Daniil Kharms was one of the brightest representatives of Russian literature in the first half of the 20th century. It is very accurately described in one popular online encyclopedia:

“A self-authored character, a super-fiction writer, an absurd man, a master of rhymed nonsense, a genius of delirium, an apotheosis of the inadequate, a model of a countercultural hero, and so on, so on, so on.”

Who was this person really?

Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev, later Daniil Kharms, was born on December 17 (30), 1905 in St. Petersburg. As a child, he came up with a pseudonym for himself, which later acquired the status of an official name. In fact, Kharms had several dozen pseudonyms: Harmonius, Charms, Shardam, Karl Ivanovich Shusterling, Daniil Zatochnik, etc. Even in this variety of names, the writer's lively, many-sided nature was manifested.

Creativity Kharms entirely consistent with the concept of OBERIU (Association of Real Art) - a group of cultural figures, founded in the late 20's. in Leningrad. Representatives of this movement preached the rejection of traditions in art, the grotesque and the aesthetics of the absurd. On the part of the authorities, the Oberiuts did not enjoy recognition, semi-official critics called their work "poetry of the class enemy." Therefore, the works of Daniil Kharms were not published, and he could realize himself only in the niche of children's literature.

Daniil Ivanovich Kharms

“I do not like children, old men, old women and prudent old people. I respect only young, healthy and curvaceous women. I am suspicious of other representatives of humanity ... Poisoning children is cruel, but you have to do something with them ... I always leave where there are children.

It is noteworthy that Kharms positioned himself as child hater. A character in one of his stories suggested throwing children into a pit, throwing lime on top. At the same time, he said that "the propensity for children" is almost the same as the propensity for the fetus, and this is almost the same as the propensity to defecate.

Most likely, this was just part of the outrageous image that distinguished the writer. After all, the children themselves were very fond of the poems and public speeches of Daniil Kharms, which delighted the children.

While reading his poem, this eccentric could suddenly pull out of his pocket a tiny cannon that suddenly fired, or take out multi-colored tennis balls from his mouth. Tricks with them were one of his favorite pastimes, and he juggled balls masterfully!

The balls fluttered in his hands, disappeared in his pockets, boots, mouth, ears, appeared at the most unexpected moments, and multiplied before his eyes. Often the “performance” ended with only one ball left in Daniil’s hands, which turned out to be ... a hard-boiled egg. To prove that this is not a ball, Kharms peeled the egg and ate it right there, sprinkled with salt, which he took out of his pocket ...

Mikhail Pavlosky

Another hobby of Kharms was drawing. The walls of his room, even the lamp shade, were painted. In addition, the writer adored classical music - Handel, Bach, Mozart, Shostakovich ... As for literature, Kharms literally bowed to the geniuses of Mayakovsky and Gogol, with whom he was, of course, creatively connected. The writer also liked the humor of Kozma Prutkov.

Daniil Kharms was, as already noted above, a master of shocking. This was also shown in his passions. For example, Harms adored small dogs, especially dachshunds. On walks with him there was always one of them. The high growth of the writer contrasted sharply with the dog. Kharms gave extremely original nicknames to his dogs, for example "The Brandenburg Concerto" or "Commemorate the Day of the Battle of Thermopylae".

Daniil Kharms on the balcony of the House of Books. Photo by G. Levin. Mid 1930s

The appearance of Daniil Kharms was also unusual, the choice of which was dictated by the image of Sherlock Holmes. The eccentric poet dressed in a checkered frock coat, wore gray stockings and a large gray cap. Following the image of the famous literary hero was complemented by a cane and an invariable smoking pipe.

The theme of Sherlock Holmes worried Kharms not only with the external style of the detective. Apparently, inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle's story "The Dancing Men", while still a young man, Harms created his own cipher, which at first resembled mysterious figures from a detective story. Later, the writer came up with a special system of icons that denoted all the letters of the alphabet. With their help, Kharms encrypted his diaries, fearing that strangers could read them. Moreover, in his notes he often spoke ill of the Soviet regime.

Original in all its manifestations, Kharms was very fond of practical jokes that he prepared in advance. Once at a party, despite the presence of ladies, he suddenly began to pull off his trousers. Everyone was dumbfounded. But the embarrassment never happened, there were one more under the top pants! In general, Harms loved shocking situations. Sometimes he could approach the window completely undressed. The writer responded to the indignation of the neighbors as follows:

“What is more pleasing to the eye: an old woman in one shirt or a young man, completely naked? And who, in his form, is not allowed to appear before people?

Daniil Kharms and Alisa Poret pose for the "home movie" "Unequal Marriage"

Despite all his eccentricities, and perhaps thanks to them, Daniil Kharms was accompanied by great success with women. The second wife of the writer Marina Malich, whom the poet often cheated on with attractive ladies, jealousy almost led to suicide.

“I was tired of his betrayals and decided to commit suicide. Like Anna Karenina. I went to Tsarskoe Selo, sat on a bench on the platform and waited for the train. One train passed. I thought no, I’ll throw myself under the next one. ”

She did not dare to carry out what she had planned. Harms understood his weakness, in his diaries there is the following entry:

"God! What is being done! I am mired in poverty and debauchery. I killed Marina. God save her! God save my poor dear Marina.

“For some reason, everyone looks at me with surprise. Whatever I do, everyone finds it amazing. And I don't even try. Everything works out by itself.”

