The strange and silly world of Daniil Kharms

[imomus]

I'd never heard of Daniil Kharms, the Leningrad microliterary absurdist and corpse-faced poseur -- he always dressed like an English dandy with a calabash pipe -- before reading Tony Wood's interesting article about him in the current London Review of Books.



He was a follower of the original generation of Soviet formalists, and was persecuted by the Stalinists for his refusal to knuckle down to the kitschy heroic styles with which they displaced and replaced this formalism. Kharms (who named himself after Sherlock Holmes, or perhaps "charms") made some headway as a children's author, but died in a prison hospital during World War II. What I mostly love about his short, silly and hilariously pointless stories is the sense of a childlike glee in breaking the rules, and an obvious relish in the crazy things a single sentence can do. Some of the techniques on display in his stories are things I do in The Book of Jokes. Although they can get Pythonesque in their silliness, they also give glimpses of Russian life in the 20th century.



Anyway, today I thought I'd just lay out some of the short (very short) stories I've found by Kharms in various places on the web.

The Redheaded Man (from The Blue Notebook)
There lived a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily. He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He had no nose either. He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, he had no spine, and he had no innards at all. He didn’t have anything. So we don’t even know who we’re talking about. It’s better that we don’t talk about him any more.

Falling Old Ladies
Because of her excessive curiosity, an old lady fell out of the window and smashed into the ground. Another old lady looked out of the window, staring down at the one who was smashed, but out of her excessive curiosity she also fell out of the window and smashed into the ground. Then the third old lady fell out of the window, then the fourth did, then the fifth. When the sixth old lady fell out of the window, I got bored watching them and went to Maltsev market where, they say, someone gave a woven shawl to a blind person.

Anecdotes from the life of Pushkin (number 7)
Pushkin had four sons and they were all idiots. One of them couldn't even sit on his chair and kept falling off. Pushkin himself was not very good at sitting on his chair either, to be honest. It used to be quite hilarious: they'd be sitting at the table, at one end Pushkin would keep falling off his chair, and at the other end, his son. One wouldn't know where to look.

Symphony no. 2
Anton Mikhailovich spat, said "yuck", spat again, said "yuck" again, spat again, said "yuck" again and left. To hell with him. Instead, let me tell you about Ilya Pavlovich. Ilya Pavlovich was born in 1893 in Constantinople. When he was still a boy, they moved to St. Petersburg, and there he graduated from the German School on Kirchnaya Street. Then he worked in some shop; then he did something else; and when the revolution began, he emigrated. Well, to hell with him. Instead, let me tell about Anna Ignatievna. But it is not so easy to tell about Anna Ignatievna. Firstly, I know almost nothing about her, and secondly, I have just fallen off my chair, and have forgotten what I was about to say. So let me instead tell you about myself. I am tall, fairly intelligent; I dress prudently and tastefully; I don't drink, I don't bet on horses, but I like ladies. And ladies don't mind me. They like when I go out with them. Serafima Izmaylovna has invited me home several times, and Zinaida Yakovlevna also said that she was always glad to see me. But I was involved in a funny incident with Marina Petrovna, which I would like to recount. A quite ordinary thing, but rather amusing. Because of me, Marina Petrovna lost all her hair -- grew bald as a baby's bottom. It happened like this. Once I went over to visit Marina Petrovna, and -- bang! -- she lost all her hair. And that was that.

An Encounter
On one occasion a man went off to work and on the way he met another man who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was on his way home. And that's just about all there is to it.

Comments

[toylike.livejournal.com]

Kharms is really great. As a kid, I had a vinyl with his stories (needless to say, it was my favorite). A great talent, writing whimsical poems for kids, and at the same time writing stuff like: all children and old persons should be brought to the center of a town, and thrown into a huge hole in the ground.
One of my favorites is: "My phone number is 32-08. Easy to remember - 32 teeth and 8 fingers".

