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Daniil Kharms: biography and interesting facts. Literary and historical notes of the young technician Kharms personal life

Daniil Yuvachev was born on December 17 (30), 1905 in St. Petersburg, in the family of Ivan Yuvachev, a former naval officer, a revolutionary member of the 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 1924 he entered the Leningrad Electrical Technical School, but was soon forced to leave it. In 1925 he took up writing. In his early youth he imitated the futuristic poetics of Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh. Then, in the second half of the 1920s, he abandoned the predominance of “zaumi” in versification.

However, it was the pseudonym “Kharms” with its ambivalence (from the French “charme” - “charm, charm” and from the English “harm” - “harm”) that 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 1926 on the basis of the submitted poetic works, two of which (“An Incident on the Railway” and “The Poem of Peter Yashkin - a Communist”) were published in the Union’s small-circulation collections. Apart from them, until the end of the 1980s, only one “adult” work by Kharms was published in the USSR - the poem “Mary Comes Out, Bowing” (Sat. Day of Poetry, 1965).

The early Kharms was characterized by “zaum”; he joined the “Order of Brainiacs DSO” led by Alexander Tufanov. Since 1926, 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 1928, Kharms has been writing for the children's magazine Chizh (its publishers were arrested in 1931). 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 1928 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 1932, the activities of OBERIU in the previous composition (which continued for some time in informal communication) actually ceased.

Kharms was arrested in December 1931, 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, 1932 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, 1932, and the poet went to Kursk, where the deported A.I. Vvedensky was already located. Kharms lived there from spring to autumn 1932.

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 1937 in a children's magazine of the poem “A Man Came Out of the House with a Rope and a Bag,” 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, 1941, 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 Kharms archive was preserved by Yakov Druskin.

Kharms was rehabilitated in 1956, 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 mistakenly credited with the authorship of a series of historical anecdotes “Jolly Fellows” (“Once Pushkin dressed up as Gogol…”), created in the 1970s 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 1989.

(taken from Wikipedia)

Kharms Daniil (12/17/1905 – 02/02/1942) – Russian writer, poet. He was a member of the Association of Real Art. During his lifetime he was known as an author of children's works.

Origins of literary activity

The writer's surname at birth is Yuvachev. Daniil Ivanovich was born in St. Petersburg. His father was a revolutionary, a member of the People's Will, and a writer. He knew Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and others. He served exile on Sakhalin, where he worked at a weather station. After exile, he served in the navy, then as an auditor. His mother was ten years younger than his father and headed a women's shelter for former prisoners. First, Daniil studied at the school at Petrishul, the oldest educational institution in St. Petersburg, then at the second labor school. In 1924 he entered the Electrical Technical College, from which he was expelled two years later.

Harms adopted the pseudonym around 1922. Regarding the origin of this name, the conclusions of researchers differ. Many other pseudonyms were found in Kharms's manuscripts. In 1926, he became a member of the Union of Poets and began reading poems by various authors, including his own works. Joining the “Order of Brainiacs” has a corresponding influence on his work. Also included in the community of “plane trees”, among which were A. Vvedensky, Y. Druskin and others.

Childhood photo of Daniel, 1910

Kharms made active attempts to unite poets and artists of the “left” persuasion. Organized such associations as the “Left Flank” and the “Academy of Left Classics.” By 1927, the OBERIU association was formed. The Oberiuts included N. Zabolotsky, B. Levin, I. Bakhterev and others. The largest meeting of representatives, called the “Three Left Hours,” took place in early 1928. Kharms wrote the play “Elizabeth Bam” especially for this evening.

Works for children

Under the influence of S. Marshak and B. Zhitkov, members of the association in 1927 turned to creativity for children. Until the end of the 30s, Kharms worked with children's publications “Hedgehog”, “Cricket”, etc. He wrote stories, poems, came up with puzzles, and funny comments on drawings. Although the Oberiuts did not like writing children's works, Kharms, unlike Vvedensky, approached the work with full responsibility.
Kharms became the author of nine children's books with illustrations in 1928 - 1931, among them “Million”, “Game”, “Theater”. “The Naughty Jam” was subsequently subject to a censorship ban for ten years. In 1937, Daniil Ivanovich translated the work “Plikh and Plyukh” by V. Bush into Russian, and in 1940 he wrote the book “The Fox and the Hare.”

Self-portrait of Kharms, 1924

Kharms' life in the 30s

In 1931, members of OBERIU were accused of anti-Soviet sentiments, Kharms was exiled to Kursk, where he lived for several months. After returning from exile, his life changes for the worse: the association disintegrates, fewer and fewer children's works are published, and his financial situation becomes more complicated.

At this time, a turning point also occurs in his work: Kharms moves on to prose works and pays more attention to adult literature. He writes a series of stories “Cases”, many short stories, short sketches. During the writer's lifetime, most of his adult works were not published. Continues to be friends with former Oberiuts. At meetings they discuss their new creations and philosophical problems. These conversations were recorded by L. Lipavsky. In 1937, a children's publishing house in St. Petersburg was destroyed.

Personal life

Daniel was married twice. In 1928 he married E. Rusakova. Judging by Kharms's diaries, family relationships were quite complex. He dedicated many of his works of the second half of the 20s to his first wife. The union collapsed four years later. Later, Rusakova was exiled to Kolyma, where she died.

