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3 books match the query 'Kharms, Daniil'

cover of Daniil Kharms: Writing and the Event

Daniil Kharms

Writing and the Event

By Branislav Jakovljevic

Northwestern University Press, 2009

The "texts" of Russian artist and thinker Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) were so many and varied and often unique (narrative, dramatic, philosophical, poetic, mathematical, pictographic, diagrammatic, musical, biographical) that they defied categorization—and, thus, thorough study or appreciation—through much of the twentieth century. This book, the first in English to view Kharms’s oeuvre in its entirety, is also the first to offer a complete, inclusive, and coherent understanding of the overall project of this artist and writer now considered a major figure in the modernist canon of Europe.

The book follows Kharms’s development as a creative thinker, inquiring into the nature of Kharmsian nonsense, the ontological status of the OBERIU object, writing as performance, Kharms’s gestural language, his "language machines," and his ideas of order, number, infinity, and chance. Reading every paper trace (as well as extant memories) of Kharms’s activities as part of a large project of world creation, Branislav Jakovljevic situates him in a twentieth-century effort—exemplified by Kafka, Beckett, Artaud, Malevich, and Khelbnikov, among others—to go beyond an interpretation of meaning circumscribed by rational and logical thought. Examining texts that could conceivably be called "literary" as well as sketches, diagrams, hieroglyphs, photographs, and unclassifiable others, Jakovljevic’s study is the first to provide a properly broad perspective on this creative thinker’s farranging, far-reaching, and finally comprehensive achievement.
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cover of Russian Absurd: Selected Writings

Russian Absurd

Selected Writings

Daniil Kharms, Translated from the Russian by Alex Cigale

Northwestern University Press, 2017

A writer who defies categorization, Daniil Kharms has come to be regarded as an essential artist of the modernist avant-garde. His writing, which partakes of performance, narrative, poetry, and visual elements, was largely suppressed during his lifetime, which ended in a psychiatric ward where he starved to death during the siege of Leningrad. His work, which survived mostly in notebooks, can now be seen as one of the pillars of absurdist literature, most explicitly manifested in the 1920s and ’30s Soviet Union by the OBERIU group, which inherited the mantle of Russian futurism from such poets as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov. This selection of prose and poetry provides the most comprehensive portrait of the writer in English translation to date, revealing the arc of his career and including a particularly generous selection of his later work.

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cover of The Man with the Black Coat: Russia's Literature of the Absurd

The Man with the Black Coat

Russia's Literature of the Absurd

Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky

Northwestern University Press, 1997

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