[samvoar.livejournal.com]

im afraid 'formalism' was a mainly soviet oficial term for describing all so-called non-socialistic (degenerative)) art. e.g. even shostakovich was blamed for composing 'formalistic' music. kharms belonged to a very interesting movement descended from russian futurism of 20s and english absurdist children poetry - oberiu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OBERIU) (all the members were officially children writers and translators of children poetry) they all were executed or died in prison during 1930-40s except for Zabolotsky.
but i think that the most interesting poet from oberiu (perhaps the greatest russian poet of the 20 century) hasn't been translated into english
alexander vvedensky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Vvedensky_(poet))

[doom-fairy.livejournal.com]

Just perfect.

[rhodri.livejournal.com]

F#ck yeah. Does he have a Twitter account?

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

"he always dressed like an English dandy with a calabash pipe"

The first three times I read that I thought it said slash pipe. lol need to get out more.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Let us have a microfiction theme among the comments!

"Ellen was riding the elevator down. She discovered though as she had finished the ride that it was the wrong floor. "I am not supposed to go to China", she said.

She searched in her pocket for a coin, pushed a different button and put the coin into the elevator's slot machine before the lift doors closed.

A klonkish sound and she found herself in a dark and cold room. A gigantic hand reached for her through a hatch and grabbed her steadily. Ellen was lifted through the hatch and was now laying on the street. Once a human, now a plastic bottle.

A naked child clapped it's hands and cried out
of happiness. Ellen was lifted to the child's mouth, got opened up and though she screamed just like a cat she couldn't escape quenching someone's thirst."

[grimgrim.livejournal.com]

Lovely, like a Russian Russell Edson (http://www.webdelsol.com/LITARTS/edson/) maybe.

"A wisdom that hasn’t been understood may get covered in dust." I like that.

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

The first three times I read it, I thought it said glash pipe.

[poups.livejournal.com]

i highly recommend this book (http://www.dursthoff.de/book.php?aid=13&m=3&PHPSESSID=24a56eaa8fd173f51d09ad6f227d84bc&bid=54&PHPSESSID=24a56eaa8fd173f51d09ad6f227d84bc) (not sure if it has already been translated). contrary to what the review says, the book is mainly about kharms. he died from hunger.

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

No, wait, that came out wrong -- glash pipe? What I meant to say was, "I desperately want to make love to a schoolboy."

[panarchist.livejournal.com]

i think that the most interesting poet from oberiu (perhaps the greatest russian poet of the 20 century) hasn't been translated into english

Fortunately, it's not entirely true:
http://www.amazon.com/OBERIU-Anthology-Absurdism-European-Classics/dp/0810122936

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I, like all Soviet children, grew up on Kharms, and it was fascinating for me to discover his dark side, his poems and stories with nasty undertones many years later.

this is my favorite Kharms short-poem:

A Fairy-Tale from the North


An old man set out to go into the woods, although he didn't know what
for. Then he came back and said:
-- Hey, old woman, you!
The old woman fell straight down. Since then, the hares are white in
winter.

This Kharming Man

[xyzedd.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I think Momus is reading my mind! Just this last week my two Kharms books arrived (including the OBERIU anthology, for all you Soviet avant-garde fans out there), and I've been poking about them with great delight and more than a little puzzlement. It had even crossed my mind that maybe Momus's joke book might have been influenced by Kharms--now I understand that it was only clairvoyantly so. (No wonder that in a dream I had last night I was in ancient Greece and came across a mask of the "little god of mockery.")

Next on your reading list I would recommend Felix Fenelon's "Novels in Three Lines" and Giorgio Manganelli's "Centuria-100 Ouroboric Novels," read while listening to Morgan Fischer's "Miniarures" collections.

xyz

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

Knock Knock!

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

“If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins most? I'd say Flippy, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong though. It's Hambone.”

:-) (http://thinkexist.com/quotes/jack_handy/)

[(Anonymous)]

Who's there?