In 1934, the writer married Marina Malich. They lived together until his arrest. He dedicated part of his work to Malich, including “Cases”. After the death of her husband, she was evacuated to the Caucasus. From there, after the German occupation, the Germans took her as an ostarbeiter. In the post-war period she lived in Europe and America.

D. Kharms, 1938

Last years and memory

In 1941, Kharms was arrested for so-called “defeatist sentiments.” The writer was threatened with execution, but he feigned mental illness. The court sent Kharms for treatment to the hospital at Kresty. Daniil Ivanovich died at the age of 37 during the siege. In February 1942, the largest number of people died of hunger in Leningrad. The wife was first informed that the writer had been transported to Novosibirsk. In 1960, Kharms was completely rehabilitated posthumously at the request of his sister.

During the writer's lifetime, only a small part of his works was published, especially for adults, but it was possible to preserve the archive with his manuscripts. Kharms's publications began to appear abroad in the 70s. In the USSR, “Flight to Heaven” was published in 1988. In the 90s, the collected works of Kharms were published, and now his works are regularly published by publishing houses.

A memorial plaque was placed on Kharms’s house in 2005, which depicts a portrait of the writer, a line from his poem and a memorial inscription. An asteroid and a street in St. Petersburg were named after him. The Kharms Literary Prize was also established. His works have been filmed more than twenty times; five films, both documentaries and feature films, have been made about the life of Daniil Ivanovich. In addition, theatrical productions based on his works are staged in Russian theaters: plays, ballet and opera.

Biography

KHARMS, DANIIL IVANOVICH (real name Yuvachev) (1905−1942), Russian poet, prose writer, playwright. Born on December 17 (30), 1905 in St. Petersburg. His father, who was a naval officer brought to trial in 1883 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 ( 1901) and Shlisselburg Fortress (1907), he published mystical treatises Between the World and the Monastery (1903), Secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven (1910), etc. Kharms’s mother, a noblewoman, was in charge of a shelter for former convicts in St. Petersburg in the 1900s. Harms studied at the St. Petersburg privileged German school (Peterschule), where he acquired a thorough knowledge of German and English. In 1924 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 (1877−1941), an admirer and successor of V. V. Khlebnikov, author of the book To Zaumi (1924 ) and the founder (in March 1925) 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 (1892−1937), creator of a number of propaganda plays, including the “actualizing” 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 1922, 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 1922, Vvedensky, Lipavsky and Druskin founded a triple alliance and began to call themselves “plane trees”; in 1925 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 1926 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 1980s, only one “adult” work by Kharms was published in the USSR - the poem Maria Comes Out, Taking a Bow (Sat. Poetry Day, 1965).

As a member of the literary association, Kharms received the opportunity to read his poems, but took advantage of it only once, in October 1926 - other attempts were in vain. The playful beginning of his poems stimulated their dramatization and stage performance: in 1926, 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 1936. 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, 1928 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 (1927−1930), 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 1927, Oleinikov and B. Zhitkov organized the “Association of Writers of Children’s Literature” and invited Kharms to it; from 1928 to 1941 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 mid-1930s, 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 (1929) 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 1930 as “the poetry of the class enemy”; the article became a harbinger of Kharms’ arrest at the end of 1931, the qualification of his literary activities as “subversive work” and “counter-revolutionary activity” and exile to Kursk. In 1932 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 1938), 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 1941, Kharms was arrested for “defeatist statements.” Kharms's works, even those published, remained in complete oblivion until the early 1960s, when a collection of his carefully selected children's poems, Game (1962), 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 1978, his collected works, prepared on the basis of saved manuscripts by M. Meilach and W. Erl, have been published in Germany. By the mid-1990s, Kharms firmly occupied the place of one of the main representatives of Russian literary literature of the 1920–1930s, essentially opposed to Soviet literature. Kharms died in Leningrad on February 2, 1942 - in custody, from exhaustion.

Daniil Ivanovich Kharms (Yuvachev), (December 30, 1905 - February 2, 1942) - 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> 1915-1918 – secondary school of the Main German School; 1922-1924 – Children's and rural unified labor school; 1924 - Leningrad Electrical Technical College; 1926 - expulsion; March 5, 1928 - marriage to Esther Rusakova, Kharms dedicated many works and diary entries to her in the period from 1925 to 1932. The relationship was difficult, and in 1932 they divorced by mutual consent. 1928 - 1941 - 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, 1934, Kharms marries Marina Malich and does not part with her until the very end; August 23, 1941 - 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> Died on February 2, 1942 from exhaustion during the terrible siege of Leningrad. p>

On July 25, 1960, 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>

The amount of writing about Kharms in recent decades only multiplies the number of questions both about the various sources and properties of his work, and about many episodes of his biography. Kharms was and remains a completely inexplicable phenomenon in the history of Russian literature. And to this day, even highly respected scientists - philologists, historians, literary critics who consider themselves experts on Kharms - do not undertake to create any detailed biography of this writer. To write his “official” literary biography, in which the real moments of his life would be linked and coordinated with the main stages of his work, what is currently missing is not so much facts as their motivations. And without this, the biography of a creative personality, according to the philologist V. Sazhin, a researcher of D. Kharms’ texts, “if it does not turn into a figment of the biographer’s imagination, then it remains only a note or a chronograph.” Unfortunately, researchers do not yet have sufficient data to go beyond this scope. Therefore, this article provides only a summary of the biography of Daniil Kharms, indicating well-known facts and those circumstances that require even more in-depth study and clarification.

