"I am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary": The Notebooks, Diaries and Letters of Daniil Kharms

589 Pages·2013·6.04 MB·English

by  Daniil Kharms

The Notebooks, Diaries, and Letters of
DANIIL KHARMS
Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth Century
Editorial Board:
Anthony Anemone (The New School)
Robert Bird (The University of Chicago)
Eliot Borenstein (New York University)
Angela Brintlinger (The Ohio State University)
Karen Evans-Romaine (Ohio University)
Jochen Hellbeck (Rutgers University)
Lilya Kaganovsky (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Christina Kiaer (Northwestern University)
Alaina Lemon (University of Michigan)
Simon Morrison (Princeton University)
Eric Naiman (University of California, Berkeley)
Joan Neuberger (University of Texas, Austin)
Ludmila Parts (McGill University)
Ethan Pollock (Brown University)
Cathy Popkin (Columbia University)
Stephanie Sandler (Harvard University)
Boris Wolfson (Amherst College), Series Editor
The Notebooks, Diaries, and Letters of
DANIIL KHARMS
Selected, Translated and Edited
by Anthony Anemone and Peter Scotto
Boston
2013
The publication of this book is supported by the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation
(translation program TRANSCRIPT).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.
Copyright 2013 Academic Studies Press
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-936235-96-4 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61811-146-3 (electronic)
Cover design by Sasha Pyle
Published by Academic Studies Press in 2013
28 Montfern Avenue
Brighton, MA 02135, USA
[email protected]
www.academicstudiespress.com
For our fathers.
“Translations that are more than transmissions of subject
matter come into being when in the course of its survival
a work has reached the age of its fame.”
−Walter Benjamin
Contents
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
About this translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Preliminaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
1924–1925 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
1926 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
1927 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .115
1928 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
1929 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
1930 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
1931 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
Arrest by OGPU. December 1931 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
1932 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301
Diary 1932-1933 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336
1933 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352
1934 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 428
1935 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 451
1936 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 463
The Blue Notebook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 477
1937 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 485
1938 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 497
1939 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500
1940 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 502
1941 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 516
Unknown years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 517
Epilogue and Finale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521
Chronology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 535
Selected Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 541
Commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 543
Glossary of Names, Places, Institutions and Concepts . . . . . . . 565
Acknowledgements
E
very work of scholarship rests on the work of others in the fi eld. What
we have done here would not have been possible without the dedication
and hard work of those scholars who rescued Kharms and his artistic
legacy from decades of oblivion. When Mikhail Meilakh, Vladimir Earl,
Aleksandr Aleksandrov, and Vladimir Glotser started studying Kharms’s life
and work in the late 1960s, he was almost completely unknown. Thanks to
their multiple editions, scholarly articles, and books, today Kharms’s works
are acknowledged classics of twentieth-century Russian literature. Another
generation of Russian scholars and researchers, including Aleksandr
Kobrinsky, Andrei Ustinov, Aleksei Dmitrenko, Anna Gerasimova, Andrei
Krusanov, Evgenia Stroganova, and Valery Shubinsky, has continued the
recovery of Kharms, contributing immeasurably to our understanding of his
life and work, and maintaining the high standards set by their predecessors.
We owe a special debt of gratitude to Valery Sazhin of the Russian
National Library in Saint Petersburg and Jean-Phillipe Jaccard of the
University of Geneva for their invaluable publication of the full corpus of
Kharms’s notebooks and diaries in Russian.
We would also like to thank: Andrei Ustinov for his meticulous reading
and constructive criticism of a long and complicated manuscript and his
generous sharing of photographs from his private collection; Dr. Gabriel
Griffi n for help identifying some of Kharms’s maladies, imagined or
otherwise; Eugene Hill of Mount Holyoke College for his encouragement
and careful reading of early drafts of this work; Bella Ginzbursky Blum
of The College of William and Mary, Boris Wolfson of Amherst College
for their helping untangle some especially tricky passages in the Russian;
F. F. Morton of South Hadley for his gentle instruction in the art of translation;
Marietta Turian of Saint Petersburg for her support and inspiration over the
years; Mikhail Vorobyov of Saint Petersburg for sharing family memories
and photographs of some of the people in this book; Anaida Bestavashvili
and Vladimir Livshits of Moscow for their enthusiasm and support of the
project; Dmitry Sokolenko of Saint Petersburg for his enthusiasm for all
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things OBERIU; Susan Downing for her help compiling the Glossary;
Stanley Rabinowitz, director of the Amherst College Center for Russian
Culture, for allowing us access to rare items in the ACRC collection; Mike
Blum of the College of William and Mary, for (always) much-needed
technical assistance; Alexandra Pyle for her cover design; Val Vinokur of
the New School for good advice and even better friendship; Robert Pyle,
Elisabeth Pyle, and Robinson Pyle for their help explaining the fi ner points
of mathematics and music; Shoshana Lucich and Michaela Beals of Stanford
University for last-minute research assistance; and our editor at Academic
Studies Press, Sharona Vedol.
We are also grateful to Mount Holyoke College for a 2011-2012
sabbatical award; to the Mount Holyoke Faculty Grants Committee for
providing material support for this research; to the New School for Public
Engagement for supporting this research with a sabbatical award in 2011-
1012; to the Interlibrary Loan Departments at Mount Holyoke College, the
New School, and Bobst Library of New York University.
Finally, we would like to thank our patient and long-suffering mothers,
without whom none of this would have been possible.
Last, and most of all, we thank Vivian Pyle and Amy Gershenfeld
Donnella for their unfl agging love and unfailing support.
A.A. and P.S.
Introduction
O
n February 2, 1942, Daniil Kharms died in the psychiatric section of
an NKVD prison hospital in Leningrad. He was barely 36 at the time,
a year or so younger than Aleksandr Pushkin was when he had died
105 years earlier, almost to the day, of a gunshot wound to the stomach in a
better part of town.1 Given the desperate conditions in Leningrad during the
fi rst winter of what would drag on to be a 900-day siege by the Wehrmacht,
it is assumed that as the city slowly starved to death around him, Kharms
did too. Like Pushkin, Kharms got it in the stomach.
During his lifetime, Kharms was known as a failed avant-garde poet
and dramatist who had some notable, if brief, success writing poems and
stories for children. However, for more than two decades following his
death, his name and his works were consigned to an enforced oblivion.
Today, after a heroic recovery operation mounted by dedicated friends,
family members, scholars, and critics over the course of decades, he is read
and remembered as a major voice of twentieth-century Russian literature.
Russians now know Kharms not only as the author of classic children’s
verse, but also as a central fi gure in a vibrant post-revolutionary avant-
garde that was the contemporary of Dada and surrealism and anticipated
the “Theater of the Absurd”; as the author of poems that built upon the
linguistic innovations of Russian Futurism; as the creator of a genre of mini-
stories beneath whose disjointed and darkly comic surfaces the violence of
the Stalinist world shimmers; as one more victim of a state whose tolerance
for deviation of any kind was strictly limited, and whose carnivorous
appetite is only too well-known. His posthumous glory is such that editions
of his works, both scholarly and popular, have been published in print runs
numbering into the thousands and tens of thousands2 and, with the advent of
the internet, there are now dozens of websites dedicated to preserving and
promulgating his legacy.
Kharms’s recovery is all the more remarkable when one considers
that during his lifetime, he managed to publish only two of his works “for
adults.”3 The rest had to wait for better days.
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