The Plummeting Old Women

by Daniil Kharms

  Daniil Kharms

  THE PLUMMETING OLD WOMEN

  INTRODUCTION & TRANSLATIONS BY

  Neil Cornwell

  WITH AN AFTERWORD BY

  Hugh Maxton

  THE LILLIPUT PRESS

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Introduction

  I INCIDENTS

  The Plummeting Old Women

  Four Illustrations of How a New Idea Disconcerts a Man Unprepared for It

  A Sonnet

  The Optical Illusion

  The Trunk

  Kalindov

  The Story of the Fighting Men

  Mashkin Killed Koshkin

  Aleksey Tolstoy

  What They Sell in the Shops These Days

  There Once Was a Man

  They Call Me the Capuchin

  The Artist and the Clock

  I Had Raised Dust

  The Red-Haired Man

  Rehabilitation

  II DIALOGUES

  Pushkin and Gogol

  Clunk

  Makarov and Petersen

  The Hunters

  Comprehensive Research

  III STORIES

  Five Unfinished Narratives

  Pakin and Rakukin

  On Phenomena and Existences No. 1

  On Phenomena and Existences No. 2

  On Equilibrium

  A Knight

  A Story

  The Fate of a Professor’s Wife

  The Cashier

  The Memoirs of a Wise Old Man

  An Historical Episode

  A Nasty Character

  Fedya Davidovich

  Knights

  The Falling

  The Drawback

  IV OTHER WRITINGS

  On the Circle

  Daniil Kharms to Aleksandr Vvedensky

  On Vvedensky

  Letter to K. V. Pugachova: An Extract

  Kharms and Myles: An Afterword by Hugh Maxton

  Further Reading

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  The silhouette on the title-page depicts the author in a Holmesian pose. The self-portrait on p. 91 is dated 13 October 1933.

  Copyright

  a self-caricature from the mid-1980s

  Introduction

  For things not to be perverse,

  We should live life in reverse.

  ALEKSANDR VVEDENSKY1

  Russian literature seems to enjoy a particular propensity for throwing up ‘new’ writers from its past – not to mention from its present; writers with something unexpected to say to the modern reader. These may have languished in obscurity from some point of the nineteenth century, or suffered repression in the twentieth. They may derive from the romantic movement or from modernism. In some cases, their main works may have remained unknown until decades after their death – the most striking example must be Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, first published 1966/7, over a quarter of a century after its author had died. In others, the very existence of both works and (even) author was virtually unknown for many years. Such is the case with Daniil Kharms (1905–42).

  ‘Daniil Kharms’ was the principal – and subsequently, constant – pen-name of Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachov. Son of a minor St Petersburg political, religious and literary figure, he was to achieve a certain local renown himself in the 1920s and ’30s as Leningrad eccentric and writer of (mainly) children’s stories. Among his other pseudonyms was ‘Daniil Dandan’ – see the three stories in this selection dated 18 September 1934 (pp. 47-52 below). The predilection for the name Kharms is thought to derive from the tension between the English words ‘charms’ and ‘harms’ (plus the German ‘scharm’), but it may also owe something to the similarity in sound to Sherlock Holmes (pronounced ‘Kholms’ in Russian), particularly in its variant form of ‘Kharms-Shardam’.

  From 1925 Kharms began to appear at poetry readings, and gained membership of the Leningrad section of the All-Russian Union of Poets (one of many predecessors to the eventual Union of Soviet Writers, formed in 1932.) A small body of his verse appeared in a Poets’ Union anthology of 1926 and in an almanac of 1927. These were the only publications of ‘adult’ work which Kharms achieved in his entire lifetime. In 1927 he joined with like-minded experimental writers (including Vvedensky and the important poet Nikolay Zabolotsky, 1903–58) to form OBERIU, a literary group which took as its name the acronym of Ob”edineniye real’nogo iskusstva or the Association of Real Art.

