Formally, the verdict concerned the poet’s activities in the field, although the real reason for the arrest was related to OBERIU. Apparently, the Soviet government could not forgive him for the shocking, somewhat scandalous antics that characterize avant-garde art - as Daniil Kharms understood it. The poet's biography in the 30s is distinguished by an ideological crisis and constant material deprivation. However, his second wife, Marina Malich, who remained with the poet until the end of his life, helped him cope with them.
The war has begun. Kharms met it with defeatist sentiments and unwillingness to participate in it, for which he was arrested a second time. In order to avoid execution, Kharms feigned madness. He was placed in a psychiatric hospital, where he died during the terrible events of the siege of Leningrad. This is how Daniil Kharms graduated, whose biography and creative heritage are now of significant interest.
Daniil Kharms. Poems for children
Widely known as a children's writer and author of satirical prose. From to . he constantly collaborates in children's magazines Hedgehog, Chizh, Sverchok, Oktyabryata. Kharms publishes about 20 children's books. Poems and prose for children provide a unique outlet for Kharms’s playful element, but they were written solely for earning money and the author did not attach much importance to them. The attitude of official party criticism towards them was clearly negative. In our country for a long time Kharms was known primarily as a children's writer. K. Chukovsky and S. Marshak highly valued this hypostasis of his work, and even to some extent considered Kharms the forerunner of children's literature. The transition to creativity for children (and the phenomenal success among the children's readership) was due not only to forced external circumstances, but most of all to the fact that children's thinking, not bound by the usual logical schemes, is more prone to the perception of free and arbitrary associations. Kharms’s neologisms resemble words distorted by a child or deliberate agrammatisms (“skask”, “song”, “shchekalatka”, “valenki”, “sabachka”, etc.).
Biography
KHARMS, DANIIL IVANOVICH (real name Yuvachev) (−), Russian poet, prose writer, playwright. Born on December 17 (30), in St. Petersburg. His father, who was a naval officer brought to trial in for complicity in Narodnaya Volya terror, spent four years in solitary confinement and more than ten years in hard labor, where, apparently, he experienced a religious conversion: along with the memoir books Eight Years on Sakhalin ( ) and Shlisselburg Fortress (), he published mystical treatises Between the World and the Monastery (), Secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven (), etc. Kharms’s mother, a noblewoman, was in charge of a shelter for former convict women in St. Petersburg in the s. Kharms studied at the St. Petersburg privileged German school (Peterschule), where he acquired a thorough knowledge of German and English. In he entered the Leningrad Electrical Technical College, from where a year later he was expelled for “poor attendance” and “inactivity in public works.” Since then, he devoted himself entirely to writing and lived exclusively from literary earnings. The diversified self-education that accompanied writing, with a special emphasis on philosophy and psychology, as evidenced by his diary, proceeded extremely intensively.
Initially, he felt in himself the “power of poetry” and chose poetry as his field, the concept of which was determined by him under the influence of the poet A. V. Tufanov (−), an admirer and successor of V. V. Khlebnikov, author of the book To Zaumi ( ) and the founder (in March ) of the Order of Zaumnikov, the core of which included Kharms, who took for himself the title “Look at the Zaumi.” Through Tufanov he became close to A. Vvedensky, a student of the more orthodox “Khlebnikovite” poet and admirer of A. Kruchenykh I.G. Terentyev (−), creator of a number of propaganda plays, including the “updating” stage adaptation of The Inspector General, parodied in The Twelve Chairs by I. Ilf and E. Petrov. Kharms had a strong friendship with Vvedensky, who, sometimes without any particular reason, took on the role of Kharms’ mentor. However, the direction of their creativity, related in terms of verbal searches, is fundamentally different from beginning to end: in Vvedensky a didactic attitude arises and remains, while in Kharms a playful one predominates. This is evidenced by his first known poetic texts: Kika with Koka, Vanka Vstanka, the grooms say the earth was invented and the poem Mikhail.
Vvedensky provided Kharms with a new circle of constant communication, introducing him to his friends L. Lipavsky and Ya. Druskin, graduates of the philosophical department of the Faculty of Social Sciences, who refused to renounce their teacher, the prominent Russian philosopher N. O. Lossky, expelled from the USSR in , and tried develop his ideas of self-worth of personality and intuitive knowledge. Their views certainly influenced Kharms’s worldview; for more than 15 years they were Kharms’s first listeners and connoisseurs; during the blockade, Druskin miraculously saved his works.
