Daniil Kharms was born in St. Petersburg on December 30, 1905. His father was Ivan Yuvachev, a revolutionary populist who survived exile on Sakhalin and was familiar with Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and other famous Russian writers of his time.
Early years
Thanks to his father, a writer, Daniil became interested in literature at an early age. He studied at several schools, including Petrishula - the oldest school in St. Petersburg. In 1925, the young man joined the All-Russian Union of Poets. Even before that, he began to use the pseudonym Kharms, with which he became widely known. The greatest influence on his work at that time was Velimir Khlebnikov, Kazimir Malevich, Alexey Kruchenykh.
The aspiring writer Daniil Kharms entered into a variety of literary clubs, which flourished precisely in the 1920s. One of them was the community of “plane trees” - young philosophers and writers of Leningrad. It also included Leonid Lipavsky, Alexander Vvedensky and Yakov Druskin.
The main activity of “Chinari” was performances with reading of their own poems. Sometimes at such meetings there were dances, especially the then extremely popular foxtrot. The Union of Poets, the locations of the regiments where his friends served - these are just some of the places where Daniil Kharms himself performed. A biography for children can do without these facts, but for the future children's writer, the events of that period of life were extremely important for the development of his creative style. Gradually, public recitations of avant-garde poetry became more and more difficult. Every year the Soviet state became more and more picky about what the intelligentsia offered to society.
OBERIU
Gradually, Daniil Kharms, whose biography at that time was most connected with life within the Leningrad bohemia, gathered around him a circle of devoted supporters. This group was called either the “Left Flank” or the “Academy of Left Classics.” In 1927 it was renamed the Association of Real Art - OBERIU. The group broke up in the early 1930s. The greatest success of her work can be considered “The Three Left Hours” - a creative evening at which the premiere of Kharms’s play “Elizabeth Bam” took place.
According to the creator's plan, OBERIU was supposed to unite all the forces of leftist art in Leningrad. Therefore, the group was initially divided into five sections: literary, visual, musical, theatrical and cinematic. Daniil Ivanovich Kharms had a hand in all this. The biography for children published in the USSR, of course, did not mention these sometimes radical experiments of the writer.
Collaboration with children's magazines
What else was young Daniil Kharms famous for? The writer's biography is often associated among the general reader with his works in the genre of children's literature. Kharms began writing for children at the instigation of Samuil Marshak, Boris Zhitkov and Nikolai Oleinikov. In the 1930s he worked in children's magazines "Chizh", "Hedgehog" and "Cricket". Daniil Kharms left many stories and puzzles in them. The biography (2nd grade presentation) cannot do without mentioning this part of his work.
For a long time, children's literature remained almost the only constant income author. It is interesting that even innocent works for the smallest audience were banned by censorship for some time. This happened, for example, with the “Naughty Book” - a collection of stories and poems. She was on the censorship list from 1951 to 1961.
Daniil Kharms, whose biography is also the biography of a translator, translated some children's works. Thanks to him, Wilhelm Busch and his book of humorous poems “Plikh and Plyukh” were read in the USSR. The writer also published works written in collaboration with colleagues in the creative workshop. So in 1937, “Stories in Pictures” was published. The illustrations were drawn by Nikolai Radlov, but the text itself was written by Nina Gernet, Natalya Dilaktorskaya and Daniil Kharms. The author's biography was known for a long time mainly from this book.
Personal life
The writer got married for the first time in 1928. His wife was Esther Rusakova. Most of the works written by Kharms in the second half of the 20s and early 30s were dedicated to this girl. In 1932 the couple divorced. Later Rusakova was repressed.
Then Kharms lived short novels. Such was the relationship with the artist Alisa Poret. The writer married for the second time in 1934 - this time to Marina Malich. The couple were together until Kharms' disastrous arrest in 1941.
Link to Kursk
Kharms was first arrested in 1931. Then, allegedly, an “anti-Soviet group of writers” was discovered, to which 26-year-old Yuvachev was included. At first he was sentenced to three years in the camps. Then the sentence for the convicted person was changed to exile in Kursk.
Kharms’ comrade Alexander Vvedensky also happened to be there. Apart from him, the writer communicated only with the artists Erbstein, Safonova and Gershov. This company was significantly smaller than the one with which the exile maintained contact in Leningrad. And yet, the writer was lucky. He himself received the news about his deportation to Kursk instead of prison with joy, and treated it no differently than a creative business trip.
In the link main problem there was a lack of money and problems with housing. Daniil Kharms experienced all this with great difficulty. The biography, briefly known from the letters of that time, says that the only consolation for the convict were these same letters from friends and relatives. Kharms' main correspondents remained his sister, father, aunt, Boris Zhitkov and Tamara Meyer. In Kursk, the writer experienced his first health problems. They were caused by poor nutrition and lack of good doctors. But even in provincial outpatient clinics, the writer was given disappointing diagnoses - pleurisy and a nervous breakdown.