Family and ancestors

The biography of Kharms' father, Ivan Pavlovich Yuvachev (1860-1940), is well known to historians of the so-called “liberation movement” in Russia. He was the son of a floor polisher at the Winter Palace, received a navigator's education at the technical school of the naval department in Kronstadt, and served for several years on the Black Sea. It is not known who or what influenced his political views, but in the early 1880s he turned out to be a like-minded member of the Narodnaya Volya and the famous “trial of the 14th”. September 28, 1884 I.P. Yuvachev was sentenced to death by hanging, but the sentence was soon commuted to 15 years of hard labor. Of this period, the convict had to spend the first 4 years in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress, and then in the Shlisselburg Fortress.

Here he turned from a militant atheist into an equally zealous champion of Christianity with a strong dose of mysticism. At the Sakhalin penal servitude I.P. Yuvachev worked in leg shackles for two years, and then, apparently using his navigator education, his superiors assigned him to manage the weather station.

Without serving his entire sentence, I.P. Yuvachev was released in 1895, lived in Vladivostok, and circumnavigated the world. The circumstances as a result of which he returned to St. Petersburg in 1899 are completely unknown. It is only known that Yuvachev Sr. decided to serve in the inspectorate of the Savings Banks Management for a position associated with constant inspection trips around Russia. Over the course of several years, he published one after another the biographical books “Eight Years on Sakhalin” (St. Petersburg, 1901) and “The Shlisselburg Fortress” (M., 1907). From the pen of the former Narodnaya Volya member also came a considerable number of preaching brochures (under the pseudonym I.P. Mirolyubov), in which the author interprets the Holy Scriptures, promotes good morals and reverence for church statutes.

Meanwhile, classes by I.P. Yuvachev's meteorology and astronomy were highly appreciated. In 1903, he became a corresponding member of the Main Physical Observatory of the Academy of Sciences (in this regard, it is worth recalling the astronomer who often appears in Kharms’s texts).

In April of the same 1903, I.P. Yuvachev married noblewoman Nadezhda Ivanovna Kolyubakina (1876-1928). At that time, she was in charge of the laundry in the refuge of the Princess of Oldenburg, and over the years she became the head of the entire establishment - a place where women released from prison received shelter and work. How Daniil Kharms’ parents met is unknown. In January of the following year, 1904, Nadezhda Ivanovna gave birth to a son named Pavel, but in February he died.

On December 17 (30), 1905, the second son was born. On this day, Ivan Pavlovich made the following entry in his notebook:

The 3rd point of this entry is “obscure” and is most likely associated with the personal refusal of the former Narodnaya Volya member from his previous beliefs. As for the biblical prophet Daniel, he will become “the most dear” for Kharms.

On January 5 (18), 1906, the boy was baptized in the Church of the Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the refuge of the Princess of Oldenburg (now Konstantinogradskaya Street, on the territory of the Boiler-Turbine Institute). Apparently, the godparents were Ivan Pavlovich’s brother, Pyotr Pavlovich Yuvachev, and “the daughter of the provincial secretary, the girl Natalia Ivanova Kolyubakina.” The latter is the elder sister of Nadezhda Ivanovna (1868-1942), a literature teacher and director of the Tsarskoye Selo Mariinsky Women's Gymnasium. There, in Tsarskoe Selo, the mother’s younger sister, Maria Ivanovna Kolyubakina (1882? - 1943?), also lived, it seems, like the eldest, who had no family. These three women raised Daniel. The father was constantly on the move due to his duties and supervised the upbringing by correspondence with his wife. Moreover, the tone of his letters and instructions was the more severe, the softer and more reverent the mother treated her son. The absence of his father was compensated by his custom of writing letters with enviable frequency and regularity, and thus his voice was constantly heard in the family. For little Daniel, this created a rather fantastic effect of visible absence with a constant feeling of his father’s participation in his real life. The father became for Kharms a kind of higher being, respect for which, as legends testify, was embodied, for example, in the fact that the son, until the end of his father’s life, stood up in his presence and spoke to his father only while standing. It can be assumed that the “gray-haired old man” with glasses and with a book, who appears in several of Kharms’ texts, was inspired precisely by the appearance of his father. It is amazing that the mother not only was not embodied in any way (with the possible exception of one poem) in Kharms’s texts, but even her death in 1928 was not recorded in his notebooks.

early years

In 1915, Daniil Yuvachev entered the first class of a real school, which was part of the Main German School of St. Peter in Petrograd (Petershule). The reasons why parents chose this particular school are unknown. In any case, here the young man acquired a good knowledge of German and English. Here his penchant for various hoaxes was already evident (at this age they were perceived as funny children's games). The future writer played the horn during lessons (it is unknown where he got it from), persuaded the teacher not to give him a bad mark - “not to offend the orphan” - etc.

During the hungry years of the Civil War, Daniil and his mother went to her relatives in the Volga region. Upon returning to Petrograd, the mother went to work as a wardrobe maid at the Barachnaya Hospital named after. S.P. Botkin, and here, on Mirgorodskaya, no. 3/4, the family lived until moving to Nadezhdinskaya in 1925. It was in this hospital that Kharms earned his first work experience - from August 13, 1920 to August 15, 1921, he served “as an assistant fitter.” The period from 1917 to 1922 is perhaps the most undocumented, and therefore researchers to this day have not been able to fill in many “blank spots” in the biography of Daniil Kharms.

