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Steven Cassedy Daniil Kharms's Parody Of STEVEN CASSEDY DANIIL KHARMS'S PARODY OF DOSTOEVSKII: ANTI-TRAGEDY AS POLITICAL COMMENT When Daniil Kharms wrote his short story "Starukha" in mid-1939, he probably had no idea that it would be among his last works, but he proba- bly would not have been surprised, either. Fortune had never been kind to the' small group of writers who, in late 1927, took the name Oberiu (Ob'°edi- nenie real nogo iskusstpa). Nikolai Zabolotskii, with Kharms perhaps the best known member of the group today, was lucky enough to survive World War II. Others were not so fortunate, and many met their end in a manner so charac- teristic of the period as to be almost tedious in the telling: two, Konstantin Vaginov and Iurii Vladimirov, died of tuberculosis in the mid-1920s, one, Aleksandr Vvedenskii. was shot while in exile. Kharms himself was one of that group of Russians who owed their cruel lot as much to enemies abroad as to their own government at home: he starved to death in 1942, while a politi- cal prisoner during the Siege of Leningrad. The enforced oblivion which awaited Kharms and his fellow writers after death was almost as unkind as the dreary fate which ruled and unceremonious- ly ended their lives and careers. It is only fitting, then, in a wry way, that when this group of quasi-Futurists experienced a revival in the mid-1960s, the enthusiasm should be short-lived and the critical response disappointing. Much of the work in the Soviet Union has tended either to be anecdotal or to concentrate on the heroic and patriotic efforts of Kharms and his fellows in the area of children's literature-an area to which, of course, they were driv- en when their "serious" work was no longer held in favor.1 In the West the Oberiuty have, for the most part, been the subject of passing references in comprehensive treatments of Russian modernism, or have been treated in stu- dies which, because of the very scarcity of additional secondary material, have not been able to go beyond the introductory and informational aspects of the subject.22 1. See, for example, the short appreciative essay of Boris Slutskii, "0 Kharmse," lunost', 9 (1968), 106. An essay by N. Khalatov, which appears at the end of Kharms's collection of children's poems, Chto eto bylo (Moscow: Malysh, 1967), although it refers enigmatically to Kharms's "disappearance" and subsequent "rehabilitation" (in 1956), also concentrates largely on his writings for children. 2. One example of a very thorough and concise article of this sort is R. R. Milner-Gul- land, " 'Left Art' in Leningrad: The OBERIU Declaration," Oxford Slavonic Papers, N.S. 3 (1970), 65-75. The few pages which accompany the Russian text of the Oberiu mani- festo contain many valuable references and much biographical information on the vari- ous members of the group. There have been a few exceptions, however. The Soviet scholar, Anatolii Aleksandrov, who did much of the pioneering work on Kharms and the Ober- iuty, has called attention to the union of the catastrophic and tragi-comic in Kharms.3 Aleksandr Flaker, in an excellent study of Kharm's short stories,4 mentions the "de-hierarchization of genres and styles,"5 Kharm's "parodi- stic relationship with canonical prose,"6 his retreat from moral and ethical problems, and describes Kharms's fictional world as one governed by habi- tual, rather than by logical, connections. George Gibian, in his excellent intro- duction to Russia's Lost Literature of the Absurd, which introduced the Obe- -rJ1!_�u the West, gives some useful indications on the style of Kharms.7 A short piece by Elena Sokol devoted to Kharms's prose8 describes how Kharms blends illusion and reality and "reduces ordinary situations to the absurd, most often through repetition of action, Gogolian non sequitur, and inconclu- sive endings."9 Finally, Alice Stone Nakhimovski, in the only full-length stu- dy to my knowledge devoted to "Starukha," has given a thoughtful discussion to the serious, religious dimension in Kharms's late story.10 After surveying the astoundingly small body of critical literature on Kharms himself and the even smaller body of references to "Starukha," one is left with the impression that the absurd, the unmotivated, and the gro- tesque in Kharms's writing have so captured the attention of most critics as virtually to eclipse any serious level of meaning or anything as clearly founded in the real world as a political comment. While it is true that the studies I have mentioned each allude briefly to the political context of Kharms's writ- ing and, in certain cases, even state that the context is evident from the style, 3. Anatolii Aleksandrov, "Oberiu. Predvaritel'nye zametki," Ceskoslovenskd rusistika, 13, No. 5 (1968), 296-303. 4. Aleksandr Flaker, "0 rasskazakh Daniila Kharmsa," ibid., 14, No. 2 (1969), 78-84. 5. bid., p. 79. 6.Ibid., p. 81. 7. Russia's Lost Literature of the Absurd: Selected Works of Daniil Kharms and Alex- ander Yvedensky, trans. and ed. George Gibian (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 1-38. 8. Elena Sokol, "Observations on the Prose of Daniil Xarms," Proceedings of the Pa- cific Northwest Conference on Foreign Languages, 26, No. 1 (19??), 179-83. 9.Ibid., p. 180. 10. Alice Stone Nakhimovsky, "The Ordinary, the Sacred, and the Grotesque in Dan- iil Kharms's The Old Woman," Slavic Review, 37, No. 2 (1978), 203-16. Nakhimovsky's study is especially valuable in pointing to the serious side of Kharms's work in general. She sees "Starukha" as an expression of the author's genuine religious faith. While I would allow this as a possibility, my analysis of the story differs from hers primarily in the emphasis on narrative form and its political significance. Since I attach greater impor- tance to the parodistic elements in Kharms (seen for their serious implications), the one point where I differ most strongly with Nakhimovsky is in her assertion that the profes- sion of faith at the conclusion of the story, which I see as unmotivated and gratuitous, represents a "miracle" leading to an "acknowledgment of the presence of God." .
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