Changes in style
In the fall of 1932, the writer returned to Leningrad. After the first trial, Kharms' life changed greatly. His group OBERIU found itself under a virtual ban - its active public activities ceased. The circulation of Yuvachev's children's books has decreased. He began to live in poverty - there was a clear lack of money. In connection with this, the whole creative style author.
Before the case against the “anti-Soviet group,” the writer Daniil Kharms, whose biography in this sense repeated the fate of many other colleagues, paid a lot of attention to utopian projects and themes. After 1932, he gradually abandoned the previous concept. In addition, the writer pays more and more attention to prose and less and less to poetry.
Problems with publishing books
The inability to publish his adult works is what Daniil Kharms suffered most from. The author's biography, poems and stories in the modern sense are an important part of Russian culture of the 20th century. However, during his lifetime, Kharms did not have such an honorable status at all. Despair led him to begin making fantastic plans for publishing the samizdat magazine “Tapir”. This plan never came to fruition.
In 1933, Kharms suffered from paratyphoid fever. Even after recovery, he was in a creative crisis. For example, in the first half of 1933, the writer completed only a dozen poems and two miniatures, which were later included in the “Cases” cycle. But it was precisely these sketches, including “The Mathematician and Andrei Semenovich,” that became the new starting point from which Daniil Ivanovich Kharms later built. The biography of the writer was like an attraction - after a long period of stagnation, he finally began to work fruitfully with a new form.
Life in Leningrad
While in Leningrad, Kharms sometimes spent entire weeks with his aunt in Tsarskoe Selo. Such was the summer of 1933, when he became interested in chess problems and plunged headlong into Indian topics. It is interesting that the writer practiced hatha yoga back in the 20s.
1933 - 1934 were a period of numerous meetings of plane trees on Gatchinskaya Street in the house of Leonid Lipavsky. This philosopher and writer remained for a long time best friend Kharms. At the same time, a specialist in German language Dmitry Mikhailov. His hobbies were close to Kharms, since he himself passionately loved everything connected with Germany.
New events
At this time, the writer earned money mainly from his performances in Leningrad schools. He also traveled to pioneer camps. He knew how to get along with children, who were always delighted with the visits of the famous children's writer. This period of relative financial well-being interrupted in 1935. At the same time, Malevich died, with whom Kharms had a long-standing, warm creative and human relationship. The writer spoke with his poem at the civil memorial service for the artist.
In the summer of 1935, Daniil Ivanovich Kharms, whose biography was still tightly connected with children's magazines, wrote the play “Circus Shardam”. Its premiere took place in October at the Shaporina Puppet Theater. Subsequently, financial problems plagued Kharms more and more often. He repeatedly applied to the Literary Fund for loans.
Creativity flourishes
In the 1930s, Kharms wrote his main works. These were “Cases” (a cycle of stories), “The Old Woman” (a story) and many short prose stories. The author never managed to publish them. During his lifetime, Kharms was primarily known as a writer in the genre of children's literature. His “underground” work became known much later.
It is believed that in 1936 appeared new type Kharms's prose. Vivid examples similar works were “The Fate of the Professor’s Wife”, “The Cashier”, “Father and Daughter”. These stories mainly dealt with the theme of death. It is also significant that that year Kharms wrote only two poems, “The Dream of Two Black Ladies” and “Variations.”
At the end of 1936, the Soviet press began to prepare for the centenary of Pushkin's death. Kharms dedicated two works to “Our Everything.” The first is the story “Pushkin - for children”, the second is an anonymous essay about Pushkin, published in Chizh.
Second arrest and death
In 1937, Kharms's children's publishing house was destroyed. Many of his friends and comrades were repressed (Nikolai Zabolotsky, Nikolai Oleinikov, Tamara Gabbe, etc.). Kharms himself was arrested for the second time in August 1941 - in the third month of the war with Germany. He was accused of spreading defeatist sentiments.
At the height of the famine during the blockade of the city, the writer was sent to a psychiatric hospital located in the famous “Crosses”. There he died on February 2, 1942. Kharms was rehabilitated only 18 years later.
The writer's archive was saved by the writer Yakov Druskin. The author's manuscripts were taken in a suitcase from the author's house, which was badly damaged by the bombing. Publication of these “adult” works began in the 1960s. However, even during the Thaw, their circulation remained low. Kharms’s legacy enjoyed much greater popularity in samizdat. In 1974, his selected works were published in the USA. The most complete four-volume edition appeared in Bremen in the 1980s. In the USSR, the copying of Kharms' works stopped only during perestroika. It was then that domestic readers for the first time were able to fully become acquainted with the work of the poet and prose writer.
