DANIIL KHARMS

The Plummeting Old Women by Daniil Kharms is a collection of stories, incidents, dialogues and fragments that forms an important part of the buried literature of Russian modernism now revealed under glasnost. These texts are characterized by a startling and macabre novelty, with elements of the grotesque, fantastic and child-like touching the imagination of the everyday. They express the cultural landscape of Stalinism years of show trials, mass atrocities and stifled political life. Their painful, unsettling eloquence testify to the humane and the comic in this absurdist writers work. The translator Neil Cornwell gives a biographical introduction to his subject, enlarged upon by the poet Hugh Maxton in a contextual assessment of the writing of Flann OBrien, Le Fanu and Doyle, and of their shared concerns with detective fiction, terror and death. Daniil Kharms (1905-42) died under Stalin. Along with fellow poets and prose-writers of the era Khlebnikov, Biely, Mandelstam, Zabolotsky and Pasternak he is one of the emerging experimentalists of Russian modernism.

"Em va passar un cas sorprenent: de cop vaig oblidar que va abans, el 7 o el 8. Vaig anar a veure els vens i els vaig preguntar quina opinió tenien ells respecte a aquest tema. I quina fou la seva i la meva sorpresa quan van descobrir que ells tampoc no podien recordar l’ordre dels numeros. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 i 6 els recordaven, pero mes enlla els havien oblidat."