D I Harms

The Writer Danil Harms (1905-1942)

'Danil Harms' was the main pen name of Danil Ivanovich Yuvachov. The son of a St. Petersburg political, religious and literary figure. In his lifetime Danil achieved limited local renown as a Leningrad avant-garde eccentric, and a writer of children's stories in the 1920s and 30s. From 1925 Harms began to appear at poetry readings and avant-garde activities, and had published two poems in anthologies in 1926 and 1927. These were the only 'adult' works Harms was able to publish in his lifetime.

In 1927, Harms joined with a number of like-minded Experimental writers to form the literary and artistic group, Oberiu, 'Association of Real Art'. The Oberiu considered themselves a 'left flank' of the literary avant-garde, and one of their catch phrases was "Art is a cupboard." Harms normally made his theatrical entrances inside or on a wardrobe, as in their highly unconventional theatrical evening in 1928, which included the performance of Harm's Kafkaesque absurdist drama 'Yelizaveta Bam'.

However, in the Stalinizing years of the late 1920s, the time for propagating experimental modernist art had passed. Tolerance of any such frivolities plummeted and hostile journalistic attention ensured the hurried disbandment of the Oberiu Group. Harms felt it wiser to allow himself to be drawn into the realm of children's literature, but even in this field anything out of the ordinary was not safe. Despite surviving one arrest and the main purges of the 1930s, in August 1941,during the outbreak of the war, Harms was arrested in Leningrad, and charged with spreading defeatist propaganda. He died, seemingly of starvation within prison hospital, in February 1942.

In spirit, Harms belongs to a tradition of experimental Soviet writings that sprang from a Futurist Formalist base in the 1920s, and that was influenced by the various modernist, Dadaist, surrealist, absurdist and other avant-garde European movements of that time. The prose miniature has long been a genre more commonly found in Russian literature than elsewhere, and Harms concentrated during the 1930's on evolving a private, idiosyncratic brand of short prose and dramatic fragments as well as theoretical, philosophical, mathematical pieces, and diaries. The boundaries between genres are fluid with him, as are distinctions between fragment and whole, finished and unfinished states. He has an uncompromising quest for the means to undermine his own stories, or to facilitate their self-destruction.

Operating against a precise Leningrad background, Harms turned a surgical glance on both the extraordinary world of Stalin's Russia and on representation. He reflects aspects of Soviet life and its literary product, passing sardonic and despairing comment on the period in which he lived.

Within his work there is a recurrence of falling, accidents, chance, sudden death, victimisation and all forms of apparently mindless violence. He uses a multitude of genres; the fable, the parable, the fairy tale, the children's story, the philosophical or dramatic dialogue, the comic monologue, carnival, the cartoon and the silent movie to depict this, all devoid of explanation, context and other standard trappings. "I am interested only in 'nonsense'; only in that which makes no practical sense. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestation."

Not until Gorbachev's policy of glasnost' took real effect from 1987, did the adult writings of Harms become published in Russia, in the form of a major collection in 1988. In the present age of post-modernist fragmentation, Oberiu evenings and Harms 'mono-spectaculars' in Russia have become commonplace events, typifying, amongst others, theatre of the absurd and theatre of cruelty. The country's press now proclaim Harms 'an international figure'.