The name is dharms. See what "Kharms, Daniil Ivanovich" is in other dictionaries

Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev (1905 - 1942) at school came up with a pseudonym for himself - Kharms, which varied with amazing ingenuity, sometimes even in the signature under one manuscript: Kharms, Horms, Charms, Khaarms, Shardam, Kharms-Dandan, etc. The fact is that Kharms believed that an unchanged name brings misfortune, and took a new surname as if in an attempt to get away from him. However, it was the pseudonym "Kharms" with its duality (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 work.
Daniil Yuvachev was born on December 17 (30), 1905 in St. Petersburg, in the family of Ivan Yuvachev, a former naval officer, a revolutionary of the People's Will, who was exiled to Sakhalin and took up religious philosophy there. Kharms' father was familiar with Chekhov, Tolstoy and Voloshin.
Daniel studied at a privileged St. Petersburg German school. In 1924 he entered the Leningrad Electrotechnical School, but was soon forced to leave it. In 1925 he took up writing.
In 1925, Yuvachev met with the poetic and philosophical circle of plane trees. He quickly gained scandalous fame in the circles of avant-garde writers under his pseudonym "Kharms" invented at the age of 17. Kharms was accepted into the All-Russian Union of Poets in March 1926 on the basis of the submitted poetic works, two of which (“The Case on railway"and" Verse of Pyotr Yashkin - a communist") managed to be printed in small-circulation collections of the Union.
The early Kharms was characterized by "absurdity", he joined the "Order of the abstruse DSO" headed by Alexander Tufanov. Since 1926, Kharms actively tried to organize the forces of the "left" writers and artists of Leningrad, creating the short-lived organizations "Radiks", "Left Flank". In 1927, S. Marshak attracted Kharms to work in children's literature. So Kharms received his first publications and the first money from them. Profit from publications remained almost the only source of money throughout the life of Kharms. He didn’t work anywhere else, when there weren’t any (and it was like that all his life), he borrowed money. Sometimes he gave it on time, sometimes he didn't give it at all.
In February, the first issue of the children's magazine "Hedgehog" was published, in which Kharms' first children's works "Ivan Ivanovich Samovar" and "Naughty Cork" were published. Since 1928, Kharms has been writing for the children's magazine Chizh. Surprisingly, with a relatively small number of children's poems ("Ivan Ivanovich Samovar", "Liar", "Game", "Million", "How Dad Shot My Ferret", "A Man Came Out of the House", "What was that?", "Tiger in the street" ...) he created his country in poetry for children and became its classic.
Then Kharms became one of the founders of the avant-garde poetic and artistic group"Association of Real Art" (OBERIU). Later, in Soviet journalism, the works of OBERIU were declared "the poetry of a class enemy", and since 1932, the activities of OBERIU in the previous composition ceased.
In December 1931, Kharms was arrested along with a number of other Oberiuts, accused of anti-Soviet activities and sentenced on March 21, 1932 by the OGPU board to three years in correctional camps. But two months later the sentence was commuted to expulsion, and the poet went to Kursk.
He arrived on July 13, 1932. “The city in which I lived at that time,” he wrote about Kursk, “I did not like at all. It stood on a mountain, and postcard views opened up everywhere. I was so sick of them that I was even glad to stay at home. Yes, in fact, except for 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 began to smile. I smiled up to 20 minutes at a time, but then the smile turned into a yawn ... ".
Kharms stayed in Kursk until the beginning of November, and returned to Leningrad on the 10th. He continued to communicate with like-minded people and wrote a number of books for children to earn his 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 sack", which "had disappeared since then", Kharms was no longer printed. This put him and his wife on the brink starvation.
On August 23, 1941, Kharms was arrested for defeatist sentiments on the denunciation of an NKVD agent. In particular, Kharms was charged with his words: “If they give me a mobilization sheet, I will punch the commander in the face, let them shoot me; but I won’t put on a uniform” and “The Soviet Union lost the war on the very first day, Leningrad will now either be besieged and we will starve to death, or they will bomb it, leaving no stone unturned.” To avoid being shot, Kharms feigned insanity. The military tribunal determined to keep Kharms in a psychiatric hospital. There, Daniil Kharms died during the siege of Leningrad, in the most difficult month in terms of the number of starvation deaths.
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 went from hand to hand and in samizdat, and was also published abroad with a large number distortions and cuts.

“I am only interested,” Harms wrote on October 31, 1937, “to "nonsense"; just something that doesn't make any practical sense. 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.

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, a revolutionary of the People's Will, who was exiled to Sakhalin and took up religious philosophy there. Kharms' 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 Electrotechnical School, but was soon forced to leave it. In 1925 he took up writing. In 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.

In 1925, Yuvachev got acquainted with 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 effortlessly changed them: Khharms, Khaarms, Dandan, Charms, Karl Ivanovich Shusterling and others. However, it was the pseudonym "Kharms" with its ambivalence (from the French "charme" - "charm, charm" and from "harm" - "harm") most accurately reflected the essence of the writer's attitude to life and work. The pseudonym was also fixed 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 (“The Case on the Railway” and “The Verse of Pyotr Yashkin the Communist”) managed to be printed in small-circulation collections of the Union. In addition to them, until the end of the 1980s, only one “adult” work of Kharms was published in the USSR - the poem “Maria comes out, bowing down” (Sat. Poetry Day, 1965).

The early Kharms was characterized by "absurdity", he joined the "Order of the abstruse DSO" headed by Alexander Tufanov. Since 1926, Kharms has been actively trying to organize the forces of the "left" writers and artists of Leningrad, creating the short-lived organizations "Radiks", "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 “Association of Real Art” (OBERIU), which in 1928 held the famous “Three Left Hours” evening, where Kharms’s absurdist “piessa” “Elizabeth Bam” was also presented. Later, in Soviet journalism, the works of OBERIU were declared "the poetry of a class enemy", and since 1932, the activities of OBERIU in the same 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 (at the same time, the texts of the works were also charged with him) and sentenced on March 21, 1932 by the OGPU collegium to three years in correctional camps (the term "concentration camp" is used in the text of the sentence) . As a result, the sentence was replaced on May 23, 1932 with deportation (“minus 12”), and the poet went to Kursk, where the exiled A. I. Vvedensky was already there.

He arrived on July 13, 1932 and settled in house number 16 on Pervyshevskaya Street (now Ufimtsev Street). The city was filled with former Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, ordinary 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. “The city in which I lived at that time,” he wrote about Kursk, “I did not like at all. It stood on a mountain, and postcard views opened up everywhere. I was so sick of them that I was even glad to stay at home. Yes, in fact, except for 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 began to smile. I smiled 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. Near the house grew yellow and purple flowers. Further on, tobacco grew and there was a large military chestnut tree. And there was an orchard. It was very quiet, and only trains sang under the mountain.

