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The amount written about Kharms in recent decades only multiplies the number of questions both about the various sources and properties of his work, and about many episodes of his biography. Kharms was and remains a completely inexplicable phenomenon in the history of Russian literature. And to this day, even highly respected scientists - philologists, historians, literary critics, who consider themselves experts in Kharms - do not undertake to create any detailed biography of this writer. To write his "official" literary biography, in which the real moments of life would be linked and coordinated with the main stages of creativity, at the moment there is not so much facts as their motivations. And without this, the biography of a creative person, according to the researcher of the texts of D. Kharms, philologist V. Sazhin, “if it does not turn into a figment of the biographer’s fantasy, then it remains only a synopsis or a chronograph.” Unfortunately, while researchers do not have sufficient data to go beyond this framework. Therefore, this article provides only a summary of the biography of Daniil Kharms, indicating well-known facts and those circumstances that need even deeper study and explanation.

Family and ancestors

The biography of Kharms' father, Ivan Pavlovich Yuvachev (1860-1940), is well known to historians of the so-called "liberation movement" in Russia. He was the son of a floor polisher in the Winter Palace, received a navigational education at the technical school of the naval department in Kronstadt, and served for several years on the Black Sea. It is not known who or what influenced his political views, but in the early 1880s he turned out to be an adherent of the Narodnaya Volya and according to the famous “trial of the 14th”. September 28, 1884 I.P. Yuvachev was sentenced to death by hanging, but soon the sentence was commuted to 15 years hard labor. Of this period, the convict had to spend the first 4 years in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress, and then in the Shlisselburg Fortress.

Here he turned from a militant atheist into an equally zealous champion of Christianity with a strong dose of mysticism. At the Sakhalin penal servitude I.P. Yuvachev worked in leg irons for two years, and then, apparently, using his navigational education, the authorities appointed him to head the weather station.

Not having served his entire term, IP Yuvachev was released in 1895, lived in Vladivostok, and circumnavigated the world. The circumstances as a result of which in 1899 he returned to St. Petersburg are completely unknown. It is only known that Yuvachev Sr. decided to serve in the inspectorate of the Savings Banks Administration for a position related to constant inspection trips around Russia. For several years, he published one after another biographical books "Eight Years on Sakhalin" (St. Petersburg, 1901) and "Schlisselburg Fortress" (M., 1907). A considerable number of preaching pamphlets (under the pseudonym I. P. Mirolyubov) also came out from the pen of the former Narodnaya Volya member, in which the author interprets the Holy Scriptures, promotes good manners and veneration of church charters.

Meanwhile, the classes of I.P. Yuvachev meteorology and astronomy were highly appreciated. In 1903, he became a corresponding member of the Main Physical Observatory of the Academy of Sciences (in this regard, it is worth recalling the astronomer who often appears in the texts of Kharms).

In April of the same 1903, I.P. Yuvachev married the noblewoman Nadezhda Ivanovna Kolyubakina (1876-1928). At that time she was in charge of the laundry in the asylum of the Princess of Oldenburg, and over the years she became the head of the entire institution - a place where women released from prison received shelter and work. How the parents of Daniil Kharms met is unknown. In January of the following year, 1904, Nadezhda Ivanovna gave birth to a son named Pavel, but already in February he died.

On December 17 (30), 1905, the second son was born. On this day, Ivan Pavlovich made the following entry in his notebook:

The 3rd paragraph of this entry is “dark” and is most likely connected with the personal refusal of the former Narodnaya Volya member from his former beliefs. As for the biblical prophet Daniel, he will become “the most expensive” for Kharms as well.

On January 5 (18), 1906, the boy was baptized in the church of the Cathedral of the Most Holy Theotokos at the refuge of the Princess of Oldenburg (now Konstantingradskaya Street, on the territory of the Boiler and Turbine Institute). Godparents were, apparently, the brother of Ivan Pavlovich - Pyotr Pavlovich Yuvachev and "the daughter of the provincial secretary, the girl Natalia Ivanova Kolyubakina." The latter is the elder sister of Nadezhda Ivanovna (1868-1942), a teacher of literature and director of the Tsarskoye Selo Mariinsky Women's Gymnasium. In the same place, in Tsarskoe Selo, the mother's younger sister, Maria Ivanovna Kolyubakina (1882? - 1943?), also lived, it seems, like the eldest, who did not have a family. These three women raised Daniel. The father, on duty, was constantly on the road and led the upbringing by correspondence with his wife. Moreover, the tone of his letters and instructions was the more severe, the softer and more reverent the mother treated her son. The father's absence was compensated by his custom of writing letters with enviable frequency and regularity, and thus his voice was constantly heard in the family. For little Daniel, this created a rather fantastic effect of visible absence with a constant feeling of his father's participation in his real life. The father became for Kharms a kind of higher being, respect for which, as legends testify, was embodied, for example, in the fact that the son, until the end of his father's life, got up in his presence and talked to his father only while standing. It can be assumed that the “gray-haired old man” in glasses and with a book, which appears in several texts by Kharms, was inspired precisely by the appearance of his father. It is amazing that not only did the mother (with the possible exception of one poem) not be embodied in the texts of Kharms, but even her death in 1928 was not recorded in his notebooks.

early years

In 1915, Daniil Yuvachev entered the first class of a real school, which was part of the Main German School of St. Peter in Petrograd (Petershule). The reasons for the parents' choice of this particular school are unknown. In any case, here the young man received a good knowledge of German and English. Here, his penchant for various hoaxes was already manifested (at this age they were perceived as funny children's games). The future writer played the horn during the lessons (it is not known where he got it from), persuaded the teacher not to give him a deuce - "do not offend the orphan" - and so on.