Frame from the film "Kharms". Photo: kinopoisk.ru

Perhaps, thanks to sincere faith, Daniil Kharms was given foresight . It is known that the writer predicted the blockade of Leningrad. That is why several of his friends left the city ahead of time and avoided starvation. Kharms also foresaw that during the first bombing his home would be destroyed.

“The Soviet Union lost the war on the very first day, Leningrad will now either be besieged or starve to death, or bombed, leaving no stone unturned ...”

As a writer, Daniil Kharms was interested in the origins of evil in man. But in his creepy stories, he did not moralize, but mercilessly ridiculed the cruelty, indifference and stupidity of the surrounding reality. Apparently, it was precisely this that those in power could not forgive Kharms. The writer was arrested three times. The latest arrest was prompted by a denunciation accusing Kharms of the following statement: "It is more pleasant for me to be with the Germans in concentration camps than to live under Soviet power."

Daniil Kharms and Alisa Poret. Early 1930s

The poet was imprisoned in the psychiatric hospital of the prison, where he died of starvation on February 2, 1942. He was 37 years old - a mystical age in Russian poetry!

Aphorisms of Daniil Kharms:

Women have always interested me. I have always been worried about women's legs, especially above the knees. Many consider women to be vicious creatures. And I don't! On the contrary, I even consider them something very pleasant.

If I say something, then it is right. I do not advise anyone to argue with me, anyway, he will remain in the cold, because I will outguess everyone. Yes, and you do not compete with me. Haven't tried that yet either. Got everyone! It’s for nothing that I don’t even know how to speak, but once I start it, you won’t stop it.

Old women who carry prudent thoughts in themselves would be good to catch with a lasso.

Better to be healthy but rich than poor but sick.

There is no prophet without vice.

Poems should be written in such a way that if you throw a poem through a window, the glass will break.

When a person says: "I'm bored," there is always a sexual question hidden in it.

First of all, a woman loves not to be noticed. Let her stand in front of you or moan, and you pretend that you do not hear or see anything, and behave as if there is no one in the room. This terribly kindles female curiosity. A curious woman is capable of anything. Another time I will purposely reach into my pocket with a mysterious look, and the woman will stare with her eyes, they say, what is it? And I will take and take out of my pocket on purpose some coaster. The woman will startle with curiosity. Well, it means that the fish got into the net!

They say that soon all the women will cut off their asses and let them walk along Volodarskaya. This is not true! Women's asses will not be cut.

A nasty scream of boys is heard from the street. I lie and invent their execution. My favorite thing is to give them tetanus to make them suddenly stop moving. Parents take them home. They lie in their beds and can't even eat because their mouths won't open. They are fed artificially. In a week the tetanus goes away, but the children are so weak that they have to lie in bed for another month. Then they begin to gradually recover, but I give them a second tetanus, and they all die.

What is difficult for others is easy for me! I can even fly. But I won’t talk about it, because no one will believe it anyway.

My phone is simple - 32-08. It is easy to remember: thirty-two teeth and eight fingers.

People see support in me, repeat my words, are surprised at my actions, but they don’t pay me money. Foolish people! Bring me more money and you will see how pleased I am with it.

Listen friends! You really can't bow before me like that. I'm just like you all, only better.

Create a pose for yourself and have the character to hold it. Once I had an Indian pose, then Sherlock Holmes, then a yogi, and now an irritable neurotic. I wouldn't want to hold onto the last pose. Gotta come up with a new pose

I have every data to consider myself a great man. Yes, but that's how I see myself. Daniel Kharms.

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In this novel by Mikhail Berg, the biographies of the famous Oberiuts Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky are rethought. The novel has long been included in many anthologies on modern Russian literature, but it is the first time that it has been published as a separate edition. Irina Skoropanova: “Through the laughable mistakes, absurdities, contradictions, the most incredible statements that are replete with F. Erskine's monograph, tragedy shines through - the tragedy of an artist in a tragic world.”

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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 20s, the time of their formation and debut, is no longer silver Age with his freedom of creative pursuits, although the innovations of the 1920s are 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 20s, 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 has been developing so intensively in the 30s that now even spiritual father 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 own 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. They occupied him: “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). They were disgusting: "Penki, lamb, ... children, soldiers, newspaper, bath"(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 simulation in the future. mental illness(more on that below).

In the meantime, collisions 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

Stand up stand up stand up

We attached to the rifle

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 are faced with moments of a 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 the world culture of the 30s, 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 speech of 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 cruel 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 dealt 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 in such an unusual way 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 the old noble family Yu. 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 value. Although, remaining on a purely biographical level, Kobrinsky speaks in some detail about the complex rapprochement-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 postmodern 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 the work of Kharms 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 thing.

Daniil Ivanovich Kharms(real name Yuvachev; December 1, 1905, St. Petersburg - February 2, 1942, Leningrad) - Russian writer and poet. Association member OBERIU .

Daniil Yuvachev was born into the family of Ivan Yuvachev, a Narodnaya Volya member, who was once sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment, who served a link in the Far East and left the revolution for religion. Daniil was born after the release of his father, when Yuvachev returned to St. Petersburg. He graduated from "Petershule" - a privileged German school in St. Petersburg. The pseudonym Kharms Daniil came up with himself precisely in school years, raising it both to the French "charme" - "charm, charm", and to the English "harm" - "harm". However, believing that the unchanging name brings misfortune, Kharms for a long time inventively varied it.