Kharms stayed in Kursk until the beginning of November, and returned to Leningrad on the 10th.

Upon returning from exile, Harms continues to communicate with like-minded people and writes a number of books for children in order to earn his 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 sack", which "disappeared since then", Kharms was not printed for some time, which puts him and his wife on the verge of starvation. Writes a lot at the same time short stories, theatrical skits and poems for adults, which were not published during their lifetime. During this period, a cycle of miniatures "Cases", the story "The Old Woman" are created.

On August 23, 1941, he was arrested for defeatist sentiments (according to the denunciation of Antonina Oranzhireeva, an acquaintance of Anna Akhmatova and a long-term agent of the NKVD). In particular, Kharms was charged with his words: “If they give me a mobilization sheet, I will punch the commander in the face, let them shoot me; but I won’t put on a uniform” and “The Soviet Union lost the war on the very first day, Leningrad will now either be besieged and we will starve to death, or they will bomb it, leaving no stone unturned.” Harms also claimed that the city was mined, and unarmed soldiers were sent to the front. To avoid being shot, he feigned insanity; the military tribunal determined "by 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 Kresty prison hospital (Arsenalnaya Embankment, 9).

The archive of Daniil Kharms was kept 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 went 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" and others), as well as the author of satirical prose. Kharms is mistakenly credited with the authorship of a series of historical jokes “Merry Fellows” (“Once Gogol dressed up as Pushkin ...”), created in the 1970s by the editors of Pioneer magazine in imitation of Kharms (he really owns a number of parody miniatures about Pushkin and Gogol). In addition, when publishing the poems "Plikh and Plukh" it is often not indicated that this is an abbreviated translation of the work of Wilhelm Bush from German.

Harms' absurdist works have been published in Russia since 1989. An unknown person in an interview with one of the TV programs of the USSR said: "This is pure nonsense, but very funny."

DANIEL KHARMS: "I SAY TO BE"

Kobrinsky A.A. Daniel 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 D. Kharms is known to the widest reader, first of all, for anecdotes about Pushkin, Gogol and L. Tolstoy, "who was very fond of small children." And although, of course, the very idea of ​​the cycle and several stories - 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 verses about siskins familiar to everyone from childhood, then even then not everyone will name their author: Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev (Kharms).

However, such ignorant, but "using" readers, thank God, are less and less. And more and more Daniil Kharms is realized by us as one of the key figures of Russian literature of the last century.

The 500-page work of A. Kobrinsky is probably the most complete biography of Kharms to date. The author in every way emphasizes the genre of his book, citing a lot of quotations from documents of the era. Perhaps the average reader on some of these pages will get stuck in the stuffy and stuffy style of Stalin's officialdom. But it will become even clearer WHAT a dissonance with the mainstream of that time was the personality and work of the writer Kharms.

In general, the impression is that life itself put on the Oberiuts, and especially on their leader Daniil Kharms, a cruel, but important experiment for posterity. The 1920s, the time of their formation and debut, is no longer the silver age with its freedom of creative pursuits, although the innovations of the 1920s are in themselves “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 arrogate to itself the monopoly right to regulate the creative process. But the Oberiuts (and Kharms in particular) remained in many ways literary outcasts - 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 search as in the 10s and early 20s.

Of course, the Oberiuts are only one of the trends that formed in the 1920s, and the direction, at its very birth, could not become any mass. And yet the winds of tomorrow roamed in the souls of these people!

Daniil Kharms was already developing so intensively in the 30s that now even the spiritual father of the Oberiuts, V. Khlebnikov, seems to him to be receding into the 19th century, seems “too bookish”.

A. Kobrinsky accurately notices: the pathos of the aesthetics of the Oberiuts was to return the poet's word from the mists of symbolism to the full-fledged real life. Moreover, in a certain sense, the word was thought of by them as real, like, say, a stone. “Poems must be written in such a way that if you throw a poem out the window, the glass will break,” Kharms dreamed. And he wrote in April 1931 in his diary: “The power inherent in words must be released ... It is not good to think that this power will make objects move. I am sure that the power of words can do this too” (p. 194).

"Poems, prayers, songs and charms" - these are the forms of the existence of the word, organized by rhythm and filled with the charisma of life, that attracted Daniil Kharms.

And in this sense, he had poems for children not only for the sake of earning money (as, for example, his closest associate A. Vvedensky). It was a completely organic form of creative expression.

Although the children themselves (as old men and especially old women) Harms could not stand. On the shade of his table lamp, he painted with his own hand "a house for the destruction of children." E. Schwartz recalled: “Kharms could not stand children and was proud of it. Yes, it suited him. Defined some side of his being. He was, of course, the last of his kind. Further offspring would have gone absolutely terrible. That is why even other people's children frightened him” (p. 287).

Kobrinsky adds his version: “Perhaps he (Kharms, - V. B.) instinctively felt them (old people and children, - V. B.) approaching death - both from one end and from 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. He was occupied with: “Illumination, inspiration, enlightenment, superconsciousness. Numbers, especially those not related by sequence order. Signs. Letters. Fonts and handwriting... Everything is logically meaningless and ridiculous. Anything that evokes laughter and humour. Stupidity... Miracle... Good tone. Human faces” (p. 284). Disgusting were: “Foam, lamb, ... children, soldiers, a newspaper, a bathhouse” (p. 285). The latter - because it humiliatingly exposes bodily deformities.

Ernst Kretschmer, who in the same years worked on his classification of psychotypes, would classify Kharms as a pronounced schizoid. These are people of sharp individuality who keep a distance from the outside world, recreating the impulses coming from it into something sometimes extremely original, and in the case of special giftedness - into something very deep and significant. The schizoid warehouse of nature will help Kharms to resort to the simulation of a mental illness in the future (more on this below).

In the meantime, clashes with the Soviet world - a world permeated with the currents of rough collectivism, the spirit of a communal apartment, hostel, barracks, cells - sometimes led to the most amusing creative results.

Here, for example, is a combatant “song”, which, at the request of the commander, was composed by Private Yuvachev, while undergoing military service (author’s punctuation):

A little out in the yard
We arrived March 7th
Stand up stand up stand up
We attached 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 go
We will come to the podium
In the morning,
To scream first
Earlier then others,
To scream first
Stalin "cheers".

The creative discrepancy between Kharms and Soviet reality was supplemented by a discrepancy even at the everyday level. So, Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev came up with a special english look for himself (caps, golfs, leggings, pipe), for which in the summer of 1932 he was constantly subjected 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 name of his favorite literary hero - Sherlock Holmes.

