Kharms short stories about Pushkin
Someone has collected some short (very short) stories that Daniil Kharms wrote and put them online, including some about Pushkin: 1. Pushkin was a poet and was always writing something. Once Zhukovsky caught him at his writing and exclaimed loudly: – You’re not half a scribbler! From then on Pushkin ...
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Matvei Yankelevich in Stop Smiling
The latest issue of Stop Smiling has an excellent interview with Matvei Yankelevich about his translation of Daniil Kharms’s Today I Wrote Nothing. A good portion of the interview consists of Yankelevich talking about the process of translation and other translations of Russian literature, including this bit ...
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George Saunders on Daniil Kharms
It’s a few days old now, but the New York Times review of Daniil Kharms’s Today I Wrote Nothing is worth checking out. Saunders does a good job of explaining how Kharms isn’t simply an “absurdist,” but an author who basically objected to the essential artifice of fiction: All of us who ...
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Daniil Kharms in the NY Sun
It seems like a while since my last Ben Lytal post . . . Thankfully today in the NY Sun he has an interesting review of Daniil Kharms’s Today I Wrote Nothing, edited and translated by Matvei Yankelevich. Kharms was part of the OBERIU—a group of avant-garde, Russian writers, who are often categorized as ...
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Kharms Excerpt
The Winged Elephant has an excerpt of the new Kharms book that, like most of Kharms’s writing, is short, precise, hysterical and fantastic. This is all I can comfortably quote here without violating free use rules: One day Orlov stuffed himself with mashed peas and died. When a story opens like that, you ...
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The New Yorker, Bringing the International Fiction
Now if they’d only get rid of the lame cartoons, I’d really like the New Yorker. Anyway, on top of the Kunkel review of Robert Walser, this week’s New Yorker includes some pieces from the OBERIU-founding, grand-absurdist Daniil Kharms. Any Kharms books, stories, excerpts you can get your hands on are ...
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