Back in , Vvedensky, Lipavsky and Druskin founded a triple alliance and began to call themselves “plane trees”; in they were joined by Kharms, who from “zira zaumi” became “plane-gazer” and quickly gained scandalous fame in the circles of avant-garde writers under his newly invented pseudonym, which became the plural of the English word “harm” - “misfortune”. Subsequently, he signed his works for children in other ways (Charms, Shardam, etc.), but never used his own surname. The pseudonym was also enshrined in the introductory questionnaire of the All-Russian Union of Poets, where Kharms was accepted in March on the basis of the submitted poetic works, two of which (An Incident on the Railway and Poem by Peter Yashkin, a communist) were published in the Union’s small-circulation collections. Apart from them, until the end of the s, only one “adult” work by Kharms was published in the USSR - the poem Maria Comes Out, Taking a Bow (Sat. Poetry Day, ).
As a member of the literary association, Kharms received the opportunity to read his poems, but took advantage of it only once, in October - other attempts were in vain. The playful beginning of his poems stimulated their dramatization and stage performance: in , together with Vvedensky, he prepared a synthetic performance of the avant-garde theater "Radix" My mother is all in a watch, but things did not go beyond rehearsals. Kharms met K. Malevich, and the head of Suprematism gave him his book God will not be thrown off with the inscription “Go and stop progress.” Kharms read his poem On the Death of Kazimir Malevich at a memorial service for the artist in Kharms’s attraction to dramatic form was expressed in the dialogization of many poems (Temptation, Paw, Revenge, etc.), as well as in the creation of the Comedy of the City of St. Petersburg and the first predominantly prose work - a play by Elizaveta Bam, presented on January 24, at the only evening of the “Union of Real Art” (OBERIU), which, in addition to Kharms and Vvedensky, included N. Zabolotsky, K. Vaginov and I. Bakhterev and which N. Oleinikov joined - with him Kharms developed a special closeness. The association was unstable, lasted less than three years (−), and Kharms’s active participation in it was rather external, and did not in any way affect his creative principles. The characterization given to him by Zabolotsky, the compiler of the OBERIU manifesto, is vague: “a poet and playwright whose attention is focused not on a static figure, but on the collision of a number of objects, on their relationships.” At the end of , Oleinikov and B. Zhitkov organized the “Association of Writers of Children’s Literature” and invited Kharms to it; from to he constantly collaborated in the children's magazines "Hedgehog", "Chizh", "Cricket" and "Oktyabryata", during which time he published about 20 children's books. These works are a natural offshoot of Kharms’s work and provide a kind of outlet for his playful element, but, as his diaries and letters testify, they were written solely for earning money (since the mids, more than meager) and the author did not attach much importance to them. They were published through the efforts of S. Ya. Marshak, the attitude of leading critics towards them, starting with the article in Pravda () Against hack work in children's literature, was unequivocal. This is probably why the pseudonym had to be constantly varied and changed. The Smena newspaper regarded his unpublished works in April as “the poetry of the class enemy”; the article became a harbinger of Kharms’ arrest at the end of , the qualification of his literary activities as “subversive work” and “counter-revolutionary activity” and exile to Kursk. In he managed to return to Leningrad. The nature of his work is changing: poetry fades into the background and fewer and fewer poems are written (the last completed poems date back to the beginning of ), while prose works (with the exception of the story The Old Woman, a creation of a small genre) multiply and become cyclical (Incidents, Scenes, etc. ). In place of the lyrical hero - an entertainer, ringleader, visionary and miracle worker - appears a deliberately naive narrator-observer, impartial to the point of cynicism. Fantasy and everyday grotesque reveal the cruel and delusional absurdity of “unattractive reality” (from diaries), and the effect of terrifying authenticity is created thanks to the scrupulous accuracy of details, gestures, and verbal facial expressions. In unison with the diary entries (“the days of my death have come,” etc.), the last stories (Knights, The Fall, Interference, Rehabilitation) are imbued with a feeling of complete hopelessness, the omnipotence of crazy tyranny, cruelty and vulgarity. In August , Kharms was arrested for “defeatist statements.” Kharms's works, even those published, remained in complete oblivion until the early s, when a collection of his carefully selected children's poems, Game (), was published. After this, for about 20 years they tried to give him the image of a cheerful eccentric, a mass entertainer for children, which was completely inconsistent with his “adult” works. Since , his collected works, prepared on the basis of saved manuscripts by M. Meilach and W. Erl, have been published in Germany. By the mids, Kharms firmly occupied the place of one of the main representatives of Russian literary literature of the –s, essentially opposed to Soviet literature. Kharms died in Leningrad on February 2, - in custody, from exhaustion.