It is known that in September 1922, for some reason, the parents considered their son’s stay in Petrograd inconvenient and sent him to his aunt, N.I. Kolyubakina. She was still the director, only now her former gymnasium was called the 2nd Detskoselsky Soviet Unified Labor School. Here Daniil completed his secondary education in two years and in the summer of 1924 he entered the Leningrad Electrical Technical School. The father, who served in the financial department at Volkhovstroi, helped ensure that the Working Committee interceded for his son, otherwise the young man of “non-proletarian” origin would not have been accepted into the technical school. But studying at the technical school was a burden for young Kharms, and already on February 13, 1926, he was expelled from there.

A penchant for fantasy, hoaxes, and writing, as was said, was noted in the early childhood of the future writer. At the age of 14, Danya Yuvachev compiled a notebook of 7 drawings (pen and ink), the contents of which still remain a mystery to researchers of Kharms’s work. But the motifs that will later be present in his main work are already obvious in them: the astronomer, the miracle, the wheel, etc. Already at a young age, a tendency towards encryption, veiling the direct meanings of objects and phenomena, which was inherent in Kharms throughout his literary life, is noticeable.

Nickname

Kharms's first known literary text was written in 1922 and bears the signature DSN. From this it is obvious that at that time Daniil Yuvachev had already chosen for himself not only the fate of a writer, but also a pseudonym: Daniil Kharms. In the future, he will begin to vary it in different ways and introduce new pseudonyms, bringing their total number to almost twenty.

There are several versions about the meaning of the literary name Kharms. According to A. Alexandrov, it is based on the French word charme - charm, enchantment. But Daniil’s father, judging by the surviving information, knew about the provocative negative meaning of this name: “Yesterday dad told me that as long as I am Kharms, I will be haunted by needs” (entry in Kharms’ notebook dated December 23, 1936). Indeed, according to the memoirs of the artist A. Poret, Kharms explained to her that in English this word means misfortune (literally “harm” - “misfortune”). However, Kharms always tended to veil (or blur) the direct meanings of words, actions, deeds, so you can look for decoding of his pseudonym in other languages.

First of all, this is the Sanskrit Dharma - “religious duty” and its fulfillment, “righteousness”, “piety”. Kharms could have known from his father that he depicted the pseudonym Mirolyubov, under which his preaching books and articles were published, with two words written in Hebrew: “peace” and “love.” By analogy with this (and from his own Hebrew studies), Kharms could associate his pseudonym with the word hrm (herem), which means excommunication (from the synagogue), prohibition, destruction. In view of these meanings, the above warning (caution) from a father to his son looks quite logical.

It should also be taken into account that from a young age Kharms was interested in the mythology, history and literature of Ancient Egypt. Traces of this interest will later appear in abundance and in a unique way in his works, and the earliest evidence is noticeable already in the above-mentioned drawings of 1919 and especially in the drawing of 1924, depicting a certain person with the caption: “That one.” This is one of the main Egyptian gods, the god of wisdom and writing, whom the Greeks later identified with Hermes Trismegistus, the bearer of the secret knowledge of all generations of magicians. The transformations that Kharms gave to his pseudonym from the very beginning of his work are reminiscent of magical manipulations, which, according to the canons of magic, are necessary so that the true meaning of the name remains a secret from the uninitiated. Thus, it was protected from adverse influences.

"Chinar gazer"

Soon, an equally mysterious part was added to the literary name Daniil Kharms: “the plane tree gazer” or simply “the plane tree”.

At the beginning of 1925, Kharms met (it is unknown under what circumstances) the poet A.V. Tufanov (1877-1941), an admirer and successor of V.V. Khlebnikov, author of the book “To Zaumi” (1924). Tufanov in March 1925 founded the “Order of the DSO Zaumi”, the core of which included Kharms, who took the title “Behold the Zaumi”.

Through Tufanov, Kharms became close to A.I. Vvedensky (1907-1941), a student of the more orthodox “Khlebnikovite” poet I.G. Terentyev (1892–1937), 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.

Tufanov’s ideas about a special “perception of space and time” and, as a result, a special language that modern literature should speak, were close to Kharms from the very beginning and had a strong influence on him. During this year, Kharms formed two notebooks of poems, which he presented on October 9, 1925 along with an application for admission to the Leningrad branch of the All-Russian Union of Poets. On March 26, 1926, the poet Daniil Kharms (Yuvachev) was admitted to it. Among these poems the following signature is often found: plane tree

This word was coined by Vvedensky, who in 1922 founded the friendly union of “plane trees” together with his former classmates at the L. Lentovskaya gymnasium (Petrograd 10th Labor School) Ya. S. Druskin (1902-1980) and L.S. Lipavsky (1904-1941). And they, who received an excellent education and were prone to mystical philosophizing and literary creativity, tended to avoid direct and unambiguous formulations and names. None of them ever deciphered the meaning of the word “plane tree”. Therefore, one can only guess: does this word mean spiritual rank, does it go back to the Slavic root “to create,” etc. etc. The most important thing is that Kharms, having met these people in mid-1925, made friends who remained his closest intellectual and creative like-minded people until the end of his life. L. Lipavsky (under the pseudonym L. Savelyev) and A. Vvedensky will work together with Kharms in children's magazines. In the 1930s, Y. Druskin would remain Kharms’s last interlocutor and spiritually close person. He will also protect the writer’s archive from destruction.

