|
A Strangely
Funny Russian Genius
Nói tóm lại,
một gã vui nhộn, quá vui nhộn đối với chủ nghĩa Cộng Sản.
Đối với
bất cứ một ấn bản nào của Stalin, về chủ nghĩa Cộng Sản.
Một thiên tài Nga tức cuời một cáchi lạ thường
Ian Frazier
Russian
Portraits
The
portraits that follow are from a large number of photographs recently
recovered
from sealed archives in Moscow, some-rumor has it-from a cache in the
bottom of
an elevator shaft. Five of those that follow, Akhmatova, Chekhov (with
dog), Nabokov,
Pasternak (with book), and Tolstoy (on horseback) are from a volume
entitled The Russian Century,
published early last year by Random House. Seven
photographs from that research, which were not incorporated in The
Russian
Century, are published here for the first time: Bulgakov, Bunin,
Eisenstein (in
a group with Pasternak and Mayakovski), Gorki, Mayakovski, Nabokov
(with mother
and sister), Tolstoy (with Chekhov), and Yesenin. The photographs of
Andreyev,
Babel, and Kharms were supplied by the writers who did the texts on
them. The photograph
of Dostoyevsky is from the Bettmann archives. Writers who were thought
to have
an especial affinity with particular Russian authors were asked to
provide the
accompanying texts. We are
immensely in their debt for their cooperation.
The Paris
Review
1995 Winter
Daniil
Kharms
Among the
millions killed by Stalin was one of the funniest and most original
writers of
the century, Daniil Kharms. After his death in prison in 1942 at the
age of
thirty-seven, his name and his work almost disappeared, kept alive in
typescript texts circulated among small groups of people in the then
Soviet Union.
Practically no English-speaking readers knew of him. I didn't,
until I went to Russia and came back and read books about it and tried
to learn
the language. My teacher, a young woman who had been in the U.S. only a
few
months, asked me to translate a short piece by Daniil Kharms as a
homework
assignment. The piece, "Anecdotes from the Life of Pushkin,"
appears in CTAPYXA (Old Woman), a
short collection of Kharms's work published in Moscow in 1991. Due to
my
newness to the language and the two dictionaries and grammar text I had
to use,
my first reading of Kharms proceeded in extreme slow motion. As I
wondered over
the meaning of each word, each sentence; as the meaning gradually
emerged, my
delight grew. Every sentence was, funnier than I could have guessed. A
paragraph began: "Pushkin loved to throw rocks." Openings like that
made me breathless to find out what would come next. The well-known
difficulty
of taking humor from one language into another has a lesser-known
correlate:
when, as sometimes happens, the translation succeeds, the joke can seem
even
funnier than it was to begin with. As I translated, I thought Kharms
the
funniest writer I had ever
read.
His
photograph facing the title page only confirmed this. At first glance
he
appeared crazy or fierce, but on closer inspection I could see the
weirdness of
a deeply funny guy. I wanted to know all I could about him. My teacher
told me that
he was a founding member of an artistic movement called OBERIU that the
name
came from the first letters of the Russian words for Association for
Real Art,
that he and other members of the group fell into disfavor and were
killed, that
when she was little she knew him as the author of poems and stories for
children. We read some of his writing for children, work as blithe and
whimsical and heedless as the stories in GTAPYXA
were dark. In Russia's Lost Literature of
the Absurd, a selection edited and translated by George Gibian
(1971), I
learned that Kharms was born Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev in Petersburg in
1905;
that his father, an intellectual and revolutionary, had been imprisoned
and
exiled to Siberia; that with his father he shared an interest in
stories of
fantasy; that he suffered from melancholy; that he admired Gogol, Knut
Hamsun
and Bach. A colleague said of him, "Kharms is art." Much of his work
consisted of public readings, pranks, performances and daring gestures.
With
the Bolsheviks in power and the nobility vanished or in prison, Kharms
assumed
the guise of an aristocrat, complete with false mustache and a
briefcase
containing his own personal silver drinking cups. To attract
people to a reading performance of the OBERIU group, Kharms strolled on
a
fifth-floor ledge in Saint Petersburg smoking a pipe and loudly
announcing the
event to passersby.
In short, he
was a cool guy, too funny for communism, or at any rate for Stalin's
version of
it. After the successful production of his play, Elizabeth Bam, a
comedy about a
woman who is waiting to be arrested and killed, the press attacked the
OBERIU,
later accusing them of "reactionary jugglerism" and "nonsense
poetry . . . against the dictatorship of the proletariat." Police
arrest d
him on the street in 1941; when his wife went to take him a package at
the prison
hospital in February, 1942, she was told that he had died two days
before.