Daniil Ivanovich Kharms (Yuvachev), (December 30, - February 2, ) - famous poet and prose writer, playwright and wonderful children's writer. He chose a pseudonym for himself very early and began writing early. He was an active participant in the Association of Real Art (OBERIU).r> Daniil Yuvachev was born in St. Petersburg into the family of Ivan Yuvachev, a revolutionary exiled to hard labor, and Nadezhda Yuvacheva. The parents were familiar with many famous writers at that time. p> – secondary school of the Main German School; – Children's and rural unified labor school; - Leningrad Electrical Technical School; - expulsion; March 5, - marriage to Esther Rusakova, Kharms dedicated many works and diary entries to her in the period from to The relationship was difficult, and in they divorced by mutual consent. - - actively collaborates with children's magazines, writes a lot of children's works, collaborates with Marshak; He has written more than 20 children's books. On July 16, , Kharms marries Marina Malich and does not part with her until the very end; August 23, - arrest (false accusation of spreading “slanderous and defeatist sentiments”) based on the denunciation of Antonina Oranzhireeva (NKVD agent); Psychiatric clinic "Crosses" - in order not to be shot, the writer feigns madness. p>
He was arrested for the second time and again sent to a psychiatric hospital.r> He died on February 2, from exhaustion during the terrible siege of Leningrad. p>
On July 25, , at the request of Kharms’ sister, his case was reviewed, he himself was found innocent and was rehabilitated, and his books were republished. p>
Today Kharms is called one of the most avant-garde, extraordinary and paradoxical writers of the 20th century. p>
Name: Daniil Kharms (Daniil Yuvachev)
Age: 36 years
Activity: poet, writer, playwright
Family status: was married
Daniil Ivanovich Kharms is a talented poet, a member of the creative association "OBERIU", but above all, readers associate Kharms as the author of children's literature. He gave girls and boys poems and stories that, after many years, became immortal. Such works include “The Amazing Cat”, “Liar”, “A Very Scary Story”, “Firstly and Secondly”, “A Man Came Out of the House”, “Old Woman”, etc.
Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev was born on December 17 (30), in the cultural capital of Russia - the city of St. Petersburg. The boy grew up and was brought up in an intelligent and wealthy family. His father Ivan Pavlovich also left a mark on history: initially he positioned himself as a revolutionary and a member of the people’s will, and miraculously avoiding the death penalty, changed his outlook on life and became a spiritual writer.
It is known that during a trip to Sakhalin, where he spent eight years in hard labor, Daniil Kharms’s father met, who made Yuvachev the prototype of a revolutionary in his work “The Story of an Unknown Man” (). The exile helped Yuvachev get rid of unceremonious moods, and, having survived all the hardships of fate, in Ivan Pavlovich returned to St. Petersburg, where he served in the inspectorate of the Savings Banks Administration, worked in the editorial office and was engaged in literary activities.
Yuvachev Sr. communicated not only with Chekhov, but also was in friendly correspondence with and. In , Ivan Pavlovich proposed marriage to Nadezhda Ivanovna Kolyubakina, who came from a noble family that settled in the Saratov province. She was in charge of the shelter and was known as a comforter to women who had been in captivity. And if Nadezhda Ivanovna raised her children in love, then Ivan Pavlovich adhered to strict rules regarding the behavior of his offspring. In addition to Daniel, the couple had a daughter, Elizabeth, and two other children died at an early age.
When the first seeds of revolution were growing on the territory of the Russian Empire, the future poet studied at the privileged German school “Die Realschule”, which was part of the “Petrishule” (the first educational institution founded in St. Petersburg in ). The main breadwinner in the house had a beneficial influence on his son: thanks to his father, Daniil began to study foreign languages (English and German), and also fell in love with scientific literature.
According to rumors, the son of Ivan Pavlovich studied well, but the little boy, like all children, was prone to pranks: in order to avoid punishment from teachers, Daniil sometimes acted out acting scenes, pretending to be an orphan. After receiving his matriculation certificate, the young man chose a down-to-earth path and entered the Leningrad Energy College. However, Kharms did not stay on the bench of this educational institution for long: the careless student never bothered to receive a diploma due to the fact that he often skipped classes and did not participate in community service.
After Daniil Yuvachev was expelled from the Leningrad Technical School, he began to engage in literary activities. Although, it is worth saying that he developed a love for creativity in his early years: as a schoolboy, he composed an interesting fairy tale, which he read to his four-year-old sister Natalia, whose early death was a shock for the future poet.
Daniil Ivanovich did not want to see himself as a prose writer and chose writing poetry as his field. But the first creative attempts of the aspiring poet resembled an incoherent stream of thought, and the young man’s father did not share his son’s literary passions, since he was an adherent of strict and classical literature in the person of Leo Tolstoy and.
