Daniil Kharms, the Soviet Menippea and the ‘Medieval’ Grotesque

Abstract

Daniil Kharms (1905–42) is a very rare specimen in the history of Soviet literature: an avant-gardiste who maintained a radical artistic method up to the German invasion of the country in 1941. His bizarre, hilarious and yet often incredibly cruel narratives from the 1930s and 1940s have in recent years aroused a great deal of interest both in Russia and abroad. English language translations have been published in Britain, Ireland and the United States, a recent theatrical adaptation of some of Kharms’ stories in Britain was received with much enthusiasm, and a significant amount of critical literature has begun to appear. Yet some of the most interesting features of his work remains obscured, and this pertains to the peculiar relationships between the literary canon, political power and the devices of popular culture that his work embodies. Kharms’ work carries on, and develops, the carnivalesque traditions of Evreinov, Meyerhold and Khlebnikov and, as it were, runs them into the moral obscenities of the Stalin era in which the world of laughter becomes tragic. In this Kharms, like Gogol before him, attempted to merge Russian traditions in which carnival maintained many disturbing elements with a western tradition in which laughter liberated man from the confines of the serious, moral world.