From a new collection of stories by Dannil Kharms, entitled Today I Wrote Nothing, edited and translated from the original Russian by Matvai Yankelvich:
"There was a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn't have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily.
He couldn't talk because he had no mouth. He didn't have a nose either.
He didn't even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, no spine, and he didn't have any insides at all. There was nothing! So we don't even know who we're talking about.
So we'd better not talk about him any more."
From a review of Today I Wrote Nothing in the Guardian:
The difficulty of knowing a man who seemingly exists but in fact does not applies to Kharms' own biography. His birth name was Yuvachev: Kharms was derived from the English words "harms", "charms" and "Holmes", as in Sherlock, the fictional detective whose sartorial style he emulated. He had also consciously developed eccentricities, such as a strange hiccup-snorting seizure that disconcerted the NKVD agents who interrogated him. And finally Kharms himself was to vanish, and along with him all the notebooks containing his works. Only after 30 years did they reappear in samizdat, before finally being officially published in the 1980s.
wait, that "hiccup-snorting seizure" routine reminds me of a certain small someone we know!
Posted by: e | December 12, 2007 at 05:29 PM