Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writing of Daniil Kharms (Hardcover)

by Daniil Kharms (Author), Matvei Yankelevich (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In this surprising new collection of Soviet writer Kharms's short pieces, including poetry and journal entries (one of which appeared in the New Yorker earlier this month), readers will find echoes of Beckett, Ionesco and Kafka, among others. Indeed, Kharms (1905–1942) was part the OBERIU (Association of Real Art), a Soviet artists' collective often described as Absurdist in orientation. A self-proclaimed member of the avant-garde, Kharms made often violent nonsense out of everyday life. In 1931, he was briefly exiled because his work did not promote Socialist Realism, as Yankelovich explains in an informative introduction. Kharms's life suffered a complete reversal after his return, a fact that shows in his writing. There's a youthful showiness to the earliest work that is replaced by a more fierce desperation in the later years, when Kharms often went hungry and knew his work would not be published. The book's wonderfully contradictory title, is in unexpected contrast to the weary resignation of a journal entry: Today I wrote nothing. Doesn't matter. Yankelovich, who provides the fine translations, makes much of the dramatic possibilities inherent in the work but almost combatively refuses to read any political meaning into his subject's writings, which alternate between playfulness and a sense of futility. (Oct.)
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Review
"Echoes of Beckett, Ionesco and Kafka...Yankelevich, who provides the fine translations, makes much of the dramatic possibilities inherent in the work." -- Publishers Weekly

"Kharms is a constant, invigorating surprise-a slap in the face, or a knock on the head." -- Christopher Sorrentino, author of Trance

"Kharms's Nothing has the power that binds atoms." -- Amy Fusselman, author of 8

"Kharms's playful and poetic work...[draws] critical comparisons to Beckett, Camus, and Ionesco." -- The New Yorker

"Kharms's shock-stories and plays show the contents of modernism under extreme pressure." -- Keith Gessen, Editor of N+1

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Overlook Hardcover; First Printing edition (November 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585677434
• ISBN-13: 978-1585677436
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #303,700 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book saved my life., June 10, 2009

By	15 (San Francisco, Ca USA) - See all my reviews

I learned of daniil Kharms from the Dutch Band, De Kift, who recorded an opera based on Kharms' play, Elizabeth Bam. I was kinda down when this book came in the mail. Almost immediately my spirits were lifted. The violence, the "non-sensical" banter, the poetry of the absurd captivated me. I continuie to search for more Daniil Kharms.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Today I Read Everything, July 1, 2009

By	Pavel Somov, Ph.D., Author of Eating the Mome... (Pittsburgh, PA, USA) - See all my reviews

I have read Kharms both in English and Russian quite a few times since my dad (a journalist and "ghost" writer in the USSR) introduced me to Kharms in mid 80s (after he had reportedly "snagged" the last copy of the "Incidences" from some street bookseller in Perestroika-era Moscow).

Each time I read Kharms I'd browse through any given compilation of "selected writings" and read at random. In later years I'd either re-read the stories I had liked or, on the contrary, choose only to read the ones I had skipped on previously. But today I read everything - the entire "Today I Wrote Nothing" from cover to cover.

Two reasons: this particular collection of Kharms' writings is skillfully organized: the incidences/old woman/blue notebook/other writings sequence is an excellent warm-up. Each pattern-interrupting-absurdly shocking-non sequitur-laden "incidence" - like a notorious Moscow pothole - violently shakes up the mind and loosens the inflexibly default of expectations of sense and logic. These "incidences" quickly warm up the reading mind for the absurdly cold scenery of the "Old Woman" novella. Just as you begin to tire of the "Old Woman" you are thrown into the paradoxical vortex of the 29 vignettes from the "Blue Notebook." And after that - with the mind cracked open for possibilities - you sail off into the greater philosophical, esoteric, metaphysical depths of "other writings" where you after such a deep dive as "On Phenomena and Existences," with compiler's astute guidance, you are helped to resurface to the by-now-familiar "shallows" of the absurd.

The sequence of this presentation is no small achievement. Consider that the people behind this collection have been charged with a mandate of dosing micro-shocks, with a task of figuring out how to tactfully deliver Kharms' literary micro-concussions. Reading Kharms - any Kharms' collection - is on par to spending an evening in a batting cage where each and every ball is a curveball of the oddest spin.

Confusion - as I have learned from Kharms - is a prerequisite for enlightenment. Kharms models that we have to lose our mind (our "equalibrium" - a genius rendition of intentional misspelling by the translator Yankelevich) to find our consciousness, our sense of self. Kharms - as I am more and more convinced - wasn't an absurdist or a literary shock-jockey, he was a mystic with a Zen bent who, I believe, wrote to stay awake during one of the darkest dreams in modern history (Stalin years).

For an English-speaking Russian, Kharms seems deceptively easy to translate. But he is anything but easy. Kharms' subtle connotation-level puns coexist next to the grotesque and the idiosyncratic. Translating Kharms' koans is like translating a haiku: with often so few lines of text to work with, one linguistic misstep, one connotational bias and you end up reading an entirely different story. Matvei Yankelevich has skillfully navigated the fiords of Kharmsian translational incidentals.

Kharms is a "monk that walked into a mausoleum" and never walked out; an inquisitive and quizzical mind born at the wrong time and in the wrong place who seems to have managed to complete the long existential arc from neurosis to acceptance just in time to die hungry in a Leningrad jail, utterly unrecognized and unknown. In this literary mausoleum, I see Kharms next to Kafka and Hamsun. I wonder where you'll place him...

Pavel Somov, Ph.D.