Daniil Kharms. Poems for children
Popularly known as children's writer and author of satirical prose. From 1928 to 1941 . he constantly collaborates in children's magazines Hedgehog, Chizh, Sverchok, Oktyabryata. Kharms publishes about 20 children's books. Poems and prose for children provide a unique outlet for Kharms’ playful element, but they were written solely for earning money and the author did not attach much importance to them. The attitude of official party criticism towards them was clearly negative. In our country for a long time Kharms was known primarily as a children's writer. K. Chukovsky and S. Marshak highly valued this hypostasis of his work, and even to some extent considered Kharms the forerunner of children's literature. The transition to creativity for children (and the phenomenal success among the children's readership) was due not only to forced external circumstances, but most of all to the fact that children's thinking, not bound by the usual logical schemes, is more prone to the perception of free and arbitrary associations. Kharms’s neologisms resemble words distorted by a child or deliberate agrammatisms (“skask”, “song”, “shchekalatka”, “valenki”, “sabachka”, etc.).
Daniil Kharms was born on December 30, 1905 in St. Petersburg.His father was a naval officer. He knew Chekhov, Tolstoy and Voloshin, in 1883 he was put on trial for complicity in Narodnaya Volya terror, spent four years in solitary confinement and more than ten years in hard labor on Sakhalin, where, along with the memoir books “Eight Years on Sakhalin” and “Shlisselburg Fortress” published mystical treatises “Between the World and the Monastery” and “Secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven”. Kharms’s mother was a noblewoman, and in the 1900s she ran a shelter for former convict women in St. Petersburg. Kharms himself studied at the St. Petersburg privileged German school(Peterschule), where he acquired a thorough knowledge of German and English.
In 1924, Daniil entered the Leningrad Electrical Technical College, from where a year later he was expelled for “poor attendance” and “inactivity in public works.” Since then, he devoted himself entirely to writing and lived exclusively from literary earnings. The diversified self-education that accompanied writing, with a special emphasis on philosophy and psychology, as evidenced by his diary, proceeded extremely intensively. He initially felt literary talent in himself, and therefore chose poetry as his field, the concept of which was determined by him under the influence of the poet Alexander Tufanov, an admirer and successor of V. Khlebnikov, the author of the book “To Zaumi”, and who founded the Order of Zaumnikov in March 1925, The core of which included Kharms himself, who took the title “Behold the Mind.” Through Tufanov, he became close to Alexander Vvedensky, a student of the more orthodox “Khlebnikovite” poet and admirer of Terentyev, the creator of a number of propaganda plays, including a stage adaptation of “The Inspector General,” parodied in “The Twelve Chairs” by Ilf and Petrov. Kharms had a strong friendship with Vvedensky, and Vvedensky, without any particular reason, took on the role of Kharms’ mentor. However, the direction of their creativity turned out to be different: Vvedensky developed and maintained a didactic orientation, while Kharms was dominated by a playful one. This was evidenced by his first famous poetic texts “Kika with Koka”, “Vanka Vstanka”, “The earth, they say, was invented by grooms” and the poem “Mikhail”.
Vvedensky provided Kharms new circle constant communication, introducing him to his friends L. Lipavsky and Y. Druskin, graduates of the philosophical department of the Faculty of Social Sciences, who refused to renounce their teacher, the prominent Russian philosopher N.O. Lossky, expelled from the USSR in 1922, and tried to develop his ideas of self-worth personality and intuitive knowledge. Their views influenced Kharms’ worldview, and for more than 15 years they were the first listeners and connoisseurs of his works.
From “zira-zaumi” Kharms later renamed himself to “plane-gazer”, and quickly became notorious in the circles of avant-garde writers under his newly invented pseudonym, which became the plural of the English word “harm” - “misfortune”. Subsequently, he signed his works for children in other ways (Charms, Shardam, etc.), but never used his own surname. The pseudonym was also enshrined in the introductory questionnaire of the All-Russian Union of Poets, where Kharms was accepted in March 1926 on the basis of the submitted poetic works, two of which were “The Case of railway" and "Poem by Peter Yashkin - a communist", were published in small-circulation collections of the Union. Apart from them, until the end of the 1980s, only one “adult” work by Kharms was published in the USSR - the poem “Mary Comes Out, Having Bowed” in 1965.