Fourteen years after his death he was officially "rehabilitated."
Bibliographies
listed him only as an author of children's books. More recently, the
larger outline
of his work has begun to emerge; perhaps soon there will be a complete
collection by which we can get to know him better. So far I have only
scratched
the surface on Kharms.
-Ian Frazier
Trong
số hàng triệu con người bị Stalin sát hại, có một nhà văn tức cười
nhất, uyên
nguyên nhất, của thế kỷ: Daniil Kharms. Sau khi ông chết ở trong tù,
vào năm
1942, khi 37 tuổi, tên và tác phẩm của ông hầu như biến mất, và chỉ còn
sống dưới
dạng chép tay, lưu truyền giữa những nhóm nhỏ, ở một nơi có tên là Liên
Bang Xô
Viết.
Thực tình là, không có một độc giả Anh ngữ nào biết về ông. Tôi (Ian
Frazier)
cũng vậy, cho tới khi đi Nga, trở về, đọc những cuốn sách về nó, và cố
gắng học
tiếng Nga. Cô giáo của tôi, một người đàn bà trẻ chỉ ở Mỹ được vài
tháng, đã ra
bài làm ở nhà cho tôi như sau: hãy dịch một đoản văn của Daniil Kharms
ra tiếng
Anh. Đoản văn "Những mẩu chuyện từ Cuộc Đời Puskhin", (Anecdotes from
the Life of Puskhin) là ở trong CTAPYXA (Bà Già), một tuyển tập nhỏ tác
phẩm của
Kharms, đã được xuất bản ở Moscow vào năm 1991. Tiếng Nga, hai cuốn từ
điển, và
một cuốn sách văn phạm, tất cả đều quá mới, lần đọc Kharms đầu tiên của
tôi thật
là chậm như sên. Cùng với sự mầy mò từng từ, từng câu, niềm hân hoan
của tôi
gia tăng, khi ý nghĩa của chúng lộ dần ra. Mỗi câu là một tức cười, hơn
cả dự
đoán của tôi về nó. Một đoạn văn bắt đầu như thế này: "Puskhin mê ném
đá". Những mở đầu như vậy làm cho tôi nghẹt thở: làm sao đoán ra nổi
cái
gì sẽ tới liền sau đó.
Giữ được chất tiếu lâm, khi chuyển dịch ngôn ngữ, là một điều khó khăn
vô cùng,
ai nấy đều biết. Nhưng có một hệ quả, ít được biết: đôi khi, trong tiến
trình dịch
thuật, câu chuyện có vẻ tếu hơn là lúc thoạt đầu chúng ta nghĩ về nó.
Trong khi
dịch, tôi nghĩ Kharms là một nhà văn tức cười nhất mà tôi đã từng đọc.
Ian Frazier, qua cuốn Văn Chương Phi Lý Đã Mất của Nga (Russia’s Lost
Literature of the Absurd), được biết, Kharms ra đời với tên Daniil
Ivanovich
Yuvachev, tại Petersburg vào năm 1905. Cha ông, một nhà trí thức cách
mạng bị cầm
tù và đầy đi Siberia. Ông thừa hưởng từ người cha, đam mê chuyện kỳ
quái. Ông
đau khổ vì "buồn" (that he suffered from melancholy). Mê Gogol, Knut
Hamsun và Bach. Một bạn đồng học nói về ông: "Kharms là nghệ thuật"
(Kharms is art). Cùng với sự lên ngôi của "nhà vô sản", và sự vào tù
của "nhà quí tộc", Kharms cảm thấy thích thú trong bộ dạng một nhà
quí phái, cộng thêm hàng ria mép giả thỉnh thoảng lại nhinh nhích, hinh
hỉnh, cộng
thêm chiếc cặp da kè kè bên mình, trong là những… chiếc ly uống rượu
bằng bạc!
Để lôi kéo khán thính giả cho một buổi trình diễn kịch của nhóm OBERIU,
ông di
dạo ở chót vót phía bên trên thành phố Saint Petersburg, miệng ngậm ống
vố, và
la lớn, thông báo cho những bộ hành qua lại phía bên dưới, về "biến cố
quan trọng" kể trên!
Nói tóm lại, một gã vui nhộn, quá vui nhộn đối với chủ nghĩa Cộng Sản.
Đối với
bất cứ một ấn bản nào của Stalin, về chủ nghĩa Cộng Sản. Sau thành công
của vở
kịch "Elizabeth Bam", một hài kịch về một người đàn bà chờ… "được
bắt và được giết", báo chí nhà nước kết án nhóm kịch của ông là… "trò
múa may phản động, thơ ca vô nghĩa… chống lại nền chuyên chính vô sản".