Kharms, as an extraordinary creative personality, quickly began to feel burdened by Tufanov’s apprenticeship: he wanted broader activities, both creatively and socially. This is precisely how researchers explain his departure from Tufanov, the organization of the Left Flank, then called the Left Flank, and, finally, the founding of the “Academy of Left Classics.” Each time it was an organization in which people of different creative interests certainly participated: artists, musicians, dramatic artists, filmmakers, dancers and, of course, writers.

In 1926, the Radix Theater was formed in Leningrad. The play “My Mother Is Covered in Watches,” composed of works by Kharms and Vvedensky, is chosen for the production. It was supposed to be a synthetic performance with elements of drama, circus, dance, and painting. But things didn’t go further than rehearsals for the play. It was decided to ask for space for the troupe’s rehearsals at the Institute of Artistic Culture (INHUK), from its head, the famous artist K. Malevich. So in October 1926, Kharms met K. Malevich, and in December of the same year, the artist agreed to join the next alliance of leftist forces, conceived by Kharms. Evidence of Malevich’s friendly feelings remained his dedicatory inscription to Kharms on his book “God will not be thrown off” (Vitebsk, 1922): “Go and stop progress.”

For the first time in a scandalous context, the name of Kharms appeared on the pages of the press after his speech on March 28, 1927 at a meeting of the literary circle of the Higher Courses of Art History at the State Institute of Art History. On April 3, a response to this speech appeared: “... on the third day, the meeting of the literary circle... was of a violent nature. The plane trees came and read poetry. Everything was going well. And only occasionally did the assembled students laugh or make jokes in a low voice. Some even clapping their hands. Give a fool the finger and he will laugh. "Chinari" decided that success was guaranteed. “Chinar” Kharms, after reading several of his poems, decided to inquire what effect they had on the audience.

“Chinari” were offended and demanded that Berlin be removed from the meeting. The meeting unanimously protested.

Then, climbing onto a chair, “Chinar” Kharms, a member of the Union of Poets, raised his hand armed with a stick upward with a “magnificent” gesture, and declared:

I don’t read in stables and brothels!

Students categorically protested against such hooligan attacks by persons appearing as official representatives of the literary organization at student meetings. They demand from the Union of Poets the exclusion of Kharms, believing that in a legal Soviet organization there is no place for those who, at a crowded meeting, dare to compare a Soviet university with a brothel and stables.”

Kharms did not retract his words in the statement he wrote with Vvedensky to the Union of Poets. He explained that he considered his performance to correspond to the reception he received, and the description he gave to the public as a mark.

Judging by Kharms' famous performances, he enjoyed the vigorous activity on stage; he was not frightened, but rather provoked by the audience's reaction to his extravagant texts and often shocking form of performances. Of course, the element of provocation was deliberately incorporated by Kharms into his behavior. But in those years it was considered the norm of artistic life. The style of speech of the imagists, yesterday's futurists, and even Mayakovsky today would be called the fashionable word “banter,” and then it was aimed at attracting the attention of the public, “outdoing” literary competitors, and creating scandalous fame for itself.

OBERIUTs

In 1927, the director of the House of Press, V.P. Baskakov, invited the Academy of Left Classics to become a section of the House and perform at a big evening, setting the condition: to remove the word “left” from the name. Apparently, Kharms and Vvedensky did not really stand for any particular name, so the “Union of Real Art” was immediately invented, which, when shortened (in accordance with Kharms’s focus on a game with direct recognition and naming), was transformed into OBERIU. Moreover, the letter “u” was added to the abbreviation, as they say now, “for fun,” which most clearly demonstrates the essence of the creative worldview of the group members.

The date of formation of OBERIU is considered to be January 24, 1928, when the “Three Left Hours” evening took place in the Leningrad Press House. It was there that the Oberiuts first announced the formation of a group representing a “detachment of left-wing art.” The literary section of OBERIU included I. Bakhterev, A. Vvedensky, D. Kharms (Yuvachev), K. Vaginov (Wagenheim), N. Zabolotsky, writer B. Levin. Then the composition of the group changed: after Vaginov left, Yu. Vladimirov and N. Tyuvelev joined it. N. Oleinikov, E. Shvarts, as well as artists K. Malevich and P. Filonov were close to the Oberiuts.

At the same time, the first (and last) manifesto of the new literary association was released, which declared the rejection of traditional forms of poetry and outlined the views of the Oberiuts on various types of art. It was also stated there that the aesthetic preferences of the group members are in the field of avant-garde art.

At the end of the 1920s, the Oberiuts tried to return again to some traditions of Russian modernism, in particular futurism, enriching them with grotesqueness and alogism. In defiance of the “socialist realism” implanted in art, they cultivated the poetics of the absurd, anticipating the European literature of the absurd by at least two decades.

It is no coincidence that the poetics of the Oberiuts was based on their understanding of the word “reality.” The OBERIU Declaration said: “Perhaps you will argue that our stories are “unreal” and “illogical”? Who said that “everyday” logic is required for art? We are amazed by the beauty of the woman painted, despite the fact that, contrary to anatomical logic, the artist twisted his heroine’s shoulder blade and moved her to the side. Art has its own logic, and it does not destroy the subject, but helps to understand it.”

“True art,” wrote Kharms, “stands among the first reality, it creates the world and is its first reflection.” In this understanding of art, the Oberiuts were the “heirs” of the futurists, who also argued that art exists outside of everyday life and use. Futurism is associated with Oberiut eccentricity and paradox, as well as anti-aesthetic shocking, which was fully manifested during public speeches.