Kharms the writer was formed in the 1920s, having experienced the influence of Khlebnikov, Trufanov and Kruchenykh. The earliest surviving poem by Daniil Kharms is dated 1922. Kharms was first published in 1926, in the almanac "Collected Poems" of the All-Russian Union of Poets, where he was accepted in March of the same year on the basis of the submitted poetic works, at the same time the pseudonym Kharms was fixed.

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. 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' absurdist "piessa" "Elizabeth Bam" was also presented. The works of the Oberiuts were regarded by the newspaper Smena in April 1930 as "poetry of the class enemy", and since 1932 the activities of the OBERIU in the previous composition have actually ceased.

In December 1931, along with other Oberiuts, he was arrested, accused of anti-Soviet activities and sentenced on March 21, 1932 by the OGPU collegium to three years in correctional camps. However, the sentence was replaced on May 23 of the same year by deportation, and on June 18 Kharms went to Kursk, where he stayed until November, then he managed to return to Leningrad.

Upon returning from exile, Kharms continues to communicate with like-minded people, collaborates in the children's magazines "Hedgehog", "Cricket" and "October", prints about 20 children's books, which they wrote exclusively for earnings and Kharms did not attach much importance to them. After the publication in 1937 in a children's magazine of the poem "A man with a club and a sack came out of the house", which "disappeared since then", Kharms was not printed for some time, which puts him and his wife Marina Malich on the verge of starvation.

Later, Harms moved away from poetry, he writes many short stories, theatrical skits and poems for adults, which were not published during his lifetime. During this period, a cycle of miniatures "Cases", "Scenes", the story "The Old Woman" are created.

In August 1941, Kharms was again arrested for "defeatist remarks." Passed through the torture chamber. To avoid being shot, he feigned insanity. Daniil Kharms died on February 2, 1942, during the siege of Leningrad, from starvation in the psychiatry department of the prison hospital. In 1956 he was rehabilitated, and his poems began to gradually return to readers.

Selected editions

• Kharms D. Collection of works / D. Kharms; ed. M. Meilakh and Vl. Erl. - Bremen: K-Press, 1978-1988. - Prince. 1-4.
• Kharms D. Flight to the Sky: Poems. Prose. Drama. Letters / D. Kharms; intro. Art., comp., prepared. text and notes. A. A. Aleksandrova; artistic L. Yatsenko. - L .: Owls. writer, 1988. - 558 p., ill. - (Heritage) - 50,000 copies.
• Kharms D. Old Woman: Stories. scenes. Tale / D. Kharms; comp. V. Glotser; artistic L. Tishkov. - M .: Yunona, 1991. - 126 p. : ill. - 125,000 copies.
• Kharms D. They call me a capuchin. Some works of Daniil Ivanovich Kharms / D. Kharms; artistic G. Muryshkin, S. Georgieva, M. Muryshkina; comp. and prepare. texts by A. Gerasimov. - M .: Karavento: Pikment, 1993. - 352 p., ill.
• “To me, an amateur, all the achievements of these directors seem squalid.” From Kharms' notebooks / Publ. int. Art. and comment. Y. Girba // Mnemosyne. Documents and facts from the history of the Russian theater of the twentieth century / Ed.-comp. V. V. Ivanov. M.: GITIS, 1996. S.111-123.
• Kharms D. Complete Works: in 3 volumes / D. Kharms; [under the general ed. V. N. Sazhina]. - St. Petersburg. : Academic project, 1997. - 5,000 copies.
• Kharms D. Full composition of writings. T. 4. Unpublished D. Kharms. Treatises and articles. Letters. Additions to v. 1-3 / D. Kharms; comp. and note. V. N. Sazhina. - St. Petersburg. : Academic project, 2001. - 319 p. — 3,500 copies.
• Kharms D. Full composition of writings. Notebooks. Diary: in 2 books. / D. Kharms; prepared text by J.-F. Jacquard and V.N. Sazhin. - St. Petersburg. : Academic project, 2002. - 3,000 copies.
• Kharms D. Circus Shardam: collection / D. Kharms; comp., prepared. text, preface, notes. and general ed. V. N. Sazhina. - St. Petersburg. : Crystal, 1999. - 1118 p. : portrait - (B-ka world lit.: BML). — 10,000 copies.
• Kharms D. Days katybr: Fav. poems. Poems. Drama. works / D. Kharms; comp., intro. Art. and note. M. Meilakh; prepared text by M. Meilakh and Vl. Erl; prepared text of "Elizabeth Bam" Vl. Erl. — M.; Cayenne: Gilea, 1999. - 638 p., ill., fax. - (Government of Poets) - 3,000 copies.
• Kharms D. Daniil Kharms: collection / D. Kharms; intro. Art. V. Glotsera. - M .: Eksmo, 2003. - 493 p., ill. - (Anthology of Satire and Humor of Russia of the XX century; Vol. 23). — 10,000 copies.
• Kharms D. Small collected works / D. Kharms; comp., intro. Art. and comment. V. Sazhina. - St. Petersburg. : ABC Classics, 2003. - 863 p. - (ABC-classic). — 7,000 copies.
• Kharms D. Cases and things / D. Kharms; comp. and note. A. Dmitrenko and V. Erl; prepared texts by W. Erl; illustrations by Y. Shtapakov. - St. Petersburg. : Vita Nova, 2004. - 494 p. : ill. — (Manuscripts). — 1,500 copies.
• Kharms D. About women and about myself: diary entries, poetry, prose / D. Kharms. - M .: Alta-Print, 2006. - 319 p., ill. - (Phallosophic monuments). — 5,000 copies.
• Kharms drawings/ comp. Yu. S. Alexandrov. - St. Petersburg. : Ivan Limbakh Publishing House, 2006. - 336 p.
• Kharms D. Poems. Dramatic works / D. Kharms; intro. Art., comp., prepared. text and notes. V. N. Sazhina. - St. Petersburg. : Academic project: DNA, 2007. - 440 p., ill. — (New Poet's Library. Small series). — 1,000 copies.