  Born of an interest in Futurist aesthetics and Formalist critical approaches, the Oberiuty considered themselves a ‘left flank’ of the literary avant-garde. Their publicity antics, including a roof-top appearance by Kharms, caused minor sensations, but the group succeeded in presenting a highly unconventional theatrical evening, ‘Three Left Hours’, in January 1928. The programme included a performance of Kharms’s absurdist drama, ‘Yelizaveta Bam’.2 Among OBERIU catch-phrases were ‘Art Is a Cupboard’, and ‘Poems Aren’t Pies; We Aren’t Herring’. However, in the Stalinizing late ’20s, the time for propagating experimental modernism had passed, and there was no reasonable expectation of tolerance towards such activities. Hostile publicity ensured the hurried disbandment of OBERIU after a number of further appearances.

  From 1928 onwards Kharms and Vvedensky published only works of children’s literature, and by 1940 Kharms had in fact published eleven books for children. Nothing out of the ordinary was safe even in this field of literary activity, though he managed to employ a number of OBERIU-type devices in his ‘playful’ approach. This OBERIU approach had been denounced generally in a Leningrad newspaper in 1930 as ‘reactionary sleight-of-hand’ and, at the end of 1931, Kharms (with others) was arrested and accused of ‘deflecting the people from the building of socialism by means of his trans-sense verses’. A short period of exile in Kursk followed: the times were still relatively mild. Little work was to be had thereafter. Kharms and Vvedensky survived the main purges of the 1930s. However, the outbreak of war brought new dangers, and Kharms was arrested in Leningrad in August 1941. He died in prison (probably of starvation) the following February. Both he and Vvedensky were subsequently exonerated and ‘rehabilitated’ during the Khrushchev period.

  In a number of texts, Kharms seems to have anticipated starvation and arrest. Indeed, he can lay claim to the title of hunger’s laureate, as this translation of an unrhyming but rhythmic verse-fragment shows:

  This is how hunger begins:

  The morning you wake, feeling lively,

  Then begins the weakness,

  Then begins the boredom;

  Then comes the loss

  Of the power of quick reason,

  Then comes the calmness

  And then begins the horror.

  Kharms’s arrest came, reportedly, when the caretaker of the building he lived in called him down in his bedroom slippers ‘for a few minutes’. One story current in Leningrad is that he was charged with involvement in some sort of terrorist conspiracy.

  From 1962 the children’s stories began to be reprinted in the Soviet Union, together with isolated first publications of a few short humorous pieces for adults. Simultaneously Kharms came to be mentioned in memoirs, and the odd scholarly paper devoted to the Oberiuty appeared. Until Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost’ took real effect, however, only a small fraction of Kharms’s literary output had achieved Soviet publication. Abroad, an awareness of Kharms and the Oberiuty began to surface in the late 1960s, both in eastern Europe and in the west. One instance of especial interest in the present context is the inclusion of five pieces in the Dublin-based magazine Atlantis.3 Sporadic publication of the Russian texts in émigré journals followed, and a book-length collection appeared in 1974, yet textual doubts
have arisen, especially in connection with the earlier publications.4 In 1978 in Bremen (West Germany) publication of an annotated collected works of Daniil Kharms commenced under the imprint of the Verlag K-Presse (the Kafka Press!) and under the editorial control (from Leningrad) of Mikhail Meylakh and Vladimir Erl’.5 The introduction to this series was delayed ‘for technical reasons’, and the whole project came to an abrupt but temporary halt with the summer 1983 arrest of Meylakh for alleged activities ostensibly unconnected with his OBERIU publishing programme. In this connection, it is reported by an unimpeachable source that British-made handcuffs are in common use in the Gulag. Happily, glasnost’ has seen the release of Meylakh in the 1987 amnesty and, along with other perhaps more astonishing miracles, a flood of minor Kharms publications in 1987 and 1988, culminating in a substantial book-length selection edited by Anatoliy Aleksandrov. OBERIU evenings and Kharms ‘mono-spectaculars’ are suddenly almost commonplace. Moscow News in September 1988, in its Russian and English issues alike, was proclaiming Kharms an international figure: suddenly his photograph was publicly available in the Soviet Union. A Yugoslav director has made a surreal film called ‘The Kharms Case’, while Islington’s Almeida Theatre staged an Oberiuty evening in 1984 – perhaps to balance, if not to unlock, the handcuffs.

