– Well, I’m ready.
– Let’s go – said the man in the black coat.
The lower ranks and the caretaker stamped their feet.
They all went out into the corridor.
The man in the black coat locked the door of Irina’s room and sealed it with two brown seals.
– Outside – he said.
And they all went out of the flat, loudly slamming the outside door.
(12 November 1940)
IV
OTHER WRITINGS
On the Circle
1. Do not take offence at the following argument. For there is nothing offensive in it, unless one does not consider that the circle may be spoken of in a geometrical sense. If I say that the circle describes four identical radii, and you say: not four, but one, then we have a right to ask one another: why? But I don’t want to talk about that kind of description of the circle, but of the perfect description of a circle.
2. The circle is the most perfect flat figure. I am not going to say why in particular that is so. But this fact arises of itself in our consciousness in any consideration of flat figures.
3. Nature is so created that the less noticeable the laws of formation, the more perfect the thing.
4. Nature is also so created that the more impenetrable a thing, the more perfect it is.
5. On perfection, I would say the following: perfection in things is a perfect thing. It is always possible to study a perfect thing or, in other words, in a perfect thing there is always something not studied. If a thing should prove to have been completely studied, then it would cease to be perfect, for only that which is incomplete is perfect – that is to say the infinite.
6. A point is infinitely small and thereby attains perfection, but at the same time it remains inconceivable. Even the smallest conceivable point would not be perfect.
7. A straight line is perfect, for there is no reason for it not to be infinitely long on both sides, to have neither end nor beginning, and thereby be inconceivable. But by putting pressure on it and limiting it on both sides, we render it conceivable, but at the same time imperfect.
If you believe this, then think on.
(10 July 1931)
8. A straight line, broken at one point, forms an angle. But a straight line which is broken simultaneously at all its points is called a curve. A curve does not have to be of necessity infinitely long. It may be such that we can grasp it freely at a glance and yet at the same time remain inconceivable and infinite. I am talking about a closed curve, in which the beginning and the end are concealed. And the most regular, inconceivable, infinite and ideal curve will be a circle.
(17 July 1931)
Daniil Kharms to Aleksandr Vvedensky
Dear Aleksandr Ivanovich,
I have heard that you are saving money and have already saved thirty-five thousand. What for? Why save money? Why not share what you have with those who do not even have a totally spare pair of trousers? I mean, what is money? I have studied this question. I possess photographs of the banknotes in widest circulation: to the value of a rouble, three, four and even five roubles. I have heard of banknotes of an intrinsic worth of up to 30 roubles at a time! But, as for saving them: what for? Well, I am not a collector. I have always despised collectors who amass stamps, feathers, buttons, onions and so on. They are stupid, dull superstitious people. I know for example that what are called ‘numismatists’ – that’s those who accumulate coins – have the superstitious habit of putting them, have you ever thought where? Not on the table, not in box, but … on their books! What do you think of that? Whereas money can be picked up, taken to a shop and exchanged, well … let’s say for soup (that’s a kind of food), or for grey-mullet sauce (that’s also a kind of foodstuff).
No, Aleksandr Ivanovich, you are almost as couth a person as I, yet you save money and don’t change it into a range of other things. Forgive me, dear Aleksandr Ivanovich, but that is not terribly clever! You’ve simply gone a little stupid living out there in the provinces. There must be no one to talk to, even. I’m sending you my picture so that you will be able at least to see before you a clever, cultivated, intellectual, first-rate face.
Your friend Daniil Kharms
On Vvedensky
(Excerpt from ‘I Decided to Mess Up the Party’)
Now I’ll say a few words about Aleksandr Ivanovich.
He’s a wind-bag and a card-player. But what I value him for is his obedience to me.
By day and by night he dances attendance on me, just waiting for a hint from me of some command.
I have only to proffer such a hint and Aleksandr Ivanovich flies like the wind to fulfil my wish.
For this I bought him some shoes and said: – There you are, wear them! – And so he wears them.