"I participate in the gloomy life..."
(preface to the book "Daniel Kharms: Throat raving with a razor", Verb 4, 1991)

In the history of Russian, and indeed of all world literature, there are few literary destinies similar to the fate of Daniil Kharms. The phenomenon of a writer who earns a living with talented children's works and at the same time, day after day creating - without any hope of publication - brilliant poems, prose, dramas that belong to truly "big" literature, of course, was determined by the realities of communist diktat in our country in 20s - 30s. But it must be borne in mind that the "second birth" of the writer, which began twenty-five years after his death and continues to this day, is a fact of today's life, today's being, to which we, researchers and readers, are involved. Now it is especially clear that not only the literary “today”, but also the history of literature is unfolding before our eyes, and this imposes special obligations, because we, willy-nilly, combine Kharms’s addressees in the “big time” and those of his contemporaries who it was not destined to find out whose contemporaries they were. With this in mind, this publication was built, uniting Kharms' diaries - a look at himself and at the era "from the inside", his works and modern imitations - a special type of literary tradition.

Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev (this is the real name of the writer) was born on December 17 (according to the new style - 30) December 1905. His father, Ivan Pavlovich Yuvachev, was a man of exceptional destiny. Being involved in the "Narodnaya Volya", he almost immediately found himself arrested. At the trial of 1883, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, which was later replaced by 15 years in prison. In hard labor, Ivan Pavlovich became a deeply religious person, and upon his return, in addition to his memoirs, he wrote several popular books about the Orthodox faith. He died in 1940, and quite a lot is known about him, unlike Kharms's mother, about whom we have very little information.

At school, Yuvachev perfectly studied German, good enough - English. But this school was not simple either: Daniil Ivanovich studied at the Main German School of St. Peter (Petershule). True, he had to complete his studies in Tsarskoye Selo, at a school where his aunt, Natalya Ivanovna Kolyubakina, was the director.

In 1924, Yuvachev entered the Leningrad Electrotechnical School. However, a year later he had to leave it. “Several accusations fell on me,” he explains in his notebook, “for which I have to leave the technical school ... 1) Inactivity in public works. 2) I don’t fit the class physiologically.” Thus, Yuvachev could not receive either higher or secondary specialized education. At the same time, he was intensively engaged in self-education, with the help of which he achieved significant results (we can judge this from the lists of books he read, which we find in his diary entries).

Since 1924, he begins to call himself Kharms. In general, Daniil Ivanovich had many pseudonyms, and he effortlessly changed them: Khharms, Khaarms, Dandan, Charms, Karl Ivanovich Shusterling and others. However, it was Kharms with its ambivalence (from the French “charm” - “charm, charm” and from the English "harm" - "harm") most accurately reflected the essence of the writer's attitude to life and work: he knew how to travesty the most serious things and find very sad moments in the most seemingly ridiculous. Exactly the same ambivalence was characteristic of the personality of Kharms himself: his focus on the game, on a merry prank, was combined with sometimes painful suspiciousness, with the confidence that he brings misfortune to those he loves (cf. the quote from "The Philokalia", which Kharms often liked to repeat and which he entirely attributed to himself: "Ignite trouble around you").

The beginning of Kharms' literary activity falls on 1925. He entered a small group of Leningrad poets, headed by Alexander Tufanov, a very extraordinary personality. Here is how the poet Igor Bakhterev recalls him: “In the twenties, in the printing house of the Leningrad cooperative publishing house “Priboy”, an absurd-looking proofreader called “senior”, one of the best proofreaders in the city, worked. Long, sometimes uncombed strands of hair descended on a hunchbacked back. His unaged face was adorned with a fluffy mustache and an old-fashioned pince-nez in a frame on a black ribbon, which he kept adjusting, somehow strangely grunting.

The proofreader acquired a particularly absurd appearance outside the printing house. At home, he replaced the usual for that time wide, without a belt, sweatshirt with a velvet camisole, and a modest self-tie with a cream jabot. And then it began to seem that in front of you was the character of the play, the action of which takes place in the 18th century. His wife, Maria Valentinovna, a little taller, fully matched her husband's appearance: loose hair, a sundress, a kokoshnik embroidered with pearls. In this guise, they also appeared on the stage, reading poetry in a duet no longer by a proofreader, but by the famous poet A. V. Tufanov in Leningrad.