  Any remotely definitive assessment of Kharms’s achievement as a writer must await full publication of his oeuvre and other research. For the moment one can make little more than preliminary and somewhat impressionistic comments. The prose miniature is a more familiar genre in Russian than in other literatures. Among writers very different to Kharms there are – from the nineteenth century alone– the feuilletons of Dostoyevsky, the prose poems of Turgenev, and the shortest stories of Garshin and Chekhov. In the twentieth century one thinks of short pieces by Zamyatin, Olesha and Zoshchenko and – more recently – the aphoristic writings of Abram Tertz (pseudonym of Andrey Sinyavsky) and the prose poems of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

  In spirit, Kharms clearly belongs to a tradition of double-edged humour that extends from the word-play and irrelevancy of Gogol and the jaundiced mentality of Dostoyevsk’s ‘underground’ anti-heroes to the recent intertextual parody of Tertz/Sinyavsky and the satirical absurd of Voinovich. In relation to the experimental period of Soviet prose in the early 1920s, and its legacy, he also has affinities (stylistic, linguistic, thematic, and philosophical) with Platonov. In ‘The Sabre’, a verse and prose sequence of 1929, Goethe, Blake, Lomonosov, Gogol, Koz’ma Prutkov and Khlebnikov are each given an honourable mention by Kharms. A contemporary favourite of his was Knut Hamsun, while on the wider plane it is hardly necessary to mention the various modernist, dadaist, surrealist, absurdist and other avant-garde movements of western Europe. Borges could have, and Beckett and Kafka have, frequently occurred in comparative discussions of Kharms.6 Kharms, the black miniaturist, is an exponent not so much of the modernist End of the Word (cf. Joyce) as of a postmodernist, infantilist End of the Story – the latter in a sense which is perhaps genuinely analogous to Beckett. Such a trend is usually taken to be a post-war, nuclear-age phenomenon. However, the Holocaust and Hiroshima may have been felt in anticipation in the Leningrad of the bleak 1930s.

  Yet Kharms seems somehow different from all of these famous authors, especially in his adoption at various levels of what might best be described as a poetics of extremism. Most striking to readers will be the recurrence of Kharms’s strange and disturbing obsessions: with falling, accidents, chance, sudden death, victimization and other forms of apparently mindless violence. These again are frequently carried to extremes, or toyed with in a bizarre manner which could scarcely be unintentional. We may invoke psychology, or Kharms’s attitude to language, to communication, to surrounding reality; but my impression strongly is that the ancestry of these Kharmsian ‘incidents’ lies in a multitude of genres, both literary and non-literary – the fable and parable, the fairy story and children’s story, the philosophical and dramatic dialogue, pantomime, the comic monologue, carnival and the silent movie. All seem to be present somewhere, in compressed form and devoid of explanations and other standard trappings. Kharms, indeed, serves up, transforms or aborts the bare bones – sometimes literally! – of the sub-plots, plot fragments and authorial devices of world literature, from the narratives of antiquity and classical European fiction to the play on plot and the metafictions of the present period: from The Satyricon to Cervantes to Calvino.

  In the modern idiom, apart from theatre of the absurd and theatre of cruelty, Kharms’s fictions anticipate in some primaeval way almost everything from the animated screenplay and the cartoon strip to the video-nasty. To put it another way, the prose of Kharms, with its skeletal terseness, has the stark but at times compelling quality of the old wireless (the cat’s whiskers) as against the comprehensive vacuousness on offer from the colour television of many a more accepted fictional form.

