<p>Books can be weird.  I can read <A href="https://www.librarything.com/work/19214260/book/152079962">Russian Absurd</a>, which are absurd vignettes recovered from Kharms' notebooks, written in the 1920s and 1930s, pieces as the introduction says that may not have been intended for public consumption, and they don't seem dated and they don't seem foreign and they don't seem like something I should never have heard about until now.  True, a lot of old women tend to fall out of windows, but I can picture myself as an old woman tumbling after defenestration, so that seems all right.  And the man alternates between looking terrifyingly serious: </p>

<p><img src="https://www.poemhunter.com/i/p/90/36390_b_6164.jpg" width="140" height="200" class="alignnone size-large" /></p>

<p>to a foppish Pushkin-esque dandy:</p>

<p><img src="https://russiapedia.rt.com/files/prominent-russians/literature/daniil-kharms/daniil-kharms_2-t.jpg" width="220" height="227" class="alignnone size-large" /></p>

<p>to simply terrifying:</p>

<p><img src="http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/.a/6a00e54fe4158b883301b8d2616e49970c-pi" width="281" height="389" class="alignnone size-large" /></p>

<p>He starved to death in 1942.  That hurts my heart. And there's so much out there, so much writing I may never get to know, hidden in notebooks in languages I don't speak.   </p>

<blockquote>
The sky is shimmering with lamps<br />
And we are flying like the stars
</blockquote>

<p>I am glad your friends saved your notebooks Daniil Kharms.  I am glad I got to read from them.</p>

<p><A href="https://www.librarything.com/work/19214260/book/152079962">Russian Absurd</a> by Daniil Kharms went on sale February 15, 2017.</p>

<p><small>I received a copy free from <a href="https://www.netgalley.com/">Netgalley</a> in exchange for an honest review.</small></p>

<p><b>ETA</b>: I have, as I always do with deceased authors, checked <i>yes</i> to <a href="https://www.netgalley.com/">Netgalley</a>'s <i>Are you interested in connecting with this author (interviews, events, etc)?</i>  They have yet to conduct even one séance for me to talk to the dead.</p>

The bizarre and harrowing existence of Danil Kharms, Russian, though hardly Soviet, experimentalist.  These fragmental excerpts from Kharms' tortured genius offer, well, if nothing else a fairly plausible depiction of what happens when a gentle soul is dropped into unspeakable horrors.  Imagine Tom Waits trying to write songs at the peak of Soviet repressions.  Gorgeous, despairing, hallucinatory.  And yet he managed to write children's books, too.

I was disappointed. In this book. I enjoy works from the mainly French absurdist tradition- Ionescu etc but I found this collection of sketches and short stories lacking in substance, and bland.

Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) was one of the Soviet Union’s most important writers during the 1920s and 1930s, but fell foul of the regime, was arrested in 1941 and imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital where he died during the siege of Leningrad and buried in a mass grave. In a timely quirk of fate, activists now believe they have found the likely location of the grave. This volume is a selection of his writings, most of which were suppressed during his lifetime. His work is not always easy to get to grips with as his decidedly modernist and avant-garde work is not to everyone’s taste. His stories are often called “anti-stories” as they usually eschew narrative and are often absurd with a surrealist twist. Often they are very short indeed, only a paragraph or a couple of sentences, and often completely pointless – or so it seems to me. Black humour, the grotesque, violence and death are constant themes. Personally I don’t find them funny, or even amusing. This is not my sort of writing. However, I am aware of his place in Soviet literature and I was pleased to discover more of his work. An important book for anyone interested in Russian literature.

I don't think I have ever read absurdist writing before so expected to struggle somewhat with Daniil Kharms' ideas. The book is more or less in chronological order of writing date and I did find the earliest work simply baffling. However I stuck with it and am glad I did as by the time I got to his discussion of infinity I realised I not only understood the essay, but was enjoying it too. Another story that I particularly liked was Connections. I am not sure if my brain began to attune to Kharms or if his ideas became more accessible as time passed. He describes fascinating snapshots of everyday Soviet life - communal apartments, food queues, unexpected police visits. One story revolves around the inconvenience of a man sleeping on an apartment corridor floor. Other residents have to repeatedly step over him, yet the building supervisor cannot evict him because the authorities have allocated the man to this apartment although he is not allocated a room.

I think it is important to remember that Russian Absurd is compiled from notebooks that Kharms did not expect to see published. There is a raw quality to his words and several of the selected pieces are snippets and short ideas. I didn't like his chauvinism which treats young women as objects to be leered at and reduces older women to figures of fun. A banned author relegated to a mental institution at the time of his early death though, I could see an increasing sense of disassociation in his later stories. Kharms writes more on philosophical and religious subjects than on observations of life around him. The inclusion of his actual NKVD 'confession' is chilling especially after having read Nir Baram's Good People which, albeit fictionally, illustrated the horrific results of such confessions. Overall I found Russian Absurd a sobering book to read. Its contrasting silliness and shocking darkness were often difficult for me to reconcile and, while I am glad to have read this book, I don't think this is a genre I would want to revisit too frequently.

This is an excellent collection, making a crucial but neglected writer accessible to Anglophones. It doesn't fit into my courses this year, but the next time I teach my Russian Literature course I'll include it. In the meantime, I have been recommending it and quoting from it.

Silly and whimsical this is not, jarring and disturbing is more of an apt description. Did I mention that Kharms was a children's author who hated children? I took my time reading this. It did not lend itself to a straight-through reading. You really need to read each entry then digest them separately. Indeed, they are written at different points in the author's life and are presented chronologically.
I was shocked and drawn to this collection at the same time. I would recommend this book to someone who is interested in Absurdism, the weird and authors like Gogol, Pushkin and Bulgakov. 
Of special note was the short story ‘The Infinite; that is the answer to all questions...'
for its beautiful blend of prose and mathematical theory from which I lifted the following quote;

“One cannot pry under an infinite line; we cannot grasp it with our thoughts. It doesn’t intersect with us anywhere; for anything to be intersected, its end, which does not exist, must be discovered.”
 
If you do seek this out, I would recommend the print copy. I received a digital copy from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review. I felt that I lost quite a bit of the aesthetics by reading it in that format. I have already added it to my wishlist. I found an interesting binding of Kharm’s work at Ugly Duckling Press, but it appears to be out of print. 
Well done to the translator of the notebooks, Alex Cigale. I can only speculate how hard it is to translate from a foreign language into English, let alone translating absurdist literature.