Daniil Kharms: Absurdism in the Shadow of Soviet Oppression

The Oxford dictionary of English defines the term “absurdism” as “the belief that humans exist in a world with no purpose or order”. This definition has derived from Albert Camus’ existentialist philosophy and it is used from many other authors of the twentieth century such as Franz Kafka or Samuel Beckett. In art, absurdism was included as part of surrealism, and many painters such as Dada or Michael Cheval were driven by its inspiration while drawing some of their masterpieces. Later, absurdism was displayed on the big screen thanks to artists such as the troupe of Monty Python. All of these artists focused on the representation of fictional universes, which function without any laws or particular order; they are chaotic and do not let any logic to their system.

One of the first discoverers of the absurdist genre was Daniil Kharms. He was a Russian author, who lived, wrote and died in Russia during the 1930s of the 20th century. He focused on writing in the absurdist genre and used the background setting of the crisis as an inspiration for his works. All of his content was considered a danger to the Soviet system, therefore everything under the name of Kharms was banned and not published due to political grounds. Some of his texts had a preventative censorship, some of them were banned after publication due to the strict measures in the USSR during this time period. Kharms was unknown by his contemporaries and he mostly survived because of his poetry for children, however his talent was acknowledged almost a century later. His works were analysed in depth revealing his extraordinary way of creating and the essence of his nonsense stories.

Dannil Yuvachev was born in 1905 in St. Petersburg. His father, Ivan Yuvachev was a member in a revolutionary organisation against the autocratic system in the Soviet Union and unfortunately this act took his freedom – he was ostracised on island Sakhalin. Daniil’s younger sister died when she reached her fourth year due to a serious illness, whose remedy was too expensive for the poor family. These tragedies have affected Daniil’s life deeply; it is suggested that his pseudonym was related to them, regarding that Kharms was a game of the words “harm” and “charm” mixed. It can be suggested that the name Kharms resembles both the essences of his life and his works – despite the darkness and the brutality in his life and in his fictional stories, there was always a sparkle of peculiar charm, which often presented the pessimistic in an optimistic light. Kharms was an active writer during the 1920s and the 1930s of the twentieth century in Russia, where the despotic regime of Stalin reflected significantly on the life of the ordinary person. The Soviet Union was at the edge of World War II, therefore during this period people were struggling to gain everyday supplies in order to survive. The following historical context will serve as an important part of understanding Kharms’ life and the possible reason behind his inspiration for writing in the absurdist genre. According to Sheila Fitzpatrick’s research on the daily life in 1930s Soviet Russia, during this period Kharms’ home country was a dangerous and lawless place. The constant political propaganda that “The party is always right” contrasted with the realistic conditions that the Russian people had to deal with every day. Almost every act of disobedience could be contrary to the demands of the authority. Dangerous acts such as “robberies, murders, drunken fights and random attacks on passerby were common” during the Soviet crisis in the 30s. The lack of food, clothes and goods was a main problem: “people no longer talked about “buying” something, but about “getting hold of it”. The lines for bread and other essentials were so long that one had to wait hours until he could buy something. Kharms represents all of these problematic themes of the crisis in many of his short stories such as Masha Found a Mushroom, Mashkin Killed Koshkin, The Beginning of a Wonderful, Summer Day, et cetera. The author himself was constantly struggling with the misery of his poor life, despite his erudition and his fluency in three different languages. He wrote in his journal:

It is sure that all of my life will pass in a horrifying poverty and I will live ordinary only when I am at the safety of my home, perhaps afterwards, as well, if I reach my 40s.

This serves as a proof for his both pessimistic and realistic analysis of the time period. In 1928 Kharms was one of the founders of the avant-garde literature organisation, called Oberiu, or Union of Real Art where he began to develop his unique understanding of absurdism. He focused on building a peculiar form of avant-garde writing; an art that deviated from realism and strived away from any logic and practical explanations of the real world. The freedom that Oberiu gave him made possible the creation of the play Elizaveta Bam, which was performed only once on stage before a negative critique came out calling it: “a cynical non-sense that no one understood”.

After the failure of his theatre of absurdity, Kharms lost his mother and all the possible career projects that he could take part in. This forced him to start writing poetry for children, however one of his poems – Out of a house walked a man was considered as “hostile towards the socialistic traditional family and the socialist revolutionary literature” and after this critique he struggled to find publishers of his poems. In 1930 Oberiu was claimed to be a group with “literature hooligans”, therefore this ended its public performances. This was followed by the arrest of a few of its members in 1931 due to an accusation of participating in an anti-Soviet illegal group of writers, one of which was Kharms himself. It can be suggested that after the critiques of Kharms’ works, he became suspicious in the eyes of the strict authority – Fitzpatrick states that once one was acclaimed to be hostile against the system, he could hardly regain back a normal social status. These people were forced to become outlaws, apropos, “even social meetings between them were likely to be interpreted as “anti-Soviet discussions […]” and this used to result in lower or higher punishments such as different forms of death sentence. The outcome for Kharms was an exile for three years and a divorce with his first wife, Ester. The sentence resulted in one of his most productive periods when he came up with the ideas from his later collection of short stories called Cases.