In the hungry years of the Civil War, Daniel, together with his mother, went to her relatives in the Volga region. Upon her return to Petrograd, her mother went to work as a custodian at the Barachnaya Hospital. S. P. Botkin, and here, on Mirgorodskaya, 3/4, the family lived before moving in 1925 to Nadezhdinskaya. In this hospital, Kharms also earned his first seniority - from August 13, 1920 to August 15, 1921, he served "as an assistant fitter." The period from 1917 to 1922 is perhaps the most undocumented, and therefore researchers to this day have not been able to fill in the many "blank spots" in the biography of Daniil Kharms.

It is known that in September 1922, for some reason, the parents found their son's stay in Petrograd inconvenient and sent him to his aunt, N. I. Kolyubakina. She still directed, only now her former gymnasium was called the 2nd Detskoselskaya Soviet Unified Labor School. Here Daniil completed his secondary education at the age of two and in the summer of 1924 entered the Leningrad Electrotechnical School. The father, who served on the financial side at Volkhovstroy, helped the Working Committee intercede for his son, otherwise the young man of “non-proletarian” origin would not have been accepted to the technical school. But studying at the technical school was a burden for young Kharms, and already on February 13, 1926, he was expelled from there.

The tendency to fantasies, hoaxes, writing, as they said, was noted in the early childhood of the future writer. At the age of 14, Danya Yuvachev compiled a notebook of 7 drawings (pen, ink), the content of which is still a mystery to researchers of Kharms' work. But the motifs that will later be present in his main work are already obvious in them: an astronomer, a miracle, a wheel, etc. Already at a young age, a tendency to encrypt, to veil the direct meanings of objects and phenomena, inherent in Kharms throughout his literary life, is noticeable.

Nickname

The first known literary text of Kharms was written in 1922 and has the signature DSN. From this it is obvious that at that time Daniil Yuvachev had already chosen not only the fate of the writer, but also a pseudonym: Daniil Kharms. In the future, he will vary it in different ways and introduce new pseudonyms, bringing their total number to almost twenty.

There are several versions about the meaning of the literary name Kharms. According to A. Aleksandrov, the basis is the French word charme - charm, charm. But Daniil’s father, judging by the surviving information, knew about the provocative negative meaning of this name: “Yesterday, dad told me that while I was Kharms, I would be haunted by needs” (entry in Kharms’s notebook dated December 23, 1936). Indeed, according to the memoirs of the artist A. Poret, Kharms explained to her that in English this word means misfortune (literally “harm” - “misfortune”). However, Kharms has always tended to veil (or blur) the direct meanings of words, actions, deeds, so you can look for decoding of his pseudonym in other languages.

First of all, it is the Sanskrit Dharma - "religious duty" and its fulfillment, "righteousness", "piety". Kharms could have known from his father that the pseudonym Mirolubov, under which his preaching books and articles were published, was depicted by him with two words written in Hebrew “peace” and “love”. By analogy with this (and from his own studies in Hebrew), Kharms could associate his pseudonym with the word hrm (herem), which means excommunication (from the synagogue), prohibition, destruction. In view of such values, the above warning (warning) from a father to his son looks quite logical.

It should also be taken into account that Harms from a young age was fond of mythology, history and literature of Ancient Egypt. Traces of this interest will later appear in a multitude and in a peculiar way in his works, and the earliest evidence is already visible in the above-mentioned drawings of 1919, and especially in the drawing of 1924, depicting a certain person with the caption: “That”. This is one of the main Egyptian gods, the god of wisdom and writing, whom the Greeks later identified with Hermes Trismegistus, the bearer of the secret knowledge of all generations of magicians. The transformations that Kharms gave from the very beginning of his work to his pseudonym resemble magical manipulations, which, according to the canons of magic, are necessary so that the true meaning of the name remains a secret from the uninitiated. Thus, it was protected from adverse influences.

"Chinar gazer"

Soon, a no less mysterious part was added to the literary name Daniil Kharms: “plane plane starer” or simply “plane tree”.

At the beginning of 1925, Kharms met (it is not known exactly under what circumstances) the poet A.V. Tufanov (1877-1941), an admirer and successor of V.V. Khlebnikov, author of the book "To Zaumi" (1924). Tufanov in March 1925 founded the "Order of the DSO zaumniks", the core of which included Kharms, who took the title "Look Zaumi".

Through Tufanov, Kharms became close to A.I. Vvedensky (1907-1941), a student of the more orthodox Khlebnikov poet I.G. Terentyev (1892–1937), the creator of a number of agitation plays, including the “actualizing” stage adaptation of The Inspector General, parodied in I. Ilf and E. Petrov.

Tufanov's ideas about a special "perception of space and time" and, as a result, a special language that modern literature should speak, were close to Kharms from the very beginning and had a strong influence on him. During this year, Kharms formed two notebooks of poems, which he submitted on October 9, 1925, along with an application for admission to the Leningrad branch of the All-Russian Union of Poets. On March 26, 1926, the poet Daniil Kharms (Yuvachev) was accepted into it. Among these poems, the caption is often found: plane tree.