In the first post-revolutionary years, Tufanov wore an ordinary jacket and wrote ordinary poems, considering himself a follower of the Acmeists. His first collection was called The Aeolian Harp. To use the terminology he himself proposed, his poems differed from those of the acmeists in their "sound orientation." Then Tufanov began to call his poems alliterative, and in the early twenties he declared poetry without words, with the replacement of a meaningful word by a meaningless phoneme. At that time, he called himself a wisecrack…” 1

Let's add that the word "zaumnik" should not be understood as a fundamental rejection of any meaningfulness of the poetic text. Tufanov dreamed of creating "phonic music", a kind of supranational language of poetry, and here, of course, Khlebnikov was his teacher. Having inherited some of the foundations of Khlebnikov's poetics, Tufanov considered it necessary to inherit his title - "Chairman of the Globe", however, with the addition of an important word - "Zaumi". It was in Tufanov's circle that two young poets, Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky, first met and became friends - as it turned out, for life. Soon they separated themselves in Tufanov's group, which by that time had received the name "Left Flank", and by the beginning of 1926 they left it, having formed with their friends, young philosophers Leonid Lipavsky and Yakov Druskin, a friendly association "plane trees" 2. Around this time, Kharms and Vvedensky were admitted to the Leningrad branch of the All-Russian Union of Poets. In the collections of the Union of Poets of 1926 and 1927, two of their poems appeared. It is unlikely that any of them could have imagined that these poems would remain the only "adult" works of theirs that they were destined to see printed.

Yes, however, "plane trees" did not particularly strive to be printed at that time. The main form of their activity was performances with the reading of their poems - in clubs, universities, literary circles. Despite the fact that Kharms and Vvedensky long ago abandoned attempts to create “phonic music” and shifted the center of gravity of experiments to such elements as rhythm and rhyme, the syntactic valence of a word, etc., their poems did not become more accessible to the “mass audience” of the period educational program. In the best traditions of “communist culture,” the listeners responded aggressively to everything incomprehensible. Sometimes scandals broke out in the public. One of these scandals occurred during the speech of the "plane trees" at a meeting of the literary circle of the Higher Courses in Art History (!) March 30, 1927. After this speech, a review by N. Ioffe and L. Zheleznov appeared in the Smena newspaper, written according to the canons of the main genre of criticism Soviet period- political denunciation. Describing the reaction to the scandal close to reality: “... climbing onto a chair,“ plane tree ”Kharms, a member of the poets’ union, raising his hand armed with a stick with a“ magnificent ”gesture, said: “I don’t read in stables and brothels!”, - the authors of the review transparently hinted that the poets insulted the Soviet higher educational institution

In the autumn of 1927, Kharms, Vvedensky, Bakhterev and Zabolotsky (the latter had just returned from the Red Army, and few people in Leningrad knew him) created a new literary group - the Association of Real Art (abbreviated as OBERIU). According to the plan of the organizers, OBERIU was supposed to consist of five groups: literary, visual, theatrical, film and musical, and to concentrate around itself the main forces of the Leningrad left art. In addition to the poets listed above, the literary section included K. Vaginov and B. Levin, and poets N. Oleinikov and Yu. Vladimirov also joined it, not being formal members. The cinema section was composed by A. Razumovsky and K. Mintz. At first, K. Malevich himself agreed to participate in the pictorial section, but the cooperation did not go further than this. The musical section was never created, but the theatrical section almost coincided with the literary section in composition, with the exception of K. Vaginov.

In 1928, the famous OBERIU declaration was published in N 2 of the Posters of the Printing House magazine. According to I. Bakhterev, the only living Oberiut, parts of "The Public Face of OBERIU" and "Poetry of the Oberiuts" were written by N. Zabolotsky. This declaration once again proclaims a complete and final break with zaum, and OBERIU is declared "a new detachment of left revolutionary art":

“There is no school more hostile to us than zaum. People are real and concrete to the marrow of bones, we are the first enemies of those who bastardize the word and turn it into a powerless and senseless bastard. In our work, we expand and deepen the meaning of the subject and the word, but we do not destroy it. We are the poets of a new attitude and a new art. We are not only the creators of a new poetic language, but also the creators of a new sense of life and its objects... A concrete object, cleared of literary and everyday husks, becomes the property of art... You seem to start objecting that this is not the object that you see in life? Come closer and touch it with your fingers. Look at the object with bare eyes and you will see it for the first time cleared of old literary gilding. Perhaps you will argue that our plots are "un-real" and "non-logical"? And who said that "everyday" logic is obligatory for art? We are amazed at the beauty of the painted woman, despite the fact that, contrary to anatomical logic, the artist twisted the shoulder blade of his heroine and took her aside. Art has its own logic, and it does not destroy the subject, but helps to know it.” (S. II - 12).

The declaration also included brief characteristics creativity of each of the members of OBERIU. Here is what was said about Kharms: “Daniil Kharms is 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 moment of action, the object takes on new concrete outlines, full of real meaning. The action, turned in a new way, retains a “classical” imprint and, at the same time, represents the wide scope of the Oberiut worldview.” (p. 12). It is curious that Marshak would later say about Kharms that he was a poet "with absolute taste and hearing, and with some - perhaps subconscious - classical basis." 3

The peak of OBERIU activity fell on January 24, 1928. The director of the Leningrad House of Printing, N. B. Baskakov, became interested in the work of the Oberiuts and invited them to prepare a large theatrical evening “Three Left Hours”. The first hour is poetry reading, the second hour is a staging of Kharms's play "Elizaveta Bam", the third hour is a film by Razumovsky and Mints "Meat Grinder".

The evening was prepared and passed with great success. Again, we give the floor to I. Bakhterev: “At two o'clock in the morning the artistic part of the evening ended - “three o'clock” turned out to be a conditional concept. And in the posters there was a good word that had gone out of modern use: a dispute. Correctly assessing the situation, the administrator Vergilesov proposed to postpone the discussion at least until tomorrow, or rather, tonight. There was noise in the hall.

