How to use this Page

The Daniil Kharms revival continues with a feature story by Daniel Kalder on the Guardian Unlimited website. Today I Wrote Nothing, edited and translated by Matvei Yankelevich, was also included in Billy Heller's "Required Reading" column in The New York Post. And the excellent blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Arts & Letters Daily, is featuring the George Saunders essay in The New York Times Book Review.

George Saunders considers Daniil Kharms in a long endpage essay in this week's The New York Times Sunday Book Review. Recently published to rave reviews, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, was edited and translated by Matvei Yankelevich. For the first time, English-language readers now have a comprehensive collection of the prose and poetry that secured Kharms’s literary reputation as one of the most brilliant and iconoclastic writers of the Soviet era.

Marjorie Perloff points out Today I Wrote Nothing as one of the "Books of the Year" in this week's issue of The Times Literary Supplement (TLS): "A dazzling book that gives me new hope for an avant garde writing that speaks to a larger audience. The Russian OBERIU poet Daniil Kharms, whose writings went unpublished in his lifetime (1905-42), was, as Matvei Yankelevich, the excellent editor and translator of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, remarks, much more than a 'Stalinist victim' or Soviet absurdist."

Today we offer a short excerpt from Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, edited and translated by Matvei Yankelevich. Long heralded as one of the most iconoclastic writers of the Soviet era, Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) was born in St. Petersburg and grew up amidst the Bolshevick revolution. As a young man, he became well known, along with other writers in the OBERIU movement that he founded, as an eccentric poet and performer of the early Soviet literary scene. He died of starvation while incarcerated by the state on suspicion of anti-Soviet activities. Today I Wrote Nothing, just published by The Overlook Press, is the first comprehensive collection of prose and poetry by Daniil Kharms in the English language.

The latest issue of The New Yorker features excerpts from Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms.

Born in St. Petersburg in 1905, Daniil Kharms was one of the founders, in 1928, of OBERIU, or Association of Real Art, an avant-garde group of writers and artists who embraced the ideas of the Futurists and believed that art should operate outside the rules of logic. In his lifetime, Kharms produced several works for children, but his writing for adults was not published. In 1931, Kharms was charged with anti-Soviet activities and briefly exiled from Leningrad. In 1941, he was arrested by the N.K.V.D. for making “defeatist statements”; sentenced to incarceration in the psychiatric ward of a prison hospital, he died of starvation the following year, during the siege of Leningrad. It wasn’t until the late nineteen-seventies that Kharms’s playful and poetic work began to appear in mainstream publications in Russia. Several books followed, as did festivals in Kharms’s honor and critical comparisons to Beckett, Camus, and Ionesco.

The gentleman translator of The Overlook Press' forthcoming Fall 2007 title TODAY I WROTE NOTHING: THE SELECTED WRITING OF DANIIL KHARMS visited our offices and graced our conference room today. Check out the video, featuring a reading of "Blue Notebook #10" from the piping-hot galleys that have just arrived.