ESSAY
Soviet Deadpan
By GEORGE SAUNDERS

NEW YORK TIMES
Published: December 9, 2007

Daniil Kharms’s brilliantly weird stories, written during Stalin’s terror, reflect an aesthetic and a political crisis.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/books/review/Saunders-t.html

Let us consider Daniil Kharms, the Russian writer often described as an absurdist, largely unpublished in his lifetime except for his children’s books, who starved to death in the psychiatric ward of a Soviet hospital during the siege of Leningrad, having been put there by the Stalinist government for, among other reasons, his general strangeness. Kharms gave flamboyant poetry readings from the top of an armoire, did performance art on the Nevsky Prospect — by, for example, lying down on it, sometimes dressed as Sherlock Holmes — and was a founder of the Union of Real Art, an avant-garde group also known as Oberiu. His brilliant, hilarious, violent little stories, written “for the drawer,” are now being discovered in the West through translations by Neil Cornwell (collected in “Incidences”) and by Matvei Yankelevich, whose anthology “Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms” (Overlook, $29.95) has just been published.

Kharms’s stories are truly odd, as in: at first you think they’re defective. They seem to cower at the suggestion of rising action, to blush at the heightened causality that makes a story a story. They sometimes end, you feel, before they’ve even begun. Here, in Yankelevich’s translation, is the entire text of “The Meeting”:

“Now, one day a man went to work and on the way he met another man, who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was heading back home where he came from.

“And that’s it, more or less.”

Bring that into workshop! You’ll get slaughtered. Crickets will sound in the seminar room. Someone will say, “I guess I’d like to know more about the Polish bread.” No starving former lover crosses the path of our man as he brings home the bread to his own hungry family; no child needs to be pulled from the Neva; the man does not pass the open door of a shoemaker’s shop, inside of which the shoemaker is berating his wife, which makes our man contemplate his own troubled marriage, as he has a meaningful flashback to his honeymoon, crushing the bread in sudden angst.

Again and again, Kharms shuffles up to the place in Freytag’s Triangle where the rising action bursts upward, then turns and hustles back the way he came. Read enough Kharms and you soon begin to recognize this refusal to play the game as his intentional aesthetic, and wonder: So, what is the meaning of this refusal to play?

When I first discovered Kharms, my answer (like the answer of many readers and critics before me) was, These stories are an absurdist response to the brutality of his times. (In the face of unimaginable savagery, traditional story conventions are quaint, even reactionary.) Kharms’s work is certainly random and violent enough. In one story, five-plus people (four, plus “the Spiridonov children”) die in the first five sentences. In another, a succession of women fall out the same window and shatter on impact — six in all, until the narrator gets bored with all these falling, shattering babushkas and wanders off.

But it occurs to me — inspired by Yankelevich’s excellent introduction — that Kharms might be writing the same way were he with us today, dressed as Matlock, lying down on Park Avenue. That is, weirdness this deep seems more likely to stem from an aesthetic crisis than a political one. What exactly was Kharms’s crisis? He was spooked by the dishonesty of the moment of necessary falsification.

Stories are, in a sense, a scam. There was never a clerk as unconflicted, docile and pathetic as Akaki Akakievich, but from the subterfuge that such a man could exist, Gogol made the wonder that is “The Overcoat.” Ghosts don’t show up to save the stingy, and many stingy die unsaved, but “a stingy guy stayed stingy, then died” is not a story, and is certainly not “A Christmas Carol.” Princes don’t invite their entire kingdoms to the palace, but if at least one doesn’t, our story is “Once upon a time Cinderella miserably cleaned, forever and ever.”

All of us who write fiction have, I suspect, felt some resistance to this moment of necessary artifice. But for Kharms this moment hardened into a kind of virtuous paralysis. I imagine him looking out his little window there in St. Petersburg, seeing people walking around out there in those Russian hats, and just as he’s about to invent some “meaningful,” theme-causing things for them to do, he freezes up, because per his observations, such meaningful, drama-exuding things do not happen so tidily in reality.

When his stories proceed — if they proceed at all — it is often by way of a kind of comic language-momentum. A riff will appear, and an elaboration of that riff will follow, along language lines rather than sense lines. In “Blue Notebook #10,” for example, Kharms starts out conventionally enough (“There was a redheaded man ...”) but then, as if reacting against all the common ways a writer might further describe this redheaded man, veers off in a mini-critique of the descriptive tradition itself. This redheaded man, we learn, “had no eyes or ears.” Succumbing to a strange frequency in his underlying logic, Kharms begins Kharmsifying: “He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily.” By the end of the story — a scant two paragraphs later — our poor redheaded man has also been shorn of his mouth, nose, arms, legs, stomach, back, spine and insides. “There was nothing!” Kharms crisply concludes. “So, we don’t even know who we’re talking about. We’d better not talk about him anymore.”

In the process of pounding a nail, Kharms has vaporized his own hammer.

Art requires artifice, but certain souls balk at artifice the way a horse balks at a snake-smelling stall. Stories make emotion and moral truth, or the illusion of these, but reading Kharms we sense his fear that the smallest false step at the beginning, magnified over the course of the tale, might produce monstrous results: falsity clothed as truth, whistling in the dark, propaganda or (worst of all) banality.

Kharms’s work is exhilarating, especially in a time when, if Beckett were alive, he might find himself on television leading a panel discussion about “People Who Have Waited Too Long for Someone!” It’s good to be reminded that fiction is more than just a device for transmitting information or learning about reality or dissecting problems. Fiction is about simultaneously outing and satisfying our innate desire for narrative. Kharms, admittedly, does more of the former than the latter. Exiting a Kharms story, we are newly aware of how hungry we are for rising action, and we have a fresh respect for, and (importantly) suspicion of, storytelling itself. We’re reminded that narrative is not life, but a trick a writer does with language, to make beauty.

Here is Kharms, standing, saw in hand, before the woman in the box. He thinks of all the other magicians who have worked so hard over the centuries to be appearing to saw her in half, then puts down the saw, mutters, “Well, I could do it, but I’m not sure it’s honest,” and leaves the stage.

But wonderfully, even this refusal to saw constitutes a story of sorts. And it’s the kind of story Kharms writes again and again, until, having read too much Kharms at one sitting, you feel like saying: “Daniil, Daniil, you’re going to starve to death before you’re 38! Dude, get cracking! Write your masterwork!”

Then you realize he’s already done it.

Reading Kharms makes us look askance at more traditional stories. We see more clearly what they are: beautiful reductions. They are more substantial, yes, more moving, more consoling. But his work constitutes a kind of noble boundary, the limit to which stories can go before succumbing to the necessary falsification — dozens of small crouching men, misshapen but dignified, refusing, forever, to jump.

George Saunders is the author, most recently, of “The Braindead Megaphone,” a collection of essays. He teaches creative writing at Syracuse University.