As a member of the literary association, Kharms received the opportunity to read his poems, but took advantage of it only once in October 1926 - other attempts were in vain. The playful beginning of his poems stimulated their dramatization and stage performance: in 1926, together with Vvedensky, he prepared a performance of the avant-garde theater “Radix” - “My Mother is All in a Watch,” but things did not go beyond rehearsals. Kharms met Kazimir Malevich, and the head of Suprematism gave him his book “God will not be thrown off” with the inscription “Go and stop progress.” Kharms read his poem “On the Death of Kazimir Malevich” at a memorial service for the artist in 1936. Kharms’s attraction to dramatic form was expressed in the dialogization of many poems (“Temptation”, “Paw”, “Revenge”, etc.), as well as in the creation of “The Comedy of the City of St. Petersburg” and the first predominantly prose work - the play “Elizabeth Bam”, presented on January 24, 1928 at the only evening of the “Union of Real Art” (OBERIU), which, in addition to Kharms and Vvedensky, included Nikolai Zabolotsky, K. Vaginov and I. Bakhterev, and to which Nikolai Oleinikov joined - Kharms formed a special closeness with him . The unification was unstable, lasted less than three years from 1927 to 1930, and Kharms’ active participation in it was rather external and did not affect him in any way creative principles. The characterization given to him by Zabolotsky, the compiler of the OBERIU manifesto, was vague: “a poet and playwright whose attention is focused not on a static figure, but on the collision of a number of objects, on their relationships.”
At the end of 1927, Oleinikov and Zhitkov organized the Association of Writers of Children's Literature and invited Kharms to it.
From 1928 to 1941, he was constantly published in children's magazines "Hedgehog", "Chizh", "Cricket" and "Oktyabryata", during which time he published about 20 children's books. These works provided an outlet for his gaming element, but, as evidenced by his diaries and letters, they were written solely to earn money (more than meager since the mid-1930s) and the author did not attach much importance to them. They were published through the efforts of Samuil Marshak, however, the attitude of criticism towards Kharms’s poems, starting with an article in Pravda entitled “Against hack work in children’s literature,” was unequivocal. And he really didn’t live by what he did for children. These were stories, poems, plays, articles, and even any line in a diary, letter or private note. In everything, in any chosen genre, he remained an original writer, unlike anyone else. “I want to be in life what Lobachevsky was in geometry,” he wrote in 1937.
The Smena newspaper regarded his unpublished works in April 1930 as “the poetry of the class enemy,” and the article became a harbinger of Kharms’ arrest at the end of 1931, the qualification of his literary activities as “subversive work” and “counter-revolutionary activity” and exile to Kursk . In December 1931, Kharms, along with a number of other Oberiuts, was arrested, accused of anti-Soviet activities, and sentenced on March 21, 1932 by the OGPU board to three years in correctional camps. As a result, the sentence was replaced by deportation (“minus 12”) on May 23, 1932, and the poet went to Kursk, where Vvedensky, who had already been deported, was already in exile. Kharms lived there from spring to autumn 1932.
Vladimir Glotser said: “Left behind are the only two “adult” publications of Daniil Kharms - a poem in each - in two collections of the Union of Poets (in 1926 and 1927). Daniil Kharms, as well as Alexander Vvedensky, did not manage to publish a single “adult” line during his lifetime. Did Kharms strive to publish his “adult” works? Have you thought about them? I suppose so. Firstly, this is the immanent law of all creativity. Secondly, there is indirect evidence that he considered over four dozen of his works ready for publication. But at the same time - here is the consciousness of hopelessness! - after 1928, he did not make any attempts to publish any of his “adult” things. In any case, such attempts are not yet known. Kharms himself tried not to let his friends know what he was writing. The artist Alisa Poret recalled: “Kharms himself loved to draw, but he never showed me his drawings, as well as everything that he wrote for adults. He forbade all his friends to do this, and made me swear that I would not try to get his manuscripts.” I think, however, that a small circle of his friends - A. Vvedensky, L. Lipavsky (L. Savelyev), Ya. S. Druskin and some others - were regular listeners of his works in the 30s. And he wrote - at least, he tried to write - every day. “I didn’t complete my 3-4 pages today,” he reproaches himself. And next to it, on the same days, he writes: “I was happiest when they took away my pen and paper and forbade me to do anything. I had no anxiety that it was my fault that I was not doing something, my conscience was calm, and I was happy. This was when I was in prison. But if they asked me if I wanted to go back there or to a situation like prison, I would say: no, I DON’T WANT.”