In –, Daniil Yuvachev became Daniil Kharms. By the way, some writers are still struggling to unravel the mystery that shrouds the creative pseudonym assigned by the world-famous author of children's poems. According to rumors, the son of Ivan Pavlovich explained to a friend that his nickname comes from the English word “harm,” which translated into Russian means “harm.” However, there is an assumption that the word “Kharms” comes from the French “charme” - “charm, charm.”
Others believe that Daniel's nickname was inspired by his favorite character Sherlock Holmes from the books of Sir. They also used to say that the poet signed his passport with a pencil next to his real surname with a dash “Harms”, and then completely legitimized his pseudonym. A talented literary figure believed that one constant nickname brings misfortune, so Daniil Ivanovich had many pseudonyms that changed like gloves: Kharms, Haarms, Dandan, Daniil Shardam, etc.
In –, Daniil Ivanovich begins his creative biography. The young man not only writes poems, but also recites the works of others at public performances. Also in , Kharms joined the ranks of the All-Russian Union of Poets, but the writer was expelled three years later for non-payment of membership fees. At that time, the poet was inspired by creativity and.
In , a new literary community emerged in Leningrad, called “OBERIU” (“Union of Real Art”). Just as he and other futurists once called for throwing modernity off the boat, the “chinari” rejected conservative forms of art, promoting original methods of depicting reality, the grotesque and the poetics of the absurd.
They not only read poems, but also organized dance evenings, where those who came danced the foxtrot. In addition to Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky, Igor Bakhterev and other literary figures were members of this circle. At the end of , thanks to Oleinikov and Zhitkov, Daniil Kharms and his associates began to compose poems for children.
Daniil Ivanovich’s works could be seen in the popular publications “Hedgehog”, “Chizh” and “Cricket”. Moreover, Yuvachev, in addition to poems, also published stories, drew cartoons and puzzles, which were solved by both children and their parents.
It cannot be said that this type of activity brought Kharms unprecedented pleasure: Daniil Ivanovich did not like children, but children's literature was the only source of income for the talented writer. In addition, Yuvachev approached his work thoroughly and tried to scrupulously work through absolutely every work, unlike his friend Vvedensky, who, according to some researchers, loved to hack and treated his duties extremely irresponsibly.
Kharms managed to gain popularity among little boys and girls, to whom mothers and fathers and grandparents read poems about cats who did not want to taste the onion and potato vinaigrette, about a pot-bellied samovar and about a cheerful old man who was passionately afraid of spiders.
Surprisingly, even the author of harmless works for children was persecuted by the authorities, who considered some of Yuvachev’s works unceremonious. Thus, the illustrated book “The Naughty Cork” did not pass censorship and was “under the curtain” for ten whole years, from to It got to the point that in December , Kharms and his comrades were arrested for promoting anti-Soviet literature: Daniil Ivanovich and Vvedensky were sent to Kursk.
It is not for nothing that in most of the illustrations Daniil Ivanovich is depicted with a tobacco pipe, since in life the gifted poet practically never let it out of his mouth and sometimes smoked right on the go. Contemporaries used to say that Yuvachev dressed strangely. Kharms did not go to fashion boutiques, but ordered clothes from a tailor.
Thus, the writer was the only one in the city who wore short pants, under which socks or leg warmers were visible. But his eccentric habits (for example, Kharms sometimes stood at the window in what his mother gave birth to) did not prevent others from seeing his kindness. Also, the poet never raised his voice and was a correct and polite person.
“Apparently, for the children there was something very interesting in his appearance, and they ran after him. They really liked the way he dressed, the way he walked, the way he suddenly stopped. But they were also cruel - they threw stones at him. He did not pay any attention to their antics and was completely unperturbed. I walked and walked. And he didn’t react in any way to the looks of adults either,” recalled Marina Malich.
As for love relationships, Daniil Ivanovich’s first chosen one was a certain Esther Rusakova. Kharms dedicated an unprecedented number of poems to his passion, but their love was not cloudless: according to rumors, Yuvachev walked to the left, and Rusakova burned with jealousy, as evidenced by the poet’s diary entries. In , the couple filed an official divorce.
In the summer of , Kharms proposed marriage to Marina Malich, and the girl agreed. The lovers lived hand in hand until Yuvachev’s arrest, which occurred in
In August , Daniil Ivanovich, again breaking the law, was arrested for spreading objectionable sentiments: the writer allegedly said that the USSR would lose the war (words that, according to researchers, were copied from a denunciation).
To avoid the death penalty, Kharms pretended to be mentally ill, so he was admitted to a psychiatric clinic, where he died on February 2, After 18 years, his sister managed to restore the good name of her brother, who was rehabilitated by the Prosecutor General's Office.