Ông bị bắt ở ngay trên đường phố, vào năm 1941. Khi vợ ông đi thăm
nuôi, vào
năm 1942, bà được thông báo, ông chết hai ngày trước đó. Mười bốn năm
sau khi mất,
tên tuổi của ông được phục hồi. Những nhà chuyên viết tiểu sử xếp ông
vào danh
sách: viết chuyện cho nhi đồng.
Ian
Frazier
Russian
Portraits
The
portraits that follow are from a large number of photographs recently
recovered
from sealed archives in Moscow, some-rumor has it-from a cache in the
bottom of
an elevator shaft. Five of those that follow, Akhmatova, Chekhov (with
dog), Nabokov,
Pasternak (with book), and Tolstoy (on horseback) are from a volume
entitled The Russian Century,
published early last year by Random House. Seven
photographs from that research, which were not incorporated in The
Russian
Century, are published here for the first time: Bulgakov, Bunin,
Eisenstein (in
a group with Pasternak and Mayakovski), Gorki, Mayakovski, Nabokov
(with mother
and sister), Tolstoy (with Chekhov), and Yesenin. The photographs of
Andreyev,
Babel, and Kharms were supplied by the writers who did the texts on
them. The photograph
of Dostoyevsky is from the Bettmann archives. Writers who were thought
to have
an especial affinity with particular Russian authors were asked to
provide the
accompanying texts. We are
immensely in their debt for their cooperation.
The Paris
Review
1995 Winter
Daniil
Kharms
Among the
millions killed by Stalin was one of the funniest and most original
writers of
the century, Daniil Kharms. After his death in prison in 1942 at the
age of
thirty-seven, his name and his work almost disappeared, kept alive in
typescript texts circulated among small groups of people in the then
Soviet Union.
Practically no English-speaking readers knew of him. I didn't,
until I went to Russia and came back and read books about it and tried
to learn
the language. My teacher, a young woman who had been in the U.S. only a
few
months, asked me to translate a short piece by Daniil Kharms as a
homework
assignment. The piece, "Anecdotes from the Life of Pushkin,"
appears in CTAPYXA (Old Woman), a
short collection of Kharms's work published in Moscow in 1991. Due to
my
newness to the language and the two dictionaries and grammar text I had
to use,
my first reading of Kharms proceeded in extreme slow motion. As I
wondered over
the meaning of each word, each sentence; as the meaning gradually
emerged, my
delight grew. Every sentence was, funnier than I could have guessed. A
paragraph began: "Pushkin loved to throw rocks." Openings like that
made me breathless to find out what would come next. The well-known
difficulty
of taking humor from one language into another has a lesser-known
correlate:
when, as sometimes happens, the translation succeeds, the joke can seem
even
funnier than it was to begin with. As I translated, I thought Kharms
the
funniest writer I had ever
read.
His
photograph facing the title page only confirmed this. At first glance
he
appeared crazy or fierce, but on closer inspection I could see the
weirdness of
a deeply funny guy. I wanted to know all I could about him. My teacher
told me that
he was a founding member of an artistic movement called OBERIU that the
name
came from the first letters of the Russian words for Association for
Real Art,
that he and other members of the group fell into disfavor and were
killed, that
when she was little she knew him as the author of poems and stories for
children. We read some of his writing for children, work as blithe and
whimsical and heedless as the stories in GTAPYXA
were dark. In Russia's Lost Literature of
the Absurd, a selection edited and translated by George Gibian
(1971), I
learned that Kharms was born Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev in Petersburg in
1905;
that his father, an intellectual and revolutionary, had been imprisoned
and
exiled to Siberia; that with his father he shared an interest in
stories of
fantasy; that he suffered from melancholy; that he admired Gogol, Knut
Hamsun
and Bach. A colleague said of him, "Kharms is art." Much of his work
consisted of public readings, pranks, performances and daring gestures.
With
the Bolsheviks in power and the nobility vanished or in prison, Kharms
assumed
the guise of an aristocrat, complete with false mustache and a
briefcase
containing his own personal silver drinking cups. To attract
people to a reading performance of the OBERIU group, Kharms strolled on
a
fifth-floor ledge in Saint Petersburg smoking a pipe and loudly
announcing the
event to passersby.
