Daniil Kharms in the NY Sun

It seems like a while since my last Ben Lytal post . . . Thankfully today in the NY Sun he has an interesting review of Daniil Kharms’s Today I Wrote Nothing, edited and translated by Matvei Yankelevich.

Kharms was part of the OBERIU—a group of avant-garde, Russian writers, who are often categorized as “absurdists.”

To frame this renaissance, Mr. Yankelevich wants to banish the term “absurd” in favor of OBERIU-specific terms. Beckett and Ionesco might be useful points of reference, but talk of Russian absurdism is a misnomer and, according to Mr. Yankelevich, ultimately a lazy attempt to fit OBERIU into familiar dichotomies: “absurdist writer in a repressive society” or “artist writing under Stalin.” [. . .]

Where previous poets experimented with phonetics, the Oberiuty would experiment with semantics — they would invent crazy situations, but describe them in terms anyone would understand. An example from an early poem by Kharms, written in 1927, around the time of the manifesto, is as realistic as a Chagall: “A room. The room’s on fire. / A child juts out of the cradle. / Eats his kasha. Up above, / just below the ceiling now, / the nanny’s napping upside-down.”

As Lytal points out later, there’s an “alogic” or “anti-logical” that powers Kharms’s writings, which are generally very funny, like Events.