Daniil kharms biography sample
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Extremists: Daniil Kharms
It’s easy to dismiss grandiose claims about art and the nature of reality, especially when they’re made by a writer who spent time in a mental hospital. This is one reason why the rediscovery of the Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms has not led to much serious consideration of his ideas. In amerika, at least, Kharms' life and his famous eccentricities have received as much attention as his work, a sad but predictable fate for a writer who enjoyed walking around Leningrad holding a butterfly net and wrote poetry in invented languages.
But a further reason for this neglect is that Kharms’ concerns—mysticism, the irrational, the absurd—are not among the priorities of contemporary American writing. He is an artifact of a literary culture vastly foreign to our own and vastly more radical, one in which publishing a manifesto that makes strange claims about art and reality, as Kharms did, was a reasonable way to start a literary career. But that time has passed,
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Another Face of Soviet Nostalgia: Daniil Kharms
Natasha Kadlec studies Russian literature at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Now I’ll tell you about how I was born,” wrote the poet Daniil Kharms in “I was born twice….” Kharms goes on to detail the process by which his father, wishing for his son to be born on New Year&#;s Day, forcibly reversed the author’s premature birth. By this logic, Kharms was born twice: once four months early, and once — indeed — on January 1.
Writing like Kharms&#; was hardly consonant with the dominant currents of official Soviet literature under Stalin, but since his posthumous circulation in samizdat during the s, Kharms has become a cult icon of alternative culture. In the years leading up to Soviet collapse, he even became a legitimate, if marginal, object of academic study. More recently, his lyrics have been set to music – from Ukrainian band Esthetic Education’s Juravli i korabli () to Icelandic composer Hafliði Hallgrímsson’s What They Sell
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Daniil Ivánovich Kharms was a 20th century Russian poet and dramatist whose poetry is usually categorised as absurdist or surrealist.
He was born Daniil Ivánovich Yuvatchov on the 30th December in St. Petersburg into a family constantly at odds with the government. His father, Ivan, was a member of “The People’s Will” which was a subversive, revolutionary group whose activities included acting against the ruling Tsar Alexander III. Not surprisingly Yuvatchov had already served time in prison by the time his son was born.
Daniil attended St Peter’s School and had an early interest in reading the books of Arthur Conan Doyle and it is thought that his pseudonym “Kharms” derived from a misheard version of “Holmes or Harms”. He was an able student, learning some English and German, and he went on to study at the Leningrad Electrotechnicum in , although he did not stay there for long. Some reports have him expelled for possibly anti-social behaviour. He was determined to carry on st