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

Abstract

daniil kharms, "i Am a Phenomenon Quite out of the ordinary": The Notebooks, Diaries and Letters of Daniil Kharms. translated and edited by anthony anemone and peter scotto. boston: academic studies press, 2013. 689pp. $35Daniil Kharms was born in St. Petersburg in 1905. He died in 1942, a patient in a psychiatric clinic, likely of starvation, during the Leningrad Blockade. Although he was known as a children's author during his lifetime-many of his children's books are now classics-he was unable to publish his writing "for adults." Not until long after his death, then, would Kharms earn his reputation as a poet and master of bizarre miniatures. Kharms's antic writing style brought the formal disapproval of the Soviet government, a fact that has led many to regard him as a dissident writer. This view has bolstered the misleading notion that censorship prevented him from reaching full artistic maturity. Like other repressed Soviet authors, Kharms has become something of a symbol-of the brave soul who risks everything to produce "extremely important work," which is then understood as the record of a dissident's struggle (or protest) against the authoritarian state. I Am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary sets out to restore Kharms to mere human status, or in the editors' words, "to recover the inner life of Daniil Kharms," and collects a wide range of personal and fugitive material, previously unavailable in English, to this end. What emerges is a portrait of an amateur-not a dissident. The selections from Kharms's notebooks, diaries, and letters suggest that his most well regarded works are the expression of an idiosyncratic, implicit aesthetic program-i.e., an amateurist's philosophy-for which life and art are held to be continuous and fluid. Given the coherence and consistency of this tacit program over time, Kharms's miniatures and other well known works appear to constitute the type of writing he would have chosen to produce even under more favorable circumstances.Reading I Am a Phenomenon , one cannot help but notice that Kharms wrote as a part of ordinary life, envisioning only a small readership of friends and family. Everyday pieces of writing, such as letters, display much ingenuity and aesthetic scruple, and they have come to be included in his body of literary works. Yakov Druskin, a friend and colleague, believed that Kharms's life and work were of a piece; the diaries and notebooks go some way in confirming this view. Kharms wrote incessantly as he went about his daily rounds. According to Anemone and Scotto, the volume's editors, the author "would write on the tram, in a sauna, at concerts, while visiting friends, visiting his aunt, or in the middle of a fight with his wife." In I Am a Phenomenon important pieces of Kharms's literary output share notebook pages with grocery lists, schemes, and memoranda of romantic meetings. Although some of the writing is of excellent quality, very little is consciously marked out as serious, planned, or distinct from the ordinary flow of words in the author's daily life. One gets the sense that even Kharms's most important works were composed spontaneously, that their literary merit is the result of a mix of happenstance and skill, perhaps inspiration, and not in general because of some special effort Kharms had made to distance himself from the social world or his practical affairs.This effect is the result of Kharms's amateurist writing practice, and one only perceives it by reading his famous and lesser pieces side-by-side, as they accrued over the days, weeks, months, and years. By allowing readers in English to approach Kharms for the first time in this way, Anemone and Scotto have rendered an important service. One does wish that they had included at least a dozen more of Kharms's classic miniatures and poems-for example, those found in Today I Wrote Nothing-in order to situate the author at the height of his powers even more forcefully in the context of his everyday life. …