Yes, Kharms was a paradox man! A deep believer, he, formally being Orthodox, allowed himself mysticism of a completely Protestant nature: letters and notes directly to God! An avant-garde in art, he retained a devoted love for the “classic-classics” itself: for Pushkin and Gogol, for 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 quarrels with some of the closest like-minded people. Kobrinsky cites A. Vvedensky's dry review of the masterpiece of the late Kharms - the story "The Old Woman": "I have not abandoned leftist art" (p. 434). Vvedensky hinted that the motives of The Queen of Spades and Crime and Punishment are too obvious in the story, and the artistic fabric itself, for all the surrealness of the idea, is “too” (for an avant-garde work) realistic.

For Kharms, the movement towards tradition is already natural, if only for a true Petersburger and a demonstrative “Westernizer”. But here we face moments and more general plan. Even T. Mann and G. Hesse noticed: the most notorious creators of avant-garde art of the 20th century sometimes ended up as convinced "classicists" or, in any case, sharply, subtly and more than respectfully perceived and used the classical tradition. Proust and Picasso, Dali and Prokofiev, Matisse and Stravinsky (and Hesse themselves with T. Mann)…

In the evolution of Kharms the writer, only this general, it seems to be completely unexplained, this "almost regularity" is only manifested.

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 is not a total absence of meaning, but, on the contrary, a different meaning that does not fit into ordinary logic, destroying, as a rule, established logical connections” (p. 417).

Alas, one had to pay for such advancement even in the relatively free 20s! After the first public speaking D. Kharms (January 1927), the 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. OUTSIDE, this drift to some extent coincided with the vector of development of the literature of the Stalinist empire, as outlined in the early 1930s by the First Congress of Soviet Writers. The fundamental difference was that Harms went to 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 listed in the camp of the ultravanguardists.

A wave of repressions swept over Kharms and his friends among the first and before many, many, just at the height of the struggle for the uniformity of our literature.

In December 1931 Kharms and his comrades were arrested. The wave of repressions was only gaining strength, and this saved them: the punishment was quite light.

You can’t erase a word from a song: A. Kobrinsky claims that I.L. is to blame for the arrest. Andronikov, then a close circle of the Oberiuts. “If all the other arrested people first of all testified about themselves, and only then they were forced to talk about others as members of the same group with them, then the style of Andronikov’s testimony is the style of a classic denunciation” (p. 216).

By the way, Andronikov was the only person involved in the case who did not suffer in any way.

A 4-month exile in Kursk was, of course, far from the worst car possible at that time. But Kharms also experienced it quite hard. “We are from material intended for geniuses,” he remarked once (p. 282). A 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 1937, in the third issue of the children's magazine "Chizh", a poem by D. Kharms "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, made them almost a political satire.

You just listen:
A man came out of the house
With club and bag
And on a long journey
And on a long journey
Went on foot.
He walked straight ahead
And looked ahead.
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 that time
And from that time
And has since disappeared.
But if somehow
You happen to meet
Then quickly
Then quickly
Tell us quickly.

That is how, in broad daylight, one of the most talented friends of Kharms N.M. "disappeared" for relatives. Oleinikov. Seeing him one morning, a friend rushed to say hello to him. But immediately she saw two people who accompanied him. Oleinikov's glance confirmed her terrifying guess... 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 run. He wanted us to completely disappear, to go together on foot into the forest and live there” (p. 382).

Then Kharms was not arrested, but he was excommunicated from literature: he was forbidden to print.

Years of desperate poverty, real hunger came. Multiply this by the creative crisis that Kharms was going through then! However, this crisis was somehow strange. It’s not that they didn’t write at all: the poems dried up. But prose texts were quite common. Actually, it was the crisis of "perestroika" - the crisis of creative maturation and withdrawal into new genres.

And the clouds were gathering not only over Kharms. He keenly felt the approach of military danger. Literally a few days before a possible call to the front (November 30, 1939, the war with the "Finland booger" began), he managed to get a white ticket. To do this, Kharms had to play 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 brutal story "Rehabilitation". This is perhaps the first time and certainly a brilliant example of black humor in Russian:

“Without boasting, I can say that when Volodya hit me on the ear and spat on my forehead, I grabbed him so that he would not forget it. Later I beat him with a primus stove, and I beat him with an iron in the evening. So he didn't die right away. And I killed Andryusha simply out of inertia, and I cannot blame myself for this ... They accuse me of bloodthirstiness, they say that I drank blood, but this is not true. I licked up blood puddles and stains - this is a natural need of a person to destroy the traces of his, at least 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 does not have to complain ... Thus, I understand the fears of my defender, but still I hope for a full justification ”(pp. 466-467 ).

You can, of course, laugh. But, perhaps, expanding the scope of what was accepted in our literature so unusually then, Kharms also prophesied a bloody mess, the ghost of which already hung over his contemporaries and would become a reality for them in less than 2 weeks? ..

Kharms foresaw the hour of his arrest. On August 23, 1941, he was "taken" by the NKVD in his apartment. The fact that recognized as mentally unhealthy D.I. Yuvachev-Kharms fell into their field of vision - the "merit" of the informer. 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 "hen" under Anna Akhmatova, and she, too, will not unravel this creature. When Anta Oranzhireeva dies in 1960, Akhmatova will dedicate a poem to her memory:

In memory of Anta

Even if it's from another cycle...
I see a smile of clear eyes,
And "died" so pitifully crouched
To the nickname dear,
Like it's 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 fierce time for the blockade, Kharms died.

The fate of his widow is amazing. From the blockade, Marina Malich ended up in evacuation, from it - into occupation, from there - into emigration. In France, she finally met her mother, who abandoned her as a child. No moral obligations connected Marina with 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 an old noble family, Y. Durnovo (however, Malich was from the Golitsyns by her grandmother). 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, only his work became a miracle in the fate of Kharms himself ...

Like any genre, biography has its limitations. Outside the framework of Kobrinsky's book, there was a broader context of the world and domestic literature, in which the work of Kharms acquires additional significance. Although, remaining on a purely biographical level, Kobrinsky speaks in some detail about the complex rapprochements-divergences of the Oberiuts with the largest poets of that time V. Mayakovsky and B. Pasternak, with philologists B. Eichenbaum and V. Shklovsky. But it is not said at all about the influence of Kharms on the domestic writers of the postmodernist generation, because here the matter was not limited to “Kharms”, as some literary authority called his later unlucky epigones.

Of course, such research is more suitable for scientific research. But Kharms' work is still so alive and important for our contemporaries, so original (and sometimes gives rise to controversy and the very fact of his influence), that it was hardly worth passing over in silence.

And yet, on the whole, 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.
Daniel Kharms. Pathographic experience

To the remark: "You wrote with an error," - answer:
This is how it always looks in my writing.”
From the diary entries of D. Kharms

Pathography as part of clinical and social psychiatry, as well as its history, is at the same time a special methodological technique for studying outstanding personalities, with the study of the disease (or personality anomalies) and the 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 some distinctive features of the work of Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) in the light of his biography (psychopathological features and human destiny).