In short, he
was a cool guy, too funny for communism, or at any rate for Stalin's
version of
it. After the successful production of his play, Elizabeth Bam, a
comedy about a
woman who is waiting to be arrested and killed, the press attacked the
OBERIU,
later accusing them of "reactionary jugglerism" and "nonsense
poetry . . . against the dictatorship of the proletariat." Police
arrest d
him on the street in 1941; when his wife went to take him a package at
the prison
hospital in February, 1942, she was told that he had died two days
before.
Fourteen years after his death he was officially "rehabilitated."
Bibliographies
listed him only as an author of children's books. More recently, the
larger outline
of his work has begun to emerge; perhaps soon there will be a complete
collection by which we can get to know him better. So far I have only
scratched
the surface on Kharms.
-Ian Frazier
Trong
số hàng triệu con người bị Stalin sát hại, có một nhà văn tức cười
nhất, uyên
nguyên nhất, của thế kỷ: Daniil Kharms. Sau khi ông chết ở trong tù,
vào năm
1942, khi 37 tuổi, tên và tác phẩm của ông hầu như biến mất, và chỉ còn
sống dưới
dạng chép tay, lưu truyền giữa những nhóm nhỏ, ở một nơi có tên là Liên
Bang Xô
Viết.
Thực tình là, không có một độc giả Anh ngữ nào biết về ông. Tôi (Ian
Frazier)
cũng vậy, cho tới khi đi Nga, trở về, đọc những cuốn sách về nó, và cố
gắng học
tiếng Nga. Cô giáo của tôi, một người đàn bà trẻ chỉ ở Mỹ được vài
tháng, đã ra
bài làm ở nhà cho tôi như sau: hãy dịch một đoản văn của Daniil Kharms
ra tiếng
Anh. Đoản văn "Những mẩu chuyện từ Cuộc Đời Puskhin", (Anecdotes from
the Life of Puskhin) là ở trong CTAPYXA (Bà Già), một tuyển tập nhỏ tác
phẩm của
Kharms, đã được xuất bản ở Moscow vào năm 1991. Tiếng Nga, hai cuốn từ
điển, và
một cuốn sách văn phạm, tất cả đều quá mới, lần đọc Kharms đầu tiên của
tôi thật
là chậm như sên. Cùng với sự mầy mò từng từ, từng câu, niềm hân hoan
của tôi
gia tăng, khi ý nghĩa của chúng lộ dần ra. Mỗi câu là một tức cười, hơn
cả dự
đoán của tôi về nó. Một đoạn văn bắt đầu như thế này: "Puskhin mê ném
đá". Những mở đầu như vậy làm cho tôi nghẹt thở: làm sao đoán ra nổi
cái
gì sẽ tới liền sau đó.
Giữ được chất tiếu lâm, khi chuyển dịch ngôn ngữ, là một điều khó khăn
vô cùng,
ai nấy đều biết. Nhưng có một hệ quả, ít được biết: đôi khi, trong tiến
trình dịch
thuật, câu chuyện có vẻ tếu hơn là lúc thoạt đầu chúng ta nghĩ về nó.
Trong khi
dịch, tôi nghĩ Kharms là một nhà văn tức cười nhất mà tôi đã từng đọc.
Ian Frazier, qua cuốn Văn Chương Phi Lý Đã Mất của Nga (Russia’s Lost
Literature of the Absurd), được biết, Kharms ra đời với tên Daniil
Ivanovich
Yuvachev, tại Petersburg vào năm 1905. Cha ông, một nhà trí thức cách
mạng bị cầm
tù và đầy đi Siberia. Ông thừa hưởng từ người cha, đam mê chuyện kỳ
quái. Ông
đau khổ vì "buồn" (that he suffered from melancholy). Mê Gogol, Knut
Hamsun và Bach. Một bạn đồng học nói về ông: "Kharms là nghệ thuật"
(Kharms is art). Cùng với sự lên ngôi của "nhà vô sản", và sự vào tù
của "nhà quí tộc", Kharms cảm thấy thích thú trong bộ dạng một nhà
quí phái, cộng thêm hàng ria mép giả thỉnh thoảng lại nhinh nhích, hinh
hỉnh, cộng
thêm chiếc cặp da kè kè bên mình, trong là những… chiếc ly uống rượu
bằng bạc!
Để lôi kéo khán thính giả cho một buổi trình diễn kịch của nhóm OBERIU,
ông di
dạo ở chót vót phía bên trên thành phố Saint Petersburg, miệng ngậm ống
vố, và
la lớn, thông báo cho những bộ hành qua lại phía bên dưới, về "biến cố
quan trọng" kể trên!
Nói tóm lại, một gã vui nhộn, quá vui nhộn đối với chủ nghĩa Cộng Sản.