The evening “Three Left Hours”, which marks the history of OBERIU (very, very short) was, perhaps, Kharms’ benefit performance. In the first part, he read poetry, standing on the lid of a huge lacquered cabinet, and in the second, his play “Elizabeth Bam” was staged. The devastating article by L. Lesnaya remains a reminder of this event, helping to slightly imagine the atmosphere of the evening.

In 1928-29, Oberiut performances took place everywhere: in the Circle of Friends of Chamber Music, in student dormitories, in military units, in clubs, in theaters and even in prison. Posters with absurdist inscriptions were hung in the hall: “Art is a cupboard”, “We are not pies”, “2x2=5”, and for some reason a magician and a ballerina took part in the concerts.

Famous film playwright and director K.B. Mints, who briefly collaborated in the cinematographic section of OBERIU, recalled some of the shocking actions of the “Unification”:

“1928. Nevsky Avenue. Sunday evening. There is no crowding on the sidewalk. And suddenly there were sharp car horns, as if a drunk driver had turned off the pavement straight into the crowd. The revelers scattered in different directions. But there was no car. A small group of very young people were walking along the empty sidewalk. Among them stood out the tallest, lanky one, with a very serious face and with a cane topped with an old car horn with a rubber black “pear”. He walked calmly with a smoking pipe in his teeth, in short pants with buttons below the knees, in gray woolen stockings, and black boots. In a checkered jacket. Her neck was supported by a snow-white hard collar with a child's silk bow. The young man’s head was decorated with a cap with “donkey ears” made of fabric. This was the already legendary Daniil Kharms! He's Charms! Shardam! Ya Bash! Dandam! Writer Kolpakov! Karl Ivanovich Shusterman! Ivan Toporyshkin, Anatoly Sushko, Harmonius and others..."

Mints K. Oberiuts // Questions of Literature 2001. - No. 1

Works for children

At the end of 1927, N. Oleinikov and B. Zhitkov organized the “Association of Writers of Children's Literature” and invited their Oberiut friends, including Kharms, to it. From 1928 to 1941, D. Kharms constantly collaborated in the children's magazines “Hedgehog” (a monthly magazine), “Chizh” (an extremely interesting magazine), “Cricket” and “Oktyabryata”. During this time, he published about 20 children's books.

Many publications about Kharms say that children's works were a kind of “sanitary trade” for the writer and were written solely for the sake of earning money (since the mid-1930s, more than meager). The fact that Kharms himself attached very little importance to his children's works is evidenced by his diaries and letters. But one cannot help but admit that poems for children are a natural branch of the writer’s creativity and provide a unique outlet for his favorite playful element. Does a child attach special importance to play? Despite their small number, Kharms’s children’s poems still have the status of a special, unique page in the history of Russian-language children’s literature. They were published through the efforts of S.Ya. Marshak and N. Oleinikov. The attitude of leading critics towards them, starting with the article in Pravda (1929) “Against hackwork in children's literature,” was unequivocal. This is probably why the pseudonym had to be constantly varied and changed.

In our opinion, such a characterization of Kharms’s children’s works is absolutely unfair. More than one generation of young readers was engrossed in his poems “A Man Came Out of the House,” “Ivan Ivanovich Samovar,” “The Game,” and others. And Kharms himself would never have allowed “hackwork” in literature for children. Children's works were his "calling card". At some stage, they actually created his literary name: after all, during the life of Daniil Kharms, no one knew that in 1927-1930 he wrote much more “adult” things, but, apart from two fleeting publications in collective collections, nothing serious was published It didn't work out that way.

Esther

However, much more than the lack of publications, Kharms in those years was worried about his relationship with his wife. Here, too, much remains unclear for biographers.

Kharms's first wife was Esther Aleksandrovna Rusakova (1909-1943). She was the daughter of Alexander Ivanovich Ioselevich (1872-1934), who emigrated in 1905 during the Jewish pogroms from Taganrog to Argentina, and then moved to France, to Marseille (here Esther was born). Anarcho-communist A. I. Rusakov took part in a protest demonstration against the 1918 intervention in Soviet Russia. For this he was deported to his homeland and in 1919 he arrived in Petrograd.

The Rusakov family was friends with many writers: A. N. Tolstoy, K. A. Fedin, N. A. Klyuev, N. N. Nikitin. The husband of one of the Rusakovs’ daughters, Lyubov, was a famous Trotskyist, member of the Comintern V. L. Kibalchich (Victor Serge; 1890-1947). In 1936, Esther would be arrested precisely for collaboration with Victor Serge and sentenced to 5 years in the camps; On May 27, 1937, she was sent by convoy to Nagaevo Bay in SEVVOSTOKLAG.

Kharms met Esther in 1925. At this time, despite her young age, she was already married (from Kharms’s diary entries and poetic works it can be judged that the name of Esther’s first husband was Mikhail). Having divorced her first husband, Esther married Kharms in 1925 and moved in with him, but every now and then she “ran away” to her parents, until the official divorce in 1932. It was a painful affair for both.

For Kharms, in any case, the torment began almost immediately after his marriage, and in July 1928, when fame and success in children’s literature came to him, albeit somewhat scandalous, he wrote in his notebook:

At the same time (or because of this?) Esther Rusakova will remain Kharms’ most vivid female impression for the rest of his life, and he will measure all the other women with whom fate brings him together only by Esther.