From the biographical data on the writer’s heredity, it is known that Kharms’s mother (a teacher by training) worked in a women’s correctional institution, where she lived with her son for about ten years, why one of the biographers wrote about Kharms: “Born near the prison, he died in prison ". The mother was distinguished by a strong-willed, assertive character, at the same time she was uncommunicative, rather formal and tough, stingy in expressing feelings. Any trust, warm relationship with his son, apparently did not exist. The writer's diary entries abound with the names of aunts and other relatives, but we do not find any mention of the mother in them. In an autobiographical sketch (“Now I’ll tell you how I was born ...”) Harms, in his usual grotesque and absurd form, reports that “... turned out to be a premature baby and was born four months prematurely ... the midwife ... began to push me back, from where I had just crawled out ... ", then it turns out that he was "shoved in a hurry in the wrong place", and he was born again after his mother was given a laxative. Thus, the mother becomes an object of ridicule, and the author himself, identifying himself with excrement, demonstrates extreme degree self-abasement with a touch of emotional flaw, recreating the life scenario of a loser who was not born like everyone else and could not be realized in life. On the other hand, this "metaphor" can be considered as a confirmation of alienation from the mother, who remains statically 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 mother's figure, associates himself with impurities. This assumption, being purely hypothetical, aims to show a combination of traits of vulnerability and sensitivity in Kharms' personality structure with elements of emotional flattening and regressive syntonicity of the "wood and glass" type. This key characterological feature of the writer, called "psychesthetic proportion", left an imprint on all his work and largely predetermined his originality.

The writer's father (Ivan Yuvachev) joined the Narodnaya Volya organization at a young age, but was arrested almost immediately. Being 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 of his "religious insanity", that he had to be transferred from the fortress to the monastery. Soon Kharms' 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 his return 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, kept his edifications, written out from the sacred books. Later, he himself, already a writer, will begin to compose moralizing parables. But in Kharms' instructions, the didactics was confused, inverted, pretentious: “... a completely normal professor sits on a bed in a lunatic asylum, holds a fishing rod in her hands and catches some invisible fish on the floor. This professor is just a pitiful example of how many unfortunates there are in life who occupy the wrong place in life, which they should have occupied, ”or -“ one person from an early age to a ripe old age always slept on his back with his arms crossed. Finally he died. Therefore, do not sleep on your side. Kharms's anti-didacticism is caricatured and rejects the existence of universal commandments and foundations. This manifests not only a desire to avoid moralizing, but also a bitter parody of morals. modern writer society and even pain for a dying person. The father did not understand and did not approve of his son's work, but despite this, he remained an authority for Kharms throughout his short life - “Yesterday, dad told me that while I was Kharms, I would be haunted by needs. Daniel Charms. Paternal worldview inconsistency, categorical and ambitiousness, the desire for opposition, and in last years and 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, prone to pranks. Since childhood, he had an indefatigable imagination, and he could almost always convince his peers of the reality of his inventions. While studying at the Lutheran gymnasium, he perfectly mastered German and English. At the same time, he not only read foreign poetry exclusively in the original, but also had an impeccable pronunciation. Already in the gymnasium, Daniel's passion for theatrical hoaxes and extravagant tricks manifested itself. He created a system of behavior thought out to the smallest detail - from clothes to poetic spells and masks - pseudonyms. He seriously convinced the teacher not to give him a deuce - “do not offend the orphan”, under the stairs of the house he “settled” his imaginary, dearly beloved “muterchen”, started long conversations with her in the presence of amazed neighbors. He climbed a tree and could sit for hours among the branches, writing something in a book. These examples show that, despite the clearly expressed demonstrativeness 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 oddities in behavior, conflicts with society begin: at the age of 19, Yuvachev was expelled from the electrical engineering school, he could not get either higher or secondary special education. “Several accusations fell on me, for which I have to leave the technical school ... 1). Inactivity in public works 2). I do not fit the class physiologically ”- thus, the schizoid personality dynamics introduces disharmony into relationships with others, which is recognized by Kharms himself. In his youth, he was actively and intensively engaged in self-education, 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, the literary space is outlined, with which Kharms' texts will subsequently be connected (by reminiscences, quotations, motives): A. Bely, V. Blake, K. Hamsun, N. Gogol, E.-T.-A. Hoffmann, G. Meyrink, K. Prutkov. In the context of his work, he also involves philosophers: Aristotle, Pythagoras, Plato, I. Kant, A. Bergson, Z. Freud. In his free time from reading and writing, young Kharms continues to “be weird”: he smokes a pipe of some unusual shape, wears a top hat and leggings, translates NEP songs into German and taps to them, invents a bride for himself - a ballerina, etc. In 1924, Yuvachev's most famous pseudonym appeared - Daniil Kharms. In general, Daniil Ivanovich had about 30 pseudonyms, and he effortlessly changed them: Khharms, Khaarms, Dandan, Charms, Karl Ivanovich Shusterling, Harmonius, Shardam, etc. However, it was “Kharms” with its ambivalence (from the French. Charm - charm , charm and from English Harm - harm) most accurately reflected the essence of the writer's attitude to life and work: he knew how to sneer at 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, illogicality inner world was transferred to the world around, magical thinking predetermined the external meaning of the pseudonym - Daniil the Enchanter - a person who is confident in his parapsychic and supernatural abilities (“ignite trouble around himself”), bringing misfortune to those he loves. The beginning of Kharms' literary activity falls on 1925. He was a member of the association of poets - "plane trees", then - "zaumnikov", performed on the stage with his poems, and often the public perceived his semantic and formal poetic experiments very ambiguously. Scandals often broke out, so in 1927, Harms refused to read in front of an audience, comparing it either with a stable or with a brothel. Despite the fact that by that time he was already a member of the poets' union, illusions were hardly built about the lifetime publications of his "adult" works. The early poetry of Daniil Kharms consists of separate, sometimes unrelated phrases, and neologisms fill the entire possible semantic spectrum:

Somehow the grandmother waved
And immediately the steam locomotive
He gave it to the children and said:
Drink porridge and chest

Everything will overtake the estheg:
There are gooks and snow…
And you, aunt, are not frail,
You are a mikuka on the heel.

The use of alogisms and semantic fragmentation as linguistic experiments was widely used by the formal literary schools of the beginning of the century, especially by the futurists (D. Burlyuk, A. Kruchenykh, V. Khlebnikov). However, in the case of Kharms, we are not dealing with experimentation (which by that time had long gone out of fashion), but with a self-sufficient creative method.

The themes of the poems (in which one can catch at least some sense) contain hints of their own exclusivity, not in terms of self-affirmation, so characteristic of young poetic talents, but in terms of hostility to all sorts of common maxims and patterns:

I am a fiery speech genius.
I am the master of free thoughts.
I am the king of meaningless beauty.
I am the God of 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 like rubbish.

