Daniil Kharms (Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev, 1905-1942) was a Russian
poet and author now considered a classic of the Russian absurd literature of
the 1930s. He was arrested in 1941 on false charges, was "determined" to be
insane and died of maltreatment and starvation in a psychiatric ward as St.
Petersburg (then Leningrad) was besieged by the Nazis.
I have collected the complete works of Daniil
Kharms in Russian (as well as translations into English). Please consider sending me any texts that
are not already here. All texts currently on this page either came from
existing online sources (such as the book
of Kharms's prose and poetry encoded in KOI-7, also available here, and
the second
book of collected works), or were prepared by myself. The works are
roughly categorized by genre and indexed in alphabetical
rather than in chronological order, hopefully making the collection
easier to use. I would appreciate your comments on the organization and
content of this page.
For the academics among us: there is some controversy concerning the
orthography and punctuation in many of Kharms's writing, aggravated by the
fact that most of it survived only in author's draft manuscripts. (It is also
difficult to draw a line between finished and unfinished works, for the same
reason.) Some scholars view the many apparent orthographical mistakes as
evidence that Kharms "couldn't spell" (chances are he was in fact dyslexic),
while others contend that these misspellings are intentional deviations from
the normative orthography. To quote Kharms: "If told, that you have
misspelt a word, answer: Thus it always appears in my writing." [The
recent edition of Kharms's complete works by V. Sazhin seems to take a more
extreme position, namely that neither Kharms's writing nor the editorial
comments, preface or other published text should be proof-read before
printing. If not for this fact, I would be inclined to believe in the
authenticity of spelling in Sazhin's edition.] I took the texts from
different sources, and some of them but not others may have been "corrected"
after contemporary orthography and punctuation. Therefore the disclaimer applies to the whole collection.
As for completeness, an academic edition of complete works would
have comments, variants, drafts and so on. My collection contains very
few variant works and almost no comments, and quite a few unfinished
pieces may be missing. However, all of Kharms's finished works and most
of the interesting drafts are present, and this certainly includes all
"significant" works.
Finally, a few words about the presentation format. Because
geocities.com did not allow (until recently) to make subdirectories, the
individual pieces are put inside big HTML-formatted files (in no
particular order since this is not intended for printing). Everything is
in KOI8 encoding. In addition, there is a single
zip file with all texts in plain ASCII (windows encoding). I will
make a more browser-friendly version with many small files when time
permits. The ASCII version is the source from which the HTML was
automatically produced.
All Russian texts are in KOI-8 encoding.
Disclaimer
The text, as prepared for the Web by Serge Winitzki, is an imprecise
rendition of the original work and may contain errors, despite proofreading. May
be used for information purposes only. Distribute for free, but always
together with this notice and in unchanged form.
NB: Этот текст, подготовленный Сергеем Виницким, приблизительно
воспроизводит авторский и может содержать ошибки, несмотря на вычитку. Его
можно использовать только для ознакомления с работой автора.
Распространяйте бесплатно, но обязательно вместе с этим добавлением и в
неизменённом виде.