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

I'm a pile-up.

[channingkennedy.livejournal.com]

Reminds me a lot of Steve Martin's Cruel Shoes; I wonder if Steve was a fan? The entirety of which is online here: c'est la (http://www.compleatsteve.com/miscellany/cruelshoes_1.htm)

but it lacks something without the turning of pages and the photo series.

The same hymnsheet?

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

There's someone on LJ who uses him as an icon, isn't there?
Strangely I am reading the book on writer Colin MacInnes "Inside Outsider", where he is described by his friends as having, "....a pale face, , pale hair, pale eyes, pale lips. You had to listen to him....he had no face, no nose, no eyes - it was a dead face, a bloodless anaemic face. That's why you remember his clothes...."

Also someone has alerted me to the presence of Boris Vian. His # L'Écume des jours (1947, Froth on the Daydream, Mood Indigo, Foam of the Daze) in particular. It appears they struggled to translate his pataphysical French into English.

The difficulty of translating Vian might account for his relative obscurity in the English-speaking world. L'écume in English means foam, froth or spume, but the expression l'écume des jours is a bizarre and unnatural concoction, typical of Vian's light and surrealistic touch. Critics comment that in L'Écume des Jours -- which Raymond Queneau called 'the most heartbreakingly poignant modern love story ever written' -- Vian's imaginative and playful use of language constitutes a fourth dimension of meaning, which supplements ordinary elements of plot and character. The difficulty of re-capturing the distinctively Vian-esque tone and charm of the text is the challenge confronting his translators. Vian's novels are tied irrevocably to the language of their composition.

It should be noted, however, that despite the difficulties almost all of his works have been translated to Romanian, Hungarian, German, Polish, Russian, a lot of them to Italian and Spanish

[shadowshark.livejournal.com]

Aaaaaaaack! Thank you so much! I heard "The Redheaded Man" a long time ago, but despite hundreds of tries to ask and google the story, I never found it until you put it here.

[shadowshark.livejournal.com]

Though I must admit some disappointment--I like how I thought it went a little better!

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

Can see how you incorporate Kharms techniques, I particularly like the Pushkin yarn.
He has a very striking slavic physiognomy, reminds me of Sviatoslav Richter.

(http://s254.photobucket.com/albums/hh103/thomascott/?action=view&current=Richter_photo_LCL_421.jpg)

hebel/queneau/cutler/hoffman

[(Anonymous)]

Brilliant - makes me think of Johann Peter Hebel, Raymond Queneau, Ivor Cutler and (a comedic version of) Heinrich Hoffman.

hebel for the in medias res
queneau for the daftness
cutler for the conceptual japery
and hoffman for no particular reason at all, maybe the tone?

CS

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

I tip my hat to you cap. That was most excellent.



Also, the Vvedensky (http://www.bc.edu/publications/newarcadia/archives/2/vvedensky/) link led me to this, which is also excellent.

"Let a mouse run over a stone. Count only its every step. Only forget the word every, only forget the word step. Then each step will seem a new movement. Then, since your ability to perceive a series of movements as something whole has rightfully disappeared, that which you wrongly called a step (you had confused movement and time with space, you falsely transposed one over the other), that movement will begin to break apart, it will approach zero. The shimmering will begin. The mouse will start to shimmer. Look around you: the world is shimmering (like a mouse)."

kokoku

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

[with-fun.livejournal.com]

hello from Russia;)

the netherlands in the seventies

[rinusvanalebeek.livejournal.com]

Makes me think how lucky Dutch readers were in the nineteen seventies. Loads of excellent translaters, a passionate publisher (van Oorschot), brought Russian literature to the Netherlands. Among those books the stories by Daniil Charms. I collected them all; I even bought those editions that were thought to become collector's items.