In 1932, Kharms managed to return to Leningrad. The nature of his work changed - poetry faded into the background, he wrote less and less poetry (the last completed poems dated back to the beginning of 1938), but he created more prose works. He wrote the story “The Old Woman”, as well as works of a small genre - “Cases”, “Scenes”, etc. In place of the lyrical hero-entertainer, ringleader, visionary and miracle worker, a deliberately naive narrator-observer appeared, impartial to the point of cynicism. Fantasy and everyday grotesque revealed the cruel and delusional absurdity of “unattractive reality” (from diaries), and the effect of terrifying authenticity was created thanks to the scrupulous accuracy of details, gestures, and verbal facial expressions. In unison with the diary entries (“the days of my death have come”, etc.), the last stories “Knights”, “Falling”, “Interference” and “Rehabilitation” were imbued with a feeling of complete hopelessness, the omnipotence of crazy tyranny, cruelty and vulgarity.
The works of Daniil Kharms were like pebbles in the mosaic of literature of the 1920s and 1930s. The stories and sketches from the series “Cases”, dedicated to his wife Marina Malich, amazingly conveyed, despite all their laconicism (some things were a third of a typewritten page), the phantasmagoric nature, atmosphere and life of the 1930s. Their humor was the humor of the absurd. “I,” wrote Kharms on October 31, 1937, “are only interested in “nonsense”; only that which has no practical meaning.”
A man left the house
With a baton and a bag.
And on a long journey,
and on a long journey
I set off on foot.
He walked straight and forward
And he kept looking forward.
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 then on,
And from then on,
And from then on he disappeared.
But if somehow he
I'll happen to meet you
Then hurry up
Then hurry up
Tell us quickly.
Kharms was interested in the miraculous. He believed in a miracle - and at the same time doubted whether it existed in life. Sometimes he himself felt like a miracle worker who could, but did not want to work miracles. One of the frequently encountered motifs in his works is sleep. Sleep is the most comfortable state, an environment for miracles to happen and for people to believe in them. It was as if he knew about the 36 years of life allotted to him. There were days when he wrote two or three poems or two stories. And he could redo and rewrite any thing, even a small one, several times.
His appearance could easily cost his life. Vera Ketlinskaya, who headed the Leningrad writers' organization during the siege, said that at the beginning of the war, she had to verify the identity of Kharms several times, whom suspicious citizens, especially teenagers, accepted because of his strange appearance and clothes - knee socks, an unusual hat, a "chain" with a lot of mysterious keychains, including a skull and crossbones,” for a German spy.
On August 23, 1941, he was rearrested following a denunciation by Antonina Oranzhireeva, an acquaintance of Anna Akhmatova and a long-time NKVD agent. Kharms was accused of saying: “If they give me a mobilization leaflet, I’ll punch the commander in the face and let them shoot me; but I won’t wear the uniform.” And another saying: “ Soviet Union lost the war on the first day, Leningrad will now either be besieged and we will die of starvation, or they will bomb it, leaving no stone unturned.” Kharms also claimed that the city was mined, and unarmed soldiers were being sent to the front.
To avoid execution, Kharms feigned insanity, after which the military tribunal determined “based on the gravity of the crime committed” that Kharms should be kept in a psychiatric hospital.
Weak from hunger, his wife Marina Malich came to the apartment damaged by the bombing, together with Daniil Ivanovich’s friend, Ya.S. Druskin, put her husband’s manuscripts in a small suitcase, as well as the manuscripts of Vvedensky and Nikolai Oleinikov that Kharms had, and this suitcase as The greatest value of the Druskin coast was during all the vicissitudes of evacuation. Then, when he returned to Leningrad in 1944, he took from Kharms’ sister, E.I. Yuvacheva, another part of the archive that miraculously survived. It also contained nine letters to the actress of the Leningrad Youth Theater (A. Bryantsev Theater) Klavdia Vasilievna Pugacheva, later an artist of the Moscow Theater of Satire and the Mayakovsky Theater. Considering the very small epistolary of Kharms that has come down to us, they are of particular value, especially the manuscript of the seemingly unfinished story “The Old Woman,” Kharms’s largest work in prose.
Kharms's works, even those published, remained in complete oblivion until the early 1960s, when a collection of his carefully selected children's poems, “The Game,” was published in 1962. After that, for about 20 years, they tried to give him the appearance of a cheerful eccentric, a mass entertainer for children, which was completely inconsistent with his “adult” works. Since 1978, his collected works, prepared on the basis of saved manuscripts by M. Meilach and W. Erl, have been published in Germany. By the mid-1990s, Kharms firmly took his place as one of the main representatives of Russian literary literature of the 1920s and 1930s, essentially opposed to Soviet literature.