  But surrounding reality is internal also. Kharms turns his surgical glance on both the extraordinary world around him and on its representations, past and present. He operates, in the main, against a Leningrad background, commenting in sardonic and despairing fashion on the period in which he lived. Names figure prominently, and some can be glossed more readily than others. The piece entitled here ‘Aleksey Tolstoy’ was written in 1934, the year of the first congress of the Union of Soviet Writers, and the personalities named were all prominent writers of the day.7 There are friends as well as rogues: Aleksandr Vvedensky has already been noted, and in the same spirit one should record that ‘From a Letter to K. V. Pugachova’ is addressed to Klavdiya Vasil’evna Pugachova, an actress in TYUZ (Theatre for Youthful Spectators) who, by moving to Moscow, became the addressee of letters from Kharms in Leningrad. The Yakov Semyonovich of ‘Five Unfinished Narratives’ is Ya. S. Druskin, musicologist and philosopher, a friend of the author’s. These real-life references blend with tho literary in such pieces as ‘Pushkin and Gogol’, where the enshrining of well-respected worthies in Soviet print is parodied. This practice of Kharms’s may stem from specific cases of glorification in Soviet journalism – the relating of Kharms’s work to contemporary sources has yet to begin. For instance, no date is available for the story ‘An Historical Episode’ (featuring Ivan Susanin, a patriotic hero of 1612), but it is tempting to presume that it may well have been written in 1937, the year of the revival of Glinka’s opera (A Life for the Tsar, renamed Ivan Sunanin) with its newly sanitized-sovietized libretto.

  I have chosen the term ‘Incidents’ to translate Kharms’s sluchai, a common Russian word which may be translated by a variety of English words – case, event, incident, occurrence, opportunity, occasion, chance. From 1936 he was engaged on a cycle or series of very short prose pieces which he specifically called sluchai, and I have grouped together in Section I those pieces I have translated which are about a page or less in length. Those of greater length form Section III, ‘Stories’; those presented wholly in dramatic form are ‘Dialogues’ in Section II. Otherwise the ordering tends to be chronological. Four examples of the non-fictional prose are presented in the final section: ‘On the Circle’ was chosen as being a fairly comprehensible (and symbol-free) representative of his mathematical-philosophical work, while the last item (a letter) may give some readers an inkling of an insight into Kharms’s own literary attitude. Of course, in connection with a body of work mainly written without thought of publication, any order now imposed is bound to be to some degree arbitrary.

  That, as Kharms would say, is all. Now read on!

  Neil Cornwell,

  Rome, January 1987 – Bristol, April 1989

  Notes

  1. Aleksandr Vvedensky (1904–41), a talented friend and close associate of Kharms; he moved to the Ukraine in the mid 1930s – see the letter from Kharms included in Section IV below – and was arrested in Khar’kov in September 1941. He died the following December.

  2. Together with this play, Kharm’s longest composition is a novella ‘The Old Woman’ – En
glish translations of both are included in George Gibian’s anthology, see ‘Further Reading’, p. 101 below.

  3. Of the translations printed here, the greater part appear in English for the first time. The following first appeared in Atlantis No. 6 (Winter 1973–4): – ‘The Plummeting Old Women’, ‘Four Illustrations of How a New Idea Disconcerts a Man Unprepared for It’, The Trunk’, ‘Makarov and Peterson’ and ‘The Cashier’. Others have been published in Poetry and Audience vol. 23 (1977), The Urbane Gorilla vol. 8 (1978), and Long Pen, 1983. ‘The Drawback’ was first published in W. J. Mc Cormack (ed.), In the Prison of His Days: A Miscellany for Nelson Mandela on His 70th Birthday (Mullingar: Lilliput Press, 1988).

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of these publications for permission to reprint items in the present collection.

  4. Russian texts of the works translated here may be found in – Grani No. 81 (1971); Daniil Kharms Izbrannoye (ed. George Gibian) Würzburg: Jal-Verlag, 1974; Kontinent No. 24 (1980); NRL: Neue Russiche Literatur Almanac 2–3, Salzburg, (1979–80); Russika 1981: literaturnyy sbornik, New York, 1982; Poiski 5-6, 1983; Russkaya mysl’No. 3550, 3 January 1985; and Aleksandr Vvedensky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy (ed. M. Meylakh) Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980 and 1984, 2vols.

  Many of these have subsequently achieved publication in the USSR, particularly during 1988. At the end of that year a valuable selection under the title Polyot v nebesa (ed. by A. Aleksandrov) was published in Leningrad.

  5. Four volumes have appeared (two in 1978, a third in 1980 and a fourth in 1988) containing the poetry written up to 1939. Nine or even ten volumes are ultimately planned, indicating the existence of far more material than is at present known. For Meylakh’s 2-vol. complete works of Vvedensky, see n. 3 above.