A bit strange to notice that it came along your virtual desk only now.

more kharms

[erotreme.livejournal.com]

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2007/08/06/070806fi_fiction_kharms

[face-on-mars.livejournal.com]

By the way, in English that sounds not that absurd as it does in Russian, because thumbs are not fingers ;)

[eclectiktronik.livejournal.com]

Charlie is genius, right, he's made from a million old pieces of bubble gum. Imagine that. In the summer of 1976 on the way home from an Alice Cooper concert, Charlie started to melt on the pavement. It was too hot in L.A and he melted, like a pink bitch.

Luckily though, there was Eric Phillips, a local crocodile who dabbled in black magic. He took pity on Charlie, and scraped him off the floor with a pair of fish slicers. He poured him into an antique soup ladle, and boarded his magic carpet, destination, Alaska. Eric Phillips decided to refreeze Charlie, but in his cold blooded reptilian haste, he refroze him into the shape of a hoover.

Charlie wasn't phased though, he just zoomed about the place, sucking up Inuits. The Inuits didn't mind. They loved it in Charlie's big tight warm belly pouch, and they refused to come out. Charlie said, "I'm cool with that," and set fire to a posh hammer to make it official. The downside was that the Inuits suffocated immediately. It was air-tight in there. Charlie panicked, and fired the tiny Inuit bullets into to Eric's crocodile peepers. The green shape, was frozen. After a quick drink, Charlie stole Eric Phillip's magic carpet, and left for Seattle. Charlie was racked with guilt. He'd killed 50 Inuits, no one needs that. He decided to spend the rest of his life putting small hairstyles onto boots, monkey nuts, trumpets, and spanners.

[eclectiktronik.livejournal.com]

http://youtube.com/watch?v=hc38Z4GntxI

;-)

[toylike.livejournal.com]

good point, yeah =)

Re: The same hymnsheet?

[x4pmc.livejournal.com]

"There's someone on LJ who uses him as an icon, isn't there?!"

Yes , there is :)

DLROW

For a while I was convinced that I saw the world. But the world as a whole was unreachable for my eyes, and I saw only fragments of it. And everything that I saw, I called 'world fragments'. And I observed characteristics of those fragments and, by observing them, I developed a science.
I understood that there were intelligent and unintelligent characteristics in the fragments. I distinguished the fragments and gave them proper names. And depending on their characteristics, I saw the world fragments to be either intelligent or unintelligent.
There were also world fragments that could deduce. And these fragments also observed the other world fragments, and me. And all those fragments were similar to each other, and I was similar to them. And I would talk to those fragments.
I would say: "Fragments are the thunder."
The fragments would say: "A heap of time."
I would say: "I am, also, a part of some trinity."
The parts would respond: "We are seeing nothing but little specks."
And suddenly, I stopped seeing them, and then I stopped seeing the rest of the fragments. And I feared that the world was disappearing.
But then I understood that I did not see the parts of the world anymore, but all the world as a whole. At first I thought that this was NOTHINGNESS. But then I understood that this was the world, and that what I had been seeing earlier, was not the world. And I always knew that this was the world, but, what that was that I had been seeing earlier, I still do not know.
When the fragments disappeared, their intelligent characteristics stopped being intelligent, and their unintelligent characteristics stopped being unintelligent. And the world as a whole stopped being intelligent or unintelligent. But when I understood that I was seeing the world as a whole, I suddenly stopped seeing it at all. I got scared because I thought the world had disappeared. And while I was thinking, I understood, that if the world really had disappeared than I could not be thinking. And I looked, searched for the world, but I could not find it. After that I did not know where to look. Then I remembered that, no matter whether I looked or not -- the world was always around me. And now it was not anymore. There was only me.
And then I realized, that I was the world.
But the world was not me.
Although, at the same time, I was the world.
But the world was not me.
But I was the world.
But the world was not me.
But I was the world.
But the world was not me.
But I was the world.
And after that I did not think anything anymore.

[taen from http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8926/Kharms/ ]