Whenever Aleksandr Ivanovich arrives at the publishing house [Gosizdat], they all laugh and say to each other that Aleksandr Ivanovich has come for money.
Konstantin Ignat’evich Drevatsky hides under the table. I say this in an allegorical sense.
More than anything, Aleksandr Ivanovich loves macaroni. He always eats it with ground rusks and he gobbles up almost a whole kilo, and perhaps even much more.
Having eaten his macaroni, Aleksandr Ivanovich says he feels sick and lies down on the divan. Sometimes the macaroni comes back up.
Aleksandr Ivanovich doesn’t eat meat and he doesn’t like women. Although sometimes he likes them. Apparently even very often.
But the women whom Aleksandr Ivanovich likes, to my taste, are all ugly, and therefore we may consider that they are not even women at all.
If I say a thing, that means it’s correct.
(1935 or 1936)
Letter to K.V. Pugachova: An Extract
I don’t know the right word to express that strength in you which so delights me. I usually call it purity. I have been thinking about how beautiful everything is at first! How beautiful primary reality is! The sun and the grass are beautiful, grass and stone, and water, a bird, a beetle, a fly, and a human being (a kitten and a key, a comb). But if I were blind and deaf, had lost all my faculties, how could I know all this beauty? Everything gone and nothing for me at all. But I suddenly acquire touch and immediately almost the whole world appears again. I invent hearing and the world improves significantly. I invent all the other faculties and the world gets even bigger and better. The world starts to exist as soon as I let it in to me. Never mind its state of disorder, at least it exists! However, I started to bring some order into the world. And that’s when Art appeared. Only at this point did I grasp the true difference between the sun and a comb but, at the same time, I realized that they are one and the same.
Now my concern is to create the correct order. I am carried away by this and only think of this. I speak about it, try to narrate it, describe it, sketch it, dance it, construct it. I am the creator of a world and this is the most important thing in me. How can I not think constantly about it! In everything I do, I invest the consciousness of being creator of a world. And I am not making simply some boot, but, first and foremost, I am creating something new. It doesn’t bother me that the boot should turn out to be comfortable, durable and elegant. It’s more important that it should contain that same order pertaining in the world as a whole, so that world order should not be the poorer, should not be soiled by contact with skin and nails, so that, notwithstanding the form of the boot, it should preserve its own form, should remain the same as it was, should remain pure.
It is that same purity which permeates all the arts. When I am writing poetry, the most important thing seems to me not the idea, not the content, and not the form, and not the misty conception of ‘quality’, but something even more misty and incomprehensible to the rationalistic mind, but comprehensible to me and, I hope, to you (…) – it is the purity of order.
This purity is one and the same – in the sun, in the grass, in a human being and in poetry. True art is on a par with primary reality; it creates a world and constitutes the
world’s primary reflection. It is indisputably real.
But, my God, what trivialities make up true art! The Divine Comedy is a great piece of work, but [Pushkin’s] lines ‘Through the agitated mists the moon makes its way’ are no less great. For in both there is the same purity and consequently an identical proximity to reality, that is to independent existence. That means it is not simply words and thoughts printed on paper, but a piece of work which is just as real as the cut-glass bubble for the ink standing in front of me on the table. These verses seem to have become a piece of work which could be taken off the paper and hurled at the window, and the window would smash. That’s what words can do!
But, on the other hand, how helpless and pitiful these same words can be! I never read the newspapers. They are a fictitious world, not the created one. Just pitiful, down-at-heel typographical print on rotten prickly paper.
Does a person need anything, apart from life and art? I don’t think so: nothing else is needed, as everything genuine is to be found in them.
I think that purity can be in everything, even in the way a person eats soup.