The unforeseen happened: hundreds of hands went up in favor of the continuation and not a single one - against ... Almost every speaker uttered the word "talented".

The evening ended early, with the first trams on working Wednesday, January 25, 1928. For a long time, the employees of the Press House talked about a miracle: until the end of the dispute, not a single spectator took a coat from the wardrobe. 4

In the poetry of the Oberiuts, something happened that R. Yakobson noted when speaking about the language of V. Khlebnikov’s poetry: “the communicative function inherent in both practical language and emotional language ... is reduced to a minimum.” 5 It was really "real" poetry: the reader, the listener was invited to forget the things known to them and, having renounced life and literary associations, to feel the "word as such" and the autonomous essence of objects.

The day after the evening "Three Left Hours" in the "Krasnaya Gazeta" appeared an article by L. Lesnaya "Ytuerebo", the tone of which was extremely unfriendly. Kharms' play "Elizabeth Bam" was characterized in the article as "a frank to the point of cynicism confusion, in which "no one understood a damn thing", admittedly..." 6 After this article, dreams of such evenings had to be abandoned, and until April 1930 perform small programs, as was the case in 1925-1926. Their last performance was an evening in the dormitory of students of the Leningrad State University, where the Oberiuts appeared with characteristic “game” posters: “Kolya went to the sea”, “The steps of mim 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, poets reasonably remarked: “Are we pies?”). To this evening, Smena responded just as promptly with an article by L. Nilvich, which could entirely form the basis of the verdict of the Troika or some other body similar to it (however, the Troika had not yet appeared): “Their (Oberiuts - A.K.) withdrawal from life, their senseless poetry, their abstruse juggling is a protest against the dictatorship of the proletariat. Their poetry is therefore counter-revolutionary. This is the poetry of people alien to us, the poetry of a class enemy…” 7

April 9, 1930 can be considered the date of the termination of the existence of the Association of Real Art - one of the last literary groups in Russia in the first half of the 20th century. Only two years remained before the creation of a single Union of Soviet Writers with a single method of socialist realism for all

Probably, Nilvich's article became one of the reasons for the arrest of Kharms and Vvedensky at the very end of 1931, although formally the poets were involved in the case of the Children's Literature publishing house. The sentence was relatively mild - exile to Kursk, and the efforts of friends led to the fact that already in the fall of 1932 Kharms and Vvedensky were able to return to Leningrad.

Finishing the conversation about OBERIU, it should be noted that up to the present time, the significance of this period for the work of Kharms and Vvedensky is greatly overestimated - to the extent that the epithet "Oberiu" is attached to works written both before and after the existence of the association. Yes, and the poets themselves are usually referred to as "Oberiuts", believing that they give them an exhaustive description. Of course, this period was important for Kharms and Vvedensky, and it left a significant imprint on all their further work. Of course, work within the framework of OBERIU was a priority for them (unlike, for example, cooperation with children's magazines and children's publishing houses, which began with Marshak's help in the late 1920s and which served exclusively as a means of earning money). But the post-Oberiut period, which began after the return of the poets from exile in the autumn of 1932, lasted three times longer and fell on a period of spiritual and creative maturity. Therefore, we are convinced. it is he who must be considered as the main one - both for Kharms and for Vvedensky.

The specifics of Kharms's work, starting from 1932, has undergone significant changes. Of course, there could no longer be any talk of any publications or speeches. Moreover, it was necessary to hide his work from outsiders: Kharms could not forget that, in addition to Nilvich’s article, there was also a denunciation that was compiled by representatives of the proletarian students of Leningrad State University themselves and which directly asked how the Union of Poets could tolerate such literary hooligans... Therefore, the communication of the former Oberiuts and people close to them took place now in apartments. They usually gathered on Sundays - Kharms, Vvedensky, Lipavsky, Druskin, Zabolotsky, Oleinikov, had the most interesting conversations on literary, philosophical and other topics. Leonid Savelievich Lipavsky briefly wrote them down, and we owe him the wonderful “Conversations”, which have not yet been published, but which help to understand the very nature of the process of communication between writers and philosophers in a narrow friendly circle, which they themselves called the “Circle of Illiterate Scientists”. The activities of this circle continued for several years. Vladimirov and Vaginov were no longer alive - they died of tuberculosis. I. Bakhterev left his former associates, and soon Zabolotsky. But life went on.

Kharms' diary entries of the thirties are especially interesting. They reflect not only his personal life, but also the cultural life of Leningrad at a time when art for the most part moved into the sphere of personal communication. Now the artist could expect to show his picture only to a small number of friends, the poet read poetry in the circle of his closest acquaintances ... Kharms in his diaries restores (of course, to varying degrees) three whole layers: his own problems and worries, the current cultural life Leningrad and the political situation in the country. And we see how everything is intertwined: Kharms, going about his business, constantly meets acquaintances - Malevich and his students, Filonov's students, poets and writers, musicians, critics, and it seems that he lives in a kind of "cultural space"; and events in the country (for example, passportization) immediately hit him.