Đối với
bất cứ một ấn bản nào của Stalin, về chủ nghĩa Cộng Sản. Sau thành công
của vở
kịch "Elizabeth Bam", một hài kịch về một người đàn bà chờ… "được
bắt và được giết", báo chí nhà nước kết án nhóm kịch của ông là… "trò
múa may phản động, thơ ca vô nghĩa… chống lại nền chuyên chính vô sản".
Ông bị bắt ở ngay trên đường phố, vào năm 1941. Khi vợ ông đi thăm
nuôi, vào
năm 1942, bà được thông báo, ông chết hai ngày trước đó. Mười bốn năm
sau khi mất,
tên tuổi của ông được phục hồi. Những nhà chuyên viết tiểu sử xếp ông
vào danh
sách: viết chuyện cho nhi đồng.
Ian
Frazier
Russia is
the funniest country in the world. Some countries, like America and
England, are
funny mostly on purpose, while others, like Germany and France, can be
funny
only unintentionally. (But that counts! Being funny is tricky, so any
way you
do it counts.) Russia, however, is funny both intentionally (Gogol,
Zoshchenko,
Bulgakov) and unintentionally (Vladimir Putin singing, as he did at a
televised
event a few years ago, “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill”). Given
the
disaster Russian history has been more or less continuously for the
last five
centuries, its humor is of the darkest, most extreme kind. Russian
humor is to
ordinary humor what backwoods fundamentalist poisonous snake handling
is to a
petting zoo. Russian humor is slapstick, only you actually die.
Surveys that
measure such distinctions often rate Russians among the world’s least
happy
people. To judge from the Russians I know, this information would hold
little
interest one way or the other. To Russians, happiness is not the big
deal it is
to us; the Declaration of Independence they don’t have makes no
statement about
it. On the street or otherwise encountering strangers Russians don’t
paste big
grins on their faces, the way we tend to do. They look sternly upon
reflex
smilers. Their humor is powerful without a lot of jollity, and it’s
hard to
imagine Bulgakov, say, convulsed and weeping with laughter, as I have
been when
reading certain scenes in his novel Heart of a Dog.
Daniil
Kharms, a Russian writer who came of age in the worst of Soviet times,
is
categorized as an absurdist, partly (I think) because it’s hard to know
what
else to call him. To me he makes more sense as a religious writer.
He is
really
funny and completely not ingratiating, simultaneously. I believe he
knew he was
funny and tried to be funny in his work, but I can’t find a single
instance of
him using the word “funny” in any of his writings, except at some
distance from
its straightforward meaning. In his personal notebooks, published for
the first
time in English in 2013, he never exults in how funny he has been or
boasts
that a witticism he said or wrote had ’em rolling in the aisles. For an
American humorist or comedy writer such diffidence would be out of
character,
if not unheard of.
Kharms’s
life gave him a lot not to be jolly about. He was born Daniil Ivanovich
Yuvachov in St. Petersburg in 1905. Formerly his father had been one of
many
young revolutionaries plotting against the life of Tsar Alexander III,
a
pastime that got him imprisoned for four years and then sent to a labor
camp on
Sakhalin Island for another eight. Later, Ivan Yuvachov became a Soviet
in good
standing and head of accounting at a power station. Kharms’s mother,
Nadezhda
Kolyubakina, was from an aristocratic background and a graduate of St.
Petersburg’s Smolny Institute for Noble Girls.
Kharms
offered a number of stories about his birth, such as that he was pushed
back in
after he came out, or that he hatched from caviar. Hunger to the point
of
starvation recurred in his youth, as he moved among relatives during
World War
I, and in his twenties and thirties in Leningrad when his notebooks
record
periods of going without food for days. He often got kicked out of
things: from
the city’s preparatory-level Peterschule at sixteen, from a college of
engineering at twenty, and from the Leningrad Union of Poets at
twenty-three.
He took the
name Kharms when he was nineteen and he wrote under it for the rest of
his
life. A connection may have existed between it and the English words
“charm”
and “harm,” both evoking his interest in magic. It is pronounced with
the same
hard, throaty h that enlivens the Russian pronunciation of names like
Hemingway
and Huckleberry Finn. At that point his life was more than halfway
over. The
next year he met Alexander Vvedensky, Leonid Lipavsky, Yakov Druskin,
and
Andrei Oleinikov, his future literary collaborators and friends. Kharms
wrote
hard-to-categorize plays, published two poems (the only works of his
for adults
to come out in his lifetime), and with Vvedensky, Nikolai Zabalotsky,
and
others formed a movement called OBERIU, an abbreviation made from
letters in
the words “Union for Real Art.” Public performances by OBERIU
participants
angered audiences to near riot and received threateningly negative
reviews.