This word was coined by Vvedensky, who in 1922 founded a friendly union of "plane trees" together with his former classmates at the L. Lentovskaya gymnasium (Petrograd 10th labor school) Ya. S. Druskin (1902-1980) and L.S. Lipavsky (1904-1941). And they, having received an excellent education, prone to mystical philosophizing and literary creativity, tended to avoid direct and unambiguous formulations and names. None of them has ever given a deciphering of the meaning of the word "plane tree". Therefore, one can only guess: does this word mean a spiritual rank, does it go back to the Slavic root “to create”, etc. etc. Most importantly, Harms, having met these people in the middle of 1925, made friends who remained his closest intellectual and creative associates until the end of his life. L. Lipavsky (under the pseudonym L. Savelyev) and A. Vvedensky will work together with Kharms in children's magazines. J. Druskin in the 1930s will remain the last interlocutor and spiritually close person for Kharms. He will save the writer's archive from destruction.

Kharms, as an outstanding creative person, quickly became weary of Tufanov's apprenticeship: he wanted a broader activity, both creatively and socially. This is what the researchers explain his departure from Tufanov, the organization of the Left Flank, then called the Left Flank, and, finally, the founding of the Academy of Left Classics. Each time it was such an organization in which people of different creative interests certainly participated: artists, musicians, drama artists, cinematographers, dancers and, of course, writers.

In 1926, the Radiks Theater was formed in Leningrad. For the production, the play “My mother is covered in watches”, composed of the works of Kharms and Vvedensky, is chosen. It was supposed to be a synthetic performance with elements of drama, circus, dance, painting. But things did not go beyond the rehearsals of the performance. It was decided to ask for a room for the troupe's rehearsals at the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK), from its head, the famous artist K. Malevich. So in October 1926 Kharms met K. Malevich, and in December of the same year the artist agreed to join another alliance of leftist forces conceived by Kharms. Evidence of Malevich's affectionate feelings remained his dedication to Kharms on his book God Will Not Throw Away (Vitebsk, 1922): "Go ahead and stop progress."

For the first time in a scandalous context, Kharms' name appeared on the pages of the press after his speech on March 28, 1927 at a meeting of the literary circle of the Higher Courses in Art History at the State Institute of Art History. On April 3, a response to this speech appeared: “... on the third day, the meeting of the literary circle ... was of a violent nature. "Planar trees" came - they read poetry. Everything went well. And only occasionally the assembled students laughed or joked in an undertone. Some even clapped their hands. Show the fool the finger and he will laugh. "Chinari" decided that success was assured. "Chinar" Kharms, after reading a few of his poems, decided to find out what effect they produce on the audience.

The "Chinari" were offended and demanded that Berlin be removed from the meeting. The assembly protested unanimously.

Then, having climbed onto a chair, "plane tree" Kharms, a member of the Union of Poets, raising his hand armed with a stick with a "magnificent" gesture, declared:

I don't read in stables and brothels!

The students categorically protested against such hooligan attacks by persons who appear as official representatives of a literary organization at student meetings. They demand that Kharms be expelled from the Union of Poets, believing that there is no place in a legal Soviet organization for those who, at a crowded meeting, dare to compare a Soviet university with a brothel and stables.

Kharms did not retract his words in a statement he wrote to the Union of Poets together with Vvedensky. He explained that he considers his performance to be appropriate for the reception he gave, and the characteristic he gave to the public is a mark.

Judging by the well-known performances of Kharms, he was pleased with the violent activity on the stage, did not frighten, but rather incited the reaction of the public to his extravagant texts and the often shocking form of performances. Of course, the element of provocation was deliberately incorporated by Kharms into his behavior. But in those years it was considered the norm of artistic life. The style of speeches of the Imagists, yesterday's futurists and even Mayakovsky today would be called the buzzword "banter", and then she had the goal of attracting the attention of the public, "surpassing" literary competitors, creating scandalous fame for herself.

OBERIUTs

In 1927, the director of the House of Press, V.P. Baskakov, proposed that the Academy of Left Classics become a section of the House and perform with a big evening, setting the condition: remove the word “left” from the name. Apparently, Kharms and Vvedensky did not really stand for any specific name, so the “Association of Real Art” was immediately invented, which, when reduced (in accordance with the Kharms setting for a game with direct recognition and name), was transformed into OBERIU. Moreover, the letter “y” was added to the abbreviation, as it is now commonly said, “for fun”, which most clearly demonstrates the essence of the creative worldview of the group members.

The date of formation of OBERIU is January 24, 1928, when the evening "Three Left Hours" was held in the Leningrad Press House. It was on it that the Oberiuts first announced the formation of a group representing the “detachment of leftist art”. The literary section of OBERIU included I. Bakhterev, A. Vvedensky, D. Kharms (Yuvachev), K. Vaginov (Wagenheim), N. Zabolotsky, writer B. Levin. Then the composition of the group changed: after the departure of Vaginov, Yu. Vladimirov and N. Tyuvelev joined it. N. Oleinikov, E. Schwartz, as well as artists K. Malevich and P. Filonov were close to the Oberiuts.

At the same time, the first (and last) manifesto of the new literary association saw the light, in which the rejection of traditional forms of poetry was declared, and the views of the Oberiuts on various types of art were stated. It was also stated that the aesthetic preferences of the group members are in the field of avant-garde art.

In the late 1920s, the Oberiuts tried to return to some of the traditions of Russian modernism, in particular futurism, enriching them with grotesqueness and alogism. In defiance of the “socialist realism” implanted in art, they cultivated the poetics of the absurd, anticipating the European literature of the absurd by at least two decades.