The scandalous reputation of Kharms was supported not only by his unusual creative manner, which will be discussed below, but also by extravagant antics and manners, as well as pretentious appearance . In an effort to differ from the bulk of citizens who joined the struggle for the industrialization of the country, Kharms appeared in public places "in a long plaid frock coat and a round cap, struck with refined politeness, which was further emphasized by the dog depicted on his left cheek." “Sometimes, for reasons also mysterious, he bandaged his forehead with a narrow black velvet. So he walked, obeying internal laws. One of Kharms's inventions was the "invention" of his own brother, who allegedly was a Privatdozent at St. Petersburg University, a grump and a snob. He imitated the manners of this "brother". So, going to a cafe, he took silver cups with him, pulled them out of his suitcase and drank only from his dishes. When he went to the theater, he stuck on a fake mustache, declaring that it was “indecent for a man to go to the theater without a mustache.” When reading from the stage, he put on a silk cap for a teapot on his head, carried a monocle ball in the form of a goggling eye, and liked to walk along the railings and cornices. At the same time, people who knew Kharms quite closely noted that his eccentricities and oddities somehow surprisingly harmoniously complemented his peculiar work. However, in general, the appearance and behavior of Kharms caused distrust and rejection of others, they were perceived as a mockery or even a mockery of public opinion, sometimes there were direct clashes with government officials: they took him for a spy, acquaintances had to verify his identity. Outrageous behavior, often part of the image of a creative person, in this case is absolutely out of harmony with the social environment and public attitudes. It can be summarized that despite the thickening political atmosphere, Kharms's behavior was dictated by internal, inexplicable motives, without taking into account realities. The personal life of the writer 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 that Kharms lived, and also far from his social circle. Several of Kharms' poems dedicated to his wife range from pathetic enthusiasm, tender passion, to vulgar pornography. In the diary entries, the motif of misunderstanding and growing alienation in family relationships sounds, 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 the dissociation of emotions, combined with everyday disorder, made the 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, even to some extent considered Kharms a 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 inclined to perceive free and arbitrary associations. Kharms' neologisms are also infantile and resemble words distorted by a child or conscious agrammatisms (“skazka”, “song”, “cheekalatka”, “boots”, “dog”, “mother”, etc.).

At the same time, Kharms's attitude towards children was very characteristic: “I don’t like children, old men and old women ... Poisoning children is cruel. But is there something to be done with them? The writer from the story "The Old Woman" categorically declares: "Children are disgusting." Harms himself explained his dislike for children in a delusional vein: “All things are arranged around me in certain forms. But some forms are missing. So, for example, there are no forms of those sounds that children make with their cry or play. That's why I don't like children." The theme of "dislike for children" runs through many of Kharms's works. The reasons for this phenomenon must be sought in the childhood of the writer himself, apparently, Kharms cannot accept his childish image, due to some unpleasant memories and associations, and transfers his dislike to children in general. A contemporary recalls: “Kharms hated children and was proud of it. Yes, it suited him. Defined some side of his being. He was, of course, the last of his kind. Further, the offspring would go absolutely terrible.

Who made up Kharms' circle of friends, in addition to fellow writers? Among the people around him, eccentrics, the mentally ill (as he called them, “natural thinkers”) prevailed, most of all he valued in people such qualities as alogism and independence of thinking, “crazy”, freedom from inert traditions and vulgar stereotypes in life and in art. “I'm only interested in 'nonsense'; just something that doesn't make any practical sense. 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. “Every muzzle of a prudent style makes me feel uncomfortable.” Kharms, thus, proclaims the spontaneity and immediacy of feelings, without their logical interpretation and any internal censorship. Such an ideological approach explains the exaggerated "childhood" in the behavior and work of the writer. This literary style, close in its principles to European "dadaism", formed the basis of the OBERIU group (Union of Real Art) created in 1928 by Kharms and like-minded people. Arranged performances and literary evenings were held with elements of clowning and shocking: participants read their works sitting on cabinets, rode around the stage on children's bicycles along various trajectories outlined in chalk, hung out posters of absurd content: “there were steps of mime kvass”, “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' play Elizaveta Bam (1929) is an example of the ability to get away 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 the unique creative style of Kharms was finally formed, which can be called a total inversion. The principle of this style is in the general change of sign: life, everything of this world, nature, miracle, science, history, personality - a false reality; otherworldly, death, non-existence, inanimate, impersonal - the true reality. Hence the inconsistency and drama of the texts, with a shift in meanings and accents in the opposite direction from logic - to 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 can help explain the originality of Kharms' creative manner: the combination of alogism -

I saw peas in a dream.
In the morning I got up and suddenly died.

and semantic aphasia -

Hey monks! We fly!
We fly and THERE fly.
Hey monks! We call!
We call and THERE ring.

By 1930, Harms, against the background of external unfavorable factors (family discord, social ostracism, material need), had periods of distinctly lowered mood, with ideas of self-abasement, conviction of his mediocrity and fatal bad luck. Due to his penchant for neologisms, Kharms gave his melancholy a female name: "Ignavia". Kharms stubbornly hides his affectivity and sensitivity behind an autistic facade. Thus, Kharms's personality can be clinically considered as psychopathic. In the personality structure, both narcissistic and hysterical (“liars and rogues”, “eccentrics and originals” according to E. Bleuler) and psychasthenic traits are visible, which makes it possible to attribute this psychopathy to the circle of “mosaic” schizoids. However, the absence of signs of stabilization and compensation for psychopathy, the inability to adapt to life and find one's own social niche by adulthood, as well as the increase in autism with an even greater separation from reality, allow us to speak of signs of a latent schizophrenic process. The game of a person who performs extravagant and mysterious acts gradually ceased to be a game, became the core of Kharms's personality. We are talking about the "amalgamation" of acquired psychopathic traits with a schizoid personality core, which also speaks in favor of the endogeneity of the process. Personal dynamics, done by Harms, thus, fits into the framework of pseudo-psychopathy and has signs of procedurality. Gross demonstrativeness is combined with autistic thinking and increased vulnerability, affective disorders become more and more atypical over time: depressions are dominated by signs of monoideism, dysphoria, and hypomanias are accompanied by foolish affect and disinhibition of drives. Thanks to a penchant for introspection and self-observation, from Kharms' diary entries we learn about episodes of dromomania, some autobiographical literary passages and sketches describe subpsychotic experiences (“About how messengers visited me”, “Morning”, “Sabre”). Some stories and letters can serve as examples of thought disorders of the schizophrenic type (breaks in thoughts, slips, 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' work, which fully reflects all the facets of his personality. An indirect sign confirming the presence of the progression of the disease is a certain depletion and fading of bright psychopathic symptoms over time and the dominance of stable features 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 the NKVD prison, then was exiled to Kursk. In prison and exile, Kharms, all the more, could not adapt to the environment. For violating the prison regime, he was repeatedly transferred to the isolation ward. The prison had a devastating effect on the personality of an impressionable writer. In Kursk, he made such characteristic diary entries: “... Dog fear comes over me ... From fear, the heart begins to tremble, the legs grow cold and fear grabs the back of the head ... Then the ability to mark your states will be lost, and you will go crazy.” “Kursk is a very unpleasant city. I prefer DPZ. Here, among all the locals, I have a reputation for an idiot. On the street, they always say something after me. Therefore, I, almost all the time, sit in my room ... ". In the autumn 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 did not want to earn money "on the side", or simply could not.

