Russian Absurd

I'd never heard of Kharms before seeing this offered as a reading copy, but after just a few pages, I felt I'd encountered him before. If you strip away the picaresque narrative of Bulgakov's Master & Margarita and replace it with Kafka's Octavo Notebooks, you'd be halfway to describing Kharms's style; Soviet absurdism with an eye for cataloguing the infinitesimal detail of the world around us in a bid to understand the depth of the human condition.
Organised chronologically rather than by genre, in this collection, you find snippets of prose next to letters next to aphorisms next to existential ponderings next to literary criticism next to short philosophical treatises. The absurd gives way to the logical, which in turn gives way to the profound, sometimes within just a few sentences.
Since falling in love with Kafka, I've been searching for a writer who imbues their work with the same desperate urge to compile and understand the world's minutiae through the art of prose. I think I've found them. Kharms needs a wider audience and a collection like this seems essential to make that happen!

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.

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.

Everyone should read Daniil Kharms--this is writing that is original, hilarious, and tragic all at once.

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.