Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms

"I like the fact that he invented his own name. He was born Daniil Ivánovich Yuvatchov. It marks a step into artificiality. He was a necessarily political author – he died in prison after falling foul of the Soviet regime in 1942, as many people did. But his absurdism seems to be more socially or linguistically oriented. His stories are also about storytelling itself, so there’s one about women tumbling out of windows, which is very short – many of his stories no more than a paragraph. He often abandons narrative towards the end. So here’s “Tumbling Women”: Because of her excessive curiosity, one old woman, tumbled out of her window, fell and shattered to pieces. Another old woman leaned out to look at the one who’d shattered but out of excessive curiosity also tumbled out of her window, fell and shattered to pieces. Then, a third old woman tumbled out of her window, and then a fourth and a fifth. When the sixth old woman tumbled out of her window, I got sick of watching them and walked over to the Mal’tseviskiy Market where, they say, a blind man had been given a knitted shawl. Yes, I love how he gives up on the narrative, and it seems very relevant today – with the distraction of the internet, which might, in his day, have been gossip, rumour, or the sort of celebrity chasing that went on the newspapers. Another thing I love is that sudden break between something that’s fairly realistic and something that really isn’t – and it’s a very fine line to cross. So you have the first old woman falling out of her window and then all of a sudden she shatters to pieces. We go from something we might see every day, to something very confusing: suddenly she becomes an object. “Because of her excessive curiosity, one old woman, tumbled out of her window, fell and shattered to pieces” A lot of absurdism is concerned with that dividing line between people and objects, and people and animals. You see it in Isabel Waidner’s book and in Leonora Carrington’s. Carrington is very interested in people and animals. And Waidner is particularly interested in the line between people and things. Many of the stories are about the ways in which the systems in which we live make us into objects of use to each other or to some unknown power that might be governmental or it might be cultural. One common trope in absurdist literature is to imagine people as objects, or bring objects to life. That’s very much a part of what Kharms was doing. He also did that via language, treating words as intermediary objects between the speaker and the thing that the speaker is referring to. A word becomes an object in itself, a material thing with a certain number of letters and a certain sound, that hovers between the intent of a speaker and the actual thing. Language is absurd in that we say the word ‘cow’ and we expect someone else to be able to conjure what that is. It’s just a three-letter word that takes up a certain amount of aural or physical space. I keep coming back, again and again, to this idea: how much can language be applied to the external world? I’m guessing from speaking to you earlier that you must be at least trilingual and so you’ll know this from experience. As soon as you start learning another language seriously you realise where the gaps are in your own language, and where the gaps are in the new language – how these words govern what can be thought. European Futurism was a violent movement and notoriously linked to Fascism. I’m interested in the violent clashes in literature. In the story about the tumbling old women, for instance, Kharms conjures a shattering but also the violence of setting one half of a sentence against another. I like another Russian writer of the same period, Viktor Shklovsky, who was involved in many of the same literary movements as Kharms, and his idea of ostranenie (estrangement), of making deliberately jolty links. I use that a lot – not because I want to copy Shklovsky, but because that is the way I see the world. I see a series of things that are difficult to bring together through language and narrative. Stories usually aim to be smooth things, but the idea of consequence and beginnings, middles and endings is something that interests me because I want to work against it. Absurdists writers tend to be unfriendly writers in a way – they’re rebellious. If you look at Carrington, there’s the wonderful title story, in which a hyena comes to live with the family of “The Debutante” of the title, who, as Carrington did, is about to make her ‘debut’ at a society ball and who, like Carrington, loathes the entire process. The hyena kills a maid and chews off her face so she can use it to go to the ball disguised in her place. At the ball, the hyena eats disgustingly and exudes strong animal smells, and it seems that Carrington is talking about the things that were forbidden to her as a polite society woman."