Vladimir Glotser said: “The world was surprised to recognize Daniil Kharms. Having first read it in the late 60s and early 70s. Him and his friend Alexander Vvedensky. Until then, the world considered Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett to be the founders of European absurdist literature. But, having finally read the hitherto unknown and, unfortunately, not yet published in our country play “Elizabeth Bam” (1927), the prose and poetic works of Daniil Kharms, as well as the play “The Christmas Tree at the Ivanovs” (1939) and poems by A. Vvedensky , he saw that this now so popular branch of literature appeared long before Ionesco and Beckett. But neither Kharms nor Vvedensky heard how they were honored. They felt the breakdown, discord, destruction of established life, human connections, etc., perhaps more acutely and earlier than others. And they saw tragic consequences for humans in this. So all the horrors of life, all its absurdities became only the background against which the absurd action unfolds, but also, to some extent, the reason that gave rise to the absurdity itself, its thinking. Absurd literature turned out to be, in its own way, an ideal expression of these processes experienced by each individual person. But, with all the influences that Kharms himself points to, one cannot help but see that he inherits not only Gogol, whom, as we later learn, he placed above all writers, but also, for example, Dostoevsky... And these sources testify that that Russian absurdity did not arise suddenly and not on random grounds.”
By Kharms himself, life was becoming more and more harsh. In 1937 and 1938, there were often days and weeks when he and his wife were severely hungry. There was nothing to buy even very simple food. “I still don’t despair,” he writes on September 28, 1937. “I must be hoping for something, and it seems to me that my situation is better than it really is.” Iron hands are dragging me into the pit."
But in those same days and years, hopeless in his own sense, he worked intensively. The story “Connection,” for example, was dated September 14, 1937. Kharms, as an artist, explored hopelessness and hopelessness and wrote about it. On January 30, 1937, he wrote the story “The Chest,” on June 21, 1937, the sketch “Comprehensive Research,” on August 22, 1937, “About how messengers visited me,” etc. The absurdity of the plots of these things is beyond doubt, but it is also certain that they came from the pen of Kharms at a time when what seems absurd became reality. Contemporaries who spoke about Kharms wrote how amazed the janitor was when he read the sign on the door of his apartment each time with a new name.
It is possible that this is how it all happened. Here is the original note, preserved in the Kharms archive: “I have urgent work. I'm at home, but I'm not receiving anyone. And I don't even talk through the door. I work every day until 7 o’clock.” “Urgent work” for an unpublished writer...
Kharms died in Leningrad on February 2, 1942 - in custody, from exhaustion during the siege of Leningrad, in the most difficult month in terms of the number of starvation deaths, in the psychiatry department of the Kresty prison hospital.
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Copyright: Daniil Kharms
Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev (1905 - 1942) while still at school came up with a pseudonym for himself - Kharms, which varied with amazing ingenuity, sometimes even in the signature under one manuscript: Kharms, Horms, Charms, Haarms, Shardam, Kharms-Dandan, etc. The fact is that Kharms believed that an unchanging name brings misfortune, and took new surname as if trying to get away from him. However, it was the pseudonym “Kharms” with its duality (from the French “charme” - “charm, charm” and from the English “harm” - “harm”) that most accurately reflected the essence of the writer’s attitude to life and creativity.
Daniil Yuvachev was born on December 17 (30), 1905 in St. Petersburg, in the family of Ivan Yuvachev, a former naval officer, revolutionary-People's Will, exiled to Sakhalin and took up religious philosophy there. Kharms's father knew Chekhov, Tolstoy and Voloshin.
Daniil studied at a privileged St. Petersburg German school. In 1924 he entered the Leningrad Electrical Technical School, but was soon forced to leave it. In 1925 he took up writing.
In 1925, Yuvachev met the poetic and philosophical circle of plane trees. He quickly gained scandalous fame in the circles of avant-garde writers under his pseudonym “Kharms”, invented at the age of 17. Kharms was accepted into the All-Russian Union of Poets in March 1926 on the basis of the submitted poetic works, two of which (“An Incident on the Railway” and “The Poem of Peter Yashkin, a Communist”) were published in the Union’s small-circulation collections.
The early Kharms was characterized by “zaum”; he joined the “Order of Brainiacs DSO” led by Alexander Tufanov. Since 1926, Kharms actively tried to organize the forces of “left” writers and artists in Leningrad, creating the short-lived organizations “Radix” and “Left Flank”. In 1927, S. Marshak attracted Kharms to work in children's literature. This is how Kharms received his first publications and his first money from them. Profits from publications remained almost the only source of money throughout Kharms’ life. He didn’t work anywhere else; when there was no money (and this was the case all his life), he borrowed money. Sometimes he gave it on time, sometimes he didn’t give it at all.
In February, the first issue of the children's magazine "Hedgehog" was published, in which Kharms's first children's works "Ivan Ivanovich Samovar" and "Naughty Cork" were published. Since 1928, Kharms has been writing for the children's magazine Chizh. Surprisingly, with a relatively small number of children's poems (“Ivan Ivanovich Samovar”, “Liar”, “Game”, “Million”, “How Dad Shot My Ferret”, “A Man Came Out of the House”, “What Was That?”, “Tiger on the Street”...) he created his own country in poetry for children and became its classic.