When his exile ended, he returned to St. Petersburg and his life continued miserably – he was at the edge of starvation with his new wife. In 1939 World War II began, and the orders were clear – every man over 14 must join the military forces. Kharms started publishing psychiatry books and simulated schizophrenia in order to avoid serving in the army. This act cost him losing all of the support by the publishing houses that he ever had and left him to a second period of chronicle starvation and hopelessness. Two years later he met with Antonia Oranzhereeva, a journalist, to whom he shared his opinion about serving in the Soviet military forces. Unfortunately, she appeared to be an agent from the NKVD (The People’s Commissariat for Internal Events). Later, when Kharms had to explain himself in front of an inspector, he fearlessly shared with him the same words: 

If they give me a mobilization order, I will strike my fist into the face of the commander. Better for them to shoot me, because I will not put on a uniform and I will not serve the Soviet army – I simply do not wish to be such crap. […] If they give me a machine-gun […] I would shoot not the Germans, but at them. […] For me it is better to live with the Germans in the concentration camps than in the conditions of the Soviet authority.

After these words, his execution was certain, however he simulated insanity again and the investigators decided to send him to the psychiatric ward called Kresty prison. He died there, alone, in 1942.

Twenty years later, his sister Elizaveta requested permission for a justification of her brother’s case and the results were positive – Kharms was exonerated and the censorship of his works were lifted. On the one hand, it can be stated that it is surprising how Kharms predicted his life accurately judging by the foregoing note from his journal – he was extremely poor; he was the most productive when isolated and he died young. On the other hand, Kharms’ fate was common during the crisis and the war in Russia. Although his death was ordinary, Kharms himself was an extraordinary phenomenon – not only as a person, but as a writer, as well. The following paragraph will focus on his works and on the techniques he uses in order to prove the innovative approach of Kharms, which surpasses the time it was written in.

In Latin, the term “absurd” forms from the construct ab-surdus, with the adjective surdus, which means “deaf” or “mute”. This leads to the most trivial etymological explanation of the noun – “which is unheard of (…)”, apropos something that no one has ever heard of. It can be stated that this description implies to Daniil Kharms himself – he was not known among his contemporaries and few people liked and appreciated his original texts.

Neil Cornwell, a renowned professor of Russian and Comparative Literature with multiple contributions to the academic field, explains one of the reasons for the uniqueness of Kharms’ works to be his “constant adoption, at various levels, of what may be terms a poetics of extremism”. This so-called Kharms extremism lies within his perpetual need to undermine his own stories or to build them with a peculiar self-destruction mechanism. This can be explained better with an example of one of his miniatures – Meeting:

So, one day a man went to work and while going there he met another man, who had bought bread and was just minding his own business. That is all actually.

It can be suggested that the terseness of this story resonates within its simplicity. Mark Lipovetsky (an acclaimed literary critic specialised in Russian forms of art) suggests that Kharms’ collection Cases is the first example in the Russian literature for Roland Barthes’s approach of ‘writing in the degree zero’, apropos “a deconstruction of writing by means of writing”. Cornwell calls Kharms “the black miniaturist” and compares his approach to Beckett’s ‘end of Story’ model, which extends in the minimalistic and infantile way of telling a story. The author’s extremism results in decomposing his texts or building them just so he could belittle their message if they had any. As an example of that can serve one of his famous short stories The Plummeting Old Women: 

Excessive curiosity made one old woman fall out of a window, plummet to the ground and break into pieces. Another old woman poked her head out of a window to look at the one who had broken into pieces, but excessive curiosity made her too fall out of the window, plummet to the ground and break into pieces. Then a third woman fell out of a window, then a fourth, then a fifth. When a sixth old woman fell out, I felt I’d had enough of watching them and went off to the Maltsev Market where I heard that a blind man had been given a knitted scarf. 

This miniature represents Kharmisian extremism in a peculiar and accurate way. The whole story is not built up around a plot, all of the characters in it do not have any character arc and there is no moral in it – it is just a cold and apathetic description of the narrator. Indeed, this carelessness lies within the charm of Kharms’ stories and within the essence of the absurdism. In the introduction the description of this term stated that the absurdist world is a place without any order or purpose. It just exists – so do the falling women who are part of it. In his research Cornwell deliberately quotes Juri Lotman:

The essence of plot lies in selecting the events, which are the discrete units of plot, then giving them meaning and a temporal or causal or some other ordering.

Then adds by himself: “The second half of this prescription is exactly what Kharms typically does not give us.”. Therefore, Kharms opposes the rich diversity and complex techniques of fiction with his minimalistic text, where the reader is provided only with a skeletal structure of the story and usually this lasts until the end.  However, not all Kharms’ stories are so simple – it can be suggested that some of them do have morals, although they are represented under the form of a cold statement. For example, the miniature Cases: 

Once Orlov ate too much crushed peas and died. When Krilov understood about this, he died, as well. Spiridonov died alone. Spiridonov’s wife fell from the cupboard and also died. Spiridonov’s kids drowned in the lake. Spiridonov’s grandma took to drinking and started begging. […] And Kruglov drew a lady with a whip in her hands and lost his mind. […] Reasonable people, but they cannot find their way in life. 