This is how hunger begins.

In the morning you wake up refreshed
Then the weakness begins
Then boredom sets in;
Then comes the loss
The quick mind of strength, -
Then comes the calm
And then the horror begins.

Kharms hides his literary work from others, with surprising persistence refuses to publish his work and writes "on the table." During these years, the proportion of prose is growing, and the story becomes the leading genre. The volume written by Kharms is relatively small and can fit in one volume. Given that the duration of his work was about 15 years, one could speak of a reduced creative capacity. Kharms himself calls the period from 1932 the period of "fall". But it was at this time that his spiritual and creative maturity came, the story "The Old Woman" and the most popular cycle of stories "Cases" were created. Harms' prose is no longer based on formal experiments and neologisms, but on the absurdity and unexpectedness of the plot, which creates a strong emotional effect:

Writer: I am a writer.
Reader: And in my opinion, you are g ... oh!
The writer stands for a few minutes shocked by this new idea and falls down dead. They take him out."

In recent years, Kharms' outlook has shifted to a darker side. The style of the narration also changes somewhat: semantic and semantic aphasia is replaced by moral aphasia. When describing expressive disorders in persons with schizophrenia, there is a violation of syllogical structures: a schizophrenic uses forms that play with the identity of predicates, such as, for example, in Kharms: "Mashkin strangled Koshkin." The number of non-standard metaphors is growing, the plots are deliberately schematic, formalized, which is hallmark autistic style of writing (one can draw an analogy with the late Gogol or with 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: “Once Orlov overate crushed peas and died. And Krylov, having learned about this, also died. And Spiridonov died by himself. And Spiridonov's wife fell from the buffet and also died. And the children of Spiridonov drowned in the pond. And grandmother Spiridonova drank herself and went along the roads ... "The tragedy of the stories intensifies to a feeling of complete hopelessness, inevitably impending madness, humor takes on an ominous, black character. The heroes of the stories subtly maim and kill each other, elements of harsh reality woven into a grotesque - absurd form Kharms's narrative no longer evokes laughter, but horror and disgust (“Falling”, “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 a beggarly half-starved existence with him. Characteristic entries appear more and more often in the diaries: “I have completely lost my mind. This is scary. Complete impotence in every sense... I achieved 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, plunge 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 more hope.
The dream is over.
Only poverty remained.

At the end of the thirties, Kharms' lifestyle and behavior remained as extravagant, although there was no longer any need to shock the public. We can assume an increase in autism with a lack of criticism and an elementary instinct for self-preservation, the presence of an emotional decline, which led to an increase in unpredictable impulsivity 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 me. They said that I had been disturbing the tenants in the building opposite for three years. I hung up the curtains. What is more pleasing to the eye: an old woman in one shirt or a young man, completely naked. In 1939, Kharms finally comes to the attention of not only law enforcement agencies, but also psychiatrists. He enters a psychiatric hospital for treatment and after discharge receives a certificate of schizophrenia. It is hardly possible to agree with those biographers who believe that Kharms' mental illness was "another artistic hoax", a simulation in order to obtain a "protection certificate" 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 very friendly to them. In the case of Kharms, if anything can be assumed, then 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 took place: after the start of the war, NKVD officers “cleaned” the city. The official charge imputed to the writer "defeatist moods". The only surviving photo from the court case shows an emaciated man with tousled hair, an expression of extreme horror and despair in his eyes. On the basis of the forensic psychiatric examination, Kharms, as a mentally ill person, is released from criminal responsibility and sent for compulsory treatment to the psychiatric department of the hospital at the transit prison, where he dies in a state of complete dystrophy a few months later.

The tragedy of Kharms as an artist and as a person was not in 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 managed to "look at writing as a holiday." Apparently, it is unlikely, but the very possibility of creative self-expression should have helped him to stabilize his mental state and contributed to a more favorable course of the disease. The main trouble was that Kharms turned out to be a pathologically sounding key on the keyboard of his time, his sound was dissonant, fell out of the general melody, but was not false. He sounded the way 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 the totalitarian era was non-recognition and death, so the fate of Kharms was shared by many of his closest literary friends. The avant-garde, which was in demand in the era of revolutionary changes and the breakdown of public consciousness (for example, V. Khlebnikov), became unnecessary and dangerous when universal equality of slogans and opinions was required.

The flourishing of avant-garde literature in liberal Western countries confirms the role of the social factor in the acceptance of new cultural phenomena. Harms anticipated his time, the laurels of the "fathers of the absurd" received E. Ionesco and S. Beckett. F. Kafka, a writer in many respects similar to Kharms, if not in form, then in terms of plot issues, already during his lifetime received loud recognition, and then was completely “canonized” as a classic of psychological prose (both Kafka and the aforementioned Khlebnikov suffered from the same mental illness, as 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 on photocopies, mixed with many fakes 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 poetry, his name became a cult in the youth mainstream. In the era of democratic changes in Russia, numerous epigones appeared who tried to copy Kharms's style. However, none of the imitators managed to get close to Kharms' writing style, which is explained by the impossibility of full 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 widely read authors in Russia. His talent has stood the test of time, his work has returned to us from oblivion and oblivion. The age-old dilemma of "genius and insanity" once again points out how non-standard individuals, holy fools and mentally ill, persecuted and executed, are the true engines of our culture. Unfortunately, progress comes at a high price.

In conclusion - the lines of the poem, which Kharms dedicated to his friend, the poet N. Oleinikov, who was shot in 1938. These lines can also be addressed to the author himself:

Your verse sometimes makes me laugh, sometimes it disturbs the feeling,
Sometimes the ear saddens, or does not make laugh at all,
He even angers sometimes, and there is little art in him,
And into the abyss of petty deeds, he hastens to plunge.

Wait! Come back! Where cold thought
Are you flying, forgetting the law of visions of oncoming crowds?
Whom did he pierce in the chest with a sullen arrow?
Who is your enemy? Who is a friend? And where is your death pole?