It is no coincidence that the poetics of the Oberiuts was based on their understanding of the word "reality". The Declaration of OBERIU said: “Perhaps you will argue that our plots are “not real” and “not logical”? And who said that “everyday” logic is obligatory for art? We are amazed at the beauty of the painted woman, despite the fact that, contrary to anatomical logic, the artist twisted the shoulder blade of his heroine and took her aside. Art has its own logic, and it does not destroy the subject, but helps to know it.”

“True art,” Harms wrote, “stands among the first reality, it creates the world and is its first reflection.” In this understanding of art, the Oberiuts were the "heirs" of the Futurists, who also argued that art exists outside everyday life and utility. Futurism is associated with Oberiut eccentricity and paradox, as well as anti-aesthetic outrageousness, which was fully manifested during public performances.

The evening “Three Left Hours”, according to which the history of OBERIU (very, very short) is counted, was, perhaps, Kharms' benefit performance. In the first part, he read poetry, standing on the lid of a huge lacquered cabinet, and in the second, his play "Elizaveta Bam" was staged. The devastating article by L. Lesnoy remained a reminder of this event, helping to imagine a little the atmosphere of the evening.

In 1928-29, Oberiut performances were held everywhere: in the Circle of Chamber Music Friends, in student dormitories, in military units, in clubs, in theaters and even in prison. Posters with absurdist inscriptions were hung in the hall: “Art is a closet”, “We are not pies”, “2x2 = 5”, and for some reason a magician and a ballerina took part in the concerts.

The famous screenwriter and director K.B. Mintz, who did not work for long in the film section of OBERIU, recalled some of the outrageous actions of the Association as follows:

Artwork for children

At the end of 1927, N. Oleinikov and B. Zhitkov organized the "Association of Writers of Children's Literature" and invited their Oberiut friends, including Kharms, to join it. From 1928 to 1941, D. Kharms constantly collaborated in the children's magazines "Hedgehog" (a monthly magazine), "Chizh" (an extremely interesting magazine), "Cricket" and "Octobers". During this time, he published about 20 children's books.

Many publications about Kharms say that children's works were for the writer something like a "laggard" and were written solely for the sake of earning money (more than meager since the mid-1930s). The fact that Kharms himself attached very little importance to his children's works is evidenced by his diaries and letters. But it is impossible not to admit that poems for children are a natural offshoot of the writer's work and give a kind of outlet for his favorite play element. Does the child attach special importance to the game? Despite their small number, Kharms' children's poems still have the status of a special, unique page in the history of Russian-language children's literature. They were printed through the efforts of S.Ya. Marshak and N. Oleinikov. The attitude of leading criticism towards them, starting with the article in Pravda (1929) "Against hack-work in children's literature", was unequivocal. This is probably why it was necessary to constantly vary and change the pseudonym.

In our opinion, such a characterization of Kharms' children's works is absolutely unfair. More than one generation of young readers read his poems "A man came out of the house", "Ivan Ivanovich Samovar", "Game" and others. Yes, and Kharms himself would never have allowed "hack-work" in literature for children. Children's works were his "calling card". At some stage, they actually created his literary name: after all, during the life of Daniil Kharms, no one knew that in 1927-1930 he wrote much more “adult” things, but, apart from two fleeting publications in collective collections, nothing serious to print did not succeed.

Esther

However, much more than the lack of publications, Kharms in those years was worried about his relationship with his wife. Here, too, much remains unclear for biographers.

Kharms' first wife was Esther Alexandrovna Rusakova (1909-1943). She was the daughter of Alexander Ivanovich Ioselevich (1872-1934), who emigrated in 1905 during the Jewish pogroms from Taganrog to Argentina, and then moved to France, to Marseille (here Esther was born). Anarcho-communist A. I. Rusakov participated in a demonstration of protest against the intervention in 1918 in Soviet Russia. For this he was exiled to his homeland and in 1919 arrived in Petrograd.

The Rusakov family was friends with many writers: A. N. Tolstoy, K. A. Fedin, N. A. Klyuev, N. N. Nikitin. The husband of one of the Rusakovs' daughters, Lyubov, was a well-known Trotskyist, a member of the Comintern, V. L. Kibalchich (Victor Serge; 1890-1947). In 1936, Esther will be arrested precisely for collaborating with Victor Serge and sentenced to 5 years in the camps; On May 27, 1937, she was sent by stage to Nagaevo Bay in SEVVOSTOKLAG.

Harms met Esther in 1925. At this time, despite her young age, she was already married (from Kharms' diary entries and poetic works, it can be judged that the name of Esther's first husband was Mikhail). Having divorced her first husband, Esther married Kharms in 1925 and moved in with him, but now and then "ran away" to her parents, and up to the official divorce in 1932. It was a painful affair for both.

For Kharms, in any case, the torment began almost immediately after his marriage, and in July 1928, when he comes to him, albeit somewhat scandalous, fame and success in children's literature, he writes in his notebook:

At the same time (or because of this?) Esther Rusakova will remain Kharms' most vivid female impression for life, and he will measure all the other women with whom fate will bring him together, only by Esther.

In March 1929, Kharms was expelled from the Union of Poets for non-payment of membership fees, but in 1934 he would be admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers without any problems (member ticket No. 2330).

