Table Of ContentWiener Slawistischer Almanach ∙ Sonderband ∙ 5
(eBook - Digi20-Retro)
Alice S. Nakhimovsky
Laughter in the Void
An Introduction to the Writings
of Daniii Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedenskij
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00064810
ALICE STONE NAKHIMOVSKY
LAUGHTEE IN THE VOID
An introduction to the writings of
DaniilKliarms and Alexander Vvedenskii
WIENER SLAWISTISCHER ALMANACH
SONDERBAND 5
00064810
г о и , л г ч л ( 5 ־
WIENER SŁAWI STI SCHER ALMANACH
SONDERBAND 5
(LITERARISCHE REIHE, HERAUSGEGEBEN VON A. hansen-löve)
Wien 1982
Titelgraphik: Plakat für einen OBÈRIU-Abend
"Tri levych časa" vom 24.1.1928
DRUCK
Offsetschnelldruck Anton Riegelnik,
A-1080 Wien, Piaristengasse 19
Zu beziehen über: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach,
Institut für Slawistik der Universität Wien,
A-1010 Wien, Liebiggasse 5
© WIENER SLAWISTISCHER ALMANACH
00064810
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In one form or another, this book has been in the works
for seven years. But my first acknowledgements go back
farther than that, to George Gibian, my professor at Cornell,
who introduced me to the works of Kharms and Vvedenskii and
was extraodinarily generous in sharing manuscripts and giving
advice. A number of people at Cornell were of great help with
the manuscript in its various stages. Richard L. Leed read
the poetry sections with a linguist1s eye for metrics, prodding
them into considerable improvement. Patricia Carden took time
out to give me the benefit of her sharp editorial skills. Of
the friends and colleagues who read various chapters, I would
particularly like to thank Elizabeth Dobbs of Grinnell, an
incisive reader of great patience, and Henry Orlov of Williams,
who was an invaluable source of information for philosophical
and historical background. Mikhail Meilakh, editor of the
collected works of Kharms and Vvedenskii, let me see unpub-
lished manuscripts and answered questions. Irina Paperno and
Boris Gasparov, late of Tartu University and now of Stanford,
gave me intellectual and moral support, and only Slava Paper-
no knows what egregious pitfalls his meticulous reading and
bilingual typing have spared me. To Ilya Levin of the Univer-
sity of Texas, Austin, my great thanks for his participation
in the Great Manuscript Exchange and for all his help there-
after. My colleagues at Colgate, past and present — Virginia
Bennett now of the University of California, Davis, Michael
Nicholson of the University of Lancaster, England, and Richard
Sylvester all suffered through various drafts, and Patricia
Ryan, one of the great bastions of true literacy, typed most
of them. I would like to thank Colgate's Humanities Faculty
Development Fund for its generous financial support. Finally,
I would like to thank my husband, Alexander Nakhimovsky of
Cornell, for his advice, his guidance, and his love.
00064810
For Sasha
00064810
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1
Chapter I: HISTORICAL SKETCH 5
Chapter II: ELIZAVETA BAM 25
Chapter III: EARLY POETRY 4 2
Chapter IV: THE ORDINARY AND THE GROTESQUE 62
Chapter V: THE ORDINARY, THE SACRED, AND THE GROTESQUE 87
Chapter VI: VVEDENSKII: IN THE WORLD'S PAVILION 104
Chapter VII: VVEDENSKII: TRAVESTIES AND IMPENETRABLE TRUTHS 132
Chapter VIII: TIME, HISTORY, AND THE FOREST 1 S3
CONCLUSION 166
NOTES 170
SELECTED ВIBLIOGRAPHY 184
INDEX 190
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00064810
INTRODUCTION
The odd and brilliant works of Daniil Kharms and Alexander
Vvedenskii were lost to both Russia and the West for some thir-
ty years. It was the misfortune of these writers to be nurtured
in a period of literary experiment that was cut off suddenly
just as they were starting out. Their first steps, taken under
the aegis of an antic literary group called Oberiu, turned out
to be the only public testament of their career, and to this
day Oberiu remains the touchstone of their notoriety in the
West. The connection is unfortunate, because the silence that
was forced on the group became paradoxically the silence under
which Kharms and Vvedenskii matured as writers. Their later
works, masterpieces of black humor with an infusion of the sa-
cred, are firmly rooted in the Russian tradition, and bear
comparison with the finest works of the European theater of
the absurd.