Much of
Kharms’s published writing in his lifetime appeared in the children’s
magazines
Ezh (Hedgehog) and Chizh (Siskin). Russians of the later Soviet era
knew him
only as a writer for children, an age group he professed to despise,
though his
poems and stories for them have become wild classics of Russian
literature. In
1931 he was arrested for putting anti-Soviet ideas in his children’s
writing.
He spent part of his brief sentence of exile in Kursk with Vvedensky,
who was
also exiled there. Esther Rusakova, his first wife, to whom he had been
married
in the late 1920s, received a five-year Gulag sentence in 1936 and
later died
in prison. His friend Oleinikov was shot in 1937. In 1939 Kharms was
diagnosed
as schizophrenic and given an exemption from military service. In
August 1941
he was arrested and charged with spreading panic and anti-Soviet
propaganda.
Held in a psychiatric prison hospital in Leningrad during the first and
hardest
winter of the German blockade, he starved to death on February 2, 1942,
at the
age of thirty-six. In 1956 he was rehabilitated, but his poems, prose
pieces,
and plays did not begin to be published in Russia until the late 1980s.
It can be
hard to explain why I like Kharms’s writing, or why anybody does. His
appeal is
unique. Joseph Brodsky once quoted Anna Akhmatova, about an improbable
Kharms
sentence, “Only with Kharms could that ever work. Never with anyone
else.” I
had never heard of Kharms before my first trip to Russia, in 1993. I
spoke no
Russian then and was kind of at sea. A Russian friend showed me a small
paperback edition of Starukha (The Old Woman), a collection of Kharms’s
pieces
edited by Vladimir Glotser, which had come out in 1991. My friend
translated a
few for me. Works of humor are the hardest part of a literature to
translate—even harder than poetry, because although you can think you
understand a poem when you don’t, with humor you must not only
understand but
also laugh, and you can’t fake that. The difficulty of humor’s crossing
cultural lines makes the laughter all the sweeter on the rare occasions
when it
succeeds.
As my friend
translated Kharms’s two-page “Anegdotes from the Life of Pushkin” for
me, I
laughed out loud. In the dizzy incomprehensibility of Russia I had
found
something I could hold on to. The “Anegdotes” were short, and numbered
one
through seven. Anegdote number six began, “Pushkin liked to throw
rocks.” That
sentence struck me, and still strikes me, as sublime. It reminded me of
the
subgenre of cheerfully moronic writing (see the brilliant “Deep
Thoughts” books
by Jack Handey) that I’ve always enjoyed and try to contribute to
myself. I did
not know that Kharms’s piece had been written at the time of the
overblown 1937
celebrations of the centennial of Pushkin’s death. (In that abysmal
year of the
Terror, Stalin’s press heaped crocodile praise on the great poet.)
I wrote down
the translations that my friend dictated for “Anegdotes from the Life
of
Pushkin” and for several other pieces, and when I returned I raved
about Kharms
to everybody. Garrison Keillor let me read “Anegdotes” on his show at
Macalester College, where it got almost no laughs. In 1998 my friend
Katya
Arnold and I published a children’s book, It Happened Like This, a
collection
of ten translated Kharms stories and poems accompanied by Katya’s
illustrations. That also did not do well. My disgruntled editor told me
it sold
eight hundred copies.
Here, as
translated by Eugene Ostashevsky in his OBERIU anthology, is the last
paragraph
of a 276-word Kharms piece titled “A Magazine Article”:
Adults get offended by nothing so
much as
the sight of children. And so, at the time of the great emperor
Alexander
Vilberdat, to show a child to an adult was taken to be the highest
possible
affront. It topped spitting into someone’s face; and even, say, hitting
the
inside of the nostril in the process. A “disgrace by child” could be
washed off
only in a duel, by blood.
The
two-paragraph story “The Adventure of Katerpillar” begins:
Mishurin was a katerpillar. For
this
reason, or maybe not for this reason, he liked to lie under the sofa or
behind
the wardrobe and suck dust. Since he wasn’t an especially neat man,
sometimes
for the entire day his mug was covered with dust like down.
