Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd: Essays and Materials

Daniil Kharms (1905-42), Leningrad absurdist of the 1920s and 30s, was just about the last representative of the Russian literary avant-garde, whose careers and lives were blighted and curtailed amid the cultural and historical excesses of Stalinism.

Unpublished and undiscussed for decades, Kharms's works gradually began to emerge from obscurity or from desk drawers in the 1960s, appearing at first mainly abroad, until glasnost brought them to the Soviet reader in the late 1980s.

Research on Kharms and his circle is still developing and publication of their works is still in progress.

Only now, as his full surviving work takes shape, is the real importance of Kharms's contribution to Russian and European literature beginning to be measurable.

The present volume of essays and other materials, assembled by leading western and Russian scholars in the field, offers a first full and collective assessment of this startlingly innovative exponent of short prose, verse and drama.