It can be stated that this miniature’s moral reflects on the importance of one’s constant will for improvement - disasters and unfortunate events happen in every single second everywhere around the world and if one does not find his way in life he might end as one of the characters in the miniature. This might be one of the possible interpretations of Kharms’ intentions when he created the text. Another one might lay within personal reasons. He had a life full of disappointments, he lived during a crisis and a war in a totalitarian country. It can be suggested that the author did not aim to use the surrealistic approach of absurdism in order to create escapism. By adding surrealistic elements to his stories, Kharms hyperbolizes the true horrors of the suffocating Leningrad’s atmosphere to such an extent that they become ridiculous. Cornwell comments on this the following:

Kharms turns a starkly surgical glance both on the extraordinary world of Stalin’s Russia and on representation itself – past and present – in storytelling and other artistic forms.

It can be suggested that Kharms’ originality was in a contradiction with one of the main ideas of the USSR – the strive of backwardness. The authorities tried to avoid any change and to regain their old glory by turning backwards in the traditional models and examples. Fitzpatrick’s research states that the word backwardness: “stood for everything that belonged to old Russia and needed to be changed in the name of progress and culture.”

It seems that Kharms could not stand the act of praise to the highly respected authors such as Pushkin and Gogol. The Soviet authority put them on a pedestal, and they used to be a model and an example for every author back at this time. It might be clear until this part of the essay, that Kharms was against everything ordinary and cliché, so it can be suggested that perhaps this is the reason why he mocked these authors in some of his works. For example Anecdotes from Pushkin’s life tells non-realistic facts and events that used to happen to Pushkin when he was young:

Pushkin loved to throw stones at himself. […] Pushkin had four sons – and all of them were idiots. One of them could not even stand on a chair and he always kept falling from it. Pushkin also couldn’t sit on a chair very well.

Any kind of mockery about praised figures was prohibited back in the 1930s in USSR, however Kharms not only was brave enough (or mad?) to write parodies, he also represented these men through the prism of a cynical and cruel humor, which hundred years later is still relevant.

As a final touch to this analysis an important matter about Kharms’ works should be examined properly. The repetition of Kharms’s peculiar fixations: with falling, accidents, randomness, sudden death, victimisation, and nearly all types of seemingly senseless violence. It can be added that there is not almost any distinction between the narratorial and the authorial position. One can find in his journal thoughts just as cynical and violent as the content of his stories: 

I don’t like children, old men, old women, and the reasonably middle aged. To poison children, that would be cruel. But, hell, something needs to be done with them! . . . I respect only young, healthy and gorgeous women. The remaining representatives of the human race I regard suspiciously. 

It can be stated that all of the unpleasant events in his life – from the passing of his young sister until his own terrible death sentence in the psychiatric ward, made Kharms a peculiar misanthrope or at least a desperate person. It can be suggested that he was obsessed with the issue of falling. The short story The Falling shows two perspectives of different women, who observe two bodies falling from a building. At the end, a crowd has gathered and cheerfully waits for the bodies to hit the ground. The last sentence states:

In the same way, sometimes when we fall from the heights we have touched, we hit the gloomy cage of our future.

This can be related to Kharms’ notes:

When falling into filth, there is only one thing for a man to do: just fall, without looking around. The important thing is just to do this with style and energy.

Regarding the unclear difference between the author and the narrator it can be stated that probably Kharms’ expressed his dissatisfaction, despair and disappointment through his writing. The bitter way in which he used to see the world has preserved through the prism of absurdism and gives to the contemporary readers a surrealistic perspective of St. Petersburg’s hardest times. As Cornwell concludes in his analysis: “In times of extremity, it is the times themselves that may seem more absurd than any absurd artistic invention.”

In conclusion, Daniil Kharms's unique approach to absurdist literature, shaped by his tragic and oppressive experiences in 1930s Soviet Russia, has left a lasting impact on literary history. His fixation on themes of randomness, senseless violence, and sudden death poignantly reflects the chaos of his time. Despite initial obscurity and censorship, Kharms's work has gained recognition for its innovative and minimalist narrative style. His stories, characterized by dark humor and a surreal portrayal of reality, challenge conventional storytelling and provide a powerful critique of oppressive societal structures. Ultimately, Kharms's legacy endures as a testament to the resilience of creativity in the face of adversity.

Works cited:

Cornwell, Neil. The Absurd in Literature, Manchester University Press, 2006.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism : Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Kharms, Daniil. The Plummeting Old Women, The Liliput Press, 1989.

Oxford Dictionary of English: Second Edition. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Хармс, Даниил. Избрани съчинения. Факел експрес, 2014.