Daniil Harms - Author

Daniil Ivanovitch Youvatchev (Harms is on of his most used pseudonyms) was born in St-Petersburg in 1905. His father, Ivan Iouvatchov, a revolutionary intellectual under the Empire and a member of the group Will of the People (Narodnaia Volia), spent most of his life in prison.

Daniil Harms appeared on the literary scene in St. Petersburg in 1925. He was 20 years old. He took part in a poetry reading with the group Oberiou. The members of the group Oberiou called themselves the "natural thinkers", fighting against the staleness of what was considered tasteful and the hypocrisy of the world. They led the criticism against Bolshevism with a particular type of mockery: they employed childlike phrases to mock the absurdity of the Stalinist system.

In 1926 Harms published poems in the Poet's Union Anthology in Leningrad. However, the majority of his literary activities happened outside the publishing world, consisting of the circulation of his manuscript among his friends (including theatrical productions, satiric sketches and songs, dramatized scenes, poetry readings, etc.). They were fleeting demonstrations, undefined, multi-faceted and never formally recorded. They were hand written or on typed pages.

At that time the Soviet Union was in a period of great confusion; it was impossible to link the artistic avant-garde and the political avant-garde. A system was put into place where the meaning of life was decided by greater forces. Harms proposed a poetic form based on the battle against logic. "The absurd" or the "insane" were considered by him and his artistic friends to be an act of liberation and a way to reach a superior category of logic. Daniil Harms vowed that he would create art or theatre that would never submit to political or national limitations, even temporarily.

His verse and prose expressed the refusal to reason as well as the rejection of logic, the accent placed on phonetics and rhythms. His writings are often disconcerting, at times comical. In 1930, Harms' black humor was attacked by the press and was considered "a threat to be reckoned with". He was then only able to publish children's books. Harms was arrested on August 23, 1941 and died in a psychiatric prison the following year.

Demonstrating a striking capacity towards artistic resistance, Harms only published two short poems (in 1926 and 1927) and children's stories in his lifetime. He was virtually unknown until the 1960's when sudden interest of his work became apparent. His works were then published in Germany in 1978-80. The Yugoslavian director Slobodan D. Persic made a film about him, The Harms Case, which was presented at Cannes in 1988. Today, we realize when we read his work that he was an important literary figure and that his writing echos loudly through Russia and the rest of the world.

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