At the same time, Kharms became one of the founders of avant-garde poetic and art group“Union of Real Art” (OBERIU). Later, in Soviet journalism, the works of OBERIU were declared “the poetry of the class enemy,” and since 1932, the activities of OBERIU in its previous composition ceased.
In December 1931, Kharms was arrested along with a number of other Oberiuts, accused of anti-Soviet activities and sentenced on March 21, 1932 by the OGPU board to three years in correctional camps. But two months later the sentence was replaced by deportation, and the poet went to Kursk.
He arrived on July 13, 1932. “I didn’t like the city in which I lived at that time,” he wrote about Kursk. It stood on a mountain and there were postcard views everywhere. They disgusted me so much that I was even glad to sit at home. Yes, in fact, apart from the post office, the market and the store, I had nowhere to go... There were days when I did not eat anything. Then I tried to create a joyful mood for myself. He lay down on the bed and started smiling. I smiled for up to 20 minutes at a time, but then the smile turned into a yawn...”
Kharms stayed in Kursk until the beginning of November, returning to Leningrad on the 10th. He continued to communicate with like-minded people and wrote a number of books for children to earn a living. After the publication in 1937 of the poem “A Man with a Club and a Bag Came Out of the House” in a children’s magazine, which “has since disappeared,” Kharms was no longer published. This brought him and his wife to the brink of starvation.
On August 23, 1941, Kharms was arrested for defeatist sentiments following a denunciation by an NKVD agent. In particular, Kharms was accused of saying, “If they give me a mobilization leaflet, I’ll punch the commander in the face and let them shoot me; but I won’t wear a uniform” and “The Soviet Union lost the war on the first day, Leningrad will now either be besieged and we will die of starvation, or they will bomb it, leaving no stone unturned.” To avoid execution, Kharms feigned madness. The military tribunal ordered Kharms to be kept in a psychiatric hospital. There, Daniil Kharms died during the siege of Leningrad, in the most difficult month in terms of the number of starvation deaths.
Daniil Kharms was rehabilitated in 1956, but for a long time his main works were not officially published in the USSR. Before the time of perestroika, his work circulated from hand to hand in samizdat, and was also published abroad with a large number distortions and abbreviations.
“I,” wrote Kharms on October 31, 1937, “are only interested in "nonsense"; only that which has no practical meaning. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestation. Heroism, pathos, prowess, morality, hygiene, morality, tenderness and excitement are words and feelings that I hate.
But I fully understand and respect: delight and admiration, inspiration and despair, passion and restraint, debauchery and chastity, sadness and grief, joy and laughter.”
The biography of Daniil Kharms begins when the first Russian revolution mercilessly destroyed human destinies, and ends at the terrible time of the Leningrad blockade - misunderstood, crossed out political regime, betrayed by those whom he considered friends...
At the time of his birth, our hero was not yet Kharms. His name was Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev. He was born in St. Petersburg on December 30, 1905.
Subsequently, Kharms loved to talk about this moment in the genre of phantasmagoria: “I was born in the reeds. Like a mouse. My mother gave birth to me and put me in the water. And I swam. Some kind of fish with four whiskers on its nose was circling around me. I started crying. Suddenly we saw porridge floating on the water. We ate this porridge and started laughing. We had a lot of fun..."
From the first day of his life, Daniel was immersed in a concentrated solution of love and severity. The source of the first was mother Nadezhda Ivanovna Kolyubakina, a comforter for women who survived imprisonment, a noblewoman by birth. The severity came from his father, Ivan Pavlovich Yuvachev, an ex-People's Volunteer who miraculously escaped hanging and was cleansed of revolutionary sentiments in his 15-year exile in Sakhalin. At his behest, his son learned German and English languages, read a lot of smart books, was trained in applied sciences.
At the Petrishule real school, Daniil was known as a good student, not a stranger to pranks, for example, he liked to play the unfortunate “orphan” in front of the teacher in order to avoid punishment. His first one dates back to approximately the same period. literary experience- a funny fairy tale. He wrote it for his 4-year-old sister Natalia, early death which became the first strong shock for the future poet.
The bright time of childhood was cut short - the year 1917 struck. After long journeys around the country, the Yuvachevs returned to St. Petersburg, which became Petrograd. Daniil worked at the Botkin Hospital, studied at the Children's Rural Labor School and wrote his first poems, which were more like a pile of nonsense. My father, raised on Pushkin and Lermontov, was horrified. To those around him, the young man seemed quite grown up.