The end of OBERIU and the first arrest

The real disaster for OBERIU came in the spring of 1930. She was connected with Kharms's performance with friends in the hostel of students of Leningrad University. The Leningrad youth newspaper Smena responded to this speech, in which an article by L. Nilvich appeared with a biting title: “Reactionary juggling (about one outing of literary hooligans)”:

After such aggressive attacks, OBERIU could not exist for a long time. For some time, the most active members of the group - Kharms, Vvedensky, Levin - went into the field of children's literature. N. Oleinikov played a big role here, who, formally not being a member of OBERIU, was creatively close to the association. With the onset of ideological persecution in the 1930s, texts for children became the only published works by Kharms and other Oberiuts.

However, they did not last long in this niche either. The free artistic worldview of the absurdists, their inability to fit into a controlled framework, could not but arouse the displeasure of the authorities. Following the sharp responses to their public speeches in the press, a “discussion about children's literature” took place, where K. Chukovsky, S. Marshak and other “ideologically inconsistent” writers, including young authors of the Lengiz children’s edition, were severely criticized. After that, the Oberiut group ceased to exist as an association.

On December 10, 1931, Kharms, Vvedensky and some other editorial staff were arrested.

What Kharms said about his works during the investigation, he could say in a circle of friends. What was fantastic here was only the circumstances of the place and the utmost sincerity with which the writer characterized his "anti-Soviet" work.

He was sentenced to three years in the camps, but the term was replaced by a short exile. Kharms chose Kursk as his place of residence and stayed there (together with A. Vvedensky, convicted in the same way) in the second half of 1932.

1930s

At the end of 1932 Kharms managed to return to Leningrad. The nature of his work is changing: poetry fades into the background and less and less poetry is written (the last completed poems date back to the beginning of 1938), while prose works (with the exception of the story “The Old Woman”, creations of a small genre) multiply and cycle (“Cases”, “ Scenes”, etc.). In place of the lyrical hero - an entertainer, a ringleader, a visionary and a miracle worker - a deliberately naive narrator-observer appears, impartial to the point of cynicism. Fiction and everyday grotesque reveal the cruel and delusional absurdity of "unattractive reality" (from diaries), and the effect of terrifying authenticity is created by the author, thanks to the scrupulous accuracy of details, gestures, speech facial expressions of the characters. In unison with the diary entries (“the days of my death have come”, etc.), the last stories (“Knights”, “Fall”, “Interference”, “Rehabilitation”) are heard. They are imbued with a sense of complete hopelessness, the omnipotence of half-witted arbitrariness, cruelty and vulgarity.

Upon returning to Leningrad, Kharms resumes friendly communication with the former Oberiuts. “We met regularly - three to five times a month,” Y. Druskin recalled, “mostly at the Lipavskys, or at my place.” Their meetings are a deliberately cultivated form of an endless philosophical, aesthetic and ethical dialogue. Here arguing and defending one's point of view as the only true one were categorically rejected. This was determined not so much by ethics as by ontology: according to the interlocutors, there is no ultimate truth in the earthly world, there can be no unconditional rightness of one in relation to the other: everything is mobile, changeable and multivariate. Hence their skepticism towards science that claims to be an absolute truth, especially the exact sciences. Echoes of this position, as well as the genre of dialogue itself, are found in abundance in the works of Kharms and contain these settings. In 1933-1934, the conversations of the former Oberiuts were recorded by the writer L. Lipavsky and compiled the book Conversations, which was not published during Kharms's lifetime. Also, the collective collection of the Oberiuts "Bath of Archimedes" was not published during the lifetime of the authors.

In 1934, K. Vaginov died. In 1936, A. Vvedensky married a Kharkov woman and went to live with her. On July 3, 1937, in the wake of the case of the murder of Kirov, N. Oleinikov was arrested, and on November 24, N. Oleinikov was shot. 1938 - arrested and exiled to the Gulag N. Zabolotsky. Friends disappeared one by one.

Meanwhile, in the atmosphere of general fear of the second half of the 1930s, Kharms continues to work no less intensively than before in children's magazines, multiplying his pseudonyms under the remaining unpublished "adult" works. He signed children's works with pseudonyms Charms, Shardam, Ivan Toporyshkin and others, never using his real name.

It is impossible not to notice that the rest of Kharms' friends, just like him, who worked intensively in various genres: poetry, prose, drama, essay, philosophical treatise, did not see anything written by them in print. But none of them can find a note of reflection on this matter. It's not that they don't want to see their works in print. It was just that the purpose of writing was itself, the actual act of utterance and, at best, the reaction of the closest friendly circle to it. The aimlessness of creativity is perhaps the best definition for what Harms (and his associates) did in the literature of the 1930s.

In the same years, Kharms compiled several collections of previously written works. In addition to those published in the posthumous collected works of Kharms, his archive has preserved two more collections compiled from previously written texts. They are somewhat similar in their composition, but still differ from each other. The most interesting thing in these collections is that above the title of many of them (and in some individual autographs) there is a badge with a number. In total, there are 38 such numbered texts, and among the icons, the oldest is 43; some numbers not found. According to modern literary critics - researchers of Kharms's work, the explanation for these strange numbers with the "t" sign should be sought in Kharms's occult hobbies. The fact is that verbal interpretations of the meanings of Tarot cards often formed into various books (and Kharms studied them, as is clear from the bibliographic entries in his notebooks). Probably, Kharms, according to the patterns known to him, applied to one or another of his texts a possible interpretation in accordance with one or another Tarot card and thus, as it were, laid out a kind of card solitaire from his works.

