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Kharms walks

Daniil Kharms -- Даниил Хармс (1905-1942)

Collected works (in Russian, English and German)

Prepared by Serge Winitzki

Complete works (in Russian) -- Полное собрание сочинений
Pre-release: documents and diary entries are not finished.

Случаи     Старуха (Повесть)     Рассказы и сценки     Стихотворения     Пьесы     Произведения для детей     Письма     Дневники     Документы     Фото и рисунки     О Хармсе    
[всё в HTML     всё в ASCII]

Collected English translations

Incidences     The Old Woman     Selected prose     Other works     About Kharms    
[all in HTML]

Collected German translations -- Uebersetzungen ins Deutsch

Auswahl    

On the Web

Хармс у Мошкова     Die Charms-Seite von Wolfgang Schwarz     Kharms in Esperanto     Kharms in Danish     "The link"

Preparer's notes

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.
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. The individual pieces of text are put inside large HTML-formatted files (in no particular order since this is not intended for printing). All Russian texts are in KOI8 encoding. In addition, there is a single zip file with all texts in plain ASCII. 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.

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.