Last
summer
I went to a production of a two-character play based on Kharms’s work
at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music. Mikhail Baryshnikov and Willem Dafoe played
the
characters, A and B, who were interchangeable and who both represented
Kharms,
according to a program statement by Robert Wilson, the director. Titled
The Old
Woman, the play expanded on the longest story in the collection
Starukha. The
plot or nonplot involves old women falling out of a window, and
subsequent
awkward developments. Wilson’s staging relied on weird, oversized
furniture,
splashes of gorgeous light, and props such as a string of pink hot dogs
long
enough to disappear up into the flies. The action started with
Baryshnikov and
Dafoe, in tuxedos and with kabuki-white faces, striding onto the stage
and
making shrill, grating noises. Your average theatergoer might have lost
heart
right there, but the people in the almost full house at BAM did not fit
that
description. We battened hatches and waited for whatever avant-garde
rush might
be in store.
Exaggerated,
silent-movie-style gestures and facial expressions, bursts of strange
music,
and sentences repeated over and over—“The miracle-worker was tall”—kept
everybody guessing. Just watching Baryshnikov stand there was a
delight; his
every gesture had something cool about it. Dafoe’s New York City accent
gave an
interesting local flavor to Kharms passages that I’d never heard in any
language, only seen on the page. There were laughs, but not a lot. I
felt a bit
better about the dead air I’d played to when I read “Anegdotes” for
Garrison
Keillor. Most people stayed through the whole performance, but a small
stream
of defections began after about twelve minutes. I had an aisle seat and
occasionally heard huffs of indignation as the disaffected hurried by.
This
made me admire Kharms even more—still to be upsetting people after
almost a
century, and in a different language and country, seemed an
accomplishment few
writers could claim.
But as it
turns out, approaching Kharms from the standpoint of humor gets you
only so
far. He was a writer and poet of huge ambition, as his surviving
notebooks,
noncontinuous from 1924 to 1941, make clear. They include a copy of the
statement he signed in the course of his interrogation after his 1931
arrest.
No doubt written by his NKVD interrogator, it summed up Kharms’s
personal
philosophy as being “profoundly hostile to the contemporary world,” and
said
Kharms believed that a “utilitarian and practical” science (e.g.,
Marxist
socialism, as applied in the Soviet Union) could never “attain the
absolute
heights or be capable of penetrating to the depths of the universe’s
mysteries.” This laying-out of his crimes against the state accurately
named
his life goals. Kharms rejected not only Soviet systems of materialism,
but
plain rationality of any kind. He lived by his own mystical faith,
sometimes
turned to random pages in holy scripture for advice, and when exiled in
Kursk,
wrote, “my only comfort is the Bible.” As a Soviet team player he
couldn’t have
been more ill-suited.
The
OBERIU
poets’ rejection of plot, sense, logic, and the other consolations of
meaning
came out of a deep asceticism. “I’m always suspicious of everything
comfortable
and well off,” Kharms wrote to a friend in 1933. Their aspirations were
also,
in a sense, patriotic. To their critics, they replied that they were
seeking “a
genuinely new art” for all of Russia. Their methods tapped the
spirituality
that Russians have turned to before in drastic times. Kharms admired
contemporary mathematicians of the Moscow School who used mystical,
nonrational
thinking to crack previously unsolved problems in set theory and the
nature of
infinity. He idolized the formalist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, twenty
years his
senior, who had cofounded an artistic movement called zaum, from the
Russian za
um, “beyond mind.” Kharms’s friend and close OBERIU collaborator
Vvedensky
declared his three themes to be “time, death, and God.” As Eugene
Ostashevsky
explains, “Vvedensky strikes one as a religious mystic in that very
modern
manner which, identifying religion with doubt, regards the absence and
even
nonexistence of God as facets of His infinite transcendence.”
Or to put
it
another way: the absurdity and chaos of existence, and the manifest
absence of
God in the whole ongoing mess, are themselves proofs of a transcendent
God.
And, may one add, of a funny God? Of a God possibly enjoying a laugh at
our
expense? In any event, at this point in the OBERIU philosophy we are
somewhere
deeper inside or underneath the group’s humorous effects.
Kharms
possessed a kind of ESP that saw beyond daily commonsense life; his
clairvoyance reminds me of the occasional gifts of prophecy that
visited the
Hunkpapa Sioux chief Sitting Bull. Kharms’s second wife, Marina
Durnovo, in her
book Moi Muzh Daniil Kharms, describes the official summons she
received to
enlist in the squads of women laborers who were digging trenches to
defend
Leningrad in the summer of 1941. Marina had severe health problems and
knew she
could die from the toil. Kharms promised to tell her something that
would save
her. For days he went to the grave of his father in a cemetery outside
the
city. Repeatedly he came back with nothing and said that she must keep
waiting.