"Ignite trouble around you"

In the late 1930s, according to the memoirs of his last friend Ya.S. Druskin, Kharms often repeated the words from the book “The Seeker of Unceasing Prayer, or a Collection of Sayings and Examples from the Books of Holy Scripture” (M., 1904): “Ignite trouble around you.” These words were close to his temperament and mental make-up. Impetuous sincerity and contempt for the opinions of the people around him always guided him. Sacrifice was, according to his concepts, one of the fundamental principles of art creation. He did not hesitate in assessing the impending war and, it seems, foresaw his fate. "Ignite trouble" became, as it were, the writer's goal in itself, a way of conscious suicide.

August 23, 1941 Kharms was arrested for "defeatist statements." Documents about the second arrest and the “case” of Kharms in 1941-42 have not been preserved. According to one version, the writer was declared insane and placed in a psychiatric hospital, where he died of exhaustion on February 2, 1942.

The second wife of Kharms, M. V. Malich, whom he married in 1935, abandoned the archive after her husband’s arrest (during the last search, only correspondence and a few notebooks were seized, and most of the manuscripts survived) and moved to the “writer’s” house on the canal embankment Griboedova, 9. Having learned from her about this, Y. Druskin went from the Petrograd side to Mayakovsky Street to a friend's abandoned apartment. Here he collected all the papers that he could find, put Kharms's manuscripts in a suitcase and carried him through all the vicissitudes of the evacuation. In 1944, Kharms' sister E. Gritsyna handed over to Druskin another part of the Kharms archive, which she found in their apartment. This is how the literary heritage of the writer was preserved from destruction.

Kharms' writings, even printed ones, remained in complete oblivion until the early 1960s, when a collection of his carefully selected children's poems, The Game (1962), was published. After that, for about 20 years they tried to assign him the appearance of a cheerful eccentric, a mass entertainer in the children's part, which was completely inconsistent with his main "adult" works. Even the writer's second wife, Marina Malich (Durnovo), in her memoirs, was sincerely surprised at how many magnificent works Kharms managed to write in the 1930s. She considered her husband not the most successful, "average" children's writer. She, like everyone else, was familiar only with children's poems published in magazines.

The biography of Daniil Kharms begins when the first Russian revolution mercilessly crushed human destinies, and ends at the terrible time of the Leningrad Siege, misunderstood, crossed out by the political regime, betrayed by those whom he considered friends ...

At the time of his birth, our hero was not Kharms yet. His name was Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev. He was born in St. Petersburg on December 30, 1905.

Subsequently, Kharms liked to talk about this moment in the phantasmagoria genre: “I was born in the reeds. Like a mouse. My mother gave birth to me and put me in the water. And I swam. Some kind of fish with four whiskers on its nose circled around me. I cried. Suddenly we saw that porridge was floating on the water. We ate this porridge and started laughing. We had a lot of fun..."

From the first day of his life, Daniel was immersed in a concentrated solution of love and severity. The source of the first was mother Nadezhda Ivanovna Kolyubakina, a comforter of women who survived imprisonment, a noblewoman by birth. Severity came from his father, Ivan Pavlovich Yuvachev, an ex-People's Volunteer who miraculously escaped hanging, and who was cleansed of revolutionary sentiments in a 15-year Sakhalin exile. At his behest, the son studied German and English, read many smart books, and was trained in applied sciences.

In the Petrishule real school, Daniel was known as a good student, not a stranger to pranks, for example, he liked to play the unfortunate "orphan" in front of the teacher in order to avoid punishment. Approximately the same period includes his first literary experience - a funny fairy tale. He wrote it for 4-year-old sister Natalia, whose early death was the first strong shock for the future poet.

The bright time of childhood was cut short - the year 1917 broke out. After long journeys around the country, the Yuvachevs returned to St. Petersburg, which became Petrograd. Daniil worked at the Botkin hospital, studied at the Children's and Rural Labor School and wrote the first poems, which were more like a heap of nonsense. Father, brought up on Pushkin and Lermontov, was horrified. Surrounding the young man seemed quite adult.

His unwillingness to be "like everyone else" was especially striking. Daniel was distinguished by originality in clothes, oddities in behavior. And, it seems, he personified himself with someone else, but this “someone” had so many names that it was easy to get confused in them. The most important of them appeared on the flyleaf of one of the Bibles - "Harms" (from the English "harm"). There are several versions of its origin. According to one of them, he was “prompted” to the writer by Sherlock Holmes, whom he admired from the age of 12.

At that time, everything “English” interested him: at the age of 17, Daniel attracted the attention of young maidens with a “ceremonial suit” with a hint of English style: a brown jacket with light specks, golf trousers, long socks and yellow boots with high soles. This “stylistic madness” was crowned by a pipe in the corner of the mouth, which did not know fire.

Daniil Kharms - Biography of personal life

A lot can be said about a person by his “love”. The absolute "love" of Daniil Ivanovich was women - with magnificent forms, witty, with a sense of humor. He early married the beautiful Esther Rusakova, and although the relationship was difficult (he cheated on her, she was jealous), he retained tender feelings for her. In 1937 she was sentenced to five years in the camps and died in Magadan a year later.

The second official wife was Marina Malich, a more patient and calm woman. Thanks to her and Kharms' friend Yakov Druskin, today we can read the writer's notebooks, his early and rare works.

From an early age, Kharms gravitated toward Westernism. One of his favorite pranks was to "play a foreigner."

