The Anti-World of Daniil Kharms: On the Significance of the Absurd

Abstract

Among the various interpretations of the prose of Daniil Kharms put forward since the rediscovery of the OBERIUTY in the 1960s and 1970s, three approaches in particular have proven especially influential. The first approach may be called international in that it locates the ‘key’ to Kharms’s prose in its parallels to twentieth-century European literature of the absurd. While George Gibian was careful to describe the OBERIU’s Russian context as well as to point out some of the important differences between Kharms and writers such as Kafka and Beckett, he was also the first to argue that the OBERIUTY ‘belong to the history of the European literature of the absurd’ (Gibian, 1974: 32). More recently, Lazar Fleishman has noted the remarkable resistance of OBERIU poetry to critical analysis, and contrasted it to the relative ease with which literary scholars have assimilated the OBERIU prose and theatre to the norms of European literature of the absurd.¹ While parallels with European literature of the absurd can illuminate the general phenomenon of OBERIU literature,² this approach is limited by its ahistoricity and its inability to account for the specific Russian and Soviet cultural traditions and contexts with which Kharms’s texts are inextricably connected.