What was especially striking was his reluctance to be “like everyone else.” Daniil stood out for his originality in clothing and oddities in behavior. And, it seems, he personified himself with someone else, but this “someone” had so many names that it was easy to get confused in them. The most important of them appeared on the flyleaf of one of the Bibles - “Harms” (from English “harm”). There are several versions of its origin. According to one of them, he was “suggested” to the writer by Sherlock Holmes, whom he admired from the age of 12.
At that time, everything “English” interested him: at the age of 17, Daniil attracted the attention of young girls with a “ceremonial suit” with a hint of English style: a brown jacket with light specks, golf trousers, long socks and yellow high-soled boots. This “stylistic madness” was crowned by a pipe in the corner of his mouth that did not know fire.
Daniil Kharms - Biography of personal life
His “loves” can tell a lot about a person. Daniil Ivanovich’s absolute “love” was women - curvaceous, witty, with a sense of humor. He married the beautiful Esther Rusakova early, and although the relationship was difficult (he cheated on her, she was jealous), he retained tender feelings for her. In 1937, she was sentenced to five years in the camps and died in Magadan a year later.
The second official wife was Marina Malich, a more patient and calm woman. Thanks to her and Kharms’s friend Yakov Druskin, we can read today notebooks writer, his early and rare works.
WITH early years Kharms gravitated toward Westernism. One of his favorite pranks was to “pretend to be a foreigner.”
He radiated an inexplicable magnetism, although photographs from those years captured a roughly hewn face with heavy brow ridges and piercingly light eyes hidden deeply beneath them. The mouth, like an overturned crescent, gave the face an expression of tragic theater mask. Despite this, Kharms was known as a sparkling joker.
One of the writer’s friends told how in the spring of 1924 he visited Daniil. He suggested taking a walk along Nevsky, but before that he went into the barn, grabbed a table leg, then asked a friend to paint his face - he depicted circles, triangles and other geometric objects on the poet’s face. “Write down what passersby say,” said Kharms, and they went for a walk. Most passersby shied away from the strange couple, but Daniel liked it.
If the pranks were intended to be expressive means rebellious soul of an avant-garde writer, then “playing schizophrenic” in 1939 had a vital goal: to avoid conscription military service and escape from persecution by the OGPU. It noticed Kharms back in the fall of 1924 after speaking at an evening dedicated to creativity Gumilyov. Then they just “talked” with him.
And on December 10, 1931, everything was serious: arrest, investigative actions, cruel torture. As a result, Kharms “confessed” to anti-Soviet activities - he spoke about his “sins”: writing hacky children’s works, creating literary movement called “zaum” and attempts to restore the former political system, while diligently indicating all “appearances, names, passwords.” He was sentenced to three years in a concentration camp. My father saved me - the concentration camp was replaced with exile in Kursk.
Returning to Leningrad, Kharms found the ranks of yesterday’s friends considerably thinned: some had died, others had been imprisoned, some had managed to escape abroad. He felt that the end was near, but continued to live to the fullest: falling in love with all the curvaceous women, writing poetry, most often for children, only for which he was tolerably paid. It’s funny that Kharms didn’t particularly like children, but they simply adored him. When he appeared on stage at the Leningrad Palace of Pioneers, he warmed up the audience with real tricks. This caused a flurry of delight.
In 1941 they came for him again. Kharms knew: it was not a matter of the denunciation that Antonina Oranzhireeva, Anna Akhmatova’s closest friend and official OGPU informant, wrote against him. He himself, his “avant-gardeism,” his reluctance to keep pace with the others - that’s what drove those others to fury. And they will not rest as long as he is alive.
Daniel's father died, there was no one to stand up for the writer, many friends turned away from him, remembering his “confession.” He could have been shot, but a “played” diagnosis came to their aid - schizophrenia. It is impossible to imagine a more terrible departure: to him, the descendant noble family, an extraordinary, talented person, was treated like a criminal. They were forced to go through physical and mental humiliation...
To the prisoners of “Krestov”, as well as to all residents besieged Leningrad, relied on 150 grams of bread per day. In the icy cell of the prison hospital, the hunted, exhausted and helpless Kharms waited in line to be transported to Kazan, where the mentally ill were “treated.” But they simply forgot about him, like other prisoners of the “Crosses”, during these terrible blockade days - they stopped feeding him, thereby dooming him to painful death.
The cardiogram of Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev-Kharms straightened out on February 2, 1942. The cold body of the one-of-a-kind poet was found a few days later, lying alone on the floor of a hospital cell.
Only in 1960 did some changes occur in his biography: by a resolution of the Leningrad prosecutor's office, Kharms was found not guilty, his case was closed for lack of evidence of a crime, and he himself was rehabilitated.