<p>Books can be weird. I can read <A href="https://www.librarything.com/work/19214260/book/152079962">Russian Absurd</a>, which are absurd vignettes recovered from Kharms' notebooks, written in the 1920s and 1930s, pieces as the introduction says that may not have been intended for public consumption, and they don't seem dated and they don't seem foreign and they don't seem like something I should never have heard about until now. True, a lot of old women tend to fall out of windows, but I can picture myself as an old woman tumbling after defenestration, so that seems all right. And the man alternates between looking terrifyingly serious: </p>

<p><img src="https://www.poemhunter.com/i/p/90/36390_b_6164.jpg" width="140" height="200" class="alignnone size-large" /></p>

<p>to a foppish Pushkin-esque dandy:</p>

<p><img src="https://russiapedia.rt.com/files/prominent-russians/literature/daniil-kharms/daniil-kharms_2-t.jpg" width="220" height="227" class="alignnone size-large" /></p>

<p>to simply terrifying:</p>

<p><img src="http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/.a/6a00e54fe4158b883301b8d2616e49970c-pi" width="281" height="389" class="alignnone size-large" /></p>

<p>He starved to death in 1942. That hurts my heart. And there's so much out there, so much writing I may never get to know, hidden in notebooks in languages I don't speak. </p>

<blockquote>
The sky is shimmering with lamps<br />
And we are flying like the stars
</blockquote>

<p>I am glad your friends saved your notebooks Daniil Kharms. I am glad I got to read from them.</p>

<p><A href="https://www.librarything.com/work/19214260/book/152079962">Russian Absurd</a> by Daniil Kharms went on sale February 15, 2017.</p>

<p><small>I received a copy free from <a href="https://www.netgalley.com/">Netgalley</a> in exchange for an honest review.</small></p>

<p><b>ETA</b>: I have, as I always do with deceased authors, checked <i>yes</i> to <a href="https://www.netgalley.com/">Netgalley</a>'s <i>Are you interested in connecting with this author (interviews, events, etc)?</i> They have yet to conduct even one séance for me to talk to the dead.</p>

The bizarre and harrowing existence of Danil Kharms, Russian, though hardly Soviet, experimentalist. These fragmental excerpts from Kharms' tortured genius offer, well, if nothing else a fairly plausible depiction of what happens when a gentle soul is dropped into unspeakable horrors. Imagine Tom Waits trying to write songs at the peak of Soviet repressions. Gorgeous, despairing, hallucinatory. And yet he managed to write children's books, too.

I was disappointed. In this book. I enjoy works from the mainly French absurdist tradition- Ionescu etc but I found this collection of sketches and short stories lacking in substance, and bland.

Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) was one of the Soviet Union’s most important writers during the 1920s and 1930s, but fell foul of the regime, was arrested in 1941 and imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital where he died during the siege of Leningrad and buried in a mass grave. In a timely quirk of fate, activists now believe they have found the likely location of the grave. This volume is a selection of his writings, most of which were suppressed during his lifetime. His work is not always easy to get to grips with as his decidedly modernist and avant-garde work is not to everyone’s taste. His stories are often called “anti-stories” as they usually eschew narrative and are often absurd with a surrealist twist. Often they are very short indeed, only a paragraph or a couple of sentences, and often completely pointless – or so it seems to me. Black humour, the grotesque, violence and death are constant themes. Personally I don’t find them funny, or even amusing. This is not my sort of writing. However, I am aware of his place in Soviet literature and I was pleased to discover more of his work. An important book for anyone interested in Russian literature.

This is an excellent collection, making a crucial but neglected writer accessible to Anglophones. It doesn't fit into my courses this year, but the next time I teach my Russian Literature course I'll include it. In the meantime, I have been recommending it and quoting from it.

Silly and whimsical this is not, jarring and disturbing is more of an apt description. Did I mention that Kharms was a children's author who hated children? I took my time reading this. It did not lend itself to a straight-through reading. You really need to read each entry then digest them separately. Indeed, they are written at different points in the author's life and are presented chronologically.
I was shocked and drawn to this collection at the same time. I would recommend this book to someone who is interested in Absurdism, the weird and authors like Gogol, Pushkin and Bulgakov.
Of special note was the short story ‘The Infinite; that is the answer to all questions...'
for its beautiful blend of prose and mathematical theory from which I lifted the following quote;

“One cannot pry under an infinite line; we cannot grasp it with our thoughts. It doesn’t intersect with us anywhere; for anything to be intersected, its end, which does not exist, must be discovered.”

If you do seek this out, I would recommend the print copy. I received a digital copy from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review. I felt that I lost quite a bit of the aesthetics by reading it in that format. I have already added it to my wishlist. I found an interesting binding of Kharm’s work at Ugly Duckling Press, but it appears to be out of print.
Well done to the translator of the notebooks, Alex Cigale. I can only speculate how hard it is to translate from a foreign language into English, let alone translating absurdist literature.