References

Alexandrov A. "Truthful writer of the absurd." - In the book: D.I. Kharms. Prose. Leningrad - Tallinn: Lira Agency, 1990, p.5-19.
Alexandrov A. Miracle. The personality and work of Daniil Kharms. - In the book: D. Kharms. Flight to heaven. 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. Throat raving with a razor. "Verb", N4, 1991, p. 5-17 and 142 - 194.
Petrov V. Daniil Kharms. _ V. book: Panorama of the Arts. Issue. 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 "Kristall", 1999. - 1120 p.
Schwartz E. "I live restlessly ..." From the diaries. L .: "Soviet writer", 1990.
Shuvalov A. Pathographic essay on 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

Soviet poet, prose writer, playwright, children's writer. One of the central representatives of the Russian avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century. During the life of Kharms, his works were not only not published, but were known to a very narrow circle of people.

Daniil Ivanovich Kharms, real name Yuvachev, born December 30 (December 17 old style) 1905 in St. Petersburg. His father was a naval officer. IN 1883 for complicity in the People's Will terror, he was brought to trial, spent four years in solitary confinement and more than ten years in hard labor, where he experienced a religious conversion: along with the memoirs "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).

Kharms's mother was of noble origin, she was in charge of 1900s a shelter for former convicts in St. Petersburg.

After the revolution, she became a housekeeper at the Barachnaya Hospital named after S.P. Botkin, his father worked as a senior auditor of the State Savings Banks, and later as head of the accounting department of the working committee at the construction of the Volkhovskaya hydroelectric power station.

IN 1915. Daniel enters the first class of a real school, which was part of the Main German School of St. Peter in Petrograd (Petershule). During the revolution and the Civil War, Kharms moved with his parents to the Volga region, then returned back to St. Petersburg. WITH 1922 Kharms studies in Tsarskoye Selo, at a school where his aunt, Natalya Ivanovna Kolyubakina, was the director. After leaving school in 1924. Kharms entered the Leningrad Electrotechnical School. However, not having the slightest craving for the profession, he was expelled a year later. At this time, he chooses the pseudonym "Kharms" for himself. The beginning of literary activity of Kharms falls on 1925. He entered a small group of Leningrad poets, "zaumniks", headed by A. Tufanov. During this year, Kharms formed two notebooks of poems, which he October 9, 1925. presented along with an application for admission to the Leningrad branch of the All-Russian Union of Poets, and March 26, 1926 was accepted into it. IN 1925 Kharms married E.A. Rusakova (divorced in 1932)

Cooperation with the "wise men" was short-lived. IN 1925 Kharms meets A.I. Vvedensky and is part of the “plane trees” union founded by him, which also included Ya. S. Druskin and L. S. Lipavsky, who became Kharms’s true friends. IN 1925-1928 years Kharms creates a number of short-lived literary (and not only) organizations. The performances of Harms and his like-minded people in public are distinguished by an unconventional approach to art, provocativeness and are sharply criticized in the "official" press. Autumn 1927 Kharms, A. Vvedensky, I. Bakhterev and N. Zabolotsky create a new literary group- Association of real art (abbreviated - OBERIU). As conceived by the creators, this association was to include not only writers, but also artists and musicians. Global plans were not destined to come true. January 24, 1928 The most famous performance of the Oberiuts took place in the Leningrad House of Press, which included reading poetry and staging Kharms's play "Elizaveta Bam". This performance (as well as all the previous ones) was criticized in the press, but Kharms' small performances with friends took place until spring. 1930 The financial situation of Kharms throughout this time remained very deplorable. In March 1929 Kharms was even expelled from the Union of Poets for non-payment of membership fees. In order to somehow earn a living, Harms began to write poetry for children, since this was the only thing he could print. December 10, 1931 Kharms was arrested and sentenced to 3 years in the camps, but then the sentence was commuted and replaced with a link to Kursk (A. Vvedensky was also exiled there). In 1932 Kharms and Vvedensky managed to return to Leningrad. From that time on, there could be no talk of any publications and speeches. Harms (like most of his friends) did not even try to publish his "adult" writings. Communication between the former Oberiuts and people close to them took place now in apartments. The only source of livelihood remained works for children, but even they were printed less and less. IN 1935 Kharms enters into a second marriage with M. Malich. After publication in 1937 in the children's magazine of the poem "A man with a club and a bag came out of the house", for some time Kharms was not printed at all, which puts him and his wife on the verge of starvation. Despite the extremely unfavorable circumstances, Kharms continues to work: he writes many short stories, theatrical skits and poems for adults, creates a series of miniatures "Cases", the story "The Old Woman". August 23, 1941 Kharms was arrested "for defeatist sentiments." According to the recollections of friends, he was really pessimistic about the prospects for the USSR in the war and was extremely negative about the prospect of serving in the army. In light of the circumstances, Kharms is hard to blame. Almost nothing is known about the further fate of the poet; neither the date of death nor its cause has been precisely established. It is known that he died in a prison psychiatric hospital, about which February 4, 1942 was reported to his wife M. Malich. Apparently Kharms feigned insanity in order to avoid being shot, and most likely died of starvation.

Kharms in his notebooks names the following reasons for his expulsion from the Electrotechnical School: “1) Inactivity in public works. 2) I don’t fit the class physiologically.”

Harms had about 20 pseudonyms. Such a large number of literary names is explained, on the one hand, by Kharms's penchant for hoaxes and theatricalization of his life, on the other hand, censorship constantly banned Kharms' works, and he published them under new pseudonyms.

The meaning of the pseudonym "Kharms" is not known for certain. Researchers of Kharms' work suggest that it is formed in consonance with the French "charme" - "charm, charm" and the English "harm" - "harm". Some go even further and look for the origins of the pseudonym in the Sanskrit "dharma" - "religious duty" and the name of the Egyptian magician Hermes Trismegistus.

The nature of the performances of Kharms and his comrades can be judged by several curious facts. So, during the speech of the "plane trees" at the meeting of the literary circle of the Higher Courses of Art History ( 1927) a scandal erupted, during which Kharms, climbing onto a chair, said: “I don’t read in stables and brothels!”.

At his last performance in the hostel of students of Leningrad State University ( 1930) the Oberiuts came with posters: "Kolya went to the sea", "The steps of mime kvass were walking", "Are we not pies?" etc. According to L. Ya. Ginzburg, in response to attempts to find out the meaning of the last slogan, the poets reasonably remarked: "Are we pies?"

K. Malevich presented Kharms with his book "God will not be thrown off" with a dedicatory inscription: "Go and stop progress!"

The literary association OBERIU is unique not only in domestic but also in world literature. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that all publications of all members of this association (with the exception of N. Zabolotsky) can be counted on the fingers of one hand. This is despite the fact that the creative potential and originality of the ideas of the Oberiuts are now obvious.

The fate of most of the Oberiuts was tragic. A. Vvedensky, who was arrested at the same time as Kharms, died during the transfer. V. Vaginov died of tuberculosis in 1934 Oleinikov was shot in 1938 B. Levin and L. Lipavsky died at the front. N. Zabolotsky eight years (1938-1946) spent in camps and exile.