(1933)
– Kharms and Myles: An Afterword
Kharms and Myles: An Afterword
‘In Russia‚’ said the Sergeant, ‘they make teeth out of old piano-keys for elderly cows …’
Flann O’ Brien, The Third Policeman
Daniil Kharms made his Irish début during the winter of 1973 when the final number of Atlantis published five of the ‘incidents’ collected here. Since then, the author has posthumously enjoyed a revival of interest in the land of his birth and death, while things in Ireland have not been getting any better either. Comparisons between Stalinist Russia and other societies rarely make sense, can too often demean the memory of those countless millions who died. While Kharms has been rehabilitated and even published in the Soviet Union, the little litany of deaths dribbles on here – some the victims of sectarian gangs, some the victims of national liberation gangs, some the victims of state-employed gangs. No commemorative fiction worth speaking of. All the victims, the puny little tally of Irish victims, each one dying kharmlessly.
But it is not of Irish politics or British policy that these ‘incidents’ are reminiscent. The work of Daniil Kharms reflects far more harshly on the reception of ‘one of our best-loved comic writers’ – Flann O’Brien. Under his various pseudonyms – for like Kharms our man liked pseudonyms and needed them – the author of The Third Policeman gained a reputation for wit and humour at the expense of his own peace of mind, even the peace of his soul. Both writers share a period – the 1930s – in which terror became the small change of daily life in large tracts of Europe. However, as before, the literary comparison may be more diplomatic: Kharms and O’Brien (under the name of Myles na Gopaleen) specialized in extremely brief exchanges between speakers who had the names of Great Men – Keats and Chapman, Pushkin and Gogol, Sir Hosis and the Da, Makarov and Petersen, – while being embroiled in mere falling, farting, feuding, fighting, but never (somehow) in either case, fucking. Fucking was out. Terror, whether spiritual or physical, might even be defined by reference to its obliteration of sex.
This recourse to naming the great can be explained as a form of manic jealously in O’Brien‘s case, providing by jealousy you mean largeness of imagination crammed into pettiness of opportunity, circumstance, and milieu. In Kharms’s case, it seems that Aesop’s wisely foolish survivors provided the example, for there is something remaining of the cunning Mr Fox and the resourceful Mr Tortoise in his characterisation. This fabulous example, however, did not in the long run prove adequate for Kharms’s circumstances – the hare won, the lamb was devoured. A crucial difference between spiritual and physical terror in the cases of Kharms and O’Brien might be registered thus – one died of hunger and the other did not die of thirst.
That unfamiliar compound ghost, O’Brien/Myles/ O’Nolan, had a stand-up figure – the man at the bus stop talking about the digs. (You never got to see the digs any more than you got to meet the brother.) This brother’s brother – for he has no name we can call him – descends from a pedigree Kharms could more intimately claim as his own. I mean the long line of disadvantaged or incompetent intellectuals-in-the-making who include the besieged student in Crime and Punishment, Oblomov in his stinking bed, the innumerable inhabitants of St Petersburg garrets and Moscow backstreets at the mercy of wicked landladies, heartless guardians, and policemen. In twentieth-century Ireland the scale of things is punier than it was under the tsars, yet O’Brien/Myles/O’Nolan managed to convey a squalor which inversely measured opportunities for true development of the soul. The student-narrator of At-Swim-Two-Birds is a poker-face challenge to Stephen Dedalus and his stay-at-home-among-the-family ease. He is closer to Raskolnikov than to anything in Joyce. Reading O’Brien’s novels, one becomes aware of the sinister double-reference of the word ‘plot’ – to novelistic structure and to criminal intention – and reading Kharms’s brief fictions one becomes even more painfully aware of the intense effort invested in keeping plot at bay. But the affinity between Kharms and O’Brien has as much to do with the manner as with the matter of the ‘incidents’.