In parallel, creativity continues - already entirely "on the table." And it also changes, and this change also applies to literary genres. We have already shown that Kharms began as a poet. In his dramaturgy of the 1920s (the plays "The Comedy of the City of Petersburg", "Elizabeth to You") verse lines also predominate. As for prose, before 1932 we meet only separate fragments of it. The post-Beriut stage is characterized by an ever-increasing proportion of prose in Kharms' work. Dramaturgy gravitates towards prose, and the story becomes the leading prose genre. In the thirties, Kharms also aspired to a large form. Its first example, (quite, however, conditionally) can be considered the cycle "Cases" - thirty short stories and sketches that Kharms arranged in a certain order, rewrote in a separate notebook and dedicated to his second wife Marina Malich. Despite the fact that this cycle was created from 1933 to 1939, Kharms approached it as an integral and complete work with certain artistic objectives. The “Cases” cycle is a kind of attempt to recreate a picture of the world with the help of a special logic of art (which, as we remember, was declared in the OBERIU declaration to be fundamentally different from the logic of “worldly”). The structure of the cycle and the systemic connections within it can be clearly distinguished: we discover the most important for Kharms prose cross-cutting themes of depersonalization of a person, automation of being, isolation and limitation of space and time, etc. Kharms seems to be experimenting with the very foundations of existence, so that the very term "case "plays with its two facets - the semantics of "happened" (i.e., what happened, the former) and the semantics of "accidental" (i.e., an arbitrarily taken slice of life). In the 1920s, syntax grew out of building blocks, as if representing linguistic aphasia. Now, in the 1930s, a world of moral aphasia, logical aphasia, is emerging before our very eyes from building blocks of people.

By the end of the thirties, the ring around Kharms shrinks (and, accordingly, the tone of the diaries becomes more and more desperate). There are fewer and fewer opportunities to be published in the children's magazines of Leningrad - "Chizh" and "Ezh". And after the publication of the famous poem “A man came out of the house ...” Kharms was not printed almost whole year. The result was a very real famine (it turns out that it is possible to slowly kill a person without camps and prisons). During this period, prose occupies a dominant position in his work, and in 1939 the quantity will again turn into quality: the second big thing will appear - the story "The Old Woman".

The "Old Woman" has several plans: a biographical plan, reflecting the real life features of Kharms himself and his friends; a psychological plan, associated with a feeling of loneliness and attempts to avoid this loneliness; fantastic. the defining plot of the story: a terrible, disgusting old woman, who has a strange power over the hero, suddenly dies in his room; philosophical, connected with the problem of faith and disbelief; literary, conceived by Kharms as a dialogue (parody and quite serious) with the plots of Pushkin, Hamsun, Dostoevsky. All these plans are connected by a feeling of an impending nightmare, and then a reality. The hero of the story, like Kharms, is a writer. He conceives a story about a miracle worker - a man with supernatural abilities who lives in our time, suffers various inconveniences, but dies without having performed a single miracle in his entire life. At the very beginning of the story, the narrator writes down the first phrase of the future work: “The miracle worker was tall,” but he won’t be able to write anything else: the corpse of an old woman that appeared in his room will make the creative process itself impossible. Kharms, of course, embodies his own state in the story: on the one hand, the constant expectation of arrest, which is characteristic of very many people at the end of the thirties (compare with the similar fear of the narrator of The Old Woman, who knows that he did not kill anyone, but understands that innocence will be impossible), on the other hand, a sense of belonging to the terrible Soviet everyday life. Neither one nor the other, of course, contributed to creativity, just as the need to constantly look for livelihood somewhere by the end of the 30s did not contribute to it either: "in every sense" - notes Kharms) determine a very long period of his biography.

After The Old Woman, Kharms writes exclusively prose. A little more than a dozen stories dated 1940-1941 have come down to us, some of them are also given in this publication. It will not be difficult for the reader to detect a shift in Kharms' worldview to a much more difficult, gloomy side. The tragedy of his works during this period intensifies to a feeling of complete hopelessness, complete meaninglessness of existence. Kharms's humor is also undergoing a similar evolution: from light, slightly ironic in Autobiography, Incubator Period 30s, this especially applies to letters to friends, the story "I decided to dishevel one campaign ...", etc.) - to the black humor of "Knights", "Fall" and other things of 1940 - 41. It is curious that the form of the first person appears again only once - in the last of the stories that have come down to us - "Rehabilitation". But "Rehabilitation" is a kind of concentration of the tragic sense of the world, it is a monologue of a murderous maniac, a sadist, a madman who speaks in his own defense at the trial. This text, to some extent, already goes beyond literature as an art form, with such disgusting, naturalistic details committed crime he abounds. The criminal, operating with the values ​​of the initially deformed consciousness, creates an example of mockery of the very concept of human logic. However, the form (the trial) should lead us to think about dozens of similar public abuses of logic and humanity that took place during the time of Kharms and did not cause any protest among the majority of citizens of the "world's first state of workers and peasants", and the calm tone of the speaker, contrasting sharply with the content of his speech, it only confirms that in his last story Kharms created a kind of model of all kinds of relations in the society in which he lived.

The beginning of the war and the first bombardments of Leningrad strengthened Daniil Ivanovich's sense of his own impending doom. On the one hand, he could easily be ruined by conscription into the army: there was no need for a German bullet or shell, it was simply difficult to imagine a person more unadapted to the army than Kharms; on the other hand, it was possible to die from a bomb or from a shell even in the city. With his characteristic pessimism, Harms told his loved ones: "The first bomb will hit our house." (The bomb actually hit Kharms' house on Mayakovsky Street, but it happened later, when neither he nor his wife were there anymore ...)

