Knowra Daniil Kharms Daniil Kharms Daniil Kharms was a Russian avant-garde writer and poet whose absurdist prose and poetry, children’s books, and association with OBERIU shaped his literary legacy.
OBERIU : A short-lived Leningrad group of experimental writers and artists active in the late 1920s. Kharms helped found this group, whose rejection of conventional meaning informed his public literary identity.
First and Second : A 1927 OBERIU performance in Leningrad that combined poetry, theater, and literary declarations. Kharms’s performance at this event made OBERIU’s experimental program visible to a public audience.
Alexander Vvedensky : A Russian poet and playwright, a fellow OBERIU member, and a close literary associate of Kharms. Vvedensky shared Kharms’s experimental circle and developed a related, though distinct, poetics of absurdity.
Leningrad : The name of Saint Petersburg from 1924 to 1991, a major cultural center in the Soviet Union. Kharms lived and worked in Leningrad, where OBERIU formed and his literary circles gathered.
The Blue Notebook No. 10 : A short prose piece by Kharms consisting of a compressed, circular account of a blue-eyed man. Its famous opening and ending demonstrate the precision with which Kharms made repetition absurd.
Russian avant-garde : A broad movement of Russian artistic experimentation that flourished from the late nineteenth century into the early Soviet period. Kharms’s formal experiments belong to this wider break with inherited artistic conventions.
The Old Woman : A novella by Kharms in which a writer’s encounter with a dead old woman spirals into grotesque uncertainty. This late prose work concentrates his abrupt shifts, deadpan narration, and unstable sense of reality.
Nikolay Zabolotsky : A Russian poet and OBERIU co-founder whose early work combined formal experiment with eccentric imagery. Zabolotsky’s participation places Kharms within OBERIU’s small network of collaborators.
Russian Revolution : The upheavals of 1917 that ended imperial rule in Russia and brought the Bolsheviks to power. The revolution and its aftermath reshaped the institutions and political pressures under which Kharms wrote.
Absurdist drama : Drama that uses illogical situations, fractured dialogue, or unresolved action to challenge conventional plot and meaning. Kharms’s theater anticipates techniques later associated with absurdist drama, without making him its sole origin.
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