In March 1929, Kharms was expelled from the Union of Poets for non-payment of membership fees, but in 1934 he would be admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers without any problems (membership card No. 2330).

The end of OBERIU and the first arrest

The real disaster for OBERIU came in the spring of 1930. It was associated with Kharms’s performance with friends in the student dormitory of Leningrad University. The Leningrad youth newspaper Smena responded to this speech, in which an article by L. Nilvich appeared with a biting title: “Reactionary juggling (about one outing of literary hooligans)”:

After such aggressive attacks, OBERIU could not exist for long. For some time, the most active members of the group - Kharms, Vvedensky, Levin - went into the field of children's literature. Here N. Oleinikov played a big role, who, although not formally a member of OBERIU, was creatively close to the association. With the beginning of ideological persecution in the 1930s, texts for children became the only published works by Kharms and other Oberiuts.

However, they did not last long in this niche either. The free artistic attitude of the absurdists and their inability to fit into a controlled framework could not but arouse dissatisfaction with the authorities. Following the sharp responses to their public speeches, a “discussion about children’s literature” took place in the press, where K. Chukovsky, S. Marshak and other “ideologically unrestrained” writers, including young authors from the children’s edition of Lengiz, were severely criticized. After this, the Oberiut group ceased to exist as an association.

On December 10, 1931, Kharms, Vvedensky and some other editorial staff were arrested.

What Kharms said about his works during the investigation, he could have said among his friends. What was fantastic here were only the circumstances of the place and the extreme sincerity with which the writer characterized his “anti-Soviet” work.

He was sentenced to three years in the camps, but the term was replaced by a short exile. Kharms chose Kursk as his place of residence and stayed there (together with the similarly convicted A. Vvedensky) for the second half of 1932.

1930s

At the end of 1932, Kharms managed to return to Leningrad. The nature of his work is changing: poetry recedes into the background and fewer and fewer poems are written (the last completed poems date back to the beginning of 1938), while prose works (with the exception of the story “The Old Woman,” a creation of a small genre) multiply and become cyclical (“Cases,” “ 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 by the author thanks to the scrupulous accuracy of details, gestures, and verbal facial expressions of the characters. In unison with the diary entries (“the days of my death have come”, etc.) the last stories are heard (“Knights”, “Falling”, “Interference”, “Rehabilitation”). They are imbued with a feeling of complete hopelessness, the omnipotence of crazy tyranny, cruelty and vulgarity.

Upon returning to Leningrad, Kharms resumes friendly communication with former Oberiuts. “We met regularly - three to five times a month,” recalled Ya. Druskin, “mostly at the Lipavskys’, or at my place.” Their meetings are a deliberately cultivated form of endless philosophical, aesthetic and ethical dialogue. Here they categorically rejected arguing and defending their point of view as the only correct one. This was determined not so much by ethics as by ontology: according to the interlocutors, in the earthly world there is no final truth, there cannot be unconditional rightness of one in relation to another: everything is mobile, changeable and multivariate. Hence their skepticism towards science that claims to be unconditionally true, especially the exact sciences. Echoes of this position, like the genre of dialogue itself, are found in abundance in Kharms’s works and contain the above-mentioned attitudes. In 1933-1934, conversations of former Oberiuts were recorded by the writer L. Lipavsky and compiled the book “Conversations”, which was not published during Kharms’s lifetime. Also, the collective collection of Oberiuts “The Bath of Archimedes” was not published during the authors’ lifetime.

In 1934, K. Vaginov died. In 1936, A. Vvedensky married a Kharkov woman and went to live with her. On July 3, 1937, following the Kirov murder case, N. Oleinikov was arrested, and on November 24, N. Oleinikov was shot. 1938 - N. Zabolotsky was arrested and exiled to the Gulag. Friends disappeared one by one.

Meanwhile, in the atmosphere of general fear in the second half of the 1930s, Kharms continued to work no less intensively than before in children's magazines, multiplying his pseudonyms under the remaining unpublished “adult” works. He signed his children's works with the pseudonyms Charms, Shardam, Ivan Toporyshkin and others, never using his real last name.

It is impossible not to notice that the rest of Kharms’s friends, just like him, who worked intensively in a variety of genres: poetry, prose, drama, essays, philosophical treatises, did not see anything they wrote in print. But none of them has a note of reflection on this matter. It's not that they didn't want to see their works published. It’s just that the purpose of writing was itself, the actual act of utterance and, at best, the reaction to it of the closest circle of friends. The aimlessness of creativity is perhaps the best definition for what Kharms (and his like-minded people) did in the literature of the 1930s.

During these same years, Kharms compiled several collections of previously written works. In addition to those published in the posthumous collected works of Kharms, his archive contains two more collections compiled from previously written texts. They are somewhat similar in their composition, but still differ from each other. The most interesting thing about these collections is that many of them have a number icon above the title (and in some individual autographs). In total there are 38 such numbered texts, and among the icons the oldest is 43; some numbers are not found. According to modern literary scholars - researchers of Kharms' work, the explanation for these strange numbers with the “t” sign should be sought in Kharms’ occult hobbies. The fact is that verbal interpretations of the meanings of Tarot cards were often compiled into various books (and Kharms studied them, as is clear from the bibliographic entries in his notebooks). Probably, Kharms, following the examples known to him, applied a possible interpretation to one or another of his texts in accordance with one or another Tarot card and thus, as it were, played out a kind of card solitaire from his works.

