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Willem Dafoe and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Photo: Lucie Jansch |
Now, one day, a man went to work, and on the way he met another man, who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was heading back home where he came from.
And that’s it, more or less.
That’s the story “The Meeting” by Daniil Kharms. In its entirety.
It was translated by Matevei Yankelevich in his collection of Kharms’ work, Today I Wrote Nothing, which includes the novella “The Old Woman,” a stage version of Darryl Pinckney’s adaptation, directed by Robert Wilson and featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Willem Dafoe, comes to the Howard Gilman Opera House from June 22—29. And it is by no means anomalous in the oeuvre of this Russian provocateur, a startling scion of the country’s literary avant-garde who starved to death in a Leningrad prison’s psychiatric ward in 1942 at the age of 36.
In fact the gesture of “The Meeting” is central to Kharms’ entire aesthetic: a drastic interruption, a boldfaced parody of plot, character development, and pretty much all the business-as-usual trappings of literature itself. And while many readers and critics have classified Kharms’ absurdism as a response to the Soviet era in which he lived and wrote, the truth is he was an outlier long before Stalin came to power. As writer George Saunders put it in a lovely 2007 essay on the author, “weirdness this deep seems more likely to stem from an aesthetic crisis than a political one.”
Of course, like most people living in Russia between the world wars, Kharms’ life was necessarily shaped by political developments. The avant-garde society he helped to found called OBERIU (“The Union of Real Art”) quickly found itself on the wrong side of the Soviet authorities, and Kharms was arrested twice before his final deadly imprisonment, making it nearly impossible for him to find work as a children’s author (his main source of income) in his 30s.
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Willem Dafoe and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Photo: Lucie Jansch |
The dedicated avant-gardist practiced self-creation in every aspect of his life, down to his own last name. He invented the moniker Kharms by adapting the English words “charm” and “harm.” The name was probably also a reference to his favorite literary character, Sherlock Holmes. Kharms wore Holmesian tweed suits and hunting caps while strolling down the streets of Leningrad. He was given to lying down in the middle of the Nevsky Prospect, and frequently recited his poems from the top of a large armoire during OBERIU’s “theatricalized evenings.” He (apparently on purpose) developed a tic somewhere between a seizure and a hiccup. In his life as in his art, he sought to interrupt existence’s monotonous flow, to throw reality into relief if only for an instant.
And then I realized that I am the world.
But the world—is not me.
Although at the same time I am the world.
Jess Goldschmidt is a writer and theater artist living in Brooklyn. She is also a copywriter at BAM.
Reprinted from June 2014 BAMbill.
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