L. Panteleev, in excerpts from his memoirs published in 1965 in Novy Mir 8, claimed that during his last meeting with Kharms in the military summer of 1941, Daniil Ivanovich expressed confidence in an early victory over the Germans. Such an invigorating tone arose due to the fact that, for censorship reasons, L. Panteleev omitted the second part of Kharms’s statement: speaking of the imminent defeat of the Germans, he sarcastically added - “because, once in this swamp, they will certainly get stuck in it.” Compare with the characteristic remark of A. Vvedensky of the 30s: speaking of his monarchism, Vvedensky explained it this way: with hereditary power, a decent person may accidentally end up at her helm

According to the memoirs of the same L. Panteleev, Kharms repeatedly became a victim of increased wartime vigilance. Its unusual appearance(repeatedly described in the memoirs) attracted the attention of people who, of course, mistook him for a spy. Several times Panteleev had to verify the identity of his acquaintance.

Thunder struck in August 1941. Kharms was arrested for "defeatist remarks". For a long time, no one knew anything about his future fate, only on February 4, 1942, Marina Malich was informed of the death of her husband. As it turned out later, Kharms, who was threatened with execution, feigned a mental disorder and was sent to a prison psychiatric hospital, where he died in the first Leningrad winter of the siege - from hunger or from “treatment”. Apparently, his arrest was not accidental: in the same month - August - almost on the same day, Vvedensky was arrested in Kharkov. The Germans were approaching Kharkov and were about to occupy the city; the prisoners were evacuated by train, and Vvedensky died somewhere along the way. According to some reports - from dysentery, according to others - he became weak from hunger and was shot by a convoy. No less sad was the fate of the rest of the Oberiuts and their inner circle. If Vladimirov and Vaginov were “lucky” to die a natural death, then Oleinikov already filled up the register of victims of the thirties: he, the only member of the CPSU (b) from the whole circle, was arrested in 1938 and shot. B. Levin and L. Lipavsky died at the front. Only I. Bakhterev and Ya. Druskin survived the meat grinder of their time. It is to Ya. S. Druskin that we owe the salvation of the Kharms archive, in which some works by Vvedensky, Oleinikov, Olimpov and others have also been preserved. Druskin came, risking his life, in the winter of 1942 (!) to the empty room of Kharms and took away a suitcase with manuscripts from there. Yakov Semenovich did not part with this suitcase either in the evacuation or on his return to Leningrad in the post-war period. For about twenty years he did not touch its contents, retaining hope for a miracle - the return of the owner. And only when there was no hope, he began to sort through the papers of the deceased friend. Now these papers are stored in the manuscript department of the Pushkin House and in the department of manuscripts of the GPB. Saltykov-Shedrin in Leningrad.

Kharms lived and worked in the darkest years, “I participate in a gloomy life” - he could repeat these words of O. Mandelstam with full right. Therefore, we recommend reading his diary entries and letters from the Appendix, "keeping in mind" some of the features of these genres in those years. The diaries could have been confiscated by the NKVD, the letters intercepted and read by the same organization. Kharms also constantly remembered this - that is why we sometimes meet in his notes completely uncharacteristic for him turns and judgments. Similarly, Marina Malich: after the arrest of her husband, she “inadvertently” confirms in a letter the “saving” version of his insanity.

And the last. If the roots of Kharms in world literature are sufficiently studied and defined - these are Dostoevsky and Hamsun, Meyrink and Kozma Prutkov, Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin, Carroll and Lear and many others - then the problem of continuing the tradition remains open. Of course, one can name writers in whose work the lines outlined by Kharms are reflected in one way or another: from D. Prigov to L. Petrushevskaya. But it seems interesting to us to cite in this publication a somewhat different development of the Kharms tradition - a cycle of "literary anecdotes", the main body of which was created at one time by Moscow artists V. Pyatnitsky and N. Dobrokhotova and which literally gave rise to an avalanche of similar texts. Continuing the line of the literary anecdote of the 18th century passing through Kharms, the anecdotes published by us also have their own artistic pattern, which is realized in a closed (as in "Cases") cyclic structure. Characters, like Kharms, are signs, but here they have a certain set of quasi-psychological features, which brings them closer to the characters of a fairy tale. On the other hand, historical realities are skilfully included in the texts, which makes it possible to regard it as a universal parody of any attempt to create a history of culture.

A few words about the principle of publishing Kharms' diaries. Based on the requirements of completeness and accuracy, they are provided with detailed comments and the "Appendix" section, which includes texts, letters and documents related to diary entries. As conceived by the compilers, the diaries, comments and the Appendix should be a single text, the task of which is to facilitate understanding of such a phenomenon as the work of Daniil Kharms.

1 I. Bakhterev. When We Were Young (Non-Fictional Story). - In the book: Memories of N. Zabolotsky, M., 1984. - P. 66.

2 For more details about this association, see: L. Druskina. There was such a community. Avrora, L., 1989, N 6. S. 100 - 131.

3 Marshak S. Ya. Sobr. op., M.. Hood. lit., vol. 8. 1973. Letter N 409.

4 I. Bakhterev. Decree. op., p. 97-98.

5 Jacobson R. Works on poetics. M., Progress, 1987. s, 275.

7 Nilvich L. Reactionary juggling. (About one sortie of literary hooligans). Smena, L., 1930. April 9, No. 81, p. 5.

8 Panteleev L. From the Leningrad records. New world, 1965. No. 5, p. 42-170.