He radiated an inexplicable magnetism, although the photographs of those years captured a roughly hewn face with heavy brow ridges and piercing bright eyes buried deep under them. The mouth, like an upturned crescent moon, gave the face the expression of a tragic theatrical mask. Despite this, Harms was known as a sparkling joker.

One of the writer's friends told how in the spring of 1924 he went to Daniel. He offered to take a walk along Nevsky, but before that he went into the barn, grabbed a leg from the table, then asked a friend to paint his face - he depicted mugs, triangles and other geometric objects on the poet's face. “Write down what passers-by say,” Harms said, and they went for a walk. Passers-by for the most part shied away from a strange couple, but Daniil liked it.

If pranks were meant to be a means of expressing the rebellious soul of the avant-garde writer, then the "playing schizophrenic" in 1939 had a vital goal: to avoid being drafted into military service and escape from the persecution of the OGPU. It noticed Kharms in the fall of 1924 after a speech at an evening dedicated to Gumilyov's work. Then they just "talked" to him.

And on December 10, 1931, everything was serious: arrest, investigative actions, cruel torture. As a result, Kharms "confessed" to anti-Soviet activities - he spoke about his "sins": writing hacky children's works, creating a literary movement called "zaum" and attempts to restore the former political system, while diligently indicating all "appearances, names, passwords." He was sentenced to three years in a concentration camp. Father saved - the concentration camp was replaced with a link to Kursk.

Returning to Leningrad, Kharms found the ranks of yesterday's friends fairly thinned out: some died, others were imprisoned, someone managed to slip away abroad. He felt that the end was close, but he continued to live to the fullest: fall in love with all the magnificent women, write poetry, mostly children's, only he was paid tolerably for them. It's funny that Harms didn't really like children, but they simply adored him. When he entered the stage of the Leningrad Palace of Pioneers, he warmed up the hall with real tricks. This caused a flurry of delight.

In 1941 they came for him again. Harms knew that it was not the denunciation that Antonina Oranzhireeva, the closest friend of Anna Akhmatova, the official informer of the OGPU, wrote about him. He himself, his "avant-gardism", unwillingness to keep pace with the rest - that's what drove those others to fury. And they won't rest while he's alive.

Daniel's father died, there was no one to intercede for the writer, many friends turned away from him, remembering his "confession". They could have shot him, but the diagnosis “played” by him - schizophrenia - came to the rescue. It is impossible to imagine a more terrible departure: he, a descendant of a noble family, an extraordinary, talented person, was treated like a criminal. Forced to go through physical and mental humiliation...

The prisoners of the "Crosses", as well as all the inhabitants of the besieged Leningrad, relied on 150 grams of bread per day. In the ice cell of the prison hospital, the hunted, exhausted and helpless Kharms was waiting in line for transportation to Kazan, where the mentally ill were "treated". But they simply forgot about him, as well as about other prisoners of the "Crosses", during these terrible blockade days - they stopped feeding him, thereby dooming him to a painful death.

The cardiogram of Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev-Kharms straightened out on February 2, 1942. The cold body of the one-of-a-kind poet was found a few days later, lying alone on the floor of a hospital cell.

Only in 1960 did some changes take place in his biography: by a decision of the Leningrad prosecutor's office, Kharms was found not guilty, his case was closed for lack of corpus delicti, and he himself was rehabilitated.

By the mid-1990s, Kharms firmly occupies the place of one of the main representatives of Russian art literature of the 1920s and 1930s, in fact opposed to Soviet literature.

Born December 17 (30), 1905 in St. Petersburg. His father, when he was a naval officer, was brought to trial in 1883 for complicity in the Narodnaya Volya terror, spent four years in solitary confinement and more than ten years in hard labor, where, apparently, he experienced a religious conversion: along with memoirs Eight years on Sakhalin ( 1901) and Shlisselburg Fortress (1907), he published mystical treatises Between the World and the Monastery (1903), Secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven (1910) and others. Kharms's mother, a noblewoman, was in charge of a shelter for former convicts in St. Petersburg in the 1900s. Kharms studied at the St. Petersburg privileged German school (Petershule), where he acquired a thorough knowledge of German and English. In 1924 he entered the Leningrad Electrotechnical School, from where he was expelled a year later for "weak attendance" and "inactivity in public works." Since then, he devoted himself entirely to writing and lived exclusively by literary earnings. The versatile self-education accompanying writing, with a special focus on philosophy and psychology, as his diary testifies, proceeded extremely intensively.

Initially, he felt the “power of poetry” in himself and chose poetry as his field, the concept of which was determined by him under the influence of the poet A.V. Tufanov (1877–1941), admirer and successor of V.V. ) and the founder (in March 1925) of the Order of Zaumnikov, the core of which included Kharms, who took the title “Look Zaumi.” Through Tufanov, he became close to A. Vvedensky, a student of the more orthodox poet “Khlebnikov” and admirer A. Kruchenykh I.G. .Terentiev (1892–1937), the creator of a number of agitation plays, including the “actualizing” stage adaptation of the Inspector General, parodied in the Twelve Chairs by I. Ilf and E. Petrov. Harms had a strong friendship with Vvedensky, who, sometimes without any particular reason, took on the role of Harms' mentor. However, the direction of their work, which is related in terms of literary searches, is fundamentally different from beginning to end: Vvedensky develops and maintains a didactic orientation, while Kharms's is dominated by play. This is evidenced by his first well-known poetic texts: Kika with Koka, Vanka Vstanka, the grooms and the poem Mikhaila invented the earth.

