Daniil Kharms: Writing and the Event

ISBN-13: 9780810125537 / Angielski / Twarda / 2009 / 320 str.

Branislav Jakovljevic

Opis

The "texts" of Russian artist and thinker Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) were so many and varied and often unique (narrative, dramatic, philosophical, poetic, mathematical, pictographic, diagrammatic, musical, biographical) that they defied categorizationand, thus, thorough study or appreciationthrough much of the twentieth century. This book, the first in English to view Kharms s oeuvre in its entirety, is also the first to offer a complete, inclusive, and coherent understanding of the overall project of this artist and writer now considered a major figure in the modernist canon of Europe.

The book follows Kharms s development as a creative thinker, inquiring into the nature of Kharmsian nonsense, the ontological status of the OBERIU object, writing as performance, Kharms s gestural language, his "language machines," and his ideas of order, number, infinity, and chance. Reading every paper trace (as well as extant memories) of Kharms s activities as part of a large project of world creation, Branislav Jakovljevic situates him in a twentieth-century effortexemplified by Kafka, Beckett, Artaud, Malevich, and Khelbnikov, among othersto go beyond an interpretation of meaning circumscribed by rational and logical thought. Examining texts that could conceivably be called "literary" as well as sketches, diagrams, hieroglyphs, photographs, and unclassifiable others, Jakovljevic s study is the first to provide a properly broad perspective on this creative thinker s farranging, far-reaching, and finally comprehensive achievement."