The two novels which O’Brien wrote in the late ‘30s – At-Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman – have their moment of intersection with the commonplace actions of crime fiction. In the first, characters conspire to murder their narrator; in the second the narrator commences with the simple announcement that ‘not everybody knows how I killed old Philip Mathers’. In absorbing these lurid details, both novels specialize in styles which convey the effects of terror by means of ordinariness. Nothing could be more ordinary than the voice of the narrator in At-Swim-Two-Birds, that dementia of modernist anxieties about multiple authors, counter-plots, obsessive description – ‘Duff-coloured puke’ – and the irresolveable conundrum of existence. Nothing could be more depth-less than the language of The Third Policeman, with its deranged yet plausible lexis and its relentless annotations. These styles can be workman-like, idiomatic, economical, elegant, all at the same time, and still they only border the elusive horror of death:
The earth was agog with invisible industry. Trees were active where they stood and gave uncompromising evidence of their strength. Incomparable grasses were forever at hand, lending their distinction to the universe. Patterns very difficult to imagine were made together by everything the eye could see, merging into a supernal harmony their unexceptional varieties. Men who were notable for the whiteness of their shirts worked diminutively in the distant bog, toiling in the brown turf and heather.
The sense of nature as a mechanistic system unaffected by man’s presence, withdrawal and return, pervades these pages of The Third Policeman. In terms of grammar, the passive voice can rarely if ever have been used to such a violent effect, sublimated into a coerced ‘normalcy’ though that effect may be. In the idiom of liberal critiques of totalitarianism, the individual is dispensible. One may recognize the same theme, disguised of course, in Myles na Gopaleen’s preoccupation with steam-engines, his fond references to their regulators and governors. These last two nouns resemble human agents but in fact name complex components of the mechanico-divine universe. Kharms had his scientific preoccupation also, and a fondness for gadgets. In his fiction there are instances (far more concise than in O’Brien) where a figure is dispensed with by the prose – he/ she falls – yet the prose narration continues with its unruffled account of the ordinary:
I was fed up watching them, and went off to Mal’tseviskiy market where, it was said, a knitted shawl had been given to a certain blind man.
To describe this kind of writing, one may have recourse to stylistics, an academic method by which effects are explained in terms of foregrounding (e.g. repetition), of violations of register (e.g. the sudden profanity, or archaism), and so forth. O’Brien/Myles/O’Nolan provides a wealth of opportunities for the stylistician, and I feel sure Kharms does also. (‘“Frig off!” – shouted the b
oyar and loosed a ladle at mine host.’) But there is another way to describe such writing, the way of paradox revealing techniques of achieved inadequacy. The sentence quoted at the end of the paragraph above might be described as comically pedantic, but only if it were admitted that it is also quaintly tragic. The great genres, the categories which have marshalled culture for Western humanity these last two thousand years or more, no longer function, or only function in some mutual violation.
Though the phrase has become meaningless – necessarily so? – God is Dead in this fiction. If fate operates all too efficiently, it is still an arbitrary surrogate for God, resembling Him only as far as a diving-bell or a plastic glove resembles imminently exiting Man. In O’Brien, the religious issue is undoubtedly at work, but it presents itself again through God’s absence, God’s locum being such reduced deputies as Father Fahrt, the Saint Augustine who lives near Dalkey or the James Joyce who writes for the Catholic Truth Society. I relate this dispersed theological theme, this exploded view of the heavenly quest, to another curious interest which both Kharms and O’Brien share – detective fiction or fictional detectives.
Neil Cornwell has illuminated the mystery of Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachov’s pen-name in one of its forms – Kharms-Shardam – by showing us its resemblance to the name of the greatest fictional detective of all time, Sherlock Holmes. The phonetic details of this need not concern us, instead it is worth stressing how Kharms evidently enjoyed posing in Holmesian gear – deerstalker, jaw-warmer pipe, etc. – while simultaneously enduring total literary suppression in early Stalinist Russia. At least one of the surviving photographs suggests a Harpo Marx ingredient in the pantomine. And so we have a Marxist Holmes, a not-so-private detective whose digs are closer to Nevskiy Prospekt than to Baker Street but whose Big Brother is also Something in the Government. Brothers are sinister figures, for their inaccessibility is never convincingly explained (as in the case of Mycroft Holmes) by their love of solitude: they suggest that survival and extinction are siblings, even identical twins. We know that Kharms posed as his own non-existent brother for an obliging photographer, and even provided biographical details of the man’s academic career. Literary critics may want to explain this as a persona, but prosecutors will recognize it as a flimsy alibi.
The Plummeting Old Women Page 7