Finally he announced that his father had revealed two words to him:
“red
shawl.” She made her way through the throngs at the enlistment center
repeating
“red shawl” to herself and was given an exemption, while weeping,
pleading
mothers and wives more deserving than she were not.
Whatever
powers he had, Kharms could not save himself. One Saturday morning in
August,
as Marina recalled, “three strange little guys” from the NKVD arrived
at their
apartment to take him away in a van. She begged them to take her, too.
She and
Kharms sat in the van, shaking. At the “Big House”—the Lyubyanka
Prison—the van
drove through the entrance to a place out of sight of the street. The
couple
were removed and brought into a reception area where two guys hustled
him away
and left her alone. She and Kharms had only a moment to look at each
other
before he was gone. She never saw him again. For months afterward she
did not
know where he was being held. She heard he had been sent to
Novosibirsk, in
Siberia, and wrote letters to friends in eastern Russia who might have
information about him. Finally she learned he was at the Crosses, a
prison
hospital on the banks of the Neva in Leningrad.
She made
two
long treks from her apartment to the hospital bringing packages, which
were
accepted, indicating he was there. The third time she went, two
starving boys
along the snowy path on the Neva’s ice begged her for help but she
clutched to
herself the tiny package of bread she was holding. When she reached the
hospital the person at the window took the package and told her to
wait. A few
minutes later he returned, pushed the package back at her, and told her
that
Kharms had died. Walking home she wished she had given the package to
the boys,
though it would have been impossible to save them.
In the
excellent introduction to Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings
of
Daniil Kharms, Matvei Yankelevich, the book’s editor and translator,
argues
against reading Kharms’s works as “parables of totalitarianism” or
commentaries
on “the absurdity of Soviet life.” He concedes that the interpretation
is tempting.
As one hip critic wrote of the OBERIU poets, “Their shit is hilarious.
But it
got them killed.” For years, I saw Kharms in that light—funny writer,
martyred
by Stalin. In the children’s book of Kharms pieces I coedited, we used
KGB
arrest papers as the background for his spooky poem about the man who
left home
and never came back.
Inevitably,
this kind of politico-biographical interpretation accompanies Kharms’s
work. In
the play at BAM, large mug shots of a haggard Kharms in prison appeared
on a
screen as part of the backdrop. The story of suffering and martyrdom is
true.
But that way of looking at him can be as pat as the rational artistic
conventions he disdained. Yankelevich insists, “Kharms consistently
denies us
our desire to draw any moral conclusions from his work…. His texts
confront the
desire to interpret head on.”
Nowadays, at
least in America, writers often describe themselves as storytellers.
They may
add that stories are how human beings live, and that we connect with
one
another through stories, and that every one of us has a story, and that
we need
to take ownership of our stories, and that we share our stories as
people have
always done sitting around the campfire in the evening, and that then
the
stories blend into one overarching, inclusive story, etc.
Whatever
Kharms is, he’s not a storyteller. In fact, he is so far from being a
storyteller that his work shows up all this
story-storyteller-storytelling
business for the humdrum received wisdom it is. Other pleasures for me
in
reading Kharms are that he does not give us likable characters, explore
hidden
trauma, claim his own identity, heal damage done to him in childhood,
or write
in a prose style so beautiful that one reads it with a sharp intake of
breath.
Kharms remained playful and unmoved in the face of all Soviet
imperatives; he’s
just as unsatisfying for the ordinary expectations of what writing is
today.
Instead, he
gives us a short tale about a crow who had four legs, or actually five
legs,
“though there’s no reason to mention that”; and a four-page play called
“Fenorov in America,” which begins with the stage directions “An
American
street. AMERICANS are walking along the street”; and anecdotes that
fall apart
and give up almost before they start; and sentences like “Since ancient
times,
people have wondered about what was smart and what was stupid.”
During my
first infatuation with Kharms I expected he would soon become a craze.
When
that didn’t happen I went the other direction and assumed he would fade
away.
Somehow that hasn’t happened, either. He keeps coming back. Eugene
Ostashevsky,
in the introduction to his collection of Vvedensky translations, notes
that the
women of the punk feminist collective Pussy Riot look to the OBERIU
poets for
inspiration, and he quotes Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova in
her
closing statement at the group’s trial on charges of “premeditated
hooliganism”
in 2012:
At the cost of their lives, the
OBERIU
poets inadvertently proved that their basic sensation of
meaninglessness and
alogism was correct: They had felt the nerve of their epoch. Thus art
rose to
the level of history…. The poets of OBERIU are thought to be dead, but
they are
alive. They are punished, but they do not die.
Kharms might
have been gratified by these sentiments, or he might have made fun of
them. Or
both.
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