The literary heritage of Kharms was preserved by his friend Y. Druskin, who, after the news of Kharms's death, came to his abandoned apartment and took the suitcase with manuscripts. J. Druskin did not touch the suitcase for 20 years and only in the 60s began to analyze the manuscripts.

A cult figure among domestic hippies - Anna Gerasimova (Umka) is a specialist in the work of D. Kharms and the Oberiuts.

Bibliography

The literary heritage of D. Kharms is small: poems and stories for children, poems for adults, several plays, prose is represented by short stories. Among his "adult" works, the cycle "Cases" and the story "The Old Woman" are most famous.

Screen adaptations of works, theatrical performances

Art films

Clownery (1989) dir. D. Frolov

Staru-ha-rmsa (1991) dir. V. Gems

Happy Days (1991) dir. A. Balabanov

Concerto for a Rat (1996) dir. O. Kovalov

Falling into the sky (2007) dir. N. Mitroshina

Cartoons

Samovar Ivan Ivanovich (1987) dir. Ts. Orshansky

Once (1990) dir. A. Guriev

Case (1990) dir. A. Turkus

Keywords: Daniil Kharms, Biography of Daniil Kharms, Detailed biography, full biography, read the biography of Kharms, the work of Daniil Kharms, absurdity, Russian avant-garde, works, read online, free, download, Russian literature, prose, Oberiuts

By the mid-1990s, Kharms firmly occupies the place of one of the main representatives of Russian art literature of the 1920s and 1930s, in fact opposed to Soviet literature.

Born December 17 (30), 1905 in St. Petersburg. His father, when he was a naval officer, was brought to trial in 1883 for complicity in the 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 memoirs 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) and others. Kharms's mother, a noblewoman, was in charge of a shelter for former convicts in St. Petersburg in the 1900s. Kharms studied at the St. Petersburg privileged German school (Petershule), where he acquired a thorough knowledge of German and English. In 1924 he entered the Leningrad Electrotechnical School, from where he was expelled a year later for "weak attendance" and "inactivity in public works." Since then, he devoted himself entirely to writing and lived exclusively by literary earnings. The versatile self-education accompanying writing, with a special focus on philosophy and psychology, as his diary testifies, proceeded extremely intensively.

Initially, he felt the “power of poetry” in himself 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), admirer and successor of V.V. ) and the founder (in March 1925) of the Order of Zaumnikov, the core of which included Kharms, who took the title “Look Zaumi.” Through Tufanov, he became close to A. Vvedensky, a student of the more orthodox poet “Khlebnikov” and admirer A. Kruchenykh I.G. .Terentiev (1892–1937), the creator of a number of agitation plays, including the “actualizing” stage adaptation of the Inspector General, parodied in the Twelve Chairs by I. Ilf and E. Petrov. Harms had a strong friendship with Vvedensky, who, sometimes without any particular reason, took on the role of Harms' mentor. However, the direction of their work, which is related in terms of literary searches, is fundamentally different from beginning to end: Vvedensky develops and maintains a didactic orientation, while Kharms's is dominated by play. This is evidenced by his first well-known poetic texts: Kika with Koka, Vanka Vstanka, the grooms and the poem Mikhaila invented the earth.

Vvedensky provided Kharms with a new circle of constant communication, introducing him to his friends L. Lipavsky and Y. Druskin, graduates of the philosophical department of the Faculty of Social Sciences, who refused to renounce their teacher, the prominent Russian philosopher N.O. to develop his ideas of self-value of personality and intuitive knowledge. Their views undoubtedly influenced Kharms's worldview, for more than 15 years they were the first listeners and connoisseurs of Kharms, during the blockade Druskin miraculously saved his compositions.

Back in 1922, Vvedensky, Lipavsky and Druskin founded a tripartite alliance and began to call themselves "plane trees"; in 1925 they were joined by Kharms, who from “gazing 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 he never used his own surname. The pseudonym was also fixed 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 (The Case on the Railroad and the Poem of Peter Yashkin, a Communist) managed to be printed in small-circulation collections of the Union. In addition to them, until the end of the 1980s, only one “adult” work of Kharms was published in the USSR - the poem Mary comes out, having bowed (Sat. Poetry Day, 1965).

As a member of the literary association, Kharms got the opportunity to read his poems, but he 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 hours, but things did not go beyond rehearsals. Kharms met K. Malevich, and the head of Suprematism presented him with his book God will not throw 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' gravitation towards the 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 Petersburg and the first predominantly prose work - a play by Elizaveta Bam, presented on January 24, 1928 at the only evening of the "Association of Real Art" (OBERIU), which, in addition to Kharms and Vvedensky, included N. Zabolotsky, K. Vaginov and I. Bakhterev, and to which N. Oleinikov joined - with him Kharms developed a special intimacy. The association was unstable, lasted less than three years (1927-1930), and Kharms' active participation in it was rather external, not affecting his creative principles in any way. 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 join it; from 1928 to 1941 he constantly collaborated in the children's magazines "Hedgehog", "Chizh", "Cricket" and "October", during which time he published about 20 children's books. These works are a natural offshoot of Kharms' work and give a kind of outlet for his playful element, but, as his diaries and letters testify, they were written exclusively for earnings (more than meager since the mid-1930s) and the author did not attach much importance to them. They were published through the efforts of S.Ya. Marshak, the attitude of leading criticism towards them, starting with an article in Pravda (1929) Against hack work in children's literature, was unequivocal. This is probably why it was necessary to constantly vary and change the pseudonym.

His unpublished works were regarded by the Smena newspaper in April 1930 as "poetry of a class enemy", the article became a harbinger of Kharms's arrest at the end of 1931, the qualification of his literary pursuits 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 less and less poetry is written (the last completed poems date back to the beginning of 1938), while prose works (with the exception of the story of the Old Woman, creations of a small genre) multiply and cycle (Cases, Scenes, etc.). ). On site lyrical hero- an entertainer, a ringleader, a visionary and a miracle worker - a deliberately naive narrator-observer appears, 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 due to the scrupulous accuracy of details, gestures, and speech mimics. In unison with diary entries (“the days of my death have come”, etc.), the last stories (Knights, Fall, Interference, Rehabilitation) are imbued with a feeling of complete hopelessness, the omnipotence of crazy arbitrariness, cruelty and vulgarity.

In August 1941 Harms was arrested for "defeatist remarks".

Kharms' writings, even printed ones, remained in complete oblivion until the early 1960s, when a collection of his carefully selected children's poems, The Game (1962), was published. After that, for about 20 years, they tried to assign him the appearance of a cheerful eccentric, a mass entertainer in the children's part, which was completely inconsistent with his "adult" writings. Since 1978, his collected works have been published in Germany, prepared on the basis of saved manuscripts by M. Meilakh and V. Erl. By the mid-1990s, Kharms firmly occupies the place of one of the main representatives of Russian art literature of the 1920s and 1930s, in fact opposed to Soviet literature.