Vvedensky provided Kharms with a new circle of constant communication, introducing him to his friends L. Lipavsky and Y. Druskin, graduates of the philosophical department of the Faculty of Social Sciences, who refused to renounce their teacher, the prominent Russian philosopher N.O. to develop his ideas of self-value of personality and intuitive knowledge. Their views undoubtedly influenced Kharms's worldview, for more than 15 years they were the first listeners and connoisseurs of Kharms, during the blockade Druskin miraculously saved his compositions.

Back in 1922, Vvedensky, Lipavsky and Druskin founded a tripartite alliance and began to call themselves "plane trees"; in 1925 they were joined by Kharms, who from “gazing zaumi” became “plane-gazer” and quickly gained scandalous fame in the circles of avant-garde writers under his newly invented pseudonym, which became the plural of the English word “harm” - “misfortune”. Subsequently, he signed his works for children in other ways (Charms, Shardam, etc.), but he never used his own surname. The pseudonym was also fixed in the introductory questionnaire of the All-Russian Union of Poets, where Kharms was accepted in March 1926 on the basis of the submitted poetic works, two of which (The Case on the Railroad and the Poem of Peter Yashkin, a Communist) managed to be printed in small-circulation collections of the Union. In addition to them, until the end of the 1980s, only one “adult” work of Kharms was published in the USSR - the poem Mary comes out, having bowed (Sat. Poetry Day, 1965).

As a member of the literary association, Kharms got the opportunity to read his poems, but he took advantage of it only once, in October 1926 - other attempts were in vain. The playful beginning of his poems stimulated their dramatization and stage performance: in 1926, together with Vvedensky, he prepared a synthetic performance of the avant-garde theater "Radix" My mother is all in hours, but things did not go beyond rehearsals. Kharms met K. Malevich, and the head of Suprematism presented him with his book God will not throw off with the inscription "Go and stop progress." Kharms read his poem On the Death of Kazimir Malevich at a memorial service for the artist in 1936. Kharms' gravitation towards the dramatic form was expressed in the dialogization of many poems (Temptation, Paw, Revenge, etc.), as well as in the creation of the Comedy of the City of Petersburg and the first predominantly prose work - a play by Elizaveta Bam, presented on January 24, 1928 at the only evening of the "Association of Real Art" (OBERIU), which, in addition to Kharms and Vvedensky, included N. Zabolotsky, K. Vaginov and I. Bakhterev, and to which N. Oleinikov joined - with him Kharms developed a special intimacy. The association was unstable, lasted less than three years (1927-1930), and Kharms' active participation in it was rather external, not affecting his creative principles in any way. The characterization given to him by Zabolotsky, the compiler of the OBERIU manifesto, is vague: "a poet and playwright whose attention is focused not on a static figure, but on the collision of a number of objects, on their relationships."

At the end of 1927, Oleinikov and B. Zhitkov organized the "Association of Writers of Children's Literature" and invited Kharms to join it; from 1928 to 1941 he constantly collaborated in the children's magazines "Hedgehog", "Chizh", "Cricket" and "October", during which time he published about 20 children's books. These works are a natural offshoot of Kharms' work and give a kind of outlet for his playful element, but, as his diaries and letters testify, they were written exclusively for earnings (more than meager since the mid-1930s) and the author did not attach much importance to them. They were published through the efforts of S.Ya. Marshak, the attitude of leading criticism towards them, starting with an article in Pravda (1929) Against hack work in children's literature, was unequivocal. This is probably why it was necessary to constantly vary and change the pseudonym.

His unpublished works were regarded by the Smena newspaper in April 1930 as "poetry of a class enemy", the article became a harbinger of Kharms's arrest at the end of 1931, the qualification of his literary pursuits as "subversive work" and "counter-revolutionary activity" and exile to Kursk. In 1932 he managed to return to Leningrad. The nature of his work is changing: poetry fades into the background and less and less poetry is written (the last completed poems date back to the beginning of 1938), while prose works (with the exception of the story of the Old Woman, creations of a small genre) multiply and cycle (Cases, Scenes, etc.). ). In place of the lyrical hero - an entertainer, a ringleader, a visionary and a miracle worker - a deliberately naive narrator-observer appears, impartial to the point of cynicism. Fiction and everyday grotesque reveal the cruel and delusional absurdity of "unattractive reality" (from diaries), and the effect of terrifying authenticity is created due to the scrupulous accuracy of details, gestures, and speech mimics. In unison with diary entries (“the days of my death have come”, etc.), the last stories (Knights, Falling, Interference, Rehabilitation) are imbued with a feeling of complete hopelessness, the omnipotence of crazy arbitrariness, cruelty and vulgarity.

In August 1941 Harms was arrested for "defeatist remarks".

Kharms' writings, even printed ones, remained in complete oblivion until the early 1960s, when a collection of his carefully selected children's poems, The Game (1962), was published. After that, for about 20 years they tried to assign him the appearance of a cheerful eccentric, a mass entertainer in the children's part, which was completely inconsistent with his "adult" writings. Since 1978, his collected works have been published in Germany, prepared on the basis of saved manuscripts by M. Meilakh and V. Erl. By the mid-1990s, Kharms firmly occupies the place of one of the main representatives of Russian art literature of the 1920s and 1930s, in fact opposed to Soviet literature.