“Ignite trouble around you”

At the end of the 1930s, according to the recollections of his last friend Ya.S. Druskin, Kharms often repeated the words from the book “Seeker of Unceasing Prayer, or Collection of Sayings and Examples from the Books of the Holy Scriptures” (M., 1904): “Ignite trouble around you.” These words were close to his temperament and mental makeup. Impetuous sincerity and contempt for the opinions of the people around him always guided him. Sacrifice was, according to his concepts, one of the fundamental principles of the creation of art. He was not shy in his assessments of the impending war and, it seems, foresaw his fate. “Ignite trouble” seemed to become an end in itself for the writer, a method of conscious suicide.

On August 23, 1941, Kharms was arrested for “defeatist statements.” Documents about the second arrest and the “case” of Kharms in 1941-42 have not survived. According to one version, the writer was declared insane and placed in a psychiatric hospital, where he died of exhaustion on February 2, 1942.

Kharms’s second wife, M.V. Malich, whom he married in 1935, abandoned the archive after her husband’s arrest (during the last search, only correspondence and a few notebooks were seized, while most of the manuscripts survived) and moved to the “writer’s” house on the canal embankment Griboyedova, 9. Having learned about this from her, Ya. Druskin went from the Petrograd side to Mayakovsky Street to a friend’s abandoned apartment. Here he collected all the papers that he could find, put Kharms’s manuscripts in a suitcase and carried him through all the vicissitudes of the evacuation. In 1944, Kharms’ sister E. Gritsyna gave Druskin another part of Kharms’ archive, which she found in their apartment. This is how the writer’s literary heritage was preserved from destruction.

Kharms's works, even those published, remained in complete oblivion until the early 1960s, when a collection of his carefully selected children's poems, “The Game” (1962), was published. After this, for about 20 years they tried to give him the appearance of a cheerful eccentric, a mass entertainer for children, which was completely inconsistent with his main “adult” works. Even the writer’s second wife, Marina Malich (Durnovo), in her memoirs was sincerely surprised at how many magnificent works Kharms managed to write in the 1930s. She considered her husband not the most successful, “average” children's writer. She, like everyone else, was familiar only with children's poems published in magazines.

en.wikipedia.org

Biography

Daniil Yuvachev was born on December 17 (30), 1905 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.

In 1925, 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 17. 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 1926 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 1980s, only one “adult” work by Kharms was published in the USSR - the poem “Mary Comes Out, Bowing” (Sat. Day of Poetry, 1965).

He arrived on July 13, 1932 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 write quickly... 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 1937 in a children's magazine of the poem “A man came out of the house with a club and a bag,” 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.

The archive of Daniil Kharms was preserved by Yakov Druskin.

Daniil Kharms was rehabilitated in 1956, 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 1970s 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 1989. 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, 2008. – 501. p., ill. – (Life of remarkable people: ser. biogr.; issue 1117)

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 500-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 1931: “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. 194).

“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. 287).

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. 288 ).

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. 284). They were disgusting: “Froth, lamb,... children, soldiers, newspaper, bathhouse” (p. 285). 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 1939:

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 1932 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. 434). 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 1930s, 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. 417).

Alas, such advancement had to be paid for even in the relatively free 20s! After D. Kharms’s first public speech (January 1927), his relatives rejoiced: “Everything is fine, and Danya was not beaten” (p. 126).

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 1931, 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. 216).

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. 282). 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 1937, 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. 382).

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, 1939, 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. 444).

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. But 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. 466–467 ).

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, 1941, 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 the name of this lady. 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 1960, 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 1941, he was placed in the psychiatric ward of the prison hospital at Kresty. On February 2, 1942, 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 1997, her son moved her to the USA, where Marina Malich died in 2002 at the age of 90. 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 (1905-1942) 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...1). 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 1924, 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 1925. 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 1927, 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 17-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. The growing 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 1928 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” (1929) 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 1930, 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 increasingly 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’ 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 1931, 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 1932, 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 1932 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 g...o!
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 sense...I had reached a huge fall. I have completely lost my ability to work...I am a living corpse...Our affairs have become even worse...We are starving...I can’t do anything. I don’t want to live... God, send us death as soon as possible,” 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 1938: “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 1939, 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 1941, Kharms was issued a second disability group, but soon on August 23, 1941, 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 Ivanovich...mastered 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 1938. 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 at times, 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", 1990, p.5-19.
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”, 1991, pp. 7 - 48.
J.-F. Jacquard. Daniil Kharms and the end of the Russian avant-garde. St. Petersburg, 1995
Kobrinsky A., Ustinov A. “I participate in a gloomy life.” Comments. _ In the book: D. Kharms. The throat is razor-thin. “Verb”, N4, 1991, p. 5-17 and 142 - 194.
Petrov V. Daniil Kharms. _ V. book: Panorama of Arts. Vol. 13. Sat. articles and publications. M.: “Soviet Artist”, 1990, pp. 235 - 248.
Kharms D. Circus Shardam: a collection of works of art. - St. Petersburg: LLC Publishing House "Crystal", 1999. - 1120 p.
Schwartz E. “I live restlessly...” From the diaries. L.: “Soviet writer”, 1990.
Shuvalov A. Pathographic essay about Daniil Kharms. - Independent Psychiatric Journal, N2, 1996, pp. 74 - 78.
Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd: Essays and Materials / Ed. by N/ Cornwell. London, 1991.

original at: http://www.psychiatry.ru/library/ill/charms.html

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