Leningrad first became aware of Kharms and Vvedenskii in
the late twenties, when a series of theatrical evenings was
put on by the outlandishly named Oberiu. The title was more or
less an acronym for Объединение реального искусства, or the
Association for Real Art. The group, which began in 1926
although it received its name and published its inevitable
manifesto two years later, proclaimed an art that would com-
bine "real" words and objects in a way that was not imitative
of life. Many works of the period have been lost, though the
legend of the literary evenings, with their poetry readings,
happenings, and dadaistic pranks, stayed vivid for a long
time. During the period of Oberiu, Kharms and Vvedenskii con-
centrated on poetry and drama, genres suitable for declamation
from a stage. To a listener not attuned to small (but crucial)
differences, much of what they wrote might have recalled the
futuristic dramas of Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh. The experiment
in any case was just as daring. Words were freed from the
00064810
2 Laughter in the Void
constraints of conventional syntax and imaginative sequences
denied the logic of cohesive form. Most of these works do not
transcend the immediate impact of their language, though in
some of them, notably in Kharms!s Elizaveta Bam, odd turns of
language and structure become an alogical reflection of the
outside world. In fact, Elizaveta Bam, the first real 3 y
absurdist piece produced by either writer, marks a watershed
in the history of Oberiu. Its performance in January 1928 was
enough of a spectacle to attract the wrath of the official
press, which by then was growing more conservative in its
tastes. Within two years, Oberiu was forced to disband.
With the end of Oberiu, the work of Kharms and Vvedenskii
began to change direction. For whatever reason — the lack of
an audience, the growing sense of isolation in a hostile world,
or perhaps the knowledge that they had reached some boundary
of impenetrability — both writers began to move toward great
clarity. The cacophony of words and objects that characterized
their early work gave way to an atmosphere of unusual sparse-
ness. 1'Respect the poverty of language. Respect impoverished
thoughts," wrote Vvedenskii in the late thirties and his
exclamation was paralleled in the narrowing of Kharms's vision
to the tiny details of the ordinary world around him. Though
their later works are no more rational, violations of logic
and language are carefully motivated. Distortions of a recog-
nizable reality in Kharms and of history and philosophical
ideas in Vvedenskii can be called grotesque. The spontaneity
of their early works has been replaced by precision; something
like dada has grown into the absurd.
Beginning in the early thirties, the writings of Vveden-
skii and Kharms take on a distinct and individual character.
Vvedenskii's poetry and his wildly unstageable plays focus on
the related themes of time, history, God, and death. The idea
of absurdity (бессмысленность) becomes double-natured for him,
connoting both the meaninglessness of everyday life and a
profundity beyond the reach of reason. At the same time,
Introduction 3
Kharms1s poetry and prose turn to the question of meaning in
the perverse and often violent disorder of everyday life. If
for the most part the perversity of life overwhelms its
meaning, the author of the black humor sketches called happen-
ings was also a believer in the possibility of a miracle, and
in many of the poems and stories the grotesque is replaced by
or combined with a surprisingly traditional faith. The works
of this period must count as the finest things that Kharms and
Vvedenskii wrote. A short list would include Kharms1s Sluchai
i rasekazy (Happenings and Stories, 1936-1941), his novella
Starukha (The Old Woman, 1938), and his poetry; and Vveden-
skii's plays Krugom vozmozhno Bog (There May Be God All Over,
1931), Nekotoroe kolioheetvo razgovorov (A Certain Quantity of
Conversations, 1936-1938), Elka и Ivanovykh (Christmas at the
Ivanovs, 1938), and his poem "Elegiia" (Elegy, 1940). Much has
been lost, including a late novel by Vvedenskii, Vbiitey vy
duraki (Murderers You are Fools).
To what extent do these late works prefigure the ideas and
methods of the European theater of the absurd? Though the
sources are obviously different, there are striking similari-
ties between the two. Both schools reject psychological realism,
preferring to portray the human condition through distortions
that become grotesque. The banality and emptiness of life is
presented in both through the deliberate use of banal and
empty language. The connection is apparent in much of Kharms,s
prose, but it is especially valid for Vvedenskii, whose
Conversations come close to realizing Ionesco's declaration
that the theater should avoid characters, plot, action, and a
time element.
The chance that Kharms and Vvedenskii might become part
of a general European movement was, of course, precluded by the
political situation in the Soviet Union. Vvedenskii died in a
prison convoy in December 1941; Kharms in prison two months
later. Neither lived to be forty, and almost nothing that they
wrote except for children's poems and stories had been published
Description:The odd and brilliant works of Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedenskii were lost to both Russia and the West for some thirty years* It was the misfortune of these writers to be nurtured in a period of literary experiment that was cut off suddenly just as they were starting out. Their first steps, tak
