Chekhov’s Mistess

Nothing About Daniil Kharms

The mythology surrounding Daniil Kharms’s death at the hands of the Soviets may or may not be based on hard facts, but Benjamin Paloff, a poetry editor at the Boston Review, is a little pissed off at his current place in literary history. I was drawn to this article I found in The Moscow Times first because Kharms is a great discovery of mine last year (for more on Kharms, who seems to have made his living as a children’s book author, at Wikipedia, or at this fan site). He’s enjoying a renaissance of sorts in English with a recent reissue of a 1993 translation of his work by Serpent’s Tail and a new translation by Matvei Yankelevich published – in hardback – last year by Overlook. But I was also drawn to this gem of Paloff’s that I love:

“Reading Russian poetry and aesthetic theory of the early Soviet period against the backdrop of the American poetry produced since then, one easily gets the feeling that a great deal of American paper could have been spared if these Russian texts had been available in English earlier.”

Ah, so true, so true, I suppose, but Paloff erodes his opportunity at making a point when he bullys a recent introduction to Kharms’ work with a cliche like “…reminiscent of a graduate seminar paper…” I do love that one because no matter how cliched, it stings, and it’s fun to watch poets gleefully spit at others with this sort of pseudo-intellectual name calling. Likewise, I remember a recent reviewer of Zbigniew Herbert’s The Collected Poems had a real problem with Adam Zagajewski’s rather short introduction to the book, which could only lead you to believe he, the reviewer, was either on a personal mission against the introducing author or just trying to make up for a lack of anything substantive to say about the work at hand.

So, back to Kharms. Paloff’s big problem seems to be the marketer’s tendency to pigeon-hole authors, as has been done with Kharms who is billed as an “absurdist” protest writer. Fair enough, but the truth is, despite the fact that “absurdist writer” might be as inept a name as “surrealist painter,” absurd as an artistic stance is a lot more impressive (and hard to pull off) than a lot of blathering political or philosophical writing. In short, if there is a political stance behind it, so called absurdist writing such as that of Kharms serves it well – as the only possible response to a sustained situation of unconscionable absurdity that is beyond any form of subversiveness – the artistic equivalent of a hunger strike. For instance, while the world will forever be engaged with Kafka, Camus will gradually fade away because his overt message is obscured by relatively dull writing (Camus fans, pummel me now, but I’ll tell you that I owe the good fortune of meeting my wife to Camus, but that’s another story). I don’t think Kafka’s work is labeled as absurd (because it’s not) but the adamantine absurdity that exists in his stories makes you feel the world that he was protesting against. Kharms’ writing does that too.

Kharms’ best known story “The Old Woman” features an old woman who appears in the narrator’s apartment and lays down and dies. The story begins like a parable:

In the courtyard stands an old woman holding in her hands a clock. I walk past the old woman, stop and ask her: “What time is it?”
“Take a look,” says the old woman.
I look and see that the clock has no hands.
“There are no hands there,” I say.
The old woman looks at the clock face and says to me:
“It’s a quarter to three.”
“So, that’s how it is? Thanks very much,” I say and leave.

If this were an American story it would have ended when the narrator saw there were no hands; he would have smiled and walked on. The Russian ending is “So, that’s how it is?” because it is. The rest of the story does that too – the narrator’s biggest problem is that the habits of those around him are so necessarily banal that when he has to consciously pay attention to them (because he has to rid himself of a dead body) his expectations are confounded by their slightest variation. Ultimately, the impossibility of his situation is so normal because normal is so impossible that it means nothing. I can’t think of a better description for for this than absurdist, can you? Or maybe I should just stick to the marketing department.

Where Paloff has a point is that not all of Kharms’ writing is absurdist. In fact, some of it is merely funny, childish or insouciantly pointless at best; something short of absurd, if that’s even what he was going for. To write that off as an American/Russian issue of sensibility is wrong. Paloff’s (and others’) idea that Kharms might have prefigured Russell Edson or Lydia Davis might be right, but those two, who weren’t killed under mysterious circumstances by the Soviets and therefore don’t enjoy a Russian mythology, have in my view an overall stronger body of work than Kharms, at least as he is translated into English, and at least standing outside of his own time.

I think a closer kin to Kharms is the Israeli writer of disarmingly curt stories, Etgar Keret, whose upcoming collection The Girl on the Fridge (actually a new release of his earlier work) features for example, a character who glues herself to the ceiling. His stories are so riddled with a humorous yet melancholy violence (a characteristic of Kharms’ writing) that you are engaged almost unwittingly with what it might be like for a person living a normal life of family, jobs and girlfriends, but with a subtext of stifling everyday violence. Being normal is a false response, yet the only way to get by. It’s an un-virtuous circle.

“And that’s it, more or less.”

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